8 ms·

I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this

I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood. For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also have to be true: - He never heard anyone talk about dreams - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art - He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used and people describe what they see in their memory of an event - He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something was demonstrated visually - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory - Etc. It just strikes me as entirely implausible.

riskable 5y ago
Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they literally just have a storage location for words/letters and that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they, "know them when they see (or write) them." You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath). Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?
GistNoesis 5y ago
The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head. You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them. This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums. Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.
silicon2401 5y ago
> cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can find examples in this very thread.
necovek 5y ago
It seems dreams are not affected by aphantasia. Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" while you do that. I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image in my head. All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, just on the other end of the curve). I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly differently. So in short, I could notice that there are some special things about my brain, but I did not know that this might be "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it). I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that you find it implausible that adults would only learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a miniscule part of them.
zepto 5y ago
If you find it implausible, you need to simply read the literature on perceptual changes caused by brain lesions. Try reading “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks. Most of your examples don’t have any obvious connection to what was posted. E.g. most people don’t have a photographic memory and we all know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head doesn’t require you to visualize anything. It just requires you not to say what you read out loud.
yboris 5y ago
Many color-blind people do not discover they are color blind until teenage years (or even later). You can live without realizing you're different even when people use different words that to them seem to be describing the same thing. I recommend reading the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is incomplete). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
caymanjim 5y ago
> - He never heard anyone talk about dreams I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets. > - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it to myself. > - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the real thing. > - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to remember the underlying information. > - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen Wiltshire[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
_dain_ 5y ago
There are similar experiences reported by many, many people. Check out /r/aphantasia, it's full of people saying variations on "omg my whole life I didn't realize 'mental images' weren't metaphorical!!!" Example: https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingphrase_made_sense_after_you_found_out/ https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp... >Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) because they can ‘see’ the person’s face in their memory. Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet another colourful metaphor. And then you have people like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or deluded.
Taniwha 5y ago
I'm 63, literally up until 5 minutes ago I didn't realise that most people (or any people) actually see images when they imagine things, I'm quite flabbergasted, in retrospect it explains lots of things

riskable 5y ago

Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they literally just have a storage location for words/letters and that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they, "know them when they see (or write) them." You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath). Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?

GistNoesis 5y ago

The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head. You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them. This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums. Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.

silicon2401 5y ago

> cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can find examples in this very thread.

necovek 5y ago

It seems dreams are not affected by aphantasia. Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" while you do that. I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image in my head. All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, just on the other end of the curve). I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly differently. So in short, I could notice that there are some special things about my brain, but I did not know that this might be "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it). I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that you find it implausible that adults would only learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a miniscule part of them.

zepto 5y ago

If you find it implausible, you need to simply read the literature on perceptual changes caused by brain lesions. Try reading “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks. Most of your examples don’t have any obvious connection to what was posted. E.g. most people don’t have a photographic memory and we all know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head doesn’t require you to visualize anything. It just requires you not to say what you read out loud.

yboris 5y ago

Many color-blind people do not discover they are color blind until teenage years (or even later). You can live without realizing you're different even when people use different words that to them seem to be describing the same thing. I recommend reading the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is incomplete). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

caymanjim 5y ago

> - He never heard anyone talk about dreams I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets. > - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it to myself. > - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the real thing. > - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to remember the underlying information. > - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen Wiltshire[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire

_dain_ 5y ago

There are similar experiences reported by many, many people. Check out /r/aphantasia, it's full of people saying variations on "omg my whole life I didn't realize 'mental images' weren't metaphorical!!!" Example: https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingphrase_made_sense_after_you_found_out/ https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp... >Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) because they can ‘see’ the person’s face in their memory. Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet another colourful metaphor. And then you have people like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or deluded.

Taniwha 5y ago

I'm 63, literally up until 5 minutes ago I didn't realise that most people (or any people) actually see images when they imagine things, I'm quite flabbergasted, in retrospect it explains lots of things