281–290 of 416 posts
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I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think
When you say you think in words, does that mean like you see printed words like a page of text? Or just audible words?
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I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think
You can't think of what a STOP sign looks like? Or your country's flag?
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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.
"Mind's eye" and "visualization" refer to actual experiences. Those of us with aphantasia (no exceptions that I've encountered so far) did not realize these words referred to actual experiences.
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I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.
How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation? I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation, as if it’s some kind of minority report style interface that appears before you and is perceived by the eye. It’s simply being able to reconstruct physical entities as mental models. Again, without being able to do that it just se…
Is there any analogy between reasoning about relationships and paths through complicated source code code vs paths through a street map? I don't think I visualize either, I just kind of absorb knowledge and piece together plans.
I don't have an inner monologue either, and I find that I've not infrequently found myself having to pronounce a word I've only ever read before. Ihhave to invent a spoken pronunciation for the first time ever and get self-conscious. It's not the same as aphantasia, but kind of similar. Well, maybe: when I see a movie about a book I've read, I never say, "oh, that actor looks different than what I thought the character looked like".
I don't mean to argue that aphantasia is "real", but I do feel there is evidence for it.
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>A DB schema is not visual How is it not visual? >Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one. Boxes with arrows are clearly visual. The text, at least, for me just is a representation of those arrows and boxes.
> How is it not visual? (not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
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On the other hand I have a hard time believing people actually fully see visual information in their head.
It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying. No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around…
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
I wonder if this could be induced in people who suffer from hallucinations to reduce or eliminate their symptoms? Maybe their system is rigged into overdrive the other way. It says on wikipedia that there are 'cases reported of acquired aphantasia'.
I don’t think hallucinations and having a “minds eye” are the same thing. A minds eye is different in the sense that it’s entirely separate from the “visual feed” you get from your eyes, they’re not combined so you can’t really mistake them as a hallucination; hallucinations trick you into seeing things that are not really there such as when people with schizophrenia can see people who are not actually with them — I…
(I shudder to think how differently things could have gone if I had been misdiagnosed with a severe mental illness when all I actually have is an unusually powerful imaginative ability.)
I really hate these aphantasia questions. It feels too subjective. I can visualize in a sense, but I would never talk of an image. In fact closing my eyes makes it harder for me to imagine anything. I can recall my dream from last night for example, I can describe it quite well. If you now would ask me to in my mind modify for example the color of the floor, I couldn’t. Because in “dream reality” I very much remember…
I can picture things in my mind's eye, can remember what people look like, walk through the recent past, etc., but I don't see them painted as images on my closed eyelids as though I was seeing them with my actual eyes. When I remember I "see" them but not in a literal visual sense.
Like if you asked me, "When you came to my house yesterday, did you see a green apple on the table?" I would scan back through my memory "visually" and if I encountered a memory of a green apple I would say yes, but I would only see that apple in my "mind's eye". Does that qualify as an image? Because I wouldn't really call it that, it's just a flash of mental objects and sure some imagery.
So am I aphantasic? I still have no idea.
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…
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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 r…