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Comment by john-radio | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble operationalizing the "blind mind's eye" concept. Catmull's brain knows what a sphere is, and my brain knows what a sphere is, and we can both describe the experience of seeing a sphere, so we both know what one "looks like."

Compare this to the phenomenon of "face blindness." My friends who suffer from this genuinely cannot describe what makes Angela Merkel's face (for instance) different from others because they lack the facility to remember it. But I can, because I don't have face blindness: Merkel's face is wrinkled, craggy even, with crows feet that resemble smile lines.

What can I do that an aphantasia sufferer cannot?

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I hate to muddy the waters here but for years thought I had face-blindness before realising that I have Aphantasia.

You're exactly right: I know what a Sphere looks like but I am missing the bit that the rest of the world seems to have where they can conjure up an image of it. Even less abstract objects like a desk or Angela Merkel's face, I am quite unable to picture.

To answer your question, if I ask you to picture a barn in a field, you presumably have no difficulty in doing so. You've probably even made assumptions about things like the colour of the barn, the weather or surrounding terrain and have a sort of portrait with a barn at the centre, but I can't do that. I am having difficulty describing what I get but it's nothing close to anything like that. I know my barn is made of wood and I know it's in a field but that's about as far as I can get.

I'm happy that this is getting discussion because obviously it's quite strange to find out that a) you're not wired the same way as the majority of the world and b) that your self-diagnosis isn't a medically recognised condition. I'm excited to see what research comes out over the next few years.

Many people, in my experience, exaggerate the ability of the mind’s eye. Ask them to picture Bugs Bunny and they’ll say they can see him perfectly, give them a pencil and ask them to draw the shape of his mouth and they’ll flounder, because they were never really seeing that sort of detail. What they were “seeing” was more like the memory of a symbol.

I hadn't considered that possibility so this is helpful; thank you. I might run a few experiments around the office later!

I think people's ability to imagine scenes, and then render them, are two very, very, very different skill sets. In fact, have somebody render the scene right before your very eyes, or even try to render bugs bunny from the image they see right in front of them.

I can imagine enormous paintings from the Prado in my head, but could I render them? No, and I have decent artistic ability (not great, but I could probably do a decent bugs bunny).

I’m not asking them to copy it exactly. I just want them to put everything where it should be.

A better example is probably a bicycle. Everyone knows what a bicycle looks like. Ask someone with a great “mind’s eye” to draw one with all the parts in the right place. I haven’t tested it, but my guess is that they’d struggle.

You're in for a treat! Here's a curated collection of bicycle drawings, complete with full renderings of some of the most interesting designs.

http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html

What I find interesting about those (I've seen something very similar before, maybe even that set) is that people don't bother to be informed by the obvious inability of the device they drew to function.

I think there are two separate skills: the ability to remember the visual symbols and the ability to draw them. Even if you can remember the symbols in great detail, you still might not be able to draw them if you haven't acquired drawing skills. However, anyone with deep visual recollection should be able to notice when something has changed. For example, they should be able to notice if Bugs Bunny's tail changes from upward-pointing to backward-pointing without looking again at the original.

> isn't a medically recognised condition.

Personally I wouldn't describe it as a medical condition, it has no adverse effects at all, and I wouldn't want to "cure" it. Whats wrong with having a spectrum from no imagery to vivid imagery and accepting that mentally healthy people can be anywhere on that spectrum? This tendency to classify any variation between people as normal or abnormal is completely unnecessary in this case.

PS not meant as a personal attack at all :)

You've inherently assumed that a medical condition must be bad. It is, literally, a deviation from the normal human condition which is brought about by a medical abnormality. To identify it does not require fixing it. But to understand it, to study it, you must be able to classify it.

I think this is a great point also. Something like Synesthesia is similar in not typically having adverse effects and it's helpful to have a taxonomy.

I agree I think. And not at all - I think I could have chosen my words more carefully there!

I suppose that you can actually picture things in your head. I (being a software engineer) think of my aphantasia as being like having the hash of an image plus some metadata in my head. I can recognize that I've seen something before once I see it again, I can tell you that I've deliberately memorized some facts about it, but I cannot recall the image itself - there are no pixels.

So I can say that my two daughters have hair the same colour as mine (hopefully never to go bald like me!), and the colour of their eyes, but I simply cannot close my eyes and picture their faces no matter what I do. If you can picture people's faces, picture places you've been or even stare at some object in front of you right now then close your eyes and "see" a picture of it, you probably don't have aphantasia

I'm genuinely curious, can you draw pictures?

What about flow diagrams on a white board? And what about coding? My coding process involves a somewhat visual process of imagining how functions connect to eachother. Is it just a logical or linguistic (like uh, using word tokens) process for you?

Not sure if this is helpful but I am at work right now building out my first Kubernetes cluster. I need a diagram of the different components to see how they all fit together and even though it's probably relatively simple, I can't picture it in my head and I am about to draw one on a whiteboard. If I can physically see something, I'm fine.

Coding is not at all visual for me because I lack the ability to picture anything. If I think of a function, I know what it does, I know what it returns and I know what arguments it should have but I can't picture a call graph in my head or anything like that; only metadata associated with things.

No on drawing pictures.

If it makes you feel any better, kubernetes is definitely not simple

Thank you - I was starting to suspect it was just me!

I feel like I have pretty good visual thinking (I can picture and walk around places I’ve been and imagined with no effort, although I don’t know if this is actually normal or subnormal since it‘s impossible to adequately convey how your mind works), but I don’t think about programs like that

I’ve always learned better by just reading plain text instead of looking at diagrams or drawing mind maps or whatever, when I think about facts or am constructing a program, the things I need just pop into my head, I don’t really consciously keep track of a visual representation of how things are tied together, I just “know” what I’ve already done and what still needs to be done without thinking about it

For me, I need to read something and form it into some visual system and then I can understand it and how to manipulate it better.

Doing that would slow me down, my textual thinking is obviously much faster than my visual thinking (or it’s just because I’ve never practised this)

I just tried to imagine the layers of the app I’m working on as a stack of blocks and it felt like a lot more effort and a lot slower than how I normally think about it, in which the descriptions of the different layers all pop into my head at once, and I can kind of cycle between which one is at the forefront of my mind. I can do this pretty much without effort

I cannot draw picture at all. Flow diagrams are no problem, nor is coding, as those rely more on a process or problem solving. I realized a long time ago I can hold all facets of large complex systems in my head, manipulate them (e.g. while out for a walk) and them simply write down the results later. There's nothing visual in this, it's a separate process.

Interesting...

I wonder: Given a graph paper and one point on that paper could you manually color in one at a time those surrounding boxes that a larger square (eg 5x5) or a equilateral triangle (aprox rasterized) or a rasterized line between two given points emerges? If yes, how would you do it? Would you need to run an algorithm of "which box to color next" in your head? Or could you just color in an entire region because you already know aproximately which boxes need to be colored? Do you know/guess which boxes you need to color before taking the pencil into your hand?

Because, given such a graph and a task to color some of the boxes to render a figure, if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it?

From a paper on aphantasia I read a while ago I recall that the difference is about which brain functions you use. Spatial thinking vs. visual. The former works fine in aphantasia, the latter does not.

As I understand it it's the difference between decomposing the barn into a cube and a prism, performing perspective projection on it, without the help of a ruler, and then rasterizing that into a 16x16 grid while also assigning colors while holding all that in your working memory at the same time and only being able appreciate it as an abstract 256-item long list of colors vs. having a finished and higher-fidelity result including grass and sky hallucinated by your visual system with little mental effort, allowing you to use the same downstream processing that you can also use when looking at the actual thing.

> if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it?

That's what I used to think it was for when people talked about picturing things. But it appears a lot of people actually see the shapes and some subset also see the colours with various degrees of fidelity as if they're in front of their eyes.

I know their spatial relation, but I don't see it.

My minds eye is mostly blind.

I can dream a sphere. (Once had a semi lucid dream, but not really in control of that)

In an extremely relaxed state maybe I can visualise a sphere, like once a year, by accident, for a few seconds.

I feel like after a long time of practice I can sorta flicker a sphere, in order to describe it, but not really.

I cannot recall, visualise and describe a sphere, that's just not possible not a real thing to me. But I can logically tell you what a sphere is, without recalling it visually.

My wife can. She also has an idetic memory. She can picture anything she wants according to her.

Pretty sure I have this, but I've never really considered a struggle. Once read something about it being a potential outcome from a stressful childhood, which I had.

Similarly I have a shocking memory. Literally need to focus to remember more than one item from a store. Can't remember more than one name at a time, also requiring effort to remember just one.

Oh well. As an aside, I'm fairly successful considering background etc. :)

I suspect I have it. When I 'visualise' things, there's no visual component to it. Instead, I'm remembering an abstract list of features that the visualisation has. For example, with a sphere, I know that it's round, probably smooth, with a surface equidistant from its centre at all points. I don't 'see' a sphere in any way though.

With a beach, I know that there's probably sunshine, there's some water, some sand, it's probably hot, maybe some wind, some waves, some seagulls. But I don't see any part of this, so if you ask me for specific details they just don't exist and I couldn't tell you whether, for example, the beach in my mind is short or long.

When it comes to faces, I can't picture them and find myself often forgetting/not recognising people with whom I'm only tangentially familiar. I couldn't describe a person's face to you at all, but if you asked 'do they have a big or small nose', I might be able to recall that (usually not though). I'm more likely to be able to recall distinct features - skin colour, hair colour, etc., than I am features where there's a sliding scale (nose size, etc.) This even applies to people close to me such as my own immediate family, partner, etc.

I suspect you do, as well. Your realizations are very similar to mine when I first found out.

> I couldn't describe a person's face to you at all, but if you asked 'do they have a big or small nose'

The day I told my wife about this, she had me try to describe a woman who'd just sold us food a few minutes prior. I've seen this woman many times, but the only thing I could really conjure is that she was old. I don't have face blindness, no problem recognizing people, unless, like you mentioned, I very barely know them.

> This even applies to people close to me such as my own immediate family, partner, etc.

After that, my wife had me try to look at her face, then look to a piece of paper and immediately draw. Of course, artistic ability and aphantasia are totally different things, but it really cemented how little visual information gets retained. As soon as I looked away, all I knew was factual information like "curly hair", "mole next to nose".

Funny, most people have the opposite question: they can't understand what it would be like to have aphantasia.

The way you're describing "knowing what a sphere is" and being able to describe it, is how I explain to people what aphantasia is like.

Consider the possibility, even if unlikely, that you yourself have aphantasia. It is common for people with aphantasia to not realize they have it until a conversation like this -- they simply assume they are experiencing what everyone else is experiencing, and that the concept of "visualizing" something is more metaphorical than it really is.

Can you really see a sphere when you're not looking directly at one, in any sense of the word? Or do you just know what a sphere looks like?

Or, perhaps, am I visualizing a sphere or simply remembering what a sphere looks like? It seems natural that we can only visualize what we have already seen, so would there not be a relationship with memory?

At 2% of the population, with a word to describe it only since 2015, That's a completely understandable & reasonable question.

I treat the world as a narrative, so a sphere is part of a very clear story. Indeed, A one of type object.

If it helps, there's an objective way to classify this under development in Australia, involving colour bias in people with stereoscopic vision: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124346-people-with-no-...

I can't describe the face of my family members to a sketch artist. I mean, I know I can recognize their face if I see it, but I can't take 2 of them and tell you who has a bigger ear, or nose or lips, or if one has a more round or oval face. This is with my own family members I see often. I use to think that people who claimed they could visualize where lying and making it that claim up until a few years ago.

You can have the subjective experience of seeing something without the objective photons that usually cause the experience, at your discretion.

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