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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#91
post #64

For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!

And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#92

When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visual…

I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.

I'm sure it's not, because most of the time I'm aphantasic and rarely I'm not and they're completely different phenomenological experiences.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#93

OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.

It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.

I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#94
post #9
post #2

You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically. - Imagine a beach when meditating - If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked - Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast - Undressing someone with your eyes - Visualising what is happening in the book you are read…

Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost b…

I normally have no autobiographical memory, but once I went to a weeklong meditation retreat and around the second day it sorta all showed up at once.

Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#95
post #9
post #2

You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically. - Imagine a beach when meditating - If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked - Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast - Undressing someone with your eyes - Visualising what is happening in the book you are read…

Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost b…

Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is.

My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.

I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.

On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.

This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task. As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mat…

I definitely can't - if I had to describe my wife or son, I would be hard pressed to go beyond very generic descriptors (long black hair, brown eyes, and so on), nothing useful to create an accurate sketch. And I wouldn't be able to draw them from memory even if I were good at drawing. This could also be explained simply by having bad memory for faces, though.

But yes, little bits of subjective introspective evidence (like that one, and also mostly ignoring visual descriptions in books, and the perception of having no mental images at all that is asked by the standard self-report tests, and so on) add up and make me 99.9% sure I have aphantasia. It's just that it would be nice to have the objective unambiguous external test, the silver bullet, to be totally sure that they're not a bunch of busses in a trench coat as so many honest beliefs are.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#97

When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visual…

If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#98
post #64

For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.

On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#99
This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory? I can imagine things happening and fill in lots of detail but I never really "see" anything

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#100
There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims:

> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.

Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?

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