351–360 of 388 posts
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What is it like to read fiction? Tolkien’s writing comes to mind as a good example: many passages of Lord of the Rings are detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Are these types of works just not enjoyable?
Many people with aphantasia skip descriptive passages when reading books.
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There is really a fundamental difference as many studies now have shown---and I can attest from personal experience. Honestly, if you have to ask the question there's a pretty high chance you are: everyone at some level believes that their own inner experience generalizes to the rest of humanity, but it's those with aphantasia who thereby believe that everyone else's description is just a manner of speaking ("they, l…
Aphantasia has nothing to do with emotional recall. You make the first assertion of this I've ever heard. I am mostly aphantasaic, but have no trouble at all remembering emotions.
The connection of aphantasia to strongly deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) is well-attested now. You can find numerous clinical studies on the matter.
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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 think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. Is that because it’s hereditary or instead something that was missing in early childhood? Like as a toddler you were never given one of those games where you fit shapes into different sized holes for example?
I’ve been teaching math for almost 18 years at this point, and only a couple years ago learned that I lean towards aphantasia. Back in high school, geometry was HARD. Calc 3 was HARD. It was presented as visualize and imagine, and I tried my best. It just turns out other people could do that, and the fuzzy thing thing (or, more commonly, the ‘bulleted list of information’ that make up my imagination) was not “normal.”
If I’d known this (and my teachers were in a position to also know this), then maybe we’d spend more time with external visual models (what Geogebra now does for us, for example) to help me out.
Now that I teach future high school math teachers, it’s definitely something I talk about to normalize “not everyone can see in their mind.”
I dont have a narrator neither. No voices in my head at all. If im talking to myself, im saying it outloud. But imagine as well, there's little to no distraction. We can focus on what we want. But it's also amazing to see other people in society who are clearly hearing voices in their head and completely and utterly distracted from day 2 day life. It's like they are possessed by demons in the bad cases.
>a vulnerability to trauma
But because of aphantasia, we dont ever qualify for PTSD. A key part of PTSD is flashbacks and rumination that we dont get.
>emotions and memory
Since memories dont have a visual aspect, the emotional impact of memories is greatly reduced.
>meditation
Since we dont get distracted, we are naturally significantly better at meditation.
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It's the same for me, in terms of it being dark and fuzzy unless concentrated on. but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc). I'm fa…
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…
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If you think about something famous, like the Eiffel tower, or big ben, you don't picture them?
No, not at all. A simple test I've seen mentioned is, ask someone this: “imagine a car, a fast car, zipping through a windy road… ok? (pause) now, what color was the car you saw?” If you even need to think about it, you hadn't seen it.
https://archive.ph/iMdvd I have aphantasia and it always astounds me when I see an article like this, or hear a friend talking about it (about not having it) and realize that their experience of the world is so fundamentally different than my own.
Have you seen the Aphantasia Apples? https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b... As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of with what kind of fidelity you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it? I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of peop…
For example I can picture infinite combinations of apples, large, small, one with bites, one with orange inside, one with glass skin etc…
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If you think about something famous, like the Eiffel tower, or big ben, you don't picture them?
No, not at all. A simple test I've seen mentioned is, ask someone this: “imagine a car, a fast car, zipping through a windy road… ok? (pause) now, what color was the car you saw?” If you even need to think about it, you hadn't seen it.
Famously, there's a psychology experiment where a person in a gorilla costume walks through the middle of a scene and beats their chest before walking off the other side of the screen, but people who've been given a challenge of tracking a ball being passed around will completely miss the gorilla. They'll laugh in shock on watching the same video a second time, amazed that they didn't "see" the gorilla on first viewing when their attention was on the ball.
In your simple test, focus is going to be drawn to other components - "fast", "zipping" and "windy" make me pay attention to the curves of the road, the wheels, the trees or cliffs causing the road to wind. The color of the car is irrelevant, so I don't pay attention to it.
I can't tell you what color the car was, but when I watched the gorilla video (without knowing in advance about it) I didn't know a gorilla had walked through the video either.
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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.
It would be totally understandable for someone who reads handwritten Russian to confuse D and g in their mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_(Cyrillic)#Form
My last name just looks like a child drawing a wavy ocean!
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It's not a confusion of terms. I can easily conjure up picture-quality images in my head, whether my eyes are open or closed. Compare that to my wife who says she can't even see my face in her head, at all, and has a hard time recognizing faces to the point where she asked my not to do anything about the red dot on my face (broken capillaries) because that's one way she recognizes that it's me. She can't see images i…
Prosopagnosia is not what aphantasia is.