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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

Can you hear or imagine sounds in your head?

Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.

Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised.

Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.

Not the GP either I can’t do any of that.

Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.

Can you hear your own thoughts when thinking in sentences? If not what does thinking a sentence through feel like?

I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head.

Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.

No, like images it's just the concept of the sound. As I can identify images (also people or faces), I can identify sounds, but I can't imagine them.

Instead of a picture of a forest and some cracking of wood, I just have these words in my head and not the real picture/sound.

Same for every other sense.

How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quickly. I've heard that people like you make great scholars for that reason.

I read very fast (English and code, and my native language), and I have a very vivid visual (as well as auditory) imagination. Wonder what I traded off in this setup.

I read about three times as fast as other people. I'm still not better in absorbing the information, I also make errors and miss key points.

The difference is that a book is already in a format I don't need to convert (to images) anymore.

About the 3x: if I need to show someone something to read on a screen and need to wait to scroll to the next page, I just read it 3 times and scroll then, it normally fits a "normal" reading speed.

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