I usually practice the art of visualization to picturize images in my mind. The more visual impact you have in your mind, its better to create things positively.
Aphantasia: A life without mental images
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#62I think I have a mild version of this. I can picture things, but it generally takes a fair bit of effort and concentration to get decent detail if the thing is complex, and it's a fleeting image. Especially picturing people's faces is difficult. I can get like.. an idea of the person's face, so I know I'd recognize it if I saw it, but I rarely see a picture of their face in my head. I do have normal visual dreams tho…
Your self-description sounds entirely typical to me. I don’t think most people can imagine detailed photographic images (e.g. of faces), though there do seem to be some who can, like certain autistic savants.
It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a useful understanding of that experience from survey answers. Sort of like when people claim non-human mammals have no consciousness or sentience because they don’t talk.
For example, just because the picture-book illustrator profiled in this article has a “vivid imagination” doesn’t mean she can literally visualize a full-fidelity photographic mental image of a whole book spread. As a photographer, when I see a scene I can “previsualize” what kind of picture I might get after fully editing/printing the image days later. But that just means I can conceptualize particular visual effects, think about the lighting, texture, contrasts, colors, and put them together in an abstract thought, not that I can precisely “see” the picture exactly as if it were finished in front of me. I would say I have a “vivid imagination” for photographs, but my mental experience of remembered or imagined vision is probably pretty similar to yours.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#63This is supposed to be a 'condition' and an 'inability'? I have this and have always associated it with an enhanced ability to think abstractly, and more generally intellectual facility. I had never met anyone else having this, until I came upon a paragraph by Einstein who comments about his absence of mental images, replaced by geometrical-like thinking. That only confirmed my intuitive assumption that it related to…
What about someone who doesn't see wire frames and are only able to visualise with features?
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#64This is supposed to be a 'condition' and an 'inability'? I have this and have always associated it with an enhanced ability to think abstractly, and more generally intellectual facility. I had never met anyone else having this, until I came upon a paragraph by Einstein who comments about his absence of mental images, replaced by geometrical-like thinking. That only confirmed my intuitive assumption that it related to…
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Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm wondering whether work with 3D modeling software can improve that. I used to play a lot with Blender when I was young and my brain has clearly installed some sort of graphics engine as a result. I can easily imagine specific perspectives in my room, rotate objects in ~10 degree steps and tweak the point of view. It's surprisingly difficult to translate objects by a small amount though. It also takes a while until…
Interestingly, I'm pretty good at mental rotations, thinking of complex shapes, etc though I don't actually "see" the objects in my "minds-eye". They still remain abstract concepts. The only analogy I can draw is this: Imagine these "concepts" in your head: Recursion Monad Quantitative Easing They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understa…
Interesting. I think about recursion both in terms of linguistic/symbolic rules that are associated with it, but I also associate it visually with call tree diagrams, nested structures and loops. I can't think about dogs, flowers and sunsets just in terms of language though, there are always images, smells, sounds, movements etc. associated with it.
Perhaps take an empty piece of paper and imagine drawing a big letter on it. I've read before that non-visual thinkers can experience visual thinking that way.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#66"But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images."
Actually this was discovered by Sir Francis Galton more than 200 years ago: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Nor is it particularly rare.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is not the experience itself, but the fact that people are so surprised when they discover that other people's mental experience can be so different to their own.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#67"But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images." Actually this was discovered by Sir Francis Galton more than 200 years ago: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm Nor is it particularly rare. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is not the experience itself, but the fact that people are so surprised when they discover that other p…
It does fundamentally divide humanity into those that can imagine, and those that can't. Its not unreasonable to guess others experience the world similarly to oneself; not at all interesting that folks would be surprised by that.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#68Wow, I finally have a word to describe my mental experience. To others, I've described the vividness of my memory as like a wireframe. I can feel spatial relationships but I don't see them like a picture in my head. There are occasions that I can see color in my minds eye, but it's mostly greyscale.
How do you dream?
OP's description of waking imagination matches mine and I dream vividly. In fact, for a while I tried to lucid dream and as I watched myself call asleep there would be an instant of sudden clarity. Like a light switch had turned on and whatever I was thinking of would jump into view, fully colored and textured. The difference to the vagueness of my normal imagination was so striking I would jolt awake. Same with sounds; I will get beautiful, complex music pouring into my head as I drift off. While awake, I hear noises I imagine but instead as if I were making sounds with my throat. I can't hear Beethoven but I can hear myself hum the notes even without doing so.
So I can say with some confidence that both extremes exist in the literal sense and this is not at all just a matter of describing the same qualia differently.
Honestly the questions given in the test don't seem to well capture my abilities. I have no ability to recall my own mother's face, but I can is of reconstruct it from facts I know (length of her hair, shape of her jaw, anything I've noticed explicitly). I get sensations of colors in short bursts if at all, it is not a dimness. And motion, rotations, and spatial relations feel real to me even if I can't see them. When it tells me to imagine a rainbow I don't see color, but I feel it's arc in the sky, even trace it mentally with imaginary hands. That aspect is not dim and vague. Makes me wonder if the author of this test either did not have this condition or had it in a different way than I.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#69I think I have a mild version of this. I can picture things, but it generally takes a fair bit of effort and concentration to get decent detail if the thing is complex, and it's a fleeting image. Especially picturing people's faces is difficult. I can get like.. an idea of the person's face, so I know I'd recognize it if I saw it, but I rarely see a picture of their face in my head. I do have normal visual dreams tho…
Your self-description sounds entirely typical to me. I don’t think most people can imagine detailed photographic images (e.g. of faces), though there do seem to be some who can, like certain autistic savants. It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a useful understanding of that experience from survey answers.…
What about people who complain about how a character looks in a movie adaptation of a book? I never see characters in a book so the movie can do whatever they want as far as I care. But other people get quite indignant over this. Can anyone here attest to what level of imagination one has to do that? I strongly suspect you're over generalizing from your own experiences, this might be a way to test it.
Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your self-description sounds entirely typical to me. I don’t think most people can imagine detailed photographic images (e.g. of faces), though there do seem to be some who can, like certain autistic savants. It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a useful understanding of that experience from survey answers.…
What about people who complain about how a character looks in a movie adaptation of a book? I never see characters in a book so the movie can do whatever they want as far as I care. But other people get quite indignant over this. Can anyone here attest to what level of imagination one has to do that? I strongly suspect you're over generalizing from your own experiences, this might be a way to test it.
Its a useful technique, to never describe your protagonist in a book. Allows the reader to customize, imagine themselves in the role, to really identify. I know 'Twilight' is famous for Bella's blank aspect. Also an old childrens' book "Harris and me" had a main character that not only was never described; they never had a name.