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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365

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Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.

I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)

It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.

I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.

Yeah that's totally insane to me.

Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.

In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.

But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.

Completely opposite on that front, here, as well. I can't even really associate, I have visual memory all the way back to my earliest childhood memories (specifically, 3-4 years old, stepping on the track of a sliding door in San Diego, I believe, it hurt, I wanted to go see the pool outside), and my memory is so visual that sometimes I can see people's face, and what they were wearing and where we were standing, in the conversations we had but not necessarily hear what they're saying. I also have some semantic memory, something like "we talked about x for a while, and then I think we did y", but it's much hazier.

Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.

After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.

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