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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.

Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogramming our visual hardware to form abstract concepts in the minds eye rather than visualizing concrete objects.

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> There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.

But you're probably only reading about aphantasia in tech forums like this one.

For me it's the other way around.

I was always good at abstract sciences, like math and theoretical physics. Partially because I could operate in my mind with my very own abstractions.

But I'm for example very bad at chess and tetris, because I can't visualize.

This has been true for me at least since I was 5.

Since we are going with anecdotes and gut feelings, I’d say these things aren’t related at all. I can imagine pictures, sounds and also have always been good at abstract thinking. Also chess and tetris are a matter of practice mostly, imo.

I can own at Tetris but I am miserable at chess. The types of visualization are completely different IMHO.

Well I'm bad compared to top 10% who play at crazy speed. I can't plan top far ahead though which makes me slower. And I'm too old I guess

I know an aphantasiac who is very good at chess.

It’s funny though you can learn to visualize in chess through solving puzzles. I couldn’t do it at all at first but after awhile it clicked and I could just move pieces in my head.

I'm not convinced. I have aphantasia, yet I know I have vivid visual dreams, and I have at least once experienced even more vivid imagery in a waking state while meditating. I don't think - at least not for everyone - that the ability isn't there. It seems like something is inhibiting it when I'm awake. That, if anything, makes it a lot more frustrating. E.g. I've chased that meditation experience for a long time

In my case, I seem to have enhanced spatial reasoning when thinking about objects, rather than something visual.

For example, if I’m asked to think of an apple, I don’t see an apple (with no color etc.), but I can “feel” an apple in the sense that I can abstractly reason about the 3D space of an apple.

Again, there’s nothing visual about it. It’s almost as if I’m blind, and can form and reason about an apple as if I had only ever been able to hold one.

I have the same experience. Often times I find myself skipping steps when explaining things to other because I'm referencing a very obvious (to me) spatial disconnect between two concepts. I've also noticed that I'll gesture to where in my mind those concepts are located spatially.

Other quirks:

- I am also always aware of which direction "home" is. I can't remember ever being lost.

- I have an automatic annoyingly good memory for songs and sounds

- "Remembering" feels more like a bundle of sense impressions being re-expressed than it does recall. This is nice because I get much more "complete" impression of what my mind remembers happening. Not sure when this changed for me but it was after definitely after a few years of meditating.

None of this is ever visual though.

Now that you mention this, removing color from the exercise and focusing on the spatial features made the exercise incredibly easy. Trying to visualize color seems to be more difficult.

I'd say it's the other way around, people with Aphantasia trend towards tech. Especially software is very abstract, you can visualize parts of it in your head but it's often not enough precise or just too complex. Even a small imprecision makes it pointless, which is very frustrating. Compare that to something like (UI) design, architecture, animation, visual effects etc. Where even rough visualizations help a lot.

Do people without aphantasia actually visualize for loops, class hierarchies, design patterns, etc…?

If not it would be easy to explain the result of the “visualize an apple” test. It’s just like visualizing a “for loop”. You’ve got a good idea of what’s it like and yet visualize absolutely nothing.

I do visualize images I have seen in the past that represent class hierarchies, I can visualize UML representing design patterns, and also can visually compose these UMLs, I can even write code in my head as I see it on the screen, for example I can change background color or font. I can only do it for small snippets, but I do see them they are not just text. Whenever I want to solve a high level design problem I actually see the systems stylized, a cache, a database, client, server, arrows between them, the same way they appear on the screen. I can easily imagine all kinds of dashboards charts and whatnot. All these to some degree of complexity, I need to make some effort to actually take a mental picture of the screen remember and visualize it after a period, unless is something I see every day. So yes people can use images to do their work every day as programmers.

I think that would be hard to gauge. From what I recall supposedly ~4% of people have aphantasia (iirc this includes minor forms, not just complete). If there are hundreds of thousands of people on this forum, there are likely thousands with aphantasia.

And whenever some niche topic comes up that relates to some group, they all come out of the woodwork to congregate. I certainly do whenever this topic comes up.

I can’t even imagine approaching a problem without some visual representation.

I see functions I wrote hours ago, maybe not every line of code but pseudocode at least. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve solved bugs just visualizing code before falling asleep.

I think there is also a phenomenon where bits of the human condition are given a label and then suddenly sprouting a subculture on the internet where people get excited to be part of something special. Some kind of disease fetish.

I asked a non-tech loved one right now and she doesn’t see anything either. I almost suspect people are claiming they “see” things when they don’t and it’s just a deep understanding of what something looks like.

While certainly some of that does happen. The language around visualization is complicated. But we know that there are people who have no ability to think in language and have no internal monologue, whereas others can do so strongly. Given how much variability there is in everything else with the brain, it would be rather strange that it isn't also true of visualization.

After all, everything we experience is our brains' interpretation of our sensory inputs. And if we can visually experience things that don't exist, whether through dreams or hallucinations (drug induced or otherwise), it stands to reason that if your mind knows how to control those same pathways you could create images in your mind.

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