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I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice. First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experien
by thornewolf 2y ago
I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice.
First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.
With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.
- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.
- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.
- When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
- I can't mind palace really much at all.
- I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.
Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio.
Interested in other people's experiences.
- Semaphor 2y ago> - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests) Interesting, I can reason how it should look and figure it out that way, but I never could just select one from seeing another version of it.
- catskul2 2y agoDo you ever talk to yourself silently? How fast do you read?
- thornewolf 2y agoYes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time. Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless). I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit. There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these thoughts though. I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.
- Workaccount2 2y agoWhen you do mental object rotations, does the answer just come to you? Like if I ask you to think of a car brand, one just jumped into your head. Does the correct rotation just come into your head too? For me to do rotations I have to visualize the object in my "minds eye" and then I watch it rotate. I can't imagine doing it any other way.
- tupolef 2y agoSorry but, your list of examples feels like a list produced by an AI from a set of articles about aphantasia, or it's like you're too influenced by these articles. Rotating 3d objects, doing multiple visual operations on a rubik's cube or mental abacus are not operations that even people with hyperphantasia will be able to do naturaly. If you gave more examples of every day situations, or if you told us that you tried to train for thoses operations for 3 months and failed, we could conclude something else.
- digging 2y agoCommand line vs GUI. (Or, for most people, a combination) In my case I'm approximately typical but there are things I'm better or worse at visualizing. I've never successfully worked a mind palace, I find myself too distracted and unable to hold the image, as if in a dream. But I'm quite good at mentally navigating routes and can build a pretty large visual model of roads I drive. (Oh. Maybe I should make a "mind city" instead.)