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As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.
Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.
But id still describe myself as an aphant.
So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.
And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.
Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.
Perhaps it is just spatial facts.
If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.
I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.
I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".
Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.
A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks.
"Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?"
"Yeah?"
"Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?"
hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture!
Do these symptoms count?
e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?
i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it.
I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.
[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104
Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.
It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.
My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
platos cave, etc
If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
> Why This Matters
Come on guys at least try.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.
I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.
Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?