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Comment by shawabawa3 | Hacker News Reader

At this point I'm fairly certain aphantasia doesn't really exist (or is extremely rare), but what exists is a disconnect between what people understand the word "visualising" to mean

I cannot project an image of an apple into my brain, but I can be aware of what an apple looks like and have that awareness move and rotate the apple. I would never call it visualising though

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From talking to people, I would say it exists on a spectrum. I can imagine an apple, the color and texture of its skin, how it feels to touch it, its weightiness, its smell, the sound it'll make when I bite into it, as well as its taste and texture. I can imagine it at different levels of ripeness too, although I don't have the same amount of information for all of them. For me it's so clear that it's almost as good as the real thing.

Some people I've talked to said they couldn't do most of that. They said they could think of an apple, but couldn't tell me much more about it, other than that it was an apple. Now, obviously I can't peer into their heads. Were they actually imagining more but were unable to put it into words? Were they underestimating the vividness of what they were imagining? Or were they accurately describing what was in their minds? Although I can't directly experience their minds, there were certainly differences between what each of us could describe.

I watched a video from a woman talking about her aphantasia. I was struck by the fact that she is an avid reader and enjoys fiction. She said she processes descriptive text as facts. Like, if she read, "Raindrops glistened in the afternoon light as they rolled off the red maple leafs, falling peacefully to the lush green grass, below," she would just have a list of facts in her head and no visualization. It makes me wonder what such a person would write, themselves. How could they put together a scene?

I'm a voracious reader (sci-fi) and I would also put it best as processing what I read as facts.

I've never been able to daydream or create worlds in my minds eye such that I get lost in them (which is something I hear people who daydream are able to do).

I think part of this is why I've always found creative writing to be difficult. For example in grade school I was certain I was among the few that read the most, yet for in class creative writing assignments I am often among the last to finish. I've always had the suspicion I'm not as creative as others for this reason.

That said I do believe that I'm very analytical, and so I found no untoward difficulty in persuasive essays, technical write-ups, etc.

Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the spaces the characters move in if you can't visualise anything?

I like how the other commentator explained it.

It feels like proprioception in a way. An abstract sense of knowing--facts internalized, without visual feedback.

As I read each word in a descriptive scene, it feels like my mind pulls in their definitions and tangled web of related concepts (facts), as well as personal memories, then establishes that scene as a "new memory".

When I read "Raindrops glistened in the afternoon light" my first reaction is to think of what that would feel and smell like for example. I can sort of imagine what that would look like, visually, but it's hazy and doesn't come naturally. And definitely not at the same acuity described by others.

Perhaps I'm just bad at visualization. And because I'm bad at it, my visualization skills have further atrophied and my other senses become preferred. Sounds probable that trying to stimulate visualization like in the exercises proposed in the article can redevelop the ability to visualize.

I'm not the original commenter here, but I don't understand your question. What does visualizing have to do with knowing where someone is?

The sense of knowing where a character is in a space in fiction is the same sense that is used to visualize anything else. It is the same phenomenon. If you can "know" where a fictional character is in a fictional space, you can also "know" how a fictional apple looks like, or how a fictional coffee smells.

How or where do you hold the knowing of the location of the fictional character? Look at that psychic phenomenon. Aphantasia seems like not knowing what psychic operations one does all the time, while someone who can visualize can consciously use these psychic operations.

Proprioception is entirely different from vision. You can know where your hand is with your eyes closed without visualizing anything. My sense of where things are in space feels very similar to proprioception, not vision.

Location and vision are separate senses. I'm completely aphantasic, but of course I can orient myself in remembered spaces. Fictional spaces are more difficult, but not impossible if the description is good.

(I'm aphantasic) one weird thing about aphantasia is that spatial awareness is often actually better in aphantasics. I have an extremely good internal mapping system but none of it is visualised - I just seem to know where I am in relation to other things around me.

We write the same way an LLM does; by putting together words in the order that convention dictates. It's less of a chore if we can make them mean something by metaphor or allusion; in your example, the author clearly intends to signify something by the glistening of the raindrops, the redness of the leaves and the color of the grass, else why mention it?

> Were they actually imagining more but were unable to put it into words? Were they underestimating the vividness of what they were imagining? Or were they accurately describing what was in their minds?

I suppose some people may imagine a "default apple" when given the prompt which would already have some parameters while others might try recreating an arbitrary apple from scratch in their head which wouldn't be very detailed. The object is only as detailed as you make it in your mind, which might take some creativity if you're not thinking about a specific one you've seen before. If you don't give it colour or smell it won't have any, it'll just be like a generic shape.

I think most people with some degeree of aphantasia used to think like you - that no one can really visualise things.

But then I started asking around and people REALLY described visualisation as a vivid clear picture of things in their heads, almost like they are there. Like literally projecting the image on their brain as you're saying.

I now think I do have some degree of aphantasia. I can describe as having low RAM, so I cannot paint the entire scene. I am able to briefly visualise some details and aspects of a scene (usually as flashes, and I cannot sustain them), but never the entire scene. If you ask me to visualise a beach, I can have visual "flashy" perceptions of the sand or the waves, but it's extremely hard for me to put everything together in a visual manner. It's much easer for me to imagine the feelings, sounds, and smells of a scene.

It’s very easy to identify it. What happens when you read a work of fiction? Do you have a rich visual representation of characters, if you draw or if you knew how to draw would you be able to draw everything you see? Colors, scenery, light or dark?

Some people don’t get any imagery when they read books. For me it’s so vivid that I read maybe 30 pages an hour if not less.

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