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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

Why does aphantasia come up so often on Hacker News?

I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again.

It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished.

Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)

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It's interesting because it should be very easy to put a test in action. Are there true capability differences between people who think in different ways? Feynman[0] goes through a particular version of such a test in his Ways of Thinking series.

It should be trivial to write up a puzzle game such that, much like those color blind tests where you need to find numbers, will very quickly eliminate people who think in different ways while being a piece of cake for others. And yet I don't think I've ever encountered one.

Are there no capabilities that can not be overcome? Would that puzzle game just be terrible entertainment? Why doesn't it exist?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbwLkuxORdY

I have a conjecture that aphantasia may be overrepresented in software disciplines. It seems sensible to me that a field which is almost wholly abstract would select a higher proportion of aphantasic people than average, as it would be of no hindrance. (I would expect the same from mathematics and maybe some sciences, but I'm not a member of any such community so I wouldn't know firsthand.)

Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.

There's research that people with aphantasia are over-represented in STEM fields: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are...

Thanks for sharing that link.

It's risky business to infer anything from job preferences though. Consider that (as far as I know) an extraordinarily large proportion of professional programmers are male -- obviously a cultural phenomenon. We certainly cannot infer that a talent for programming is located on the y-chromosome.

Edit after reading the paper associated with that link:

> Our aphantasic and hyperphantasic samples were opportunistic, in the sense that our participants had approached us spontaneously following publicity triggered by our original publication

This suggests that many of the participants actually read scientific publications (or reporting thereof). That's an obviously biased set of people who indeed are way more likely to work in STEM (and have an abundance of time to spend browsing the web), rather than as hairdressers.

That seems wrong to me. I personally use visualization frequently during development and not having that ability seems to me a massive hinderance.

I don't even understand how you can begin to plan a user interface without the power of visualisation. I suppose you just have to produce drafts? I can just lie there in bed and iterate for hours, imaging how the user will move through processes, etc. It seems a huge disadvantage to only be able to develop such an idea while actually having the interface in front of you. Maybe this is the real reason some developers never want to leave the back end :)

I feel like even planning architectural code is somewhat visual for me, like I have a mental model of the folder structures and how different components of the system relate to each other.

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