- "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..."
- counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.
And it didn’t help me fall asleep at all.
But I don't feel like I am impacted in imagining simple algorithms. I also construct them of very simple forms and rearrange them in my mind. I also feel like it is a lot easier for me to imagine things „automatically“ due to it being memories or being a byproduct of thinking about something. But my mind struggles constructing these images at will.
Also taking a pen and drawing these things up can replace some of the missing imaginary power :)
This matches my experience - I think of it a bit like a really slow CRT, the phosphorescence fading before the image can be composed.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
How is it not visual?
>Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.
Boxes with arrows are clearly visual. The text, at least, for me just is a representation of those arrows and boxes.
(not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
1. https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/miikkulainen.visua...
Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.
> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.
You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?
The boxes and arrows image representation of a schema is not the schema itself. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Almost like rendering a 3D image, but stopping early. I can also go full color with effort but it's generally unnecessary.
These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.
Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.
I think it’s also the reason why I was good at maths, very used to conceptualize stuff
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know.
I don’t believe that people have a high res magical image. I believe there’s something that feels like visual stimulation which is used as a reference for information. I don’t have anything that seems remotely visual.
Some people do, hyperphantasia. I can do this, perfectly visualize the details of the Mona Lisa and examine it from any angle in my mind's eye. If I am in a semi-lucid state while nearing sleep, I can do it even more intensely, as the other day I was visualizing waves bouncing around in a maze and I could see every single bounce.
However, you're right that most people cannot do it so vividly, but it is not the case to say that it's simply memories and concepts, it actually is images and video inside their heads.
Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
Can you describe the difference to me based on your experience? I don't quite understand what it would be, because in my mind's eye, I can literally see the entirety of the Mona Lisa. It does not feel like a "feeling," like happiness or angriness, those are what I'd classify as feelings.
> Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
I don't draw so it would be limited by my drawing ability, but I can reproduce it pretty well if I tried hard enough, as I can visualize it completely in my mind.
If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
Note that I'm not interested in memory aspects here. If one can't differentiate minute details, yet still see them highly realistically, then what exactly is it one sees? Probably not the same as the real thing or a photographic image.
A follow-up question would be whether the envisioned details are stable enough to draw or reason from, or whether the image keeps changing in one's head. In the latter case, the process of phantasising may be more akin to what diffusion models do.
I see what you mean, yes, it's not eidetic or photographic memory when I see it in my mind, I can't see all the small details like that, but I can see it as if I took a picture, not an extremely high resolution one that shows every brush stroke, but more akin to something like this photo's level of detail (I can visualize the people in the crowd as well) [0]. I might even say that I cannot see the details because I actually have no knowledge of them (exactly how many folds or creases there are), than being unable to visualize them entirely. For example, I can see the Mona Lisa with 4, 5, 6, folds in her sleeves, all different images in my mind. Some people however can see every crease exactly as it is but that's much rarer, it's photographic memory, and it's not really what I'd call a normal person's (without aphantasia) experience. It is likely even trainable with more exposure to the actual underlying artifact such as observing the painting in-depth and remembering via visual snapshots what it looks like.
There are others with aphantasia, perhaps milder forms of it, who cannot "see" the Mona Lisa as a photograph, they just see a blur or something more akin to curves and lines that they must focus on, sometimes without color. These people would have less stable images in my mind, but generally my images are pretty stable. I'm curious to hear about what you can see in your mind's eye. Based on what you were saying, it seems to me like you're more on the belief or feeling side, or is it that you can completely see an image in your mind that's stable?
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/05/02/arts/02reyburn3/m...
Is there a meaningful distinction?
In the latter case, one assumes to see details, but in fact one does not, and one cannot focus on details, nor reason with them.
I'm painting a black-and-white distinction here, but I suppose that in reality it is even more complex.
Does this make sense, or do you still insist that there is no meaningful difference between these two interpretations? In that case, could you point out where you think my reasoning goes wrong?
But my original point was more that the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise. There isn’t a homunculus in your head with a little film projector.
I tend to agree, but I suppose that the level of lossiness varies from person to person, and depends on training and concentration.
> the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise
Interesting! Would you say that the same mechanism applies to the feeling of hearing or tasting things? Or are those fundamentally different from visual experiences?
And what about observing the real world, is that the same experience as replaying something in one's head, but using a different input source?
No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head.
The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely.
(I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back.
I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!
For what it's worth, I can also hear them. I carry on conversations with people who aren't physically in the room all the time. For example. (My doc assures me that this is fine as long as I know they're not in the room and I don't trust what they say without verifying!) It's extremely useful for bouncing ideas around, even if it's really only an elaborate way of thinking about something by myself in several ways. I find it intuitively easier to discuss something with another person than just to sit and think about it.
I will say it's not much of a tactile sense, though. I can use my hands to manipulate things if I want, but I don't feel them nearly as clearly as I can see and hear them. I guess I also just don't do this as often, because how something physically feels isn't usually terribly important to me. Same reason I look at and listen to a lot more things for information in the outside plane than I touch.
We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice.
I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is.
The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people.
I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
So you can visualize a graph, as if it were drawn out on a sheet of paper?