6 ms·

No one on earth can 'visualise' an image in their head as if they were seeing it in real life. This entire fiasco is just people on different spectrums of menta

No one on earth can 'visualise' an image in their head as if they were seeing it in real life. This entire fiasco is just people on different spectrums of mental picturing that are freaking out because they are misinterpreting what aphantasia is. I assure you you are most likely normal, and it's common to not recite a sentence word for word or picture an object perfectly. Others can do it very well. Just like you can visualise music very well, whereas I cannot. It's a (tight) spectrum.

jjk166 6y ago
Plenty of people can visualize an image in their head as if they are seeing it in real life. As one of those people, trust me that if your brain is set up to work that way, it's pretty difficult to imagine any other way of picturing the world. Likewise there are plenty of people who honestly can't picture things in their mind at all. The fact that you are towards the middle of the spectrum does not mean the extremes don't exist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- plutonorm 6y ago
  So you can draw photo realistic impressions of those memories? Come on now. I can visualise pretty vividly, but I know that my memory is conning me, the textures and details are the feelings of textures and details. If I actually interrogate the visualisation the detail is not there. It's like trying to read writing in a dream, you imagine that it's perfect because the feeling is the same, but try to actually read - the detail is not there.
  - cortic 6y ago
    >the detail is not there. Usually no, but (anecdote); I cannot normally remember my credit card number, dreaming years ago i read the number aloud and when i woke i could remember the numbers that i had recited in the dream, i checked and they were correct... So at least sometimes in dreams the detail is real. I have a theory that memory recollection is linked to social impulses, that our minds forget things on purpose (without our knowledge lol) as a tool for social integration. I've seen some indirect evidence of this in some sports, where people tend to be just about as good at a sport as their social peers, change social peers and they become better or worse accordingly. -this would have interesting implications for aphantasia treatment.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Well I can't draw anything very well, but I can see in my mind a photo-realistic image indistinguishable from what I am perceiving in real time. No matter to what degree I interrogate it, I find no discrepancies with the real world. Everything I revisit is exactly as I remember it. I can read text in my dreams. I can make arbitrary changes to whatever I visualize and project them onto the real world as if my eyes were seeing it for real. Compare your memory of, say, song lyrics - you might misremember some of the words but that doesn't mean your memory of the lyrics aren't real, you are remembering a real and coherent set of words, not making them up as you go. When you hear that song again and you know what word is coming up next that is not your mind conning you, that is just successful recall. Likewise you probably know the melody of the song; though you might not be able to transcribe it, you would immediately notice if even a single note was off. More impressive, you can probably correctly identify a song you haven't heard in years from a fraction of a second long sample. If you show me some tiny portion of a photograph of something I've seen before, I will similarly be able to identify it instantly. I used to think that everyone experienced the world the same way as I did. Personally, as a visual person, I found graphs to be the most intuitive way of conveying information. How could anyone not understand a graph? But my brother can't make heads or tails of them. He's an incredibly intelligent person, but he fundamentally does not process and store information visually. I've met many other people who can think in ways I can't, such as people who can think visualize objects in 4 dimensions. If you want further evidence that thought processing is not constant across different people, consider that it is not even constant over a single lifetime. What language do you process language in? If you learn a second language, most people, myself included, eventually reach a point where you can think in that second language without using your primary language as a mediator. The brain is simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly plastic. Entire regions can be repurposed to function in radically different ways. All evidence points to extreme variability in how our individual minds work.
    - plutonorm 6y ago
      Ok I kinda believe you. But I do not understand why you wouldn't be able to draw perfectly. Why can you not simply overlay what you see with you're minds eye over the real world? I do this when I am drawing, that's why I'm not a bad drawer. And it's also how I know the limitations of my visualisation. As I learn to draw, say, faces better, the detail and accuracy of my visualisation improves.
- cortic 6y ago
  Its likly to be largely an illusion; There was a talk from a neurologist years ago, when he demonstrated that mental images don't act like real images. If you picture something like a pirate, and someone asked you about the scene, eg; what color are his trousers, what kind of shirt.. You will get a question that you don't instantly know, your mind will quickly 'colour/paint in' so you can answer, but the important part is that you didn't notice that bit was missing before you were asked, which is not now a real picture acts - you would have noticed the pirate had no trouser without needing to be asked about them. eye-sight itself is an illusion to some degree, eyes don't send images, they send data that is re-assembled into a construct of abstractions, aka you don't see a cup until you know its a cup. there are a lot of optical illusions that exploit this.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Look at your computer screen. Really take it in. Where is the banner? Where is the exit button? What is the color of your underwear? Perhaps you will remember what color underwear you put on this morning, perhaps you will check, but it would be pretty weird if your underwear's color was constantly on your mind. Nevertheless, I doubt you would argue that your underwear did not have color while you weren't thinking of it. Now open up an image of a pirate on your screen. Click on the window and drag it down until the bottom half is off the screen. What color are the pirate's trousers? The computer is only displaying a portion of the image, so technically the pirate's trousers don't exist. But nevertheless the data in the image file would suggest that the pirate does in fact have trousers of a certain color, even if that color is just a number. You are correct that visual memory does not work like a photograph, but why would it? Your eyes don't send photographs via mail to a little post office in your head, your vision is a means of processing the signals of huge numbers of neurons firing together. Visual processing ought to the same circuits in the brain as vision, the fact that it behaves like vision is evidence that those circuits really are in use. Of course what I imagine is an illusion, no one is proposing that simply by imagining an object it will manifest in reality. The point is that it is exactly the same sort of illusion as the one that my brain makes when I see real things, and thus my perception of my visual thoughts is the same as my perception of the visible world.
cercatrova 6y ago
Yes, that is what the experience of most people is like without aphantasia. I can even, for like a second, see a fully formed picture in my mind, like a scene from a sci-fi movie, or anything else, really, although it can disappear if I don't focus on the exact details. I can see everything, the shapes, the layout, colors, all of it. It really is like playing a movie in your mind.

jjk166 6y ago

Plenty of people can visualize an image in their head as if they are seeing it in real life. As one of those people, trust me that if your brain is set up to work that way, it's pretty difficult to imagine any other way of picturing the world. Likewise there are plenty of people who honestly can't picture things in their mind at all. The fact that you are towards the middle of the spectrum does not mean the extremes don't exist.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
plutonorm 6y ago
So you can draw photo realistic impressions of those memories? Come on now. I can visualise pretty vividly, but I know that my memory is conning me, the textures and details are the feelings of textures and details. If I actually interrogate the visualisation the detail is not there. It's like trying to read writing in a dream, you imagine that it's perfect because the feeling is the same, but try to actually read - the detail is not there.
- cortic 6y ago
  >the detail is not there. Usually no, but (anecdote); I cannot normally remember my credit card number, dreaming years ago i read the number aloud and when i woke i could remember the numbers that i had recited in the dream, i checked and they were correct... So at least sometimes in dreams the detail is real. I have a theory that memory recollection is linked to social impulses, that our minds forget things on purpose (without our knowledge lol) as a tool for social integration. I've seen some indirect evidence of this in some sports, where people tend to be just about as good at a sport as their social peers, change social peers and they become better or worse accordingly. -this would have interesting implications for aphantasia treatment.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Well I can't draw anything very well, but I can see in my mind a photo-realistic image indistinguishable from what I am perceiving in real time. No matter to what degree I interrogate it, I find no discrepancies with the real world. Everything I revisit is exactly as I remember it. I can read text in my dreams. I can make arbitrary changes to whatever I visualize and project them onto the real world as if my eyes were seeing it for real. Compare your memory of, say, song lyrics - you might misremember some of the words but that doesn't mean your memory of the lyrics aren't real, you are remembering a real and coherent set of words, not making them up as you go. When you hear that song again and you know what word is coming up next that is not your mind conning you, that is just successful recall. Likewise you probably know the melody of the song; though you might not be able to transcribe it, you would immediately notice if even a single note was off. More impressive, you can probably correctly identify a song you haven't heard in years from a fraction of a second long sample. If you show me some tiny portion of a photograph of something I've seen before, I will similarly be able to identify it instantly. I used to think that everyone experienced the world the same way as I did. Personally, as a visual person, I found graphs to be the most intuitive way of conveying information. How could anyone not understand a graph? But my brother can't make heads or tails of them. He's an incredibly intelligent person, but he fundamentally does not process and store information visually. I've met many other people who can think in ways I can't, such as people who can think visualize objects in 4 dimensions. If you want further evidence that thought processing is not constant across different people, consider that it is not even constant over a single lifetime. What language do you process language in? If you learn a second language, most people, myself included, eventually reach a point where you can think in that second language without using your primary language as a mediator. The brain is simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly plastic. Entire regions can be repurposed to function in radically different ways. All evidence points to extreme variability in how our individual minds work.
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    Ok I kinda believe you. But I do not understand why you wouldn't be able to draw perfectly. Why can you not simply overlay what you see with you're minds eye over the real world? I do this when I am drawing, that's why I'm not a bad drawer. And it's also how I know the limitations of my visualisation. As I learn to draw, say, faces better, the detail and accuracy of my visualisation improves.
cortic 6y ago
Its likly to be largely an illusion; There was a talk from a neurologist years ago, when he demonstrated that mental images don't act like real images. If you picture something like a pirate, and someone asked you about the scene, eg; what color are his trousers, what kind of shirt.. You will get a question that you don't instantly know, your mind will quickly 'colour/paint in' so you can answer, but the important part is that you didn't notice that bit was missing before you were asked, which is not now a real picture acts - you would have noticed the pirate had no trouser without needing to be asked about them. eye-sight itself is an illusion to some degree, eyes don't send images, they send data that is re-assembled into a construct of abstractions, aka you don't see a cup until you know its a cup. there are a lot of optical illusions that exploit this.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Look at your computer screen. Really take it in. Where is the banner? Where is the exit button? What is the color of your underwear? Perhaps you will remember what color underwear you put on this morning, perhaps you will check, but it would be pretty weird if your underwear's color was constantly on your mind. Nevertheless, I doubt you would argue that your underwear did not have color while you weren't thinking of it. Now open up an image of a pirate on your screen. Click on the window and drag it down until the bottom half is off the screen. What color are the pirate's trousers? The computer is only displaying a portion of the image, so technically the pirate's trousers don't exist. But nevertheless the data in the image file would suggest that the pirate does in fact have trousers of a certain color, even if that color is just a number. You are correct that visual memory does not work like a photograph, but why would it? Your eyes don't send photographs via mail to a little post office in your head, your vision is a means of processing the signals of huge numbers of neurons firing together. Visual processing ought to the same circuits in the brain as vision, the fact that it behaves like vision is evidence that those circuits really are in use. Of course what I imagine is an illusion, no one is proposing that simply by imagining an object it will manifest in reality. The point is that it is exactly the same sort of illusion as the one that my brain makes when I see real things, and thus my perception of my visual thoughts is the same as my perception of the visible world.

cercatrova 6y ago

Yes, that is what the experience of most people is like without aphantasia. I can even, for like a second, see a fully formed picture in my mind, like a scene from a sci-fi movie, or anything else, really, although it can disappear if I don't focus on the exact details. I can see everything, the shapes, the layout, colors, all of it. It really is like playing a movie in your mind.