They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.

As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.

As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.

People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.

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techgnosis a day ago | parent | next [-]

Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.

I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.

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ksbd-pls-finish a day ago | parent | next [-]

Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.

I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.

	▲	D-Machine 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is why the denialism about differences in visual experience are so indefensible: they basically require an assumption that the whole world is out to lie and deceive. Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ. To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".

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8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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jhedwards 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is such a weird response, what do I have to gain by lying about such an event? Why would you want to "verify" it? I am sharing a lived experience: my visual experience of the image of the dystopian landscape was so strong that my cognitive experience was consumed by the image in my mind, to the extent that I no longer saw the image conveyed by my eyes.

I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.

	▲	lojban 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think I may share the same experience as you, but I've never known if what I have is closer to aphasia or hyperphantasia. From the way people describe their experiences, it's difficult to know what they truly mean. I don't think anyone is lying, but it must be hard to convey these experiences with our language as it is. In your first post, I thought "that's definitely not me", but in your second post I thought, "oh, that's actually 100% me" To me, everything I imagine is on a different mental plane. This is what I thought people meant by a "minds eye". You don't see it literally, but it's there in your imagination. What confuses me though is that for some people, it sounds like it's an overlay on their actual visual perception, something so vivid they could practically rotoscope it. I could never do that; I imagine I'd be a better artist if I could. My imagination on this plane is so vivid that I'll get lost in it, and not see what's in front of me, as you describe it, simply because I'm "not paying attention" until some immediate danger jolts me "awake". I colloquially call this "zoning out" or "daydreaming" Actually, I think my imagination might be part of what makes it so hard for me to read books. I'll get distracted by the world building, playing the different scenarios in my head, that I'll forget about the words in front of me, and minutes will go by before I remember I'm supposed to be reading a book.

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the_gipsy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.

	▲	jhedwards 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think "visual hallucination" is something very different from the minds eye. The imagination is one source of visual experience, the eyes are another. A visual hallucination is when something goes wrong and the data from your eyes is contaminated or distorted in some way. In my case, my imagination can produce photo-realistic visual experiences which are strong enough to block out the data from my eyes. They don't mix, but I can supplant one for the other at will. If they did mix I think that would be a disorder and we'd be talking about something other than aphantasia and imagination.