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Comment by nil-sec | Hacker News Reader

The best “test” for this I’ve heard is to ask people how many windows they have in their apartment. They might say 5 and then you ask them how they came to this conclusion. A normal thing to do is to walk through your apartment in your mind and count. Someone with a Aphantasia either remembers the number or cannot answer this question.

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That test doesn't work, at least for me. I can't visualise at all, but I can think about my house and remember how many windows are in each room. The difference is I remember them abstractly, not visually.

Yeah, when i'm visualizing i'm just describing how something looks with language. I could write out a description of walking through my house and counting the windows i find, and that's pretty much the same as what i call visualizing. I even dream occasionally without visuals, just me telling the story of what's happening in the dream.

Do you have audio, scent, taste , or touch memory?

I can't visualize, but I have all those. So for example I can think about objects abstractly, remember their smell and feel them.

Same with me. My description of it is that my "visualisation" is not "visual" but "conceptual". I don't SEE the room and therefore the windows, but I know the concept of the room with it's windows.

That's a really good way of putting it, and it's fits me to some extent too. Thanks.

For me its almost like that. But I have like a vague visualization. Like I recall what it looks like to be standing in those positions or looking in that direction, but it's never a sharp or stable image. Rather very fleeting.

To me it's like there is a visualization ability that is turned all the way up when I am asleep and turned most of the way down when I am awake.

Tests like your first question are often poor indicators because people without an ability will develop other skills or methods to compensate. We don't just walk through life not knowing anything that's going on around us.

After being asked "How many X are there?" a few times, for example, we figure out that counting and remembering minutiae is important.

I once read an article about aphantasia which showed a bunch of blocks, and later showed different orientations of blocks and asked if they were the same or not. If you could, the article concluded that you had good ability to visually rotate a 3D object in your mind. I don't know if I do or not. That sounds difficult. But I could say right away which shapes sounded the same.

I think the more important question was how they came up with the number. If you lack the ability to go through your apartment in your mind and count the windows AND do not happen to remember the number outright, it might indicate something like aphantasia.

Absolutely -- but realize at that point you're asking a brain for an explanation of how it operates. Self-reported data in social science is not the most robust.

Especially in the situation where you're trying to figure out if someone has constructed their own methods to mimic 'normal' ones. The more effective and internalized the method, the less likely the person is going to be able to identify and report it.

Just look at all the people who are saying they're surprised to learn that "picture it in your mind" is meant to be literal. Their mimicry is so effective they can't recognize it in themselves.

Why would it be more normal to walk through apartment then just simple remember the number?

Because it's enormously abnormal to remember such a useless fact.

You would remember just from cleaning them and thus knowing how much work remains repeatedly.

I would know how much work remains by visualizing the uncleaned windows in my apartment.

That does not imply it is abnormal to remember overall number after you visualized it few times. I would even argue it is abnormal to not remember result of calculation you have done multiple times.

It's a useless number. People don't tend to remember useless numbers they can recalculate with no effort. Same with the number of doors or plants.

And they also don't need to visualise whole house to get that number. That strikes me as the more absurd way of finding the number even when you are calculating it.

Can't argue with that. It's just easier to visualize a complete city with all the houses inside of that city than it is to remember a useless number. At least for me. Text is hard for me to remember, pictures aren't.

So count something you see, but dont interact with? Most people do not count and rememeber every object in their homes. The point is to illustrate that some people dont have working 3D models in their minds, not to argue about what method for remembering is easiest for you.

You do interact with window every time you clean it. Is it someone else who cleans where you live? If yes and you dont pay them, you should participate in cleaning too.

You do interact with windows every time you check they are all closed before leaving for holidays or weekend. Every time you close it and open it. Most people have small number of rooms and exactly one occasionally two windows in it. We are not talking about how many books you have nor anything like that. We are talking about large visible objects that are few in numbers you interact with fairly often.

Also, the point was not to illustrate point, the point was to diagnose visualization problem based on remembering number of windows.

Even when interacting, why would you count them?

You don't need to consiously count them to remember how many of them are.

Plus, while cleaning them or checking whethe they are closed, you will be like "two done, three to go" enough times to remember "five".

Not really. I think "two rooms to go", not "x windows to go". There's no point in counting or adding, so I don't bother. Also, I only clean my windows once a year, if that. There's an hilarious story about a spider family having bred on the other side of a closed window I hadn't opened all year. That must have been at least 500 spiders. It was hard to even look through the window, so I eventually bothered to clean that one early. Maybe a mistake, seeing how half of those spiders than entered into my room, but, whatever. I don't mind spiders.

> walk through your apartment in your mind

I.e., most people don't just remember the number off the top of their heads, but will have to take a couple of seconds to build a mental image and count at the time the question is first asked of them.

I understand that. I just find it ridiculous that this test considers a way that does not involve visualisation as something abnormal or proof that the person has the disorder.

You don't need to visualize anything there, do you?

I just go "kitchen, one, living room, another two..."

But I'd have to think hard which way the windows swing open, unless they are double windows.

Do you know your living room has two windows without seeing it in your mind?

While typing that question I had a flash of an image of the wall with (2) windows.

I have a vague picture of a white frame behind a couch, but nothing definitive. For example, I don't "see" any color of the couch, even though I can tell you the color if I think about it.

It's more a "conceptual windows behind couch" than my real one.

I suspect I'm on the spectrum quite a bit towards Aphantasia (which would explain a few things), but not at the very end.

The same way I know 2,3,5,7 are the first primes without flashing a picture of the number line in my head, or Beethoven's 5th starts "ba-ba-ba-baahm" without flashing a picture of the sheet music in my head. Most of my memories are not stored in graphic form.

Beethoven is sound, so that's different from sight. Can you hear Beethoven's 5th in your mind?

I'm a visual type, so I can't wrap my head around how one could think without pictures. How do you retrieve the information about windows in your house? I can just walk through my house through my mind, but if you don't see... how else would you retrieve information that you don't have memorized?

I have memories of opening up all the windows in my apartment, so I know I have one in the bedroom and one in the living room. The memory is more "felt" in the motion of my arms in unlocking and sliding said windows than "seen". If you asked me how many panes of glass it has, I couldn't tell you. At least two, because it opens by sliding sideways, and that doesn't move the whole window. Are there crossbeams subdividing the two portions vertically or horizontally? Maybe a grid? I couldn't tell you. I can't even tell you how many panes of glass my mental image has, it's too indistinct.

Having just now stood up to check - it looks like the answer is 3 planes of glass for the living room window, which I never would've guessed. The two sliding panes, undecorated aside from their frames, and then another fixed pane above - presumably so the movable bits aren't as heavy by reaching all the way to the ceiling - with a wooden lattice/grid subdividing it into a 2x6 grid.

I personally don't quite have aphantasia - I do have the ability to (very weakly) visualize. It's so weak I grew up thinking the "minds eye", "visualizing", "counting sheep", and "memory palaces" were all overly flowery metaphors that meant thinking non-visually about concepts. I didn't get the draw of scenery descriptions, and still can't effectively turn them into worthwhile visualizations. I was never disturbed by the characters described in books looking different than I imagined them when a movie was made, because I'd never imagined them visually.

Say reality has a vividness and observable detail of 10. Dreams also rate a 9 or a 10 when I experience them - subjectively indistinguishable from reality except by realizing that what I'm experiencing might be "impossible" by the rules of the world as I know them, and that the more likely explaination is thus that I'm dreaming. On the other hand, visualizing those same dreams from memory - or visualizing any other memory - might only rate a 1, if that. Trying to visualize a non-memory - e.g. trying to visualize "a beach" if I don't take the specific effort of thinking of a specific beach I've been to before and trying to remember that beach specifically - I get the outline of a circle, and two straight linear lines - without color or texture or anything, representing the sun, the horizon, and the interface between sand and sea.

I'm semi-convinced this is partially down to habit. My default pattern as I go about my day is, when seeing things, to reduce them down to their concepts first, and then to remember those concepts, and then to later recall those concepts and reenforce those memories, rather than the weak and forgotten visual memories, which in turn means a very weak mental visual library from which to draw from for synthesizing visualizations, and very little practice remembering or recalling such memories.

As an experiment along those lines - I made a point of observing and remembering the visual representation of various lane-merge road signs during a commute. Turns out there's a bunch of different patterns in various rotations - mostly yellow, but some orange. It's still a memory heavily renforced by concepts - the 3 dashes of one pattern, the S-bend shape divided into approximately thirds. I could draw them pretty accurately. Ask me to draw a speed limit sign and... well, I know the color scheme, and there's a large number, and I could tell you where several are and what the limits are. I think they say "speed limit" on them, but I couldn't tell you if the words go above or bellow the number, or maybe both? Perhaps it varies by sign? Is there a "MPH" too? I have remembered that road signs are ALLCAPS and sans-serif (by straight up realizing those were questions I could ask and answer for myself by observing reality), so despite not knowing where on the signs the words go, I at least know what the shape of the letters should be pretty accurately.

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