4 ms·

I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass thos

I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass those questions, but I can. It's almost an intuitive sense of which one is right.

cartoonfoxes 4y ago
Elsewhere in this thread people were talking about imagined sounds or music, and a specific impairment in their ability to hear music in their heads. An anecdote: I'm in the middle of learning the bass part for a piece of music. Having listened to it enough I can imagine the sound enough to "hear" the notes, fret noises, pluck and slap sounds. Altogether it's a very high-fidelity simulation. I was practicing right up until, for apparently no reason at all, the song falls out of my short-term memory. Completely gone - can't even remember its name - but I could still work the fingerboard just fine. The muscle memory and intuition of how to play "that song" are still there, and my hands continue to play it almost as well as before. People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia. I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.

4 ms·

I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass thos

by prometheus76 4y ago

cartoonfoxes 4y ago
Elsewhere in this thread people were talking about imagined sounds or music, and a specific impairment in their ability to hear music in their heads. An anecdote: I'm in the middle of learning the bass part for a piece of music. Having listened to it enough I can imagine the sound enough to "hear" the notes, fret noises, pluck and slap sounds. Altogether it's a very high-fidelity simulation. I was practicing right up until, for apparently no reason at all, the song falls out of my short-term memory. Completely gone - can't even remember its name - but I could still work the fingerboard just fine. The muscle memory and intuition of how to play "that song" are still there, and my hands continue to play it almost as well as before. People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia. I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.