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Comment by rhythmofrest | Hacker News Reader

My brother in law has aphantasia. We've had long conversations comparing our experience, or lack thereof, of mental images. One thing he says is that for remembering faces, its more like he can store a hash or metadata of a face, then when seeing a person again, can check that the hash or meta matches. Also, he doesn't get "earworms", that is, pieces of music that encode and replay in his mind ad nauseum. When asked to imagine a given piece of music, he inadvertently hums.

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I have aphantasia and love the analogy to hashing. It matches my experience quite closely in as much as I can't really imagine faces in the abstract, but can verify a match in the real world with ease. Reminds me of NP-hard problems in that respect – verification is easy, calculation is hard.

With respect to not being able to imagine music though, I don't think the two are necessarily linked. I most definitely get earworms, and as a guitarist rely heavily on my "mind's ear".

That's interesting, because i visualize only by describing a thing to myself in words, but my inner ear can play a song just as if i were listening to it and i get earworms all the time.

Great analogy to hashing. I call it "seeing in concept instead of visuals" but hashing works better for facial recognition :)

In regards to music - for me it's the opposite. I can't visualise to save my life, but I can compose an entire symphony in my head and hear it in all it's glory. Or "perform" any accent I've heard before perfectly in my head (of course it won't ever come out even close to how I hear it internally if I try to actually speak it).

> One thing he says is that for remembering faces, its more like he can store a hash or metadata of a face, then when seeing a person again, can check that the hash or meta matches.

That is normal way of remembering things. Pretty much all drawing from life tutorials for beginners put emphasis on human memory being bad when it comes to visual details. They explain in depth that mind simplifies and you should look more then draw.

Do you mean hash or a description? A hash is a completely opaque symbol. A description is notes like shape, color, nose size, eye shape, etc

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