jxelam

Do you get any closed-eye visuals while falling asleep? Obviously psilocybin massively increases ability at this, but I've found practising daily at night can increase control and level of detail dramatically over the course of a few months.

And from there it's possible, with effort, to do it while awake and with eyes open. If you've ever read Roald Dahl's "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar", I've found the experience remarkably reminiscent.

I'm not sure if it's the same mechanism as aphants have, as it still feels far more laboured than what they describe and very much still in the realm of closed-eye visuals, but I've found it's better than nothing.

Visualising does appear to be a skill you can actively get better at, for example there's some evidence to suggest describing what you're seeing out loud as you're doing it can increase your ability with time and practice.

There's some work being done in this area under the name Image-Streaming: http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm

Obviously there's a lot of variance as everyone's different, but here's a list of benefits at least some people with aphantasia report:

* Being more in the moment. An example of this is being better at mindfulness, as well as simply not living in the past or worrying about the future as much.

* Less prone to trauma. You've already mentioned this, but not remembering scenes with full sensory information appears to provide a level of protection in some people when it comes to traumatic memories that are otherwise relived and unable to be processed.

* Being better at abstract thought. Lots of people's memory is largely a kind of first person chronological narrative, made up of scenes on a timeline. Some people with aphantasia report they remember in a far more abstract structural manner, not merely confined to the visual. This is obviously also somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to remembering say past events.

* Thinking faster on your feet. Without the added visual element, it seems possible to be be more linguistically dexterous and witty because there's less delay between thought and words.

I hasted to add this is all a generalisation, and more about a propensity to be better than you'd personally otherwise be at these things as opposed to a superpower. I don't think it's coincidental that in Francis Galton's original paper on this, he found people with aphantasia are disproportionately represented in what we'd now call STEM.

I have an aphantasia and I'm a programmer, and I've personally found I'm much more able to reason about complex systems than average, and the way I think about them seems markedly different.

People with aphantasia may or may not dream visually. There's actually quite a range of experiences just within dreaming. For example, not everyone dreams in colour and not everyone dreams in first person.

I'm currently running an exploratory survey of these sorts of sensory differences to see their prevalence, especially among people with autism and SPD: https://surveys.autisticempire.com/117683

Prosopagnosia and misophonia are interesting, prosopagnosia both in terms of recognition but also how it affects sexuality (think demisexuality), and misophonia both in terms of existence and what pitches people find intolerable.

Aphantasia is also interesting in that there's a visual form and an auditory form, and my preliminary survey results show a large correlation with autism for the visual but none for auditory. More generally, it's also interesting how it interacts with things like depression, anxiety, and mindfulness as well as things like DP/DR.

I became interested in sensory differences because I do not feel hunger or cold (more common than you'd think, interoception differences), and then discovered I have aphantasia back before it had a name, but also have CEV of at least level 4 and can conjure it up with effort just by closing my eyes which is apparently far from the norm.

I have a suspicion quite a lot of revealing stuff has been written throughout history on these things, just with the author assuming everyone's like them. To take CEV as an example, Jung's "active imagination" as described in the Red Book sounds a lot like CEV level 4, and also resembles how some people describe shamanic journeys. I can also see how maladaptive daydreaming can start off slowly, lead to a paracosm before ending up with Gondor.

Gwern, bit of a tangent but I think actually related: have you by chance looked into thought loops at all? Obviously there's the psychdelic variety, but I'm also thinking of those described by sufferers of anxiety, depression, and especially anorexia.

Yes I think you're right. Although the post-js version would be the page you're looking at, so it makes sense it'd prioritise that over "what html was sent from the server which may not reflect what you're seeing".

Does it not work to select all, right click and "view selection source"?