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Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

theguardian.com

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Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#241

Post by UncleSlacky »

listenallyall wrote: post #190
ergonaught wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fMRI can probably spot it for people like myself who are fully aphantasic. But: 1. "Imagine a table. There is a ball on the table. The ball rolls off the table onto the floor." 2. "From memory, what color was the ball? The table? The floor? What did you see under the table?" Neither I nor any other, uh, aphants, that I have known have answers to those questions. Imagination still works, and answers to those questions…

"mind's eye" is a metaphor. You, like everyone else, have two eyes, in the front of your face. There isn't an extra one embedded in anyone's brain.

The pineal gland in the brain has sometimes been termed the "third eye":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland#Society_and_cultu...

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#242

Post by notRobot »

markers wrote: post #191

I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based…

I'm pretty sure you can regain the ability. Covid damages the brain, and the brain "forgets" how to do certain things (like smell or visualise or focus), but brains are incredibly powerful and flexible, and can re-learn these things. I myself have long covid and lost a lot of sensing ability, but have been able to improve my senses of smell and touch by training with promising results. Here are some techniques people have used to help learn/relearn how to visualise: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/

Can't hurt to try, right?

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#243

Post by Pwhy1 »

neongreen wrote: post #88

Alert: if you were happy to learn about aphantasia, you might also be happy to learn about SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), which I think is correlated with aphantasia. SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes . Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for…

I started a small meditation where I attempt to walk back through the whole day as best I can, while trying to drift to sleep. It has made me appreciate my life more and I remember more mundane details because I have at least recalled it once, if that makes sense.

Unless it is a day to forget... If you have too many of those, you know something needs to change.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#244

Post by ryanjshaw »

markers wrote: post #230
ryanjshaw wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic. I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place. You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real de…

I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance. Reading reddit etc, there are so many people gettin…

Not sure why I was downvoted (I know it wasn't you), but it sounds like we are on the same page.

It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.

I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).

If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.

Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#245

Post by navjack27 »

listenallyall wrote: post #169
auggierose wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The woman in the article describes that she has no problem identifying faces she has seen before, in fact, she is better at that than average. It is just that she doesn't see these faces as a picture in her head. So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the…

It sounds like people simply have different definitions of "a picture in her head." Her mental processing sounds entirely normal on all counts. I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes…

Don't close your eyes. Just picture it in your head. It has nothing to do with invoking closed eye visualization.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#246

Post by navjack27 »

coldblues wrote: post #217

I'm very interested in this topic, so I'll go ahead and describe my experience. I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures…

I am exactly the same as you and I also have the same exact anxiety intrusive thought flashback rumination memory issues. It's totally a trade-off but it's not a trade-off that we willingly made when we were being wired up by our genetics lol.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#247

Post by magicalhippo »

leames99 wrote: post #188

For me, visualisation is related to memory recall. If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation. For aural imagination, such as music composition, I imagine snippets of music I've heard, then combine them. There is a visual component to that, but it's symbolic, not vivid. If I need to imagine something I haven't exp…

> If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation.

When someone asks me to imagine a scene, I don't really do that. That scene with mountains, trees and a lake? It's like three labels just kinda being there... waiting to be updated based on what comes next.

But if I make a focused effort, I can sorta do it. I can recall seeing something which might look like that, and recall some visual aspects. Not super vividly, but something I could at least use as a basis to draw a sketch for example.

But just by default, those images from my memory seldom come up just reading something. I have to focus and spend time recollecting. But they never ever become vivid as in real life, not remotely close.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#248

Post by navjack27 »

tambre wrote: post #22
MoSattler wrote: post #20

I am curious: do people with aphantasia dream?

For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.

You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#249

Post by helij »

markers wrote: post #191

I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based…

I just realised that I had similar experience. I can still picture things in my mind but dreams only came back a few weeks ago after being absent for a long, long time. Thinking about it it's not been months but a year or two.
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