341–350 of 416 posts
is there a version of not being able to visualize faces of people you know? asking for a friend. from all i read about things like this, the more it become apparent that we all experience things in a unique way.
Of course they can picture things in their mind, that's how they see. To explain the not-joke: the things you see are not "out there" they are in your mind. Now of course the things you see through your eyes are there, but the images are imaginary, the eye and brain do all kinds of things between the retina and the mind to make the imagery you see. Your visual perception is constructive. Metaphorically speaking, the…
I don't see anything. I feel like we're talking past each other. I am skeptical that "visualize an apple" to some people gets them the mental equivalent of a Blender model where they get a 360 degree view of the image and from there they are able to apply arbitrary transformations. I can "replay" songs in my head with pretty good fidelity to the original if I remember enough of it, but I think that's fairly common.
I can confirm it's basically a blender model in my head I can ~arbitrarily transform at will. Worth noting it's not just visual, I can 'touch' the surface of the imagined object(s) or whack two together and 'hear' what that sounds like.
I've sometimes wondered if I could have aphantasia or perhaps be low enough on the visual imagery spectrum to have some of the practical effects of aphantasia. When I try to visualize an object, I can in some sense visualize it but it feels very indistinct. It's like I can't see the object as a whole only the specific details I focus on. For example, I have a friend who wears circular glasses and has a handlebar must…
that's basically what I experience. When I learned that many artists picture their entire drawing in detail, and then put it down on page roughly as they imagine it, I couldn't even imagine that.
People who draw out of thin air usually have these trained references in mind, so when they draw a pose they're not so much simply copying from their imagination, but from facts and past experience, about knowing about anatomy, light, and proportion. You draw as you go and see what's on the page, and you can build out a world that didn't exist, but not so much from mind's eye, but somewhere in-between the page and prior experience.
None of the above training or sketching would be needed by someone with a photographic memory or an imagination that can hold that level of mass detail (they'd only need to know practical techniques their medium depends on). There have been people like that such as Austin Osman Spare, but in the main the vast development in art has to do with learning about anatomy, proportion, light, color, and technique as taught by all the great masters.
Cartoons are a good example how a style comes not so much from the imagination, but how one very naively and simply draws characters and then builds off that natural style into something refined. This comes from playing on the page, not imagining what one wants. If you copy other people's cartoons you can also learn different lessons, and that has to do with training the eye and technique.
I've sometimes wondered if I could have aphantasia or perhaps be low enough on the visual imagery spectrum to have some of the practical effects of aphantasia. When I try to visualize an object, I can in some sense visualize it but it feels very indistinct. It's like I can't see the object as a whole only the specific details I focus on. For example, I have a friend who wears circular glasses and has a handlebar must…
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 don't see anything. I feel like we're talking past each other. I am skeptical that "visualize an apple" to some people gets them the mental equivalent of a Blender model where they get a 360 degree view of the image and from there they are able to apply arbitrary transformations. I can "replay" songs in my head with pretty good fidelity to the original if I remember enough of it, but I think that's fairly common.
I can confirm it's basically a blender model in my head I can ~arbitrarily transform at will. Worth noting it's not just visual, I can 'touch' the surface of the imagined object(s) or whack two together and 'hear' what that sounds like.
What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.
If you’re looking for objective measures, aphantasia correlates inversely with objective measures of visual memory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/ But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is. For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it? For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no c…
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I feel similarly, though less about the lack of objective testing and more about the inability to even be sure we're talking about the same thing. Like I can visualize stuff fine, but not literally see it like some Hololens overlay -- it's in a sort of abstract internal space separate from what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I wonder whether some self-diagnosed aphantasiacs only think they are because they overest…
I disagree. Asking someone to name shapes that resemble for example the Sydney Opera house seems to me just a test of creativity, not ability to “visualize” something in your head. I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our…
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>And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ what the fuck
I am also like this. Why would I remember that? I don't remember almost anything I don't work to remember or is unusual. It's amazing to me that people do. (I also have aphantasia and find it extremely difficult to believe that the entire thing isn't just a misunderstanding of language.)