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I suspect that I would classify as one who has aphantasia, as I can't picture images at will. This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in

I suspect that I would classify as one who has aphantasia, as I can't picture images at will. This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.

davidhunter 5y ago
I’m with you. Do you believe it gives you an edge on certain types of tasks?
- aendruk 5y ago
  I feel like I’m better prepared for the tasks that are too complex to process all at once and must be decomposed and navigated systematically, because I’m well practiced at approaching everything that way, by necessity.
kmonsen 5y ago
I can't picture images at all, and don't really dream at all either. Wonder if there are any implications, I went through most of my life thinking this is normal.
- emerged 5y ago
  I can’t picture images at all and thought it was normal. I mean it seems to be relatively common at least so we aren’t total aliens. It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts. That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
- mikelevins 5y ago
  It’s unlikely that you don’t dream, but not at all unlikely that you dream but don’t remember it.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    That is probably true, but since I can't remember them I don't know if they are visual or not.
  - scruple 5y ago
    Yes. I have no visual imagery, either, but I know that I dream. I just have no recall, or very, very little. I've tried the dream log thing, etc. and nothing ever made a difference. I have a handful of dreams that I can recall from the entirety of my life and a couple from childhood, a couple from adulthood. I know that 1 of them is a recurring dream. 3 of them are actually nightmares.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      I could have written that whole comment you make, except I have only one dream I can remember from my whole life and it is a nightmare. Have not had it for at least 10+ years. I mean how do you do a dream log when you wake up and it is just like I have no idea if I dreamt or not.
      - mikelevins 5y ago
        I kept journals for several years. One night I woke up from a dream that was particularly interesting, so I turned on the light, found my journal, and wrote down everything I could remember. I decided then to keep a journal and a pen next to my bed so that recording additional dreams would be easier. I soon found that I had collected multiple volumes of recorded dreams and auxiliary notes about them. I don't know whether writing my dreams down made it more likely that I would dream, or more likely to remember my dreams--I know that some people say that it makes you more likely to remember your dreams, but I don't know whether that's true. I just know that the number of dreams I ended up writing down was much greater than I expected based on the number of dreams that I had previously remembered. Also, I needed to write them down very quickly after waking or I'd forget them. Every minute I waited caused me to lose more details. That still seems to be true years later. I don't keep a dream journal anymore, but I notice that if I wake from a dream, and I want to remember it, I need to write it down or tell someone about it pretty much right away. If I don't, it'll be lost within a few minutes. I might remember that I had a dream, and I might remember what I felt like when I was having it, but most often nothing more than that. If I write it down or otherwise communicate it, though, I usually remember the parts that I managed to communicate before the rest disappeared. Maybe if you keep a journal close to your bed as I once did, you'll get lucky one night and wake up from a dream to write it down. Maybe it will then turn out that those people are right: that writing down dreams makes you more likely to remember additional ones. I don't know if that's true, but maybe.
gavinray 5y ago
I am the same way, I explain it as "I think in concepts" Relationships is a word to explain it that I hadn't thought of before. I think a lot of engineers are probably similar. When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc. A lot of engineering/software stuff is abstract. Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation I also have essentially no geo-spatial awareness. I constantly get lost and have no sense of cardinal directions. Anyone else out there have a brain like this?
- prometheus76 5y ago
  That's very interesting because I also have aphantasia, but I can flip objects and know which answer is correct. I don't know how to explain it, but I can do it. I also have no problem with cardinal directions, and I have no problems with right/left (although my ability to distinguish right/left was a later development than my peers).
- kaashif 5y ago
  > When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc. Interesting that you feel this way. I definitely do imagine a codebase spatially, and constantly draw diagrams on paper to orient myself. I find those note taking tools like Dendron that do nothing except make a nice graph of your knowledge very useful. If you make a graph with services or classes as nodes, and edges as calls between them, you can absolutely get a sense of when a codebase or system architecture is spaghetti, and when it's a neatly organised tree with neatly distinguished layers and no cycles. In fact, surely that's why people call spaghetti code spaghetti - because the call graph looks like a plate of spaghetti and is impossible to untangle.

davidhunter 5y ago

I’m with you. Do you believe it gives you an edge on certain types of tasks?

aendruk 5y ago
I feel like I’m better prepared for the tasks that are too complex to process all at once and must be decomposed and navigated systematically, because I’m well practiced at approaching everything that way, by necessity.

kmonsen 5y ago

I can't picture images at all, and don't really dream at all either. Wonder if there are any implications, I went through most of my life thinking this is normal.

emerged 5y ago
I can’t picture images at all and thought it was normal. I mean it seems to be relatively common at least so we aren’t total aliens. It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts. That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
mikelevins 5y ago
It’s unlikely that you don’t dream, but not at all unlikely that you dream but don’t remember it.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  That is probably true, but since I can't remember them I don't know if they are visual or not.
- scruple 5y ago
  Yes. I have no visual imagery, either, but I know that I dream. I just have no recall, or very, very little. I've tried the dream log thing, etc. and nothing ever made a difference. I have a handful of dreams that I can recall from the entirety of my life and a couple from childhood, a couple from adulthood. I know that 1 of them is a recurring dream. 3 of them are actually nightmares.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    I could have written that whole comment you make, except I have only one dream I can remember from my whole life and it is a nightmare. Have not had it for at least 10+ years. I mean how do you do a dream log when you wake up and it is just like I have no idea if I dreamt or not.
    - mikelevins 5y ago
      I kept journals for several years. One night I woke up from a dream that was particularly interesting, so I turned on the light, found my journal, and wrote down everything I could remember. I decided then to keep a journal and a pen next to my bed so that recording additional dreams would be easier. I soon found that I had collected multiple volumes of recorded dreams and auxiliary notes about them. I don't know whether writing my dreams down made it more likely that I would dream, or more likely to remember my dreams--I know that some people say that it makes you more likely to remember your dreams, but I don't know whether that's true. I just know that the number of dreams I ended up writing down was much greater than I expected based on the number of dreams that I had previously remembered. Also, I needed to write them down very quickly after waking or I'd forget them. Every minute I waited caused me to lose more details. That still seems to be true years later. I don't keep a dream journal anymore, but I notice that if I wake from a dream, and I want to remember it, I need to write it down or tell someone about it pretty much right away. If I don't, it'll be lost within a few minutes. I might remember that I had a dream, and I might remember what I felt like when I was having it, but most often nothing more than that. If I write it down or otherwise communicate it, though, I usually remember the parts that I managed to communicate before the rest disappeared. Maybe if you keep a journal close to your bed as I once did, you'll get lucky one night and wake up from a dream to write it down. Maybe it will then turn out that those people are right: that writing down dreams makes you more likely to remember additional ones. I don't know if that's true, but maybe.

gavinray 5y ago

I am the same way, I explain it as "I think in concepts" Relationships is a word to explain it that I hadn't thought of before. I think a lot of engineers are probably similar. When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc. A lot of engineering/software stuff is abstract. Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation I also have essentially no geo-spatial awareness. I constantly get lost and have no sense of cardinal directions. Anyone else out there have a brain like this?

prometheus76 5y ago
That's very interesting because I also have aphantasia, but I can flip objects and know which answer is correct. I don't know how to explain it, but I can do it. I also have no problem with cardinal directions, and I have no problems with right/left (although my ability to distinguish right/left was a later development than my peers).
kaashif 5y ago
> When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc. Interesting that you feel this way. I definitely do imagine a codebase spatially, and constantly draw diagrams on paper to orient myself. I find those note taking tools like Dendron that do nothing except make a nice graph of your knowledge very useful. If you make a graph with services or classes as nodes, and edges as calls between them, you can absolutely get a sense of when a codebase or system architecture is spaghetti, and when it's a neatly organised tree with neatly distinguished layers and no cycles. In fact, surely that's why people call spaghetti code spaghetti - because the call graph looks like a plate of spaghetti and is impossible to untangle.