> Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337

> Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music. > it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors. I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters. I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild! Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.