311–320 of 388 posts
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I haven’t heard of Galtonism. From my experience as the colorblind child of native Russian speakers, it’s Daltonism (дальтони́зм). https://en.openrussian.org/en/colour-blind
Good lord, I had both of their wiki pages open, and STILL somehow D and G were the same letter in my mind. I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a monument to my goof.
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I find it implausible that people really have extreme, detailed imagery. Not that they can't do it on demand, if desired. But if every time they imagined something, it instantly appeared with all possible detail - that's just tremendously inefficient. I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of t…
What about people who can look at something and then draw it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire Do they have to recall specific areas, or do they perceive the entire thing as a fully instantiated mental image.
He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately. But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.
But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.
And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.
I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
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So, if you watch a poor person begging for food on the street, how do you process that in the future? Do you rely on the remembered feeling and literal observation in words? How do you not remember what you saw?
Adding a data point. I don’t think this is aphantasia, but rather SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory). For the future, the memory has to be recorded as facts as the original experience is gone. This means the emotions and other aspects cannot be experienced again. Recording things like, I saw this, I felt like this, I intend to do this. Not all people who can’t visualise have this SDAM thing (though it…
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I remember the shape of a candle perfectly well, I just can't "see" anything. It's not a list of abstract properties, it's an understanding of the shape of a candle. Why would you need to be able to see it to remember its shape?
Because the shape is a physical thing, it's perceived by your senses. I meant remember, not understand. You can understand something, but I specifically mean remember.
I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it. I can have a high-resolution image of a candle, but it's not useful for understanding that there's a candle in the picture - for that, you need to have parsed the image and understood what it contains. The visualization is just the source material. Similarly, when you read a book, you're not remembering what entire pages look like with all the words on them.
The problem with these kinds of things is that so much happens unconsciously that we're not aware of. You think remembering the image is important because you're unaware of all the processing that allows you to understand the image.
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I can _remember_ the properties of an apple - approximate size, weight (my hand does not instantly drop to the floor due to its weight), etc. I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg). In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications. One example I can give i…
Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn movie that you make in your own mind. I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Tou…
The best I can do: do people with aphantasia only get aroused if the stimulus is present? Can't they not get horny just imagining things, like I imagine most people can?
Does steamy literature do anything for them? I imagine it doesn't, since if you cannot imagine things then words on a page just have no power.
In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".
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Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn movie that you make in your own mind. I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Tou…
I have so many questions to ask people with aphantasia related to sex, but it would get uncomfortably personal, so maybe best not to. The best I can do: do people with aphantasia only get aroused if the stimulus is present? Can't they not get horny just imagining things, like I imagine most people can? Does steamy literature do anything for them? I imagine it doesn't, since if you cannot imagine things then words on…
The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.
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What's funny is, I have complete aphantasia, but I can imagine a ball, I just can't see it. If you ask me what color it is, I would say white, because I imagined a baseball. But I can't see it, I'm just thinking about it.
When you read this do you hear it in your head?
The difference comes when I close my eyes vs. block my ears. When I close my eyes, I don't see images, I can't voluntarily make images appear. But with my eyes and ears blocked, I can still think words - my inner monologue - which I experience in much the same way as I do when I'm reading. I can't conjure other sounds though, which is why I don't really consider that equivalent to "hearing" - it's not sound, it's the concept of words. I don't have any analogue of that for images.
Ordinary aphantasia doesn't imply anything about lack of inner monologue. Some people apparently do lack an inner monologue, and if they're also aphantasic, that's been described by some authors as "deep aphantasia". But there's no evidence that the two conditions are related, except in a kind of conceptual sense.
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Your metaphor isn't bad, actually. I just don't visualize anything. It's more like a feeling of abstract relationships. It often feels like most of my brain is in RAM; I can usually recall things almost instantly. And if I can’t, I can do the trick where you think of something else and let your mind crunch in the background until it pops up. I should clarify that I can still imagine what a room looks like and what’s…
Your description matches my experience exactly, and I find it oddly comforting to know someone else has the same thing going on in their head.
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Comically, though, programming communities really seem to have a statistical over representation of both aphantasics and hyperphantasics. One of these articles comes out every few years and I've witnessed at numerous workplaces how quickly a large portion of the engineers realize they're aphantasic and everyone else is aghast that they can't rotate complete architectural diagrams etc. That said, it really is binary o…
I'm not sure its binary, I feel like ive gotten worse at it with age, and for some reason I find it harder with my head sideways.