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Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its

Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have memories of documentaries that “replay” in my head. When I am imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I can’t really see what is in front of me. In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.

codazoda 5y ago
Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.
pxc 5y ago
> Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow. How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that? These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme
- drdeca 5y ago
  Yeah, that’s definitely more vivid than what I see, and I’m fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have trouble “seeing the entire thing at once”. That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  Usually, I can see everything all at once, fully detailed. Think of a screenshot, that's basically how it is like for me. I've even visualized entire websites in perfect clarity and reproduced them from that screenshot-like memory.
burke 5y ago
What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities. If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination: * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery. * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part. * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail. * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update. It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation. It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.

codazoda 5y ago

Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.

pxc 5y ago

> Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow. How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that? These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme

drdeca 5y ago
Yeah, that’s definitely more vivid than what I see, and I’m fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have trouble “seeing the entire thing at once”. That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.
cercatrova 5y ago
Usually, I can see everything all at once, fully detailed. Think of a screenshot, that's basically how it is like for me. I've even visualized entire websites in perfect clarity and reproduced them from that screenshot-like memory.

burke 5y ago

What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities. If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination: * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery. * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part. * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail. * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update. It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation. It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.