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There's an aphantasia subreddit I checked out once. There was a discussion where people mentioned that they could hear a song in their head and play it back, an

by c3534l 6y ago

There's an aphantasia subreddit I checked out once. There was a discussion where people mentioned that they could hear a song in their head and play it back, and they could recall a voice or speak in their head, but it had never occurred to them that people could do something like that with images. I asked someone if they could visualize red versus blue in their head and they said they could not, they could only think of the words red and blue and not imagine what the colors looked like without actually looking at something red or blue. One person told me they had absolutely no imagination at all and could not, for instance, recall the sound of someone's voice or imagine warm sand between their toes.

andromeduck 6y ago
Yeah, as one of the more extreme cases Im honestly pretty jealous. All my memories are essentially abstract ideas/connections. Memories of places for example is mostly how they're spatially connected, rough dimensions, how it was constructed, how it operates, and sometimes how it made me feel the first or last time I saw it. I can't conjure the face or voice of any loved one nor the feeling of walking into a cold lake for example only an abstract description like if you were writing in a journal. When music triggers a memory, what is recalled is the feeling or train of thought when that memory was formed.
Tor3 6y ago
If there is sound (e.g. someone says something) and I'm not actively listening to it, but suddenly I have to focus on what was said then I can replay the last few seconds and catch up. I guess this is common to some level at least - it's hard to see how it's possible to communicate otherwise. After all we kind of have to keep a full sentence in our heads in order to understand it. What I definitely can't do is replaying something that visually happened if I'm focusing on something else, or not paying attention. The same goes for other physical stimulation like touch etc. If I'm not conscious about it I can't tell what happened before the moment I focused. So, if I suddenly find myself in a slightly embarrassing position relative to someone else in a crowded pub, for example, and I didn't pay attention, I couldn't tell if it was because the way I was moving or if it was because of someone else. But if someone said something I'll just replay it. Works nicely for listening to a language I don't know that well too, I just replay it and translate it. But in a conversation there's no time to do that, so I'm stuck. (I'm not talking about creating or remembering a sequence of events and playing that in my head as a movie - that's not a problem. But there seems to be an always-on "cache memory" for audio while there's none for visual or other stimuli. For me, at least. What I'm wondering is - do other people have "cache memory" for visual or other input interfaces?)

by c3534l 6y ago

andromeduck 6y ago

Yeah, as one of the more extreme cases Im honestly pretty jealous. All my memories are essentially abstract ideas/connections. Memories of places for example is mostly how they're spatially connected, rough dimensions, how it was constructed, how it operates, and sometimes how it made me feel the first or last time I saw it. I can't conjure the face or voice of any loved one nor the feeling of walking into a cold lake for example only an abstract description like if you were writing in a journal. When music triggers a memory, what is recalled is the feeling or train of thought when that memory was formed.

Tor3 6y ago

If there is sound (e.g. someone says something) and I'm not actively listening to it, but suddenly I have to focus on what was said then I can replay the last few seconds and catch up. I guess this is common to some level at least - it's hard to see how it's possible to communicate otherwise. After all we kind of have to keep a full sentence in our heads in order to understand it. What I definitely can't do is replaying something that visually happened if I'm focusing on something else, or not paying attention. The same goes for other physical stimulation like touch etc. If I'm not conscious about it I can't tell what happened before the moment I focused. So, if I suddenly find myself in a slightly embarrassing position relative to someone else in a crowded pub, for example, and I didn't pay attention, I couldn't tell if it was because the way I was moving or if it was because of someone else. But if someone said something I'll just replay it. Works nicely for listening to a language I don't know that well too, I just replay it and translate it. But in a conversation there's no time to do that, so I'm stuck. (I'm not talking about creating or remembering a sequence of events and playing that in my head as a movie - that's not a problem. But there seems to be an always-on "cache memory" for audio while there's none for visual or other stimuli. For me, at least. What I'm wondering is - do other people have "cache memory" for visual or other input interfaces?)