371–380 of 416 posts
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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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.)
>Why would I remember that? Why wouldn't you lol
I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition. At least I couldn't imagine doing any job I ever head without the ability to manipulate visual information in my head.
It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
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> 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.
I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen…
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>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
I just „visualize“ a map or blueprint, not as an image, but as concept. Think of it as an image of text and lines.
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It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker. When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
Wait, do people see images of a clock in their mind? Like you, I know spatially where the hands should point so I assume this is what “seeing” is. Do people see a clock… like a legit visual when they close their eyes?
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There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that. The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dum…
I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
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> I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Some people do, hyperphantasia. I can do this, perfectly visualize the details of the Mona Lisa and examine it from any angle in my mind's eye. If I am in a semi-lucid state while nearing sleep, I can do it even more intensely, a…
How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details? Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
Is there a meaningful distinction?
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Nope I didn’t realize she was facing a particular direction. I’d consider that a lack of knowledge. But if I did again it would just be words. I don’t believe that people have a high res magical image. I believe there’s something that feels like visual stimulation which is used as a reference for information. I don’t have anything that seems remotely visual.
Forget the Mona Lisa, maybe you've never seen it even in a book. Do you know what the shape of your country (like from a map) looks like? Of course you do, and it's not because you went around and did your own border survey, it's because you've seen the shape on maps thousands of times, and you can picture it in your head.
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I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen…
When I 'visualize' it's not an image at all . It's the concept of what the image would be showing, which the above posters have called a graph or schematic. But that's an analogy, and not to be taken too literally. I don't visualize a schematic. I instead feel the connections and relationships between concepts. It's entirely non-visual.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
1. https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/miikkulainen.visua...