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The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow. A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being

by ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow. A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR. Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described. Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is. The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight. And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.

kaashif 2y ago
> Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described. But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other. If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_? I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    > But not a specific teacup Right, isn't that weird though! :-)
    - jodrellblank 2y ago
      I've watched something about an autistic person with a photographic memory who said they had trouble with the concept of "a church" because in their mind they could only picture specific churches and they all looked different. I've seen anecdotes of people with perfect pitch saying that if a tune was transposed to a different octave or played in a different key or interpretation, everyone else says it is "the same tune" but to them it has different notes so it's a different tune. I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
  - kaashif 2y ago
    > If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_? I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying. If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image. This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like. Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image. Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_? The pure, abstract essence of teacup, to them. I suppose I assume it does have size and shape (it's functionally an imaginary cup, after all, and not another imaginary object). Maybe to someone who has only ever seen blue teacups, it's inherently blue? For me, if I start that exercise it's not even white; its colour is undefined until I interrogate the idea it should have colour. Or until whichever hilarious infant I am having an imaginary tea party with tells me what colour it is, of course.
  - kaashif 2y ago
    My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image. If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image. If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind. I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
    - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
      > My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image. Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them. After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
      - kaashif 2y ago
courseofaction 2y ago
On the other end of the spectrum, Nikola Tesla's visualisations were so strong that as a child he would vividly hallucinate objects when their names were spoken to him.

kaashif 2y ago

> Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described. But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other. If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?

jodrellblank 2y ago
If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_? I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > But not a specific teacup Right, isn't that weird though! :-)
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    I've watched something about an autistic person with a photographic memory who said they had trouble with the concept of "a church" because in their mind they could only picture specific churches and they all looked different. I've seen anecdotes of people with perfect pitch saying that if a tune was transposed to a different octave or played in a different key or interpretation, everyone else says it is "the same tune" but to them it has different notes so it's a different tune. I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
- kaashif 2y ago
  > If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_? I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying. If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image. This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like. Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image. Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
> If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_? The pure, abstract essence of teacup, to them. I suppose I assume it does have size and shape (it's functionally an imaginary cup, after all, and not another imaginary object). Maybe to someone who has only ever seen blue teacups, it's inherently blue? For me, if I start that exercise it's not even white; its colour is undefined until I interrogate the idea it should have colour. Or until whichever hilarious infant I am having an imaginary tea party with tells me what colour it is, of course.
- kaashif 2y ago
  My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image. If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image. If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind. I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    > My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image. Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them. After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
    - kaashif 2y ago

courseofaction 2y ago

On the other end of the spectrum, Nikola Tesla's visualisations were so strong that as a child he would vividly hallucinate objects when their names were spoken to him.