Many people have no mental imagery. What's going on in their brains? | Hacker News Reader

Many people have no mental imagery. What's going on in their brains?

nature.com

22 pointsjohngossman11 comments

Wow. This explains a huge amount, I’m slightly stunned. I had always assumed people were speaking metaphorically when they talked about seeing with the mind’s eye. I think I’m about a 4.8 on the scale shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Can definitely relate to @spacedcowboy’s "orrery" model, though in my case it generally received as a source of annoyance, not a superpower sadly :) and to the sdam you describe @deafpolygon.

> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.

I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.

fascinating to find the differences (though maybe not for the people with aphantasia)

Another article that touches on this in a different way is temple grandin's paper on how animals think

https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

i also have aphantasia. it’s interesting to say the least. as a side effect of aphantasia, i also experience sdam (severely deficient autobiographical memory) in which i don’t recall clear events in my life (i only know that certain things happen, but in general it’s all just a blur) and i have difficulty recognizing people in a crowd (even loved ones).

Interesting to hear that someone also has sdam (I didn't know the term before). For me it's like knowing about major events but everything older than 3 years is just blurred. Imagine a beach-leveling-net behind a car that just evens out the beach... also I have troubles put events in an chronological order. The more you know...

I'm one of those people that has a very weak mental "imagery". It comes with its own positives and negatives.

What would you say some of these pros and cons would be? I don’t think anyone really speaks about the possible negatives of having strong mental imagery would be

traumas for one. not being able to picture some traumatic event surely helps

I’ve written about this before …

I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.

My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.

Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.

So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.

I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.

It's exactly as another commenter thoughtfully replied. My mind works better which rules, interactions between systems, teasing out insights in complicated data, understanding where things break down between boundaries, foreseeing issues that people wouldn't think of well before they come up, etc.

While I'm not sure this is directly related, but even things like being a participant in a multi-party conversation and watching 2 people have a discussion and instantly pick up on the fact that person 1 interpreted something in a certain way that doesn't match up with person 2's interpretation of it. Super handy being able to instantly just jump in and say "by the way I think person 1's understood that to mean this instead of that".

I cant sort of imagine a blank screen but w cant turn off the mental imagery that is with me all the time. I can run two full sets of imagery at the same time, actual reality, like driving a car on the hyway, and then whatever I am thinking about, though I will have no recall of what I saw while driving, but will seamlessly pop back into actively thinking about driving when anything anomylous appears. And lots of other little two channel visuals, looking at a screen while reviewing the last screen and thinking about where something might be...........in the huge mad jumble of stuff spread out over a lot of space in different buildings in the. For me there is almost constantly two visual things happening, and sleep is when it gets paired down to one, and only if I work to full physical capacity will I just sleep through with no active dreaming, as it's called. Certain physical activities will command my full attention, but the visual recall is always there. Reading is special, as I must actualy see the words, but the images my mind creates to go with them are very strong. I also design and build three dimensional objects in varios materials, and am interested in aircraft design and systems, and will just sit, and play with ideas, and often waking up with finished workable solutions. Maybe people who dont project imagery can just access the same information as direct knowledge without the visuals, or are they useless dumb fucks?, just read further down and "spacedcowboy", obviosly not a dumb fuck describes his experience of an elephant in the room, which I read, and understand, but with visuals running in the background.

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