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Suppose you need a fork, and you send me to go to your home to get one. Talk me through how to find your home and your kitchen and your silverware drawer. Can

Suppose you need a fork, and you send me to go to your home to get one. Talk me through how to find your home and your kitchen and your silverware drawer. Can you do all that without picturing any of it?

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Not the person you're responding to, but I also think I have a substantial degree of aphantasia (my "mind images" are quite weak and inconcrete) after reading about the subject in the past. Interesting exercise. If you ask me to explain that, I do think in a kind of abstract first-person 3D map of the street and my home, which can be pretty accurate in terms of scale, angles, etc. and it is helpful enough to accurately perform the task at hand of describing how to find the fork. But I can't really say I picture it in any meaningful way. Things have no color, but I can't say that they are black and white either, they are just the concept of an object of a given shape occupying a given space. When I mentally go to my home's door, I can stop and think about what color the door is (only with one object at a time) but this feels more like assigning the concept of whiteness to the abstract idea of the door being there, than like evoking an image of the door.
ALittleLight 7y ago
I can give directions without picturing things and actually can't "picture" things at all. Although I can metaphorically "picture" things where I think about the thing and what I know of it. To direct you to forks, I'd say "stand in the kitchen facing the bar, forks are in the right most drawer." I don't need to picture anything because I've committed directions like these to memory so that I can find forks and things myself. I don't mean that I've memorized phrases like that and I'm constantly chanting them to myself, but it's more like I have a memory of that fact and can serialize my memory into those words. I couldn't tell you things that I didn't memorize - e.g. is the silverware drawer wider than other drawers? How many drawers are in my kitchen? Is there a handle on the drawer? What does it look like?

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

Not the person you're responding to, but I also think I have a substantial degree of aphantasia (my "mind images" are quite weak and inconcrete) after reading about the subject in the past. Interesting exercise. If you ask me to explain that, I do think in a kind of abstract first-person 3D map of the street and my home, which can be pretty accurate in terms of scale, angles, etc. and it is helpful enough to accurately perform the task at hand of describing how to find the fork. But I can't really say I picture it in any meaningful way. Things have no color, but I can't say that they are black and white either, they are just the concept of an object of a given shape occupying a given space. When I mentally go to my home's door, I can stop and think about what color the door is (only with one object at a time) but this feels more like assigning the concept of whiteness to the abstract idea of the door being there, than like evoking an image of the door.

ALittleLight 7y ago

I can give directions without picturing things and actually can't "picture" things at all. Although I can metaphorically "picture" things where I think about the thing and what I know of it. To direct you to forks, I'd say "stand in the kitchen facing the bar, forks are in the right most drawer." I don't need to picture anything because I've committed directions like these to memory so that I can find forks and things myself. I don't mean that I've memorized phrases like that and I'm constantly chanting them to myself, but it's more like I have a memory of that fact and can serialize my memory into those words. I couldn't tell you things that I didn't memorize - e.g. is the silverware drawer wider than other drawers? How many drawers are in my kitchen? Is there a handle on the drawer? What does it look like?