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For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book. Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their
by Swizec 12d ago
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
- Akronymus 12d ago> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really. I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on. Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too. But id still describe myself as an aphant.
- vidarh 12d agoAccording to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
- culopatin 11d agoI can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
- fatnoah 11d agoI'm the same. As a student, I could vividly picture the page of the book containing the details of whatever problem I was working on. I have close to zero artistic and design ability, but am very strong in engineering and spatial reasoning.
- dr_hooo 11d agoI've wondered about this: if you can hold an image clearly in your mind - e.g. the Eifel tower - wouldn't you be able to reproduce it well on paper? I know that's not artistic ability in the creative sense, but still..
- vidarh 10d agoPeople often can't reproduce what is right in front of their open eyes well. Conversely, I have aphantasia but can draw reasonably well from memory (at one point well above average, but I'm about 30 years out of practice). There are people who can "trace" what they imagine, but it doesn't appear that being skilled at drawing is that closely linked to ability to visualise. An interesting thing, though, is that if I draw from memory my lines are more precise, while if I draw from something I can see, I will sketch out and refine. I think the two are quite different skill sets - drawing what you see often requires paying attention to spatial relationships and transferring those to the drawing to get proportions right etc.
- D-Machine 11d agoAnyone who doesn't believe this is real needs to explain the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia. Good luck with that.
- teunispeters 11d agoSchematic conceptual, and several other modes not listed. I only do verbal with concentration, and never photo. NOT a picture, I'm aphantasiac. Map, maybe, sort of works. But mapping (mathematics concept) works in some ways superior to the idea of "2d map". GIS associations for instance are intuitive and obvious to me, but so are dictionaries.