4 ms·

>> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people a

>> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.

watwut 5y ago
It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only this one specific difference in how people think. I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots of psychology topics. Try autism.
- burnished 5y ago
  As a sibling comment posited, its popular pretty much anywhere. Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.
SilasX 5y ago
If there were a concrete phenomenon that's consistently observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We can't directly compare subjective experience, so any comparison is going to be filtered through the language of how we describe said experience, and so it's that much harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category and the extent to which people have it. Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic. Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is. (Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.) Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition. Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.
- blindmute 5y ago
  I mean, if you have a strong mental imagery, it's not ambiguous at all whether it's metaphorical or not. It really is seeing. All experience is subjective, but it's like if half of people were seeing in greyscale and tried to argue that there may or may not be different colors other than grey, and that the discussion is pointless. The people seeing colors are like, uhhh no man, there are actually different colors and you're just not seeing them. It's incredibly obvious that there are more colors than grey. But when a large chunk of people see in monochrome, and even more people are seeing an extremely desaturated palette to where it's almost grey but not quite, the discussion gets muddied. And then the greyscale seers try to convince everyone that it's just a difference in language and actually 'red' is just a feeling. It's just absurd to anyone who has the strong sense.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Except this is nothing like color blindness. No matter how much you play with colors, you remain colorblind. Colorblindness also affects your life at least somehow. This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops. It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.
    - d3ad1ysp0rk 5y ago
      Are you implying that aphantasia is treatable by practice visualizing things? My own experience with it and everything I've seen (no pun intended) says otherwise, but I'm happy to read a good source of reasoning around your theory.
- watwut 5y ago
  Yep. And it completely ignores aspect of it being something that you can train. It is more of mental skill, like ability to manipulate numbers in your head, remember worst and what not. I 100% doubt I am only one whose visual imagination got significantly better with trying to learn new strongly visual skill (in my case drawing). > or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.

watwut 5y ago

It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only this one specific difference in how people think. I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.

pseudalopex 5y ago
Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots of psychology topics. Try autism.
burnished 5y ago
As a sibling comment posited, its popular pretty much anywhere. Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.

SilasX 5y ago

If there were a concrete phenomenon that's consistently observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We can't directly compare subjective experience, so any comparison is going to be filtered through the language of how we describe said experience, and so it's that much harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category and the extent to which people have it. Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic. Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is. (Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.) Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition. Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.

blindmute 5y ago
I mean, if you have a strong mental imagery, it's not ambiguous at all whether it's metaphorical or not. It really is seeing. All experience is subjective, but it's like if half of people were seeing in greyscale and tried to argue that there may or may not be different colors other than grey, and that the discussion is pointless. The people seeing colors are like, uhhh no man, there are actually different colors and you're just not seeing them. It's incredibly obvious that there are more colors than grey. But when a large chunk of people see in monochrome, and even more people are seeing an extremely desaturated palette to where it's almost grey but not quite, the discussion gets muddied. And then the greyscale seers try to convince everyone that it's just a difference in language and actually 'red' is just a feeling. It's just absurd to anyone who has the strong sense.
- watwut 5y ago
  Except this is nothing like color blindness. No matter how much you play with colors, you remain colorblind. Colorblindness also affects your life at least somehow. This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops. It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.
  - d3ad1ysp0rk 5y ago
    Are you implying that aphantasia is treatable by practice visualizing things? My own experience with it and everything I've seen (no pun intended) says otherwise, but I'm happy to read a good source of reasoning around your theory.
watwut 5y ago
Yep. And it completely ignores aspect of it being something that you can train. It is more of mental skill, like ability to manipulate numbers in your head, remember worst and what not. I 100% doubt I am only one whose visual imagination got significantly better with trying to learn new strongly visual skill (in my case drawing). > or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.