I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.

It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

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aeonik 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hesitate to come to this conclusion.

When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.

The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.

E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.

As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.

Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.

So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.

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dd8601fn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great.

I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.

I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.

	▲	cheez-whiz 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from) Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.

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cheez-whiz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.

As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.

If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.

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throwuxiytayq 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.

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suddenlybananas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.

	▲	polytely 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
	▲	throwuxiytayq 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.