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Interesting... I wonder: Given a graph paper and one point on that paper could you manually color in one at a time those surrounding boxes that a larger square

Interesting... I wonder: Given a graph paper and one point on that paper could you manually color in one at a time those surrounding boxes that a larger square (eg 5x5) or a equilateral triangle (aprox rasterized) or a rasterized line between two given points emerges? If yes, how would you do it? Would you need to run an algorithm of "which box to color next" in your head? Or could you just color in an entire region because you already know aproximately which boxes need to be colored? Do you know/guess which boxes you need to color before taking the pencil into your hand? Because, given such a graph and a task to color some of the boxes to render a figure, if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it?

the8472 8y ago
From a paper on aphantasia I read a while ago I recall that the difference is about which brain functions you use. Spatial thinking vs. visual. The former works fine in aphantasia, the latter does not. As I understand it it's the difference between decomposing the barn into a cube and a prism, performing perspective projection on it, without the help of a ruler, and then rasterizing that into a 16x16 grid while also assigning colors while holding all that in your working memory at the same time and only being able appreciate it as an abstract 256-item long list of colors vs. having a finished and higher-fidelity result including grass and sky hallucinated by your visual system with little mental effort, allowing you to use the same downstream processing that you can also use when looking at the actual thing.
vidarh 8y ago
> if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it? That's what I used to think it was for when people talked about picturing things. But it appears a lot of people actually see the shapes and some subset also see the colours with various degrees of fidelity as if they're in front of their eyes. I know their spatial relation, but I don't see it.

the8472 8y ago

From a paper on aphantasia I read a while ago I recall that the difference is about which brain functions you use. Spatial thinking vs. visual. The former works fine in aphantasia, the latter does not. As I understand it it's the difference between decomposing the barn into a cube and a prism, performing perspective projection on it, without the help of a ruler, and then rasterizing that into a 16x16 grid while also assigning colors while holding all that in your working memory at the same time and only being able appreciate it as an abstract 256-item long list of colors vs. having a finished and higher-fidelity result including grass and sky hallucinated by your visual system with little mental effort, allowing you to use the same downstream processing that you can also use when looking at the actual thing.

vidarh 8y ago

> if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it? That's what I used to think it was for when people talked about picturing things. But it appears a lot of people actually see the shapes and some subset also see the colours with various degrees of fidelity as if they're in front of their eyes. I know their spatial relation, but I don't see it.