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Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions
by misthop 12d ago
Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions
- jibbit 12d agoSo you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like?
- misthop 12d agohttps://aphantasia.com/study/vviq https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
- jibbit 12d agoseems ironic (and not at all trustworthy)! if you're right, you can't actually imagine what being able to do it would be like
- sceptic123 12d agoAre you arguing against the GP having it because you can't imagine what that's like? Is that the irony you're talking about?
- vidarh 12d agoThe people who question this usually turn out to clearly have aphantasia. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have achieved visualisation during meditation, once. I also can visualise while dreaming. I do not visualise while awake other than that one time. The difference is extremely stark and very obvious.
- thom 11d agoI really don't think this is the right definition. I don't think I have aphantasia: I picture things in my mind's eye, can manipulate those images, and I get the various stimulus responses described in some of the literature. But it's totally different than dreaming: it's an act of will, I can dismiss it at any time, and I would never be able to convince myself I was actually 'seeing' what I imagined. But heck, if that's it then hail, brother.
- vidarh 11d agoIt's absolutely not a definition - if you can actually picture things, you don't have aphantasia. I brought it up because it's surprisingly frequent that the people who doubt it exists turns out to doubt it because they don't actually believe people actually picture things, and that it's all just talking in metaphors. It's what I used to think most of my life... Note that some people who do picture things do visualise it so clearly that it is comparable to seeing, and that was my one singular experience with it as well, but that is the far other end of the scale. Most people will definitely be able to tell it apart from "actually" seeing, but it will be distinctly visual. When I draw a comparison to dreaming it's about the images, not about being able to will it or dimiss it.
- thom 11d agoGotcha. I _do_ have extremely clear auditory hallucinations, especially when I'm sleepy, but I was never talented enough to write them down properly, so I can believe more vivid visual ones are possible. Just always anxious that's what people mean during these threads.
- Gravityloss 12d agoHmm turns out I have hyperphantasia? No wonder it feels it's hard to explain things to people a lot of the time...
- thom 11d agoNot sure what to answer on any of those questions. There's no 'perfectly clear but nothing like normal vision' option.
- ThrowawayTestr 12d agoWhat does you mother look like?
- misthop 12d agoShe's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory
- nelox 12d agoWhat does that mean? You can recite a description you’ve read or heard, but what about looking at a photo and describing it?
- misthop 12d agoAfter looking at a photo? I have a memory of the "facts" of the photograph. I have no image of it
- vidarh 12d agoI can describe someone from memory, and I can draw them, but I can't see them unless they're in front of me (or I'm looking at a photo).
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- jaggederest 11d agoCan you draw them and then look at the drawing? I'm just wondering about the "bootstrap" ability, for lack of a better term.
- vidarh 11d agoI'm not sure what you're asking. Of course I can look at the drawing. But it still doesn't produce any image that persist when I'm not looking at it.
- JoshTriplett 12d agoDoes it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file? If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
- misthop 12d agoI'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
- orta 12d agoTo add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.
- cyclopeanutopia 12d ago> I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.
- misthop 12d agoSome people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery
- vidarh 12d agoSome people hear it more like a recording.
- jareklupinski 12d agohow is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck? i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
- misthop 12d agoProprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range
- jareklupinski 12d agointeresting! i always have to 'see myself' in my head to answer those kinds of questions
- vidarh 12d agoFor my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average. I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
- jareklupinski 12d agothat's interesting too! i can visualize clearly, but have _terrible_ artistic skills; nothing in my head can make it out unless through CAD :)
- vidarh 12d agoMy drawing style is different from memory, though. Clearer lines, vs closer to impressionist if I draw from something in front of my eye. The difference is quite stark.
- cubefox 12d agoThat's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.) Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
- sfink 10d agoSpeaking for myself: I don't miss what I never had. But I can remember or imagine sensations, which seems more relevant to me anyway? (Again, I can't compare to what I've never experienced.) It's an interesting angle to investigate though. Eg is there a reliable or at least common connection between aphantasia and response to porn? Again speaking for myself as someone with pretty total aphantasia, visual porn does very little for me. I guess it did as a kid, but I think that was more about finding things out? Video can work, but only by communicating actions that appeal to me. Most of it seems almost entirely pointless; I had never considered the possibility that it's because vision isn't as connected to experience for me as much as it seems like it is for most other people? I guess I've just always imagined that other people were better at relating to the experience of the people in the images or videos.
- logicallee 12d agoCan you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
- ppalata 12d agoI can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
- fwlr 12d ago(Also aphantasic) I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
- logicallee 12d agoYes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal. 1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure. 2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.) I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it?
- badgersnake 12d agoI’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out?
- misthop 12d agoWhen I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
- al_borland 11d agoI went to some seminars that talked about this a lot. How visualizing doing something perfectly can be as good, or better, than actual practice. There was also a lot of, “close your eyes, imagine a bike, what color is it?” type stuff. Not being able to visualize anything, all of this fell very flat. It wasn’t until later I found out there actually are people who can visualize things as if they were happening. I have trouble wrapping my mind around what that must be like, but I bet all these visualization exercises make a lot more sense.
- sfink 10d agoI am fully aphant, but when i played the trombone it absolutely helped me to rehearse purely mentally during the day before a test. There wasn't anything visual about it, though. I just went through the motions mentally, over and over. Outside of that, the whole visualization to practice idea rarely does anything for me. (I still use the term visualization even now that I've discovered it doesn't mean for most others what it did for me!)
- cyclopeanutopia 12d agoWhen you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after?
- misthop 12d agoThe image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing
- _ink_ 12d agoI am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
- codetiger 12d ago1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street. 2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see. 3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times. 4. Can remember a favorite color. 5. Don't have a consistent handwriting. Do these symptoms count?
- misthop 12d agoThose don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one
- chaps 12d agoWhen you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
- misthop 12d agoNothing, no
- _ink_ 12d agoNot GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
- al_borland 11d ago99.99% of the time, it’s just black. Seeing things like you’re describing sounds like a super power. The 0.01% of the time, I have seen blue lights. Without trying to look around too much, it’s something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0 This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
- chaps 8d agoYeah, that's kind of what I'm talking about! It's a very specific visualization where it comes and goes and feeds into itself. It's really cool. The brightness you're talking about is legit. It's fun to play with bringing that in and out. A thing that seems to kinda trigger the visualizations I've experienced is to focus on where those blueish blobs disappear into nothing. For me, that looks like an intense brightness kinda sorta collapsing into the center of my vision which happens again starting from the edges of my vision. In a way it feels like I'm watching some low level neuron activity. But if I close my eyes and try to force some sort of visualization, it doesn't happen until I slow down and just pay attention to that middle point between my brain and my vision. Not really a meditator, but I've experienced it the strongest when I'm about to fall asleep. Once I'm in that headspace, I can keep it going until I see those wild, megalithic visualizations.
- boothby 12d agoI'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
- cubefox 12d agoI posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi