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Comment by basscomm | Hacker News Reader

> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?

Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.

If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.

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In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.

So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.

I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.

Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t.

Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.

Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.

The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.

Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane.

So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.

That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.

He started by saying he initially couldn't even achieve phantasia (at school) but now can and that validates his experience which is he has made strides on mental imagery department.

Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?

It's not, but you then must admit that there's a variety of experience that you may not experience, and that some people don't need to learn, or vice versa, cannot learn.

Fair enough but we're not discussing all under the heaven here.

The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.

Parent poster was rejecting the idea that subjective reports claiming impossibility were possible, I'm not going to extend them the benefit of the doubt in the opposite direction. "That's not a real thing" puts the onus on the demonstrator, you can't disprove subjective experience using subjective experience.

I believe in a plurality of human experiences, they do not, because they experienced one thing different. It's a specious argument, just like all the people rejecting the idea that other people can have a different subjective experience (based solely on their own personal experience) in this thread.

> Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack?

He literally said he HAS the ability. He can actually do it. It is just that he learned it at some point.

I think people can experience A, B, and C, he's saying "I was like A, but I learned to be like B, therefore A does not really exist". It's a bad argument. It's like claiming that, because you have dyslexia and learned to read, dyslexia doesn't exist, even though other people who are dyslexic can have a severity where they can't learn to read.

He desribed his own experience of learninig to visualise. That is entirely valid thing to say in the context of "is it learnable or unchangeable or something in between".

He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.

Also, dyslectic can learn to read. They have difficulty with it, including in later age. But "cant learn to read" is not that thing.

He rejected the idea of it being fixed for anyone else, based on it being changed for himself, which is uncharitable at best. Some people with dyslexia are incapable of learning to read, maybe you should check it out. That doesn't mean every dyslexic is incapable, but that's a real variation. And you're rejecting the idea of that yourself, which also feels pretty uncharitable.

How does it compare to the imagery you see in dreams?

Few people routinely mentally visualize with the same breadth and vividness as dreaming, unless perhaps they have poor dream recall or don't dream very vividly. It's probably more rare than aphantasia.

On the flip side, this means with some introspection and reflection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization as the dominant mode is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner, and the other modes are difficult to identify or articulate.

A fascinating thing about dreams I realized as a midlife adult after getting into ML is how coupled brain storage : dreaming is.

Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?

If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.

But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.

Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.

FWIW, I don’t have aphantasia; I can visualize stuff in my head, but it’s nothing like actual vision, and neither is how I see in what I would call vivid dreams. My dreams and my wakeful “mind’s eye” are pretty similar, I would say. The point is, they are only faintly comparable to actual vision, but I would never characterize that difference as aphantasia, or say that I have trouble visualizing things.

It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.

In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.

That sounds like hypophantasia, i.e. not the absence of internal imagery, but a very vague one.

No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.

Fwiw, I can visualize things, I can hear noises in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, smell things in my head.

So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.

I can smell phantom smells through my nose directly it seems, like I feel the sensation of detecting some smell directly in the neurons connected to my nose. Not sure if that's the same for you or others. It's not in my mind per se, at least not initially.

Perhaps different from mind's eye then! But alas, I can't do that either.

Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.

This same behaviour does actually persist in other areas. I'm colourblind, even as an adult I have other people argue that perhaps I just don't know which colours are which rather than have a problem with the mechanism within the eye for detecting them.

> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.

You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.

> Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia

Citation needed.

People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.

Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.

That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.

https://worldmetrics.org/aphantasia-statistics/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...

Why do conservatives think trans people are everywhere?

"People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere."

Because they hear about it all the time in their bubble.

Some/many people who can’t smell actually don’t know that, nor do the people around them. The same can be true for color blindness and actual blindness!

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