When we took my boy for a WISC (children's IQ test) when he was ten, as part of a larger neuropsych test, he had enormous trouble with the spatial reasoning parts. The funny thing was that the test wouldn't score, as he was getting less than 5% on some of sections and more than 95% on others. This is a pattern that is apparently unlikely enough that the test assumes you aren't taking it seriously and gives up. So his IQ result was effectively "NaN". Based on that and other parts of the neuropsych, he was informally diagnosed with Non-Verbal Learning Disability (informally because NVLD isn't currently in the DSM).
While the IQ test was useless for him, thankfully the diagnosis was enough to get him into a school who understood his learning style and he went from completely failing out of school in sixth grade to now just getting accepted to a highly competitive college in NYC.
I always struggled with those questions as well. Only decades later, when I realized I have aphantasia [0], did that, just like many other things, suddenly make sense.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
PS "The vividness of mental imagery has a key role in the development and continuation of intrusive memories," ouch, does it ever. Every embarrassing moment I've ever had is right there at hand.
Like you, I have aphantasia. Unlike you, I’m very good at spatial puzzles like this. Hmm.
But IQ tests have more complicated ones, and there I’d not manage to keep everything in mind.
All of it is much easier of course when you can write things down, or make notes.
I'm not truly sure if I have aphantasia, but I do think I don't get as vivid imagery in my head considering what other people claim to see. Although I always thought they were embellishing it. But for example when reading books I never found any use for scene etc descriptions, and they seemed just words, while I think other people got images in their head, and for this reason those descriptions were good.
Talking to Claude it thinks I don't have aphantasia, since I think I can see vague flashes of things. E.g. I try to recall my family member's face, I get what I think are vague flashes of the face. But it seems to require a lot of effort and definitely not voluntary based on text.
But I may be better at imagining some abstract content, like numbers. E.g. if I have to remember a 2FA code, sometimes I can keep visual imagery for 3 of the numbers and the other 3 I keep repeating in my head. Maybe text and numbers I can keep visualisation better, but not true 2d or 3d detailed imagery.
Out of curiousity can you imagine any numbers or abstract shapes at all?
> Out of curiousity can you imagine any numbers or abstract shapes at all?
No, nothing at all, I have to (e.g. a 2FA code) repeat it to myself repeatedly, and then I’ll remember it by rhythm. Which is also how I remember e.g. months in a year, or the order of cardinal directions.
Ideas live like a non-visual, non-textual concepts more akin to feelings but not quite so.
I am good at maths, IT, programming and reasoning problems.
Bad at any sort of visual, mehanical problems. For example in a car engine I can not connect naturally how one part effects the other without knowing operational concept beforehand.
I also don't have any narrator voice in my head but my dreams can be extremely vivid.
I remember in meditation guides when they tell you to imagine you are on the beach and whatnot, I always assumed this is figure of speech.
I also have to focus hard. When I look at an object and then I close my eyes, if I put effort in I can see it blinking fast between black and the object and then black smoothly becoming more and more dominant, but it's longer than a second, and I guess how long depends on how much effort I put in.
I'm also terrible at real life 3d things and remembering how to navigate without GPS, or remembering places.
> I remember in meditation guides when they tell you to imagine you are on the beach and whatnot, I always assumed this is figure of speech.
I kind of also thought it was figure of speech, I do feel like I can get some sort of low imagery to black framerate going on if I imagine penguin in a snow cave, but it takes so much effort it doesn't feel pleasurable or worth doing. I never understood counting sheep either, thought it was some sort of joke.
I wonder how much miscommunication or misunderstanding there is between people, because everyone assumes they process things in the same way.
Also I wonder when saying disgusting, shocky or dark humor related things, it seems nothing to me since it's just words, but I wonder if it offends or shocks some people so much because they get the actual imagery.
Ohh, that is yet another thing I never thought of. Would be interesting to know.
Interesting issues I had never thought about.
As I grew older and my verbal skills improved, I switched to the abstraction that comes with language. I also became more outgoing; I'm still an introvert but nowhere near what I was when I was a child. I suspect if you took a random Masaai hunter, they would do very well at these kinds of spatial reasoning tests.
Even in my career as a software engineer, I still tend to rubber duck a lot and really excelled at pair-programming. That's why I really enjoy using LLMs when programming now. When I transitioned to engineering management, I learned over the years to get out of the way of my directs who performed better alone; many times I wouldn't even meet with them for a month, and that made them extremely productive.
The issue with a lot of organizations is that they don't account for the variety in problem-solving techniques and abstractions that engineers use. Engineers are not some monolith that always need to be managed from the top-down; you should always play to their strengths and support a variety of problem-solving styles.
That's an interesting idea. Since I feel like it's same for me. When I meet with people they have their ideas, suggestions and requirements that they put out and I feel like I have some sort of social obligation to meet them and eventually it might not fit very well into what I had planned and then I start to overthink related to how I can fit their ideas into what I was planning to do and it derails a lot. If I ignore the ideas I might need to justify it later or at some point, or argue immediately, but then so much energy will go towards justifying and debating, it will derail what I was to do anyway. It just I have this very strict big picture idea of what I'm planning to do in my head, and it feels impossible to share it with people without actually going through with it. Even if I wrote a massive document it wouldn't help I feel.
I've actually got feedback in my past that I should consider other's opinions more when doing something, but then it just breaks down everything I was to do, and I feel like I could execute really quickly.
I have trouble with group meetings as well, e.g. where people are going through tasks by splitting them down into subtasks, then discussing subtasks one by one, while I feel like I have a big picture thing, where I do not want to divide things into subtasks, since it's everything supposed to work together, and they can't be discussed individually. Although it's considered common best practice to divide and conquer, I feel like it's not how I best think. And I have idea for each subtask, but it's all coming from that "big picture" idea, and if I propose it I will have to start explaining the whole big picture I have in mind, and it would derail the whole thing, so I usually just let people discuss things out, because I can't explain the whole thing anyway. I can never be in sync with people in group meetings, so I'll just try to come up with things to pretend I'm being an active participant.
I'm obsessed with this big picture idea, and excited about executing it, but everything around it demotivates me and kills the excitement.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381002...