Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

I probably have some mild aphantasia, because my imagination doesn't usually include vivid pictures. I'm also pretty bad at graphic design and home decorating. On the other hand I do see things in dreams. And all my life even non-spatial things, like mathematical/logical/grammatical relationships, have felt like they had a spatial arrangement to them. And maybe this is something else, but I remember it wasn't until college that my own reasoning really started to feel "verbal".

Once I was reading a 20th century philosopher who was criticizing Locke and others of his time for describing knowledge or ideas as mental imagery, saying that of course it's not like we really see pictures in our heads. I wish I could remember who this was. I want to say Saussure or Deleuze. I was personally more sympathetic to Locke, but I could see this writer's point (or not, heh). It's funny to think that aphantasia has influenced philosophy.

I'm also curious what relation aphantasia has to chess-playing ability. I'm a pretty good chess player (for someone who doesn't take it seriously), but I can't see the board in my head at all. Grandmasters can play whole games blindfolded, and Magnus Carlsen has a YouTube video playing ten opponents at a time while blindfolded. I have to try really hard just to "see" a 3x3 position. I guess aphantasia makes it hard to mentally play a few moves and then stop and assess whether the new position is good for white or black, or even just notice basic tactics in it.

I think I'm in the same boat as you. I've discussed this with my spouse and we've determined that my mind's eye is pretty impaired. It's there, but just barely.

I totally agree with the "spatial arrangement" of math/logic etc, I'm a software engineer and arranging and abstracting things into their logical parts internally comes as easily as looking at component parts laid out on a table to me (although it's not really visual).

In regards to chess (I'm pretty decent at chess) I think it's like this, if you wrote a chess program, you wouldn't write it to visualize the representation of the board, you would set up variables to track state, etc. I think my "internal representations" of abstractions are just that, variables that my mind is tracking and understanding the relationships between, as easily as any other sense.

While looking for a way to explain my own aphantasia, I came across the works of Temple Grandin, a poster child of high-functioning autism. Since there is no physiological test for ASD, I believe that the following cognition types may be presented within the general audiences as well, however, they are not treated as outliers as long as their 'owners' have sufficient social skills. Thus, I suggest that you ignore autism/ASD references below:

"I have observed that there are three different specialized autistic/Asperger cognitive types. They are:

1) Visual thinkers such as I, who are often poor at algebra. 2) Verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing but they lack visual skills. 3) Pattern thinkers such as Daniel Tammet, who excel in math and music but may have problems with reading or writing composition." [1]

"<...>Chess masters think not in pictures or words, but are good in recognizing patterns. Pattern thinking is a more abstract form of visual thinking; thoughts are in patterns instead of photo-realistic pictures. Pattern thinkers see patterns and relationships between numbers. Some of the best descriptions are in Daniel Tammet’s book Born on a Blue Day (Tammet 2006) and in Jerry Newport’s book Mozart and the Whale (Newport et al. 2007). The weak areas in pattern thinkers is usually reading and writing composition." [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research-shows...

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