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Comment by shaneos | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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