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Comment by majiy | Hacker News Reader

If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".

The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that is already pushing it.

These kind of "mind-travels" are sometimes done at end of yoga classes. For me, they are complete pointless, and I usually fall asleep.

I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.

On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.

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> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".

As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk alongside a wood, but every time I try to picture it, my mind balks. Also, combining a wood with a mountain I find tough, other that a mountain covered by trees. I think it is because of their genealogical dissimilarity.

Huh. I have a lot of trouble visualizing things in general, I suppose I would be a "4" on the scale from the article, but this prompt is actually easier than most for me. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time hiking in mountains?

Put yourself on the side of a mountain, with a steep drop off on the left.

Far to the left, you can see more mountains, but trees and hill block your view on the right. It's really common to see while hiking, though usually you turn to the downhill side to take a picture

Yeh... I can now see that. Thanks. Context is everything. Though I paint landscapes, I rarely stray outside the city. hence my knowledge of landscapes is mostly from paintings, not real life. The scene you describe is difficult to find in the painting lexicon (for it's asymmetry), though doubtless common in nature.

What part of the world do you live in?

Areas of the American west, with mountains above treeline and meadows, can have exactly this topography.

Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.051055,-121.796685,3a,75y,30...

I live in urban Vietnam. However, my visual imagination is derived heavily from paintings, particularly those of the romantic era (eg the Hudson river school). The promt suggest something very asymmetrical, which is anathema to the romantic schema (they avoid asymmetry but also too much symmetry). Not saying it's impossible for me to get there, just very difficult.

I guess the larger point is that vusualisation is as much fiction as it is recal.

By the way, I love the gmap link image, but I don't see it as an effective responce to the hint. I see it instead as a classic vista (I.e framed window-form).

For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.

I also can vividly "hear" music, not really voices, but I can put a track on in my head almost as if listening to the radio. For people that can't do this, it might sound great - and it is quite cool except for waking up many mornings with a random track stuck in your head or hearing a particular riff over and over again.

I don't tend to remember faces of people I've recently met - there are times when someone says hi, starts chatting and I think "who the hell is that?"

> For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.

I can imagine this, but if someone just says "you're walking down a winding path", I visualize something much more like the original parent. It takes nonzero effort to bother to mentally render a scene like that, so it doesn't just happen when someone says something; I have to actively want to be imagining it. I don't have some scene ready-to-go that I can drop myself into.

The above changes if a specific place is named, somewhere I've been. Then I'll generate some scene based on my memory.

Your second two paragraphs could have been written by me.

  >>If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
  >>The image I see in my mind...

I see no image. No empty paper with an arrow, nothing. Same with sounds.

I don't have a problem identifying faces. I'm not great at putting names with faces, but that may be separate.

I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think

You can't think of what a STOP sign looks like? Or your country's flag?

I know what they look like (and could happily draw them), but I can't close my eyes and picture them.

Not who you asked, but also have aphantasia.

"think of" is far too ambiguous here to really meaningfully drill into the differences of _how_ people think about things. I know that a stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue. Thinking about it just involves no imagery.

Information you might rely on visualization for, I don't (because I can't). I couldn't tell you with any confidence what my family that just visited this afternoon was wearing (something I assume is easier for people who would remember it visually), but I can recall what happened - in what order, where, who said what, etc. - throughout their visit.

I have a vivid imagination. My stop sign visualized as looking up to your right at a stop sign a few feet above your head, so a proportionally distorted octagon. The coating is metallic red and near-white and has a mild flaky look to it as some colored metal has, with a hint of rainbow from the sun that lights it from my back. There is a standard metal post with holes in it. There is a mostly blue sky as background framed with small leaved, large trees. I know that if I paned down, I'd see grass with small, yellow flowers.

When I lose my wife at the store, I often realize I would be useless in describing what she was wearing if I had to. If friends were over, I wont recall their attire unless it specifically came up, then I might remember it for years.

I know what they look like. Could describe them to you. Draw them on a piece of paper. Can't visualise one in my head.

Heck, I can't even visualise what my wife and kids look like, something that my wife finds astonishing (and sad).

I'm useless at art, for the most part, with no visual imagination to work with.

Yesterday we were at a clothes store, and I could tell my youngest that I didn't think a particular set of clothes she was trying suited her, and was able to make specific suggestions. I can look at clothes and decide if they'd suit. Not because I could see them together in my head, or picture her wearing them, but because I've learned the rules, for want of a better way to put it.

I can think of them no problem, but I don’t visualize them it’d more that I think of their abstract representation.

When you say you think in words, does that mean like you see printed words like a page of text? Or just audible words?

Not the person you asked, but for me: "audible". i.e. my thoughts are an inner voice.

I don’t have aphantasia, but I do think in an audible stream of words.

This has led to an odd quirk in my experience as a software developer: I hate keywords or variable names that don’t have an obvious pronunciation, like “fn”. They interrupt the stream and make me stumble in a way that doesn’t seem to afflict people who appear to experience written words as grouped glyphs without hearing them.

(I’ve chosen to read “fn” as “effin” as a puerile expression of resentment.)

It’s really hard to describe, but not even audible words. Just the idea of words, I have to actually speak to hear the words.

> I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.

> On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.

I'm the same way. I can almost replay entire songs in my head, and if I hear a repeated sound I can replay it slowed down in my head to count it, but in college I discovered that I had trouble recognizing faces of people when I'd meet them a second time. This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.

> This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.

We are very good at remembering and recognizing small details. You may have a trouble with faces yet you may have no trouble with a minor details what makes you recognize the person even if you actually struggle to recognize their face.

Anecdata: I always had not such a good eyesight, which, of course, only got worse with the age. Recently I stood at the bar entrance and recognized a friend from ~30 meters, despite what:

- he was in an unfamiliar to me clothing

- he wasn't with a cane like our previous couple of meetings (broken leg)

- I can't see shit at ~2 meters

Just a combination of his height, walking pattern and ~hair colour (and what he definitely headed to that bar and was not passing by) made me recognize him despite what I, quite literally, barely could see him.

I don't have perfect pitch, but I can hit concert A perfectly. One of the sounds I can vividly recall is the sound of an orchestra tuning!

I feel my memory/imagination is abstract, spatial, relational and factional. With that prompt I "see"/experience looking at the dark with a torch. I go over all the details one by one, but I don't see them it's just abstract concepts, like colour, shape and location. I don't "see" a whole picture when zooming out. It's just the aggregate concept. This might also be related to my dyslexia, why I'm good at abstract stuff like maths/programming and why I'm very good at direction and path finding. I have a good memory (but more of an indexing problem as I grow older ;) I consider myself quite creative (I love DIY stuff and creating things), but especially at improving, tweaking. Less so at starting from scratch. I have an eye for details. That's why I'm great at pairing on tasks. I have never experienced these things as a disability, but more so as talents.

I think my auditory visualisation is on the outlier side, I will literally sit in the car with nothing on the stereo just humming along to what I’m imagining in my mind.

It’s almost like I’m actually hearing music (or I can imagine people speaking in basically any accent) - even full orchestral. But it’s subtly different in a way I can’t really describe.

My image visualisation is much weaker, I can imagine moving images, in colour and everything but it’s much more vague.

I have to picture somewhere else I've been before that is like that. I can't make up new realistic landscape images in my head. That said, I'm not an artist

exactly all of this for me. and I've just learned about SDAM which kinda really resonates as well.

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