| ▲ | misthop 5 hours ago |
| Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions |
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| ▲ | JoshTriplett 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file? If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene? |
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| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing). As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail. I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can. | |
| ▲ | majiy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe. I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo". | |
| ▲ | mirror_neuron 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision. | |
| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it.
I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word | | |
| ▲ | cyclopeanutopia 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course. | | |
| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery | |
| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some people hear it more like a recording. | | |
| ▲ | cyclopeanutopia 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I can do that, but I think it is the same thing on a spectrum, just like the visual imagination. |
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| ▲ | orta 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue. | |
| ▲ | tekla 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure this is the default. Who literally hears music when thinking of it. | | |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I do. I can "play it back" in my head, with full music/lyrics/chords/etc. | |
| ▲ | Kiro 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do and just asked around among friends. Everyone did. | |
| ▲ | drcongo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most I think, especially among musicians, which makes the GP fascinating to me! | | |
| ▲ | tekla 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I can play the piano, saxaphone, and guitar, and I've never considered being able to think about music to be actually hearing it. |
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| ▲ | bethekidyouwant 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you literally hear music in a dream have you never had an auditorial hallucination? | | |
| ▲ | tekla 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yes I've had auditorial hallucinations. It was clearly inside my head, I was not "hearing" it |
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| ▲ | logicallee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It reminds me of a joke. It's better told in person but you get the idea: A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks. "Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?" "Yeah?" "Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?" hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture! |
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| ▲ | drcongo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there. |
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| ▲ | boothby 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses? |
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| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have an inner monologue, that is the extent of my inner senses. | | |
| ▲ | Akronymus 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | do you have inner music or just your voice serving as the instrument like me? | | |
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| ▲ | chaps 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal. |
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| ▲ | _ink_ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother. | |
| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nothing, no |
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| ▲ | codetiger 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street.
2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see.
3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times.
4. Can remember a favorite color.
5. Don't have a consistent handwriting. Do these symptoms count? |
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| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Those don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one |
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| ▲ | jareklupinski 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| how is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck? i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?) |
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| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average. I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory. | | |
| ▲ | jareklupinski 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | that's interesting too! i can visualize clearly, but have _terrible_ artistic skills; nothing in my head can make it out unless through CAD :) |
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| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Proprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range | | |
| ▲ | jareklupinski 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | interesting! i always have to 'see myself' in my head to answer those kinds of questions |
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| ▲ | jibbit 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like? |
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| ▲ | cyclopeanutopia 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after? |
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| ▲ | _ink_ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see. | |
| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing |
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| ▲ | badgersnake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out? |
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| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books. |
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| ▲ | ThrowawayTestr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What does you mother look like? |
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| ▲ | misthop 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | She's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory | | |
| ▲ | smusamashah 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But if you only remember facts, can someone else pretend to be that person you remember with those facts? | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, memory is not limited to facts. There's just no visualization to go along with the recollection of faces etc. You can absolutely still recognize people correctly when looking at them. | |
| ▲ | godshatter 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm also an aphant. Recognition still happens. I'll see a person I haven't seen in years, know that I know them, then finally remember who they are much later. Even though I can't picture them after seeing them, I'll still remember who they are much later. Usually, anyway. I get stressed out having to meet someone I haven't seen for a long time in a cafe or something. I have to scan everyone and wait for that ping of recognition to happen. | |
| ▲ | drcongo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a fascinating question - I'm aphantasic and mildly face blind (I thought the two female leads in Disclosure Day were the same person for most of the movie and that we were jumping back and forth in her timeline). I've always assumed I'm face blind because of the aphantasia, but I know several aphantasics who have no problem recognising faces. In answer to the question though, no - even as someone with face blindness, the faces of people I've known and loved for a long time are burned in somewhere - I just can't access that part of my brain at will. |
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| ▲ | nelox 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What does that mean? You can recite a description you’ve read or heard, but what about looking at a photo and describing it? | | |
| ▲ | vidarh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I can describe someone from memory, and I can draw them, but I can't see them unless they're in front of me (or I'm looking at a photo). | | | |
| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | After looking at a photo? I have a memory of the "facts" of the photograph. I have no image of it |
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| ▲ | Zealotux 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like. | |
| ▲ | tiborsaas 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is not a memory nor a detail recall issue. The visual part is just not there, but I know how my mother looks like :) | |
| ▲ | afavour 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head. |
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| ▲ | cubefox 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi |
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| ▲ | Akronymus 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | yeah looks like it triggered a keyword filter to mark it as dead to me. Or a few people flagged it. Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it. | | |
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| ▲ | logicallee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it? |
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| ▲ | misthop 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not.
I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative | |
| ▲ | fwlr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | (Also aphantasic) I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged. | | |
| ▲ | logicallee 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal. 1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure. 2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.) I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it? | | |
| ▲ | fwlr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a bit more stream of thought, hopefully that is helpful. The pyramid can’t take up all the space inside the cube, only another cube could do that. So there must be some points that are “inside cube, outside pyramid” and other points “inside cube, inside pyramid”. The pyramid is given as wholly inside the cube so there are no “outside cube, inside pyramid” points. Same for sphere inside the pyramid. So it’s { out-cube | in-cube out-pyramid | in-cube in-pyramid out-sphere | in-cube in-pyramid in-sphere }
I struggle parsing the ray description, “horizontal” must meaningfully constrain the ray somehow (otherwise it wouldn’t have been mentioned), but I don’t know what that changes. Then I think about facts I know about rays - they can be uniquely specified with two points, or one point and one direction - oh, and we are given the direction is always “horizontal”, so we only need one point. The ray goes on forever so every “in” is “enter+exit”, so add 2 for every “in”. So it’s { out-cube (=0) | in-cube(2) out-pyramid (=2) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) out-sphere (=4) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) in-sphere(2) (=6 }
1) Maximum, that’s 6, from the last option, so “cube, pyramid, sphere…”, have to exit the innermost first, so “…sphere, pyramid, cube”. I don’t know where this ray is positioned, “halfway” might be a good guess, or maybe pyramid is half of square and circle is half of pyramid so “a quarter way up”.2) Distinct, that’s `0 2 4 6`. `0` doesn’t count because we want “still passes through the cube”, so 3 counts exist. Thankful that “tangents don’t count” so I don’t have to think about them, because nothing immediately comes to mind on how to handle them. |
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| ▲ | ppalata 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.) |
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| ▲ | cubefox 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.) Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter. |