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My wife has multiple sclerosis. Aphantasia is one of the complications she's experiencing. Without being able to visualize she's had to resort to using a notepad and paper to write everything down. She's always been creative and it's been very hard on her to come down with this.
I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.
I don't understand how you can be unable to visualize scenes in your head but also write a script for _Silicon Valley_ that contains descriptions of visual humor.
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I don't think i visualize things ( if i understood correctly). Although it seems just partially. I do have dreams, but don't remember them ( after 10 minutes, i forgot them for sure). I never understood how people could draw robot faces to describe a person at a police officer... It seems weird... I have memories, but trying to describe something i will say "general things" like colors, objects, ... I can't describe…
If it's helpful I think I have aphantasia and am also an INTJ engineer.
I take it from the article that this would solve one of my biggest internal issues: songs getting stuck in my head. It's gotten so bad in recent years that I don't listen to music at all , because it may stimulate a "earwig" that will not stop.
The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as you've given your mind closure on the pattern, get your mind out of the rut of analyzing the pattern by listening to something else (also to completion.)
More precisely, the experience of having a song stuck in your head is strongly analogous to the experience of having been half-told a joke. You've sort of allocated a mental context buffer and it's waiting around to receive the rest of the context, so that it can then evaluate the 'punchline'. The simplest way to discard the buffer ("ruin the joke") is to just get the punchline early, without the rest of the context. If you go through a bit of music theory, you can recognize a song as a pattern of building and releasing tension. You could actually just listen to the part of a song that finally releases the tension—closes the matching parenthesis to the opening one your mind is stuck on—and that would do the trick. Listening to the whole song is just easier.
I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.
I would suggest researching a bit about "modalities" in NLP. If you have heard of NLP before and it rings alarm bells, forget the magical thinking stuff about NLP ...the interesting beginnings of the project began on some good scientific research in how people imagined things in their mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_systems_%28NL... In essence, people can think visually, kinetically (feeling), au…
> I'm sure you can imagine what it felt like when something really funny happened to you, right?
I can't. In fact, the entire notion of how I "felt" in the past seems like a metaphor to me.
> And you could probably also remember listening to a song you heard on the radio.
I can remember the fact that I heard a certain song on the radio. I certainly cannot hear it.
> If you cannot remember, imagine the feeling of the sun, sound and imagine the sound you might hear.
I've been to beaches and snowy mountains and absolutely could not imagine those things. I know in the abstract that a beach is warmer than a mountain, but I don't feel those memories differently—they're just textual descriptions, like what you'd read in a book.
I just realized that when I imagine things they are rather sketchy. For example, when I imaging a beach, it is very abstract. When I try to describe what present on it, I do not use an object from the picture, I first remember what could present on the beach like a left towel and then sort-of add it to the mental image.
In school I also had troubles with drawing. I could draw regular shapes like cubes, spheres or beams, but drawing an animal was a nightmare.
A probably related thing is that I do not get why people drink. I do it occasionally for a social aspect, but I do not remember that I ever experienced being more relaxed from it or having any special fun. I just feel more and more intoxicated :(
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I don't understand how you can be unable to visualize scenes in your head but also write a script for _Silicon Valley_ that contains descriptions of visual humor.
The human mind adapts, he only recently concluded that there is a difference... It doesn't mean he can't have visual humor. He just experiences it differently ( text/facts vs images)
I'm really skeptical of this "disorder." I think it mostly amounts to "semantics and variability in human abilities, not pathology."[1]
Metacognition like this is super slippery and is really easy to draw whatever conclusion you want. I've just never been able to draw even mildly realistic anything ever, this doesn't mean I have a disease.
[1] http://doc2doc.bmj.com/forums/open-clinical_psychiatry_aphan...
I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.
Could I ask if you drink alcohol? If so, do you experience an alternation in your mood like being more relaxed or having a different perspective on things?
There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody. My wife, for example, can't process "left" and "right" without great effort. She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take. Even more confusingly, she's a v…
I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out relative left-right to other people. Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".
I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.
That was very mind-opening write, thanks! Could I ask if you drink alcohol? If so, do you experience an alternation in your mood like being more relaxed or having a different perspective on things?