• OK, it's on.
  • Please note that many, many Email Addresses used for spam, are not accepted at registration. Select a respectable Free email.
  • Done now. Domine miserere nobis.

I have Aphantasia

Black Rose

An unbreakable bond
Local time
Yesterday 10:48 PM
Joined
Apr 4, 2010
Messages
10,783
-->
Location
with mama

TheAdditional1

The Pharaohs Advocate
Local time
Yesterday 9:48 PM
Joined
Jul 12, 2015
Messages
65
-->
Location
Non-utopia
Aphantasia: A condition in which people cannot create images in their head.




Conversely, I think I may be pretty close to hyperphantasia. Visualize everything, even little bubbles of chains of interlocking situations when someone is spelling out their logic.

Far below the technical Sherlockian Mind Palace though. Just creatively.
 

Hadoblado

think again losers
Local time
Today 2:18 PM
Joined
Mar 17, 2011
Messages
6,614
-->
Are you sure AK? That doesn't seem likely.

How do you remember what something looks like? If I ask you what a face looks like, do you only semantically understand that the eyes are above the nose but below the hairline?
 

Black Rose

An unbreakable bond
Local time
Yesterday 10:48 PM
Joined
Apr 4, 2010
Messages
10,783
-->
Location
with mama
Are you sure AK? That doesn't seem likely.

How do you remember what something looks like? If I ask you what a face looks like, do you only semantically understand that the eyes are above the nose but below the hairline?

My hypothesis is that spacial awareness is separate from color awareness and that the spacial part of the brain tells the color part what to visualize in people's heads by shaping those colors in a feedback loop. I am fine when it comes to shapes but I do not see colors (in my head) which is the visceral sensation of vision.

This is what I have found from wikipedia:

220px-Ventral-dorsal_streams.svg.png


Visual pathways in the human brain. The ventral stream (purple) is important in color recognition. The dorsal stream (green) is also shown. They originate from a common source in the visual cortex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis#Dorsal_stream

Dorsal stream[edit]
The dorsal stream is proposed to be involved in the guidance of actions and recognizing where objects are in space. Also known as the parietal stream, the "where" stream, or the "how" stream, this pathway stretches from the primary visual cortex (V1) in the occipital lobe forward into the parietal lobe. It is interconnected with the parallel ventral stream (the "what" stream) which runs downward from V1 into the temporal lobe.
 

Hadoblado

think again losers
Local time
Today 2:18 PM
Joined
Mar 17, 2011
Messages
6,614
-->
Interesting. The reason I doubted it was because you seem to be very visual in content here, but I guess that can be explained by you liking it when you see it. It's only skepticism, I'm not telling you how you work :angel:
 

AndyC

Hm?
Local time
Today 3:48 PM
Joined
Nov 30, 2015
Messages
353
-->
I have auditory aphantasia. To remember sound I remember everything without recreating the sound such as the source of the sound, semantics, context, etc. I can recreate the muscle sensations involved in making sounds via the voice, yet this is fairly limited in it's capacity to let me audiate songs and such because muscle memory is very different and I only use it as a replacement for mnemonics and not for listening. But I have mastered the feedback of pitch due to its simplicity and have developed perfect pitch (note differentiation). Ocassionally when I'm just about to fall asleep I can hear beautiful music quite vividly, but the second I recognise it, it goes away, which is interesting. My brother is very talented at writing great music, and I think it may be a consequence to his possibly well developed audiation abilities, and maybe, if I had not any trouble with such, should I experience similar capabilities? In an IQ test I took, I scored quite low on anything auditory, especially working memory. I'm not sure what it is that is creating this difficulty, I shall possibly research it given the motivation. My visual imagination is quite capable, at least it seems so, I did not score incredibly high on any tasks that test this ability. Smell, probably like most, cannot be conjured within my imagination, as well as taste but I can recreate touch and pain at a level close to that of visualisation.
 

QuickTwist

Spiritual "Woo"
Local time
Yesterday 11:48 PM
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
7,182
-->
Location
...
I am this way for certain things as well. My therapist asked me how I would like to see myself, where I was in life that made me feel content and happy. I could only think of myself in an appartment cutting vegetables in a dark kitchen. This exercise was supposed to give me an idea of what goals I should set for myself and instead I had no compelling evidence for what I would like my life to look like given there were no obstacles. If you asked this question my therapist asked me, a lot of people would prolly say they would want to be rich or have a nice house or nice car and have a successful job and have an attractive SO and possibly have kids or something. I don't have any of those aspirations and in fact I have so little to even dream about. I have no idea what I want to accomplish in/with my life. I literally have no real goals that really want to pursue. I am simply experiencing life moment by moment.
 

Black Rose

An unbreakable bond
Local time
Yesterday 10:48 PM
Joined
Apr 4, 2010
Messages
10,783
-->
Location
with mama
I kind of knew this for some time but one thing is that I cannot mentally manipulate my thoughts. This is both visual and auditory. When I am alone in the park my mind is empty so I try to remember things to connect together, extroverted Intuition is good at connecting things together. But it is not manipulation. I just realize a new way of things going together. And my memories are not visually seen. They are seen but invisible. So the invisible things connect together as new concepts. When this stops happening my mind is empty and I get anxiety because nothing is happening. I do not like sitting on the grass with an empty mind doing nothing. So I try to remember things. I wish I had the ability to mentally manipulate ideas.
 

QuickTwist

Spiritual "Woo"
Local time
Yesterday 11:48 PM
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
7,182
-->
Location
...
I kind of knew this for some time but one thing is that I cannot mentally manipulate my thoughts. This is both visual and auditory. When I am alone in the park my mind is empty so I try to remember things to connect together, extroverted Intuition is good at connecting things together. But it is not manipulation. I just realize a new way of things going together. And my memories are not visually seen. They are seen but invisible. So the invisible things connect together as new concepts. When this stops happening my mind is empty and I get anxiety because nothing is happening. I do not like sitting on the grass with an empty mind doing nothing. So I try to remember things. I wish I had the ability to mentally manipulate ideas.

Interesting.

There is this guy on INTJf who has PMed me on a number of occasions. He seems to think that I think in ideas rather than words or pictures. Not sure what to make of that really.
 

Grayman

Soul Shade
Local time
Yesterday 9:48 PM
Joined
Jan 8, 2013
Messages
4,416
-->
Location
You basement
1) What is it like to read books without pictures?
2) The hero called Daredevil can see without seeing. I internally see things via other senses than just vision like the daredevil. Vision requires concentration and color words and texture requires that I mentally focus on the thing I am looking at in my head.
3) Seeing the world through sensual feeling can tell me a lot more about the world that I am looking at than vision can. I can feel a cavern filled with cold water inside a mountain. My mind creates a picture of a mountain cut in half to show me the cavern but still cannot tell me that the water is cold or that the rocks are sharp and when I place my hands on the rocks I can feel the rocks threatening to cut my skin. When I run my hand through the water I can feel that it is cold clean and very refreshing. Do you feel these things as I say them?

How can a person enjoy books if they cannot feel the world and the characters of that book?
 

Black Rose

An unbreakable bond
Local time
Yesterday 10:48 PM
Joined
Apr 4, 2010
Messages
10,783
-->
Location
with mama
1) What is it like to read books without pictures?

When I think spatially it is not projected outside my head. It is much like looking at the back of your head. If I read the pink elephant balancing on a ball I think that my temporal lobe recognizes it but my parietal lobe does not project it. The temporal/parietal areas are designated the 'what' and the 'where' system. Higher cognitive areal project into them so those links must be broken or something because the links are needed to see colors and shapes. So when I think of the pink elephant, it only happens in my frontal lobes. The frontal lobes do not project in the right ways into the back of the brain for me to simulate anything there.

edit:

I do not have imaginary tactile sensations.
 

gps

INTP 5w4 Iconoclast
Local time
Today 12:48 AM
Joined
Mar 16, 2010
Messages
200
-->
Location
Upstate NY, USA, Earth
That test seems highly biased towards women/females!
The questions involved colors and natural settings ... faces, sunrises, blue skies, clouds with lightening.

I have a degree in Mech Eng tech which found me and my class mates imagining THINGS -- not faces, sunrises, and such -- in 3D and rotating them in our mind's eyes.
This did NOT entail colors so much as shapes, profiles, and such in black-and-white.

Far more women dream in color than men as well as being able to lucid dream.
Men more often visualize to navigate in 3D via spatial cues, not color and texture which women use more heavily and readily.

I was awakened by a naked man in the early hours of Saturday morning when I was 18.
I was sleeping in my bed in a 3-man room in a navy barracks.
I recognized the guy; he was in my class in the same computer tech school.
He said, "get out of MY bed".
I looked around the room and spotted MY room mates.
I asserted that it was MY room, not his.
In his drunken state he had ascended one-too-many flights of stairs and navigated down a hall colored something starkly contrasting the color of his hallway ... IGNORING something the vast majority of women would not ignore.
However the room he mistook for his was spatially located directly above his.
He got the distance from the hall entrance door right, the side the hall right.
His navigation of space was just a floor off ... as he FAILED to notice a HUGE color clue that the floor was not the one on which his room was located.

I suspect that the test could be rewritten to favor the way MEN visualize ... more spatially and with more attention to shape and profile and far less attention to color, texture, facial features, natural settings and such.

The test also didn't test for visualizing future conditions, next state, next step sorts of scenarios.
I can look the present state of a sculpture I'm working on and anticipate what it will look like with modifications I'm anticipating.
My mind favors the SUBJECTS and WAYS it visualizes; It doesn't find visualizing sun rises or lightening storms very interesting, satisfying, or useful as a general rule.

Imagine a pink elephant taking dump on a sunrise as it turns into a lightening storm!

Really? I can't imagine too many men/guys wasting mental effort on such.

A bicycle has front chain ring with 45 teeth and the chain is presently on a rear sprocket having 21 teeth.
Imagine the rider pedaling at a rate of 70 revolutions per minute on the crank.
This is the sort of thing many visually adroit, mechanically inclined guys can and WILL expend effort visualizing.

Seymour Papert -- the author of "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas" -- recounted viewing and imagining mating gears as a child.

Given a perspective view of physical `part' I can imagine a top, front, and right side view of the part ... without injecting irrelevant color or `facial expression' into my visualization.

I'm not interested in visualizing Tall, fat, short, skinny individuals with the sun rising behind them as a purple haze burns off.
I'm sure that there are plenty of good visualizers who reject or suppress visualizing scenes -- of features of scenes -- more hallucinatory or fantastic than those more realistic, possible, or probable.

I'm pretty sure that most men favor and appreciate a `spatial sense' and the ability to imagine spatial juxtapositions than warm fuzzy color lacking all spatial to-scale suchness; as such I'm imagining something akin to elective mutism in the domain of imagination.
Given the suggestion to imagine off white, as contrasted with ivory, or vanilla frosting I'd balk; it's just too `gender inappropriate' for me.
Elective refusal to imagine a fantasy painted with words via a questionably-valid `test' does not indicate an inability to do so so much as it speaks more to motivation. Meh.
 

BurnedOut

Beloved Antichrist
Local time
Today 10:18 AM
Joined
Apr 19, 2016
Messages
1,309
-->
Location
A fucking black hole
Apparently, I suppose highly imaginative people can be successful at anything. I've observed quite a lot that if you are not imaginative enough, you will fuck up in math and every technical field too. Even more, imagination is I surmise highly correlated with spatial IQ too.

Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk
 

gps

INTP 5w4 Iconoclast
Local time
Today 12:48 AM
Joined
Mar 16, 2010
Messages
200
-->
Location
Upstate NY, USA, Earth
Apparently, I suppose highly imaginative people can be successful at anything. I've observed quite a lot that if you are not imaginative enough, you will fuck up in math ....

And you will notice those who can't by their eyes glazing over when exposed to a symbolic expression they can't either parse or picture in their mind's eye.
To wit, there was a guy -- 99problems -- who started a thread over on INTPc who could visualize a pattern he could manifest via wood planking to make a pool deck via his carpentry skills but if someone gave him a PEMDAS encoded algebra expression which could form some or all of the pattern he would wig out BECAUSE `it' was qua WAS -- to HIM -- algebra qua ALGEBRA.

I almost presented a graphical program via papert logo which would exploit a similar herring bone pattern for dePICTing the sum of the first n odd integers ... but he was pretty much chased out of the group for expressing his decidedly sexist views on women in the military BEFORE it dawned on me to do it, so the point crafting of my as-urged demonstration became moot.

... every technical field too.
Even more, imagination is I surmise highly correlated with spatial IQ too.

Big Time!
Although apparently NOT in Electrical Engineering.
While in classes with Mech Tech students I noticed that we all pretty much could imagine spatial scenarios and experience The Real when imagining these as a form of personal gold standard ... then using math to shore up our visualizations and engineering drawings.
When I transferred into an electrical engineering tech program I discovered that my classmates did NOT imagine ANYTHING; they `trusted in the math'
Whereas I quite often employed analogical reasoning which precluded the math by imagining a mechanical system or fluidics circuit which was analogous to the electrical (sub)circuit at issue.
As a group, Electrical Engineers seem substantially less spatially oriented in their thinking and daily operations.

And I fail to `see' or `imagine' anything spatial about imagining a sun rise on a foggy morning or imaging the facial expression of a friend.
The imagination test at hand seems to decouple spatial and to-scale aspects of how many MEN visualize and/or image.
 

BurnedOut

Beloved Antichrist
Local time
Today 10:18 AM
Joined
Apr 19, 2016
Messages
1,309
-->
Location
A fucking black hole
And you will notice those who can't by their eyes glazing over when exposed to a symbolic expression they can't either parse or picture in their mind's eye.
To wit, there was a guy -- 99problems -- who started a thread over on INTPc who could visualize a pattern he could manifest via wood planking to make a pool deck via his carpentry skills but if someone gave him a PEMDAS encoded algebra expression which could form some or all of the pattern he would wig out BECAUSE `it' was qua WAS -- to HIM -- algebra qua ALGEBRA.

I almost presented a graphical program via papert logo which would exploit a similar herring bone pattern for dePICTing the sum of the first n odd integers ... but he was pretty much chased out of the group for expressing his decidedly sexist views on women in the military BEFORE it dawned on me to do it, so the point crafting of my as-urged demonstration became moot.



Big Time!
Although apparently NOT in Electrical Engineering.
While in classes with Mech Tech students I noticed that we all pretty much could imagine spatial scenarios and experience The Real when imagining these as a form of personal gold standard ... then using math to shore up our visualizations and engineering drawings.
When I transferred into an electrical engineering tech program I discovered that my classmates did NOT imagine ANYTHING; they `trusted in the math'
Whereas I quite often employed analogical reasoning which precluded the math by imagining a mechanical system or fluidics circuit which was analogous to the electrical (sub)circuit at issue.
As a group, Electrical Engineers seem substantially less spatially oriented in their thinking and daily operations.

And I fail to `see' or `imagine' anything spatial about imagining a sun rise on a foggy morning or imaging the facial expression of a friend.
The imagination test at hand seems to decouple spatial and to-scale aspects of how many MEN visualize and/or image.
There's a difference between the imagination and the standard definition of imagination i'm talking about in this scenario. Real imaginative skill is spatial IQ I surmise. Males still dominate the top echelon when it comes to spatial IQ. I suppose its something to do with evolution itself. Man - hunter and female - caretaker.
So its pretty much explanatory why males have a better spatial IQ

Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk
 

gps

INTP 5w4 Iconoclast
Local time
Today 12:48 AM
Joined
Mar 16, 2010
Messages
200
-->
Location
Upstate NY, USA, Earth
There's a difference between the imagination and the standard definition of imagination i'm talking about in this scenario.

Real imaginative skill is spatial IQ I surmise.

Males still dominate the top echelon when it comes to spatial IQ.
I suppose its something to do with evolution itself.
Man - hunter and female - caretaker.
So its pretty much explanatory why males have a better spatial IQ

If it weren't self-evident or self-explanatory enough, voles have been used to scientifically reveal how mating in a promiscuous species of vole has produced spatial skills superior to another subspecies which mates for life.
Males which succeed in passing their DNA along to the next generation just may have had a superior ability to navigate in 3D space than their rivals.

And the ability to imagine -- or even notice -- facial expressions is rather moot as voles don't mate via f2f `missionary' position.
So -- as per the language of our female-biased test at hand --`imagine' an Asperger-syndrome promiscuous male vole humping a future-baby-mommie vole as the sun rises in technicolor in a fog on a prairie as a thunder storm approaches on the horizon. :rolleyes:
 

Black Rose

An unbreakable bond
Local time
Yesterday 10:48 PM
Joined
Apr 4, 2010
Messages
10,783
-->
Location
with mama
A symptom of Apantasia is being unable to recognize faces. I do not have this problem. I can recognize faces fine. But I do have week spatial abilities. This is a face I drew 6 months ago to test how well I can draw. I do not have good perspective and I would never try colors.

vaF5IQW.png
 
Top Bottom