The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.
You say "apple" to me and I'm #1, glossy skin, insides, all that
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they're not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor's faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5's are not handicapped in the slightest. They're so "normal" that mankind is just now figuring out we're far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
EDIT: Showed this to my wife and she was somewhat mystified as to what I was asking. Pretty sure she's a 5. I get frustrated as hell when I ask her to describe a thing and she's clueless. "Did the radiator hose pop off, or is it torn and cracked?" "I don't know!"
EDIT2: The first Star Wars book after the movie came out was Splinter in the Mind's Eye. I feel like I got that title. What's it mean to you?
What the fuck do you mean some people don't have an inner monologue. How do they... Think thoughts? I literally cannot comprehend how they work through thoughts.
I'm convinced lots of people actually don't think
The proper way humans are supposed to think is with Critical Thinking Skills. It used to be taught in schools, often in English classes. Remember being taught how to write an essay from the General concept to down to the specific point? That was teaching Critical Thinking Skills, learning how to craft a coherent argument.
Today, many states actively discourage the teaching of Critical Thinking Skills. Republicans in particular hate it. About a decade ago, the Texas Republican Party even included opposition to Critical Thinking Skills in their state platform, claiming that it taught children to defy authority figures. No it doesn't, it just teaches them when those authority figures are trying to exploit them. They actually tried to position Critical Thinking Skills as detrimental to childhood education.
If you don't develop Critical Thinking Skills, you will substitute orderly thinking with a sort of ad hoc, improvisatory, chaotic thinking, which is easy for someone with a nefarious agenda to tap into and manipulate. Those with good Critical Thinking Skills learn to recognize and resist things like propaganda.
Literally everyone does this tho. It only feels like everyone else because you can't be aware of when you're not thinking.
No, having kids now I am sometimes super tired only being able to function for the daily activities without much planning and thinking about others. This made me realize this state (or even worse) is probably normal for a lot of people.
Vibes or visuals
Vibe thinking?
How the fuck would you function without an inner monologue AND aphantasia...
I don't know, that's hard to imagine
Guards, send this peasant to the dungeons.
Yes, guard here, just give me a brief description of the culprit.
The culprit looks like this.
That's me. Best way I can describe it is like a word cloud but no text or dialog. A bunch of concepts with varying importance and strength of connections.
Me too. I think in the connections between ideas. Almost like thinking in metaphor. Also OP said they were surprised aphantasia is not a disability, but thinking without senses is way faster, you don't need to think in a straight line, but can just think a clump of thoughts at once.
Non-linear thought is super helpful! But yeah, I have to actively translate to words.
It's like breathing, it's just automatic. If someone points it out and I over think it then suddenly I go brain stupid for a second double guessing everything.
Probably different for everyone, but I have neither and sometimes feel almost compelled to speak my thoughts out loud. If I don’t speak them they’re just kind of abstract feelings or impressions.
My mom had a stroke that was caught early, and she was this way in the first couple years afterwards. I had to ask her to stop talking to me so I could read a menu, and she was self-aware about it. She was like "I'm sorry. Just tell me. I just have to speak my thoughts into existence these days."
It’s interesting to hear about someone having a similar experience due to a brain injury. I have always wondered if my inability to internalize thoughts was some kind of developmental thing; if I don’t speak them or write them down then they’re really scattered and sorta incoherent.
My best guess: sometimes, one idea flows to the next in my head without the words. Usually I "feel" sentences falling into place at least a few words ahead of what I'm saying, at least kind of. But sometimes I just sort of talk, without the inner mo ologue, and it's mildly confusing. Like, who the hell is building the sentences if it's not me? And why does what's coming out of my mouth totally agree with what I would be saying if I could build the words right now?
Basically, sometimes the place that ACTUALLY assembles the words bypasses the self-awareness layer, and the words just come out.
I imagine this is somewhat analogous to the people with no inner monologue; there are still thoughts, they just don't take the form of words. Pictures, concepts, or even other things that make less intuitive sense to those of us with inner monologues.
Easily we just do. It's like breathing. We just do it.
Can you explain how you breath? Or beat your heart? Or create blood?
That's how we do.
Is there anyone who can't (partially) control their breath?
I'm a word-er, but I think hank green explained it pretty well in a video. Language is just an I/O bus, thoughts occur as a set of abstractions with associations.
Yeah I'm calling bullshit on this one haha, op is implying some people cannot process word if not spoken or written. That would be so unbelievably disabling you probably couldn't function in society.
It's not that they don't process words, it's that those without internal monologues may think in concepts, images, or visualized actions rather than using the words those concepts are attached to. As an example, some deaf people if they have an internalized monologue have reported their monologue being visualized sign language, instead of audible speech spoken in their head. There's quite a lot of variability in how someone processes their internal thoughts.
Some without internal monologues have mentioned that they can vocalize text in their head, but only if done consciously, and they usually find that it would make reading agonizingly slow to do so for them.
Simon Roper does a couple really excellent videos on this subject, if you'd like to hear a very eloquent first hand experience of someone else's non-monologue internal thoughts.
Also @[email protected]
That should be my next post! 😂 My inner monologue is like words on a page. And again, I can't see how one could enjoy a novel with the monologue and mind's eye.
This one I find difficult to comprehend.
My inner monologue is petty much my entire thought process. How does one think and rationalise without one?
I am a 5 on this scale, and for all other senses. No smell, sound, touch or taste either.
So yea; it when I say my inner monologue is pretty much my whole thought process.
It totally blew my mind; when I realized others could see actual images in their heads.
The no inner monologue thing still boggles me. Considering my point of view; where it is all of my inner self.
"Picture in your mind"...
Me, a 5 on the scale, young: Weird turn of phrase, but okay. I have the... idea of an apple.
Me, still a 5 on the scale but now an adult, in about 2023, learning about aphantasia and that other people were being literal about mind's eye: WHAT.
Yep....me for 40 years; that is just a metaphor to help think about things. Then one day reading about aphantasia....WTF!!!!!people can actually see, it's not just a metaphor.
But then I had a conversation with my partner; she can combine flavors in her mind and know, pretty accurately, what stuff will taste like; it is one reason she loves cooking.
People can actually get a song stuck in their heads....again, not a metaphor.
Mind blown!!!!
My 7yo can project images from his mind into the world; what the hell. He can "watch" movie when looking at the wall when he is in bed going to sleep; with the sounds and everything.
I have some level of auditory imagination; I can play back something I've heard a few times, but it's more like a ghost of the thing than feeling like it's hitting my ears somehow.
The main non-verbal sense I use in my head is spatial. There is a 3d space that I can imagine objects within, rotate around, kind of analyze things about it. There is no visual component to this, yet it feels like it shares the space that the mind's eye could see into.
I've described the closest thing I have to visual imagination as like many of the things that happen in the brain's processing of images after the eyes: resolving patterns of light into shapes and lines, processing shapes into the sense of a particular recognized object. If I think about a tree, I definitely don't see a tree in any sense. But I do sort of feel like I did just see a tree, just... without any sense of light or feeling like I actually did any seeing, metaphorical or otherwise. All the analysis, none of the pixels.
I have a little more of the seeing, but I also want to reach for your ghost metaphor. Imagining a tree for me is a little like seeing a tree, but quite a bit more like having just seen a tree.
I call this the curtain; when I imagine something, like a tree, I can't see the tree. But it is still there; just like it is behind a black curtain, no images from the tree can be seen.
My inner monologue even reacted to your comment when I read it 😅
Tomorrow is chores.
Isn't 5 is called Aphantasia ? To be unable to visualize something in the mind?
Yep! Craziest thing is that we just started looking into this thing in the past 10-20 years. Proof to me that it's no handicap, but if you took my mind's eye away I'd feel crippled.
It has its benefits. You can talk absolute depravity, like Trump farting so much shit into Ivankas mouth that liquid diarrhea is overflowing from the side of her mouth with chunks of yesterday's pasta bolognese dangling off her chin, and get no mental image of that filth. But you can enjoy that imagery.
I'm probably 1 but I can tune stuff out.
Stuff like "you are now manually breathing" doesn't really bother me.
I've also got a lot of intrusive thoughts so maybe I'm just practiced at shutting it down.
It's more of a spectrum with hyper- and a- phantasia being the extremes on each end
(Prophantasia is considered the ability to project imagined images into your physical field of view)
If you really want to blow your mind (heh), you should check out SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory), which is thought to be linked to aphantasia
Wow. I didn't know about the term "prophantasia" until now. Probably because I think that visualizing things in our 3d world is a normally developed imagination power of the people who don't have Aphantasia.
Prophantasia seems like biologically evolved Augmented Reality. Where instead of wearing a piece of AR glass, We're naturally born with this trait.
I can pull out my palm in front of me and visualize a small cat jumping around. Not for too long because I cannot imagine the random movement a cat does. But, as a still object, visualizing an apple is easy.
I am more curious to wonder if someone can manually develop Spatial Intelligence without being born with it priorly.
Wait you can not only in some sense see a-cat-on-your-hand when imagining that, but also see an imaginary cat on the hand you are actually seeing???
Do you then not see the stuff behind the cat while you are imaging the cat to be in the way???
Imagining a cat on my hand is just for adding easiness.
I can imagine a cat anywhere. Right now, a tall water bottle is on a table in front of me. I can imagine a cat one the table, walking towards the bottle and ultimately jumps on it. I can also imagine the bottle to shake or fall down as an impact.
Imagining a still object, for example an apple is more easy. I can imagine the apple has a non scientifical gravity trait and it keeps bouncing on every flat surfaces around the room.
I've been considering this as normal imagination power for the people who don't have Aphantasia. Probably because I can imagine like this with ease.
Seeing past the thing that I imagine is kinda a cognitive blindspot. Because, I don't try to look past what I imagine. A cat or an apple.
Only when I get aware of the fact if I really do look past or not, the confusion arises. But it is much difficult for me to imagine a transparent object. Like an apple made of glass.
I'm a #5 on that scale.
I won't say I'm not jealous of people who're #1s. However, to directly answer your question, it's not like our heads are empty. You think apple and (apparently) 'see' an apple. I think apple and it's like thinking of how you'd describe an apple. It's red, it's round. It has a stem. It's juicy. It tastes good... but I can't see it. Or anything else. They're just thoughts.
I have a very difficult time with facial recognition, presumably as a result of this. If I'm watching a movie where there's a lot of characters that are shown but not named, I have a difficult time following that. I need to be able to assign names to them to keep them straight in my head, and often-times if a character isn't named but they're important, I'll assign them a name myself just to have something to track them with. I can recognize people I interact with a lot obviously but if you asked me to describe what someone looks like who I'm not currently interacting with, that's very difficult for me to do, beyond very surface-level stuff, like their gender or their build. If I had to describe someone for a police sketch, I'd be useless at that. Remembering facial features is like remembering a list of words; I can't just call up an image of them to describe... if I haven't already committed that description to memory, I can't describe the person.
It's funny, honestly, because I never realized this wasn't how everyone is until I saw the image you linked some years back. I actually called up my mother immediately after and asked her what she could see. The conversation went something like:
"When you think of an apple, can you see the apple?"
"Yes..."
"Yeah, but like... you can actually see it, though?"
"...yes...?"
"Yeah but I mean like... you can see it, as if you're looking at it?"
"...yes, what is this about?"
I had that exact same conversation with my mom but it went like this:
"Ok mom, picture a cow in your head"
"Oookayyy"
"Now you can see a cow right?"
"What do you mean"
"Like... You can see a picture of the cow, right?"
"Nooo"
My dad chimes in "yes, obviously"
"...crap. Mom, I have some news for you"
Both of us grew up thinking we had no imagination or were dumb. I remember being incredibly frustrated when a teacher taught us the concept of the Memory Palace where you picture things in rooms of a house. Like if you had to remember five playing cards you'd picture a room with 7 red clowns, with hearts on their cheeks. Then in the next room you'd picture a king, holding up a spade, etc. That just made it harder for me to remember and the teacher kept telling me I wasn't listening or trying.
I feel that explanation about being useless to a sketch artist on a spiritual level, that blew my mind as a kid. To this day I can't really describe what my parents or wife looks like, I can just list characteristics. I feel my brain trying to visualize but then it comes up empty
I used to want very much to be an artist, or at least, be able to draw capably, but it's always seemed impossible. I can think of what I want to draw in a macro sense - like, if I was thinking of that famous Norman Rockwell painting with the boy with the bindle sitting at the diner next to the police officer, I can certainly imagine the scene. Just thinking of that painting from memory, the officer is looking down at the boy who's looking up at the officer, there's a man behind the counter in a white outfit looking at both of them with an amused expression, there's some pastries or donuts or something on the counter...
But to draw something, it feels like you've got to be able to imagine the micro details, and without references to look at, I just can't do that. The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer's hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?
I even have a difficult time commissioning artwork as a result of this, because it's difficult to describe what I want without having something visual to reference.
I've seen a recommendation for the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory. The commenter also attached their drawings from before and after, saying it took a quite short time to go from rudimentary scribblings to full-fledged detailed realistic drawings. So perhaps these books help, though I've got a feeling they might be about drawing from references.
I'm not really an artist, but for myself I resolved this problem by making decisions like that when I come around to those details. I.e. I'll choose the fitting shoes when it's time to draw the shoes. And of course, sketching is for planning this kind of stuff before drawing proper begins.
I'll give this a look! Thanks for the recommendation!
I don't think I'm really explaining the problem well, but like... If I don't have a visual reference, I just can't imagine (or draw) what the minute details actually look like in those situations. An artist might be able to take a side-profile picture of a shoe and visualize what that would look like if it was a front or back or diagonal viewpoint, and draw it into their scene. I know what a shoe looks like... I can describe one, I know a shoe when I see one obviously, but when it comes to needing a level of detail sufficient to actually draw the lines - to know where the next line should go - I come up blank. I can draw something and recognize that it doesn't look like what I want, but it's difficult to actually identify what it is that I do want unless I stumble on it.
I can draw very low-detail things. Stick figures, say, or basic outlines, but the details come very hard to me.
The person who recommended those books said they 'teach how to draw what you see instead of what the brain tells you to draw'. Which is a bit odd, and I don't know if they meant drawing from references specifically, but it kinda sounds like it might help with capturing an object how it should look. Especially since their 'after' example was a detailed drawing of a crow down to the feathers.
I'm actually simultaneously intrigued and a bit wary of these books, since I prefer unrealistic and quirky style and want to develop one like that for myself, but am afraid I might go for detailed looks if I learn to do that.
What Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches you is to draw how an object does look. I'm probably a 4 on the scale and can draw because of this book. One of the memorable techniques is to take a photograph, turn ti upside down and draw it that way. Then, turn your drawing upside and see what you got. By making the image a bit confusing, you can focus on the lines and shading your eyes see, and not 'a man in a chair' your mind sees.
I have aphantasia as well but I do actually have something sort of like a memory palace.. kinda. It should be completely useless when I’m awake, but isn’t. I have a dream town, and every place I’ve dreamed about more than three times in the last ~20 years is there in a surprisingly consistent and exceptionally vivid way, like logging into a mmorpg, but spawning in random places. If not for it being easily recognizable as “my town”, I’d struggle to tell it from waking reality because that’s the only other time I experience “sight”. It’s genuinely unsettling sometimes, when my brain makes a new place, to not know if I was dreaming. Maybe that’s why I revisit places until they feel comfortable and familiar and get incorporated into the town.
I say it isn’t completely useless because I use spacial memory to “go places” when awake. I can’t see it, but I know what’s there if I go there, the same way I can mentally count the windows, and know what’s around them, in my house without visually touring the house; I think about where I go to open windows on a nice day, and count the stops.
I can’t put things into the town purposely. Locations or objects, unfortunately. Everything has to already be there if I want to make use of it. But if I can find a useful thing on my spacial tour, I can make note of where I found it, or move it to somewhere more useful. Like the finding the windows exercise, but, to continue your example, I happen to recall that next to window 3 is a Christmas cactus with pink heart-shaped flower buds, and I choose to ”move it” it to the 7th window of my tour. (And yes, if I make note that I’ve moved something, it does stay there when I dream, so that’s really neat)
Genuinely not that useful for things people probably normally use a memory palace sort of thing for, like short-term memories, (finding useful objects is difficult, and sometimes requires a lot of in-dream exploring, which takes actual time) but somewhat useful for certain long-term things, like numbers or recipes. And as a bonus, when I forget something, I’ll often stumble across it in my town and be reminded. Like the recipe for my mom’s cheesecake is the literal ingredients just sitting on the counter in the pocket floor she lives in (she’s a nightmare I had often enough to join the town’s residents, but I shoved her in an impossible floor so I can avoid her). I put that recipe there because I like to modify it, and I often forget what the base recipe is. It’s not written down in the normal sense because I’ll lose it, but it’s simple enough for a representation like that to be easy to hold onto.
But I’ve had similar frustrating experiences with people telling me to visualize things for whatever reason. Like nope, my internal computer is GUI-free. Text output only, with a screen reader. Not even multiple voices, which I hear is a thing most people can do, just the one default reader voice.
On the subject of not being able to visualize people, if there’s someone you haven’t seen in a long time, do you falsely match other people up with the description? For example, my mom died when I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now. It’s been so long that I genuinely don’t remember what she looks like unless I’m looking at a photo. But I know her general description, and when I see other women who fit the description I -feel- that they look just like her even though they usually don’t, actually.
Good heavens! I learned about the memory palace in a Hannibal Lector book, thought it was genius, assumed everyone could do that.
I've been told on Reddit that people with aphantasia can actually do the ‘memory palace’ thing. But, since it was just one commenter who didn't quite describe how it would work, while I myself can visualize but dislike the ‘palace’ technique, I have no further information as to how to do it.
I'm basically the opposite. I can remember peoples faces very well but have a hell of a hard time trying to remember their names. I'd say I'm a 1 or 2 on this scale, depending imon if I'm fully engaged with the content (like reading a book).
But aren't you visualizing the assigned character's face? I think we all have varying amounts of this depending on what it is. It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
Edit: I see you say further down that you have a difficult time with facial recognition.
Everyone's brain does such wildly different things.
Can't visualize faces at all; I think you pulled that quote from a different post. ;)
The thing to remember, though, is that... I didn't even know this was something that I "couldn't do" until it was pointed out to me that others can do it. I just assumed everyone else was being metaphorical when they said they "visualized something" in their head, or whatever. So whereas you hear it and think "Oh gosh, these people can't do this very normal thing! That must be awful!", to us, it's more like we've just been living our lives as normal and then 30+ years in, we discover that most people have a superpower that we don't have.
Oh I see, you were quoting OP. My mistake.
I think it's kind of cool that are brains adjust.
But is it a superpower if the ability hadn't been called out until the 21st century? That's what kicks my ass. We can be so radically different, on what to me is a fundamental cognitive skill, yet it doesn't make enough of a difference that the ancients didn't figure it out three thousand years ago!
Thoughts are a weird thing to describe. I bet it just never really occurred to anyone to discuss specifically what they see in their head when they think of a thing - everyone just assumed what they saw was the same thing everyone saw.
It's like the theory that the color you see as green might not be the same color I see as green - how do you actually determine that?
So you never have sexual fantasies? If somebody asks you to describe how something looks, how are you able to do it? Can you at least remember the colors red and blue?
I have sexual fantasies, but they're more like reading erotica than watching porn.
I imagine I describe things just like I expect others do, except that instead of having a catalogue of pictures to reference, I have a filing cabinet of documents with descriptions of those things. The concept of a 'photographic memory' is completely foreign to me. If I'm walking down the street and I see someone get mugged, then I get asked about it later, I can recall and recite the things I specifically took notice of in the moment, but if I want to be able to give a description of e.g. what the person was wearing or what color their hair was, I need to consciously observe those things and commit them to memory at the time. As I understand it, some folks can just recall the event and 'replay' it in their mind, and recall things they might not have taken direct notice of originally; I definitely can't do that.
I’d never really connected my lack of a mind’s eye with my inability to follow unnamed characters through a movie until you just said that. 🤯
I think I’m a one, but I might be a five and I can’t tell, because how do I know what format my brain uses to tell me apple? I just know that it does.
I can imagine tastes well enough to cook pretty well and can often predict what a dish will taste like with pretty good accuracy ( I just recently saw a recipe for chocolate rosemary banana bread, and I could imagine that combination, even though I’d never had it before), so there are clearly some senses I can do it for. I think I can also do it visually, but I can’t exactly print it out, so I just know that I’ve received the thought.
If you close your eyes and focus on an apple, what do you see? My understanding is that people without aphantasia / who are "1s" can actually see an image of the apple, as though they were looking at it. If you just see black, no image at all, you might be a 5.
I think I’m overthinking this, but I can’t tell how you would know that you’re seeing it. I think I see it if I try, but my natural inclination is more like I know the apple’s there but I’m not looking at it.
Bizarrely, I am sure that I can “see” aspects of the apple, because that’s how I’m trying to focus on seeing it. Like, I can see the dimple where the stem connects and the curve of the apple with natural color variation for the part of the apple that I can see, but if I try to zoom out, it’s back to awareness of the apple.
I think I’m overthinking it, because I can “see” approximations of the apple variations in this post, but maybe it’s because they’re two dimensional.
It's possible that you're a 3 or a 4. My understanding is that people who are 1s can see the apple as though it was there in front of them. They can rotate the image in their minds, break it in half and examine the insides, see the seeds and the veins on the leaf and the discoloration near the stem. Zooming in or out isn't problematic at all.
If you're a 5, you can certainly be aware of these things - that they're features of an apple - but if you really focus on seeing the apple - as though with your eyes, rather than just thinking about the features of the apple as qualitative properties - you can't do it. It's just blackness.
I’m not sure what difference this makes, but I can see snapshots of each of those, just not video. Though if I imagine biting into an apple, I can get all the senses together.
I think I might have just been trying to isolate sight from the other senses, because the only real experience I have with only the sight of apples is in pictures, so it being automatically 2d does make sense.
Yeah, checking now, I can see those things as well as long as I’m also feeling, hearing, and smelling them.
Thank you! I first learned about this a while ago and I’ve occasionally wondered about it. I don’t think I would have figured it out without you talking me through it.
You're welcome! It's a topic I find intriguing, and it's always interesting to discuss the different ways people experience these things, now that I realize we're not all the same. :)
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On the upside our kids aren't going to be traumatised by pictures of apples.
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My sister has #5 and I can ask her to make a response if you want OP.
Last we talked about it she said if she tried really hard she can see come colors and shapes but that's about it.
The best conversation about it we ever had went something like this (keep in mind were both autistic and when together dont always communicate like neurotypical people do):
*while driving*
her: "get in that turn lane to the right"
*i do the 👆hand tricks and turn*
her: "when I don't want to do that I always think in my head 'never eat soggy waffles' and remember that east is left and right is west"
me: "that's not even correct,, but like WHY would you do that??"
her: "to remember how to turn"
me: "why wouldn't you just do the hand things?"
me: "like imagine them in your head and-"
her: "MUST BE NICE HUH?"
*we both explode in laughter*
she didn't even mean to make a joke about it, that's just genuinely the way she remembers lefts and rights
also this meme has become a common occurrence whenever the topic is brought up
Also a pretty interesting thing I remembered while writing this is a clip on TV (can't remember what show it was) where they asked a room of people to draw a bicycle then they made it IRL by welding it and told them to ride it a block or two and back. Only 1 of ~15 did it correctly, one girl got it exactly but forgot the peddles. Pretty interesting how they could all imagine a bike but couldn't draw it correctly
The left/right story might be a different thing. Was in my 40s until I could instinctively know left from right. Before that I would snap my left fingers, or mime it, because I'm sinister and can't snap my right.
Only way I got better was saying to myself, "This is bullshit and you're all growed up. Work on this thing." Somehow I got better, can't say how.
I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I'm a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
very well could be, our genetics are a concoction of adhd, autism, anxiety, depression, etc etc
i used to be able to know without doing the L R hands in highschool, but I guess that skill faded over time 🤷♀️
personally it's not big enough of an issue for me to do anything about bc taking a wrong turn is way more embarrassing than doing a L R hand.
that's interesting, my sister has done some stuff with a CAD program for 3d printing and it wasn't an issue for her. What specifically do you have trouble with?just realized you were probably talking about a mental map rather than a 3d modeling program 😂, my sister has the same issue and hates driving because of it
My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?
I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.
Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.
For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.
When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I’d get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain.
Holy cow. This is possibly the best description of how I usually think I've ever encountered. It was actually a bit unnerving to read. Though I've always conceptualized it as "shapes" and "holes" rather than vectors.
The ability to near-instantly make connections between symptoms and cause for any given issue in a system I'm familiar with especially resonated. The best explanation I could give someone without stepping back and basically re-solving the whole thing from a standing start would be "the shapes fit together".
It feels like I'm being asked how I knew a puzzle piece fit in a space, and for some reason "I looked at it and could see that it fit" is not a sufficient explanation. No, I didn't need to investigate other possible pieces. They are obviously different shapes. The one that you're asking about doesn't even belong to the same puzzle.
Similarly I am also utterly incapable of describing what a person looks like in any detail. I have a "mind's eye" and can conjure up images of them in my head, but for whatever reason I just completely lack the ability to express what I see in words outside of very high level details. They have brown hair, they're tall, what do you mean "what shape is their face?" Sara's face is the shape of Sara's face. It couldn't be any other shape.
I do have an internal monologue or voice though, but it's not constant. It usually only comes up when I'm dealing with other people and need to try to reason through what someone else is doing.
For my own inner monologue, it often feels more like a preview or mirror than like hearing something external. Definitely English words, though I can also navigate nonverbal ideas in a similar sense to how you describe. The "essence" of the item, its database ID in a way.
Same with my inner audio sense: I can play things back I've heard several times and recall, like an old song, which is just a copy of how I heard it before (mostly). If it was a 90s mp3, it'll still have whatever weird audio glitch crept in there during all the piracy. Can't pick the elements apart, it's just one layer.
No mind's eye for me. Good spatial sense, though; it just isn't tied to any feeling of sight. As for "imagining" an apple, I definitely don't in any way see an apple. But there's a part of the brain that, when you look at an apple, takes the incoming light analyzes it, and returns "Apple". When I imagine the apple, I get that same return, the sense that I have just experienced or currently am experiencing an apple. Does my brain tell me I saw the toothy curves of the bottom of a red delicious? Yep. Did I see anything, anywhere, metaphorically or otherwise? Nope. All analysis, no pixels.
This is a perfect representation of how my mind is laid out. Everything is a tree with things connected together by feelings/relations. Individual events are painful to keep track of (wife constantly tells me that we've already had conversations multiple times). Superfluous detail is lost immediately.
But how a certain function in code breaking can ripple to the whole system is as natural as I breathe. Random trivia facts too, since they were novel enough to connect at the cool thing to know node. What someone wore yesterday or where the ketchup is (I don't eat ketchup) is just completely filtered out. Couldn't describe peoples faces but I know them when I see them. 99% of those "celebrity lookalike" things look nothing like them and I get baffled how people can confuse them, but I'd assume it's from them visualizing the celebrity with some error
I can see things in my head, rotate them, look from different angles, try out different colors for a room, etc. But it's not really the same as seeing visually. It's just kind of imagining what it would look like. It's hard to explain. It's as if you were dreaming it while you are still awake. But also less vivid than a dream.
Same here, I can rotate things in my head and change their color, but it's not quite HD. It's like an abstract image of what it should look like. It's also quite fleeting since I get easily distracted. But when I'm half-asleep or waking up on a lazy Sunday, holy shit, I can visualize so many things in bright colors and can see them clearly. I wish I could do that all the time.
My architect buddy wanted to hire me to handle IT, do drafting in my down time. He met me managing a reprographics shop, blueprint place. "I can't look at a blueprint and visualize what it's going to look like."
LOL, he looked like I slapped him! Totally alien thought to that man.
I'm not as puzzled about the concept of aphantasia (or the opposite) as much as the fact that people here, and two I know IRL, always self report as either 1s or 5s, with a handful of exceptions (ATTOW).
Is there a selection bias, where anyone in-between doesn't relate to either extreme enough to comment, or do said extremes conflate the ability to "picture" fine details with the ability to remember them in the first place?
Well, if it makes anyone feel better, I'm somewhere around 2 or 3. But that's really nothing to write about.
I'm noticing that in this comment section, too. I hadn't noticed before, but most people do seem to be one extreme or the other. I imagine it's because at either end they feel like they have something unique to offer the conversation, but those in the middle probably feel as if they are normal and it won't be interesting to contribute, maybe?
Ooc, what would you label yourself? I posted mine if you want to see my experience as someone who jumps around the spectrum a bit
Without rigorously researching the phenomenon, I'd put myself in the 2, edging towards 3 - I can visualize things with however many details I can see with my own eyes if I focus a little, but instinctually I only see vague shapes that serve their purpose in whatever scenario I'm thinking of.
I can rotate objects and remember the back-face details;
I can picture a moment from a story I was reading, where a bipedal nocturnal lizard in a cramped spaceship violently recoils from having a flashlight pointed at its eyes;
I cannot quantify the spacing between its eyes compared to the height between those and the tip of the nose as seen by a front-facing isometric projection, even if it's all a fiction and I could just make things up.
Basically my mind is running Unreal Engine 5 with medium settings, low LOD and AI generated textures - which would also explains a lot of other things now that I think about it.
hey thats also how I work :D
I think I'm like a 3 or 4.
I remember some years back there was a "test" going around the internet where you were supposed to picture an apple moving off a table in your head, and then it would ask you "ok what did the person pushing the apple look like, what color were their clothes, etc." and I thought "oh shit do I have aphantasia?"
Later I realized that couldn't be entirely true since I do picture characters in books, although I always picture them as an actor or another character from a comic/show/movie, never as an original face.
For those who are a 4 or 5 on this diagram: What are your dreams like?
Pretty lifelike. Full color/sensory immersion, even to the point of feeling things like cold, heat, wind, hearing loud noises, smells etc. Sometimes, if ive been really sleep deprived, it can take me a solid few minutes to realize Im even awake and in the "real world".
I’m a 5. Dreams are fine. As realistic as I want them to be.
They can be amazing or terrible. Fly, go through days in dreams, sex, get chased by a monster. Lucid dreams. I also have sleep paralysis, so it can get pretty fucked up. It's like having another life. Best part is I should be too old to have nocturnal emissions. Worst part is you can be so scared you wake yourself up (and your partner) by screaming. Or, in a few instances, choking or hitting your partner in your sleep.
But you see things vividly in your dreams?
Like, I'm a 1 on this scale. I remember and imagine very visually. I can picture an apple sitting on a plate on a table and it looks real. In fact, my mind imagined it being slid onto the table, and the apple rocked on the plate as it slid to a stop. My imagination has a physics engine.
I also dream vividly, the experience feels very lifelike. The few lucid dreams I had tended to fade quickly when I realized I was dreaming. I'd love to be able to cause, and then maintain, that state.
Your mind has an active visual cortex. Other folks think more using their audio cortex. Some more with somatic awareness (feeling tone).
Mathameticians can visualize math.
Everyone is wired a bit different.
I'm a two or a four on the scale, depending on how much weed I consume. As heavy weed use dulls the minds eye. Though irregular use can enhance it.
And after years working in kitchens, I can think in smells. I.e.mix spices in my mind and smell them in my head before adding to a dish.
I'm that way with ice cream. I own an ice cream business that creates custom ice creams, and after many years, I can think of a a flavor combination, and sort of "taste it" in my mind.
I love ice cream, but I don't eat it that often any more. If I have a craving, often just thinking about what flavor I'd have is satisfying enough, but I don't really need to eat the ice cream.
I just did it as an experiment, and imagined a combo of honey, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. My mouth watered, but after a moment of really concentrating on what that flavor would taste like, I felt fairly satisfied enough about experiencing the taste, that I don't feel a need to actually eat the ice cream. I think my brain has trained itself to release ice cream endorphins based on the thought alone, and not the actual taste experience from my tongue, and that satisfies my craving.
I should write a diet book: "Think And Grow Thin."
Just from that one flavor combo I now want to try all your ice creams 😂💜
Yeah, you do. Honey Cinnamon is my secret weapon.
I can make ice cream out of almost anything, but here are some of my favorites:
Peach Cinnamon
Bananas Foster (Banana, cinnamon, caramel)
Raspberry Chocolate Chip
Raspberry Brownie
Raspberry Nutella
Coffee Nutella
Salted Caramel with Candied Bacon
Almond Joy (Coconut, Almonds, and mini dark chocolate chips)
Mayan Chocolate (Cocoa powder, cinnamon, cayenne pepper)
The Honey Cinnamon is also great when it's infused with Bourbon or Scotch. We also make our own homemade caramel, fudge, brownies, cookie dough, etc., all organic or natural as much as possible. All of our fruit ice creams are made with real fruit, no artificial sweeteners, flavors, or colors.
I literally make the best ice cream in the world, and have done events alongside Top Chef contenders and winners, including Richard Blais. Don't you wish you had that mental tasting ability right now?
Oh, I can imagine well enough! They all sound amazing! I want to try chocolate pistachio honey, and blackberry vanilla 💜 Where is your shop? (If you can even tell me without doxxing yourself lol, please don't dox yourself 😂)
I no longer have a retail shop, the 7 day a week grind got to be too much after a lot of years. I just do events now, colleges, weddings, corporate events, etc. all over the East Coast. It isn't as creative, and I miss my regular customers, but I actually make a lot more money, with a LOT less work this way.
So if you want to try my ice cream some time, you'd have to hire me for a gig somewhere on the East Coast. Know anyone who is getting married? Or have a big corporate event coming up?
I do know someone getting married in December, but in Texas 😂
I'm glad you got your work/life balance more manageable now, that's awesome!!!
I'd do it, but the travel charge would be significant.
They've done studies on dopamine with sugar. It's not the eating it that's satisfying, it's the getting it. So most dopamine is released on the way to the mouth. Assuming you've had ice cream before and the neural pathways are laid.
Which is why the first bite is the best.
But yeah the mind has some plasticity. We can learn to be more visual or olfactory 'thinkers'.
Makes sense. It's why we have that Pavlovian response to just the promise of something tasty. It shouldn't be surprising that the same effect that is making our mouths water, is also releasing endorphins in anticipation of the taste. Just thinking about it is pleasurable enough to release endorphins.
Some of us can even think without any senses.
I do have a hard time thinking without "listening" my own voice
Yeah I think everybody actually does, but the sense consciousnesses are a lot less subtle than stuff like intentions.
And even that last part can be let go of. What is beyond that is beyond conceptualization, but it's not nothing. Nor is it something. As both are concepts.
Some people also don't have an internal monologue. I'm probably a 3 or 4, it takes significant effort to see something in my head. But my thoughts a words and they definitely have a voice.
I assume there is a scale for how well we can imagine every sense.
I have an internal dialogue.
I have to practice pretty hard to do that, it's much easier in a journal than in my head to dialogue. Do you find it helps being mindful?
i find it helps finding interesting people to talk to :D
I mean I guess that’s lucky in some ways my thoughts never stop
Mine don't stop either, but it's just constant words. Are your thoughts mostly images?
Words mostly but I can visualize accurately
I'm definitely a 4. The shape is there, but even that's work for my brain. I know what a thing looks like, but I can't see it. Also, I think a lot less people are #1 than they think. A #1 is someone who can make photorealistic art from the picture in their brain. I'm guessing that's like 1% of the people if not less.
I can "see" my wife's face, down to the pores, but I couldn't put it on paper. That's a whole 'nother skill. And yes, the combination of traits are probably more rare than 1%.
Question for you - when you say it's work is it more like:
It's a challenge to summon any imagery in your mind's eye
Or
You can picture a vague hazy apple, but it morphs / distorts into other things?
The second one. I read somewhere that when you want to fall asleep you should try to picture the perfect apple, with the lighting, colours and everything. Like meditation for people who don’t want to meditate.
I gave myself a headache trying to keep the shape of an apple in my mind.
That's exactly how I am as well, it's infuriating at times for sure lol.
Definitely that for me. I can force my brain to remember that the apple in question is red, but then my brain will question WHAT EXACTLY IS RED? AND IF RED WHICH RED??? AND SHOULDN'T THERE BE SOME GREEN IN THERE TOO? HOW MUCH? OH WAIT NOW YOUR APPLE IS GREEN. NO, THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU WANTED. APPLES HATE US! and now all of a sudden I'm focusing on a rotten apple core and my ADHD is working out what it would take to turn that apple core into a sapling and how long will it take to make a fruiting apple tree from those seeds? And now my boss is asking me what tf have I accomplished since 8am this morning
...and I can tell you the one thing I DIDN'T do this morning was draw an apple because how do you get 10,000 shades of color from red and black pencils?
From what I've heard, people farthest on the left of the scale can not only picture an object but rotate it too, often while remembering what the non visible sides would look like. The best example i can think to describe this is rotating a rubix cube without mixing up the patterns/colors.
I’d say I’m a 4 at best but when I did some iq test as a kid (with an actual psychologist) I scored really highly on the spatial reasoning and can often imagine how things go back together or how the should fit when repairing something. But if i try to visualise something it’s usually taken directly from a memory, rather than created in my head…if any of that makes sense.
Yeah, I did a few of those tests for my ADHD diagnosis last year. I’m in the 99th percentile for spatial reasoning. I’m also a 5 on this scale. I can see a puzzle piece and know where it fits in the puzzle. I can see a bunch of weirdly shaped blocks, and figure out how to put them into the shape I want. I was really good at those “you have a bunch of geometric shapes, make them look like a dog” types of things as a kid. My shrink was visibly shocked at how quickly I flew through that section of the test, because the primary limiting factor was how quickly I could rearrange the pieces.
But I can’t fucking picture any of it in my mind. If I have a sketch pad, I can draw a scaled floor plan of my house. But I can’t picture what my furniture looks like. I can describe it. I know what it looks like. But I can’t picture it. Part of my current job involves making scaled drawings. I’m sure that’s not related at all \s
My brain likes to hallucinates the bump map textures from the Xbox 360 era and hard line non pixelated shadows.
I never know how to interpret this scale. I can think of objects and describe what I'm thinking about, but I don't see anything in the same way my eyes do. Or rather, I see a black void, and if I try to picture an apple it's like a black object on a black background, but I know it's there.
I also get better at it the longer I do it; if I read a book for a long while, the ideas get sharper in my head and can be in color, but I'm still not "seeing" in the same way my eyes do.
I'd call that a 5. With work a 4?
Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.
I am definitely a number 1, I couldn't imagine not being able to imagine. I can go beyond one. I can visualize the apple and taste it as I begin to eat said apple.
Discover the trick as a kid, when denied food from my abusive mom boyfriend. He made me stand in a corner while they ate dinner. I used this skill to bring a cheeseburger into existence and then began to eat it. Even felt full afterwards. Of course that sensation only lasted couple hours, but was still interesting trait to discover.
being a 1 with ADHD is crazy, like I can be in the middle of a class and zone out and start visualising myself walking around the campus in incredible detail, or FPV droning inside a friend's house, or really anything I can think of, although that said it takes a fair bit of effort to keep it going beyond a certain amount of time.
Dude it's a constant battle to not get lost in thoughts. The real world is boring af 90% of the time. I've sat for hours quietly immersed in the imaginings. It's also fantastic for extrapolating and working through ideas though. Sights, sounds, tactile sensations, movement, it isn't vivid like reality but it has such depth.
And don't get me started on the times you imagine yourself doing a task and then completely believing you actually did it until someone gets mad at you for it, it's funny but also kinda ass
Haha 😅
this is how i fall asleep most of the time, i start "playing" some scenerio im my head until my brain shuts off.
I have severe 5 aphantasia. It was such a relief when a name was put to it.
Hahaha same! I started asking every person I know about it because I was so curious. Like, that can't be real, you can't see stuff. But everyone I know seems to have some level of actual visualization except me. And I am an okay artist, just need references and a lot of trial & error when drawing.
#1 is really useful for 3d modeling. I can work out most of the details in my head, then put the final design into a computer to print.
I once managed to write an entire OpenSCAD model on paper. When I typed it into a computer (aside from a few syntax errors) the model was exactly as I wanted.
The advantages are very fast design iterations. The disadvantages are that I have to remember the entire final product and not confuse it with any previous iteration while writing it down; and that I have to actually write it down and not just assume that the 3d printer will start on its own.
I'm closer to 3 or 4 on OP's scale, and that may explain why I have never been able to wrap my head around OpenSCAD.
I've settled on FreeCAD. It is visual enough that I don't have to strain my brain too hard to imagine what my project might look like.
I do 3D modeling and design and I am a hard #5. Can't see a thing unless I'm dreaming. But when I think about a part or machine I'm designing I do have an awareness of it in my head, but it's like it is related to my proprioception (the awareness of where your body parts are) instead my vision. I can imagine the surfaces of what I'm thinking about, and how those surfaces will interact as things move, but can't see them whatsoever.
I didn't know real visualization and aphantasia were things until I was well over a decade into this career, haha.
3 or 4
I can "picture" with images but it's not top accuracy. It's mostly imagining a thing existing
Same here. Had plenty of argument with teachers when I said I couldn't really visualize things... I just had to "close my eyes and try harder". Glad this kind of information is more out there now.
Are you able to see your memories more like dreams or are your memories more like a vibe?
Memories are more like the feelings and senses associated with the memory, alongside a narration of what happened. Like if I had a fight and had to recount it to police, I’d think of how I moved, where I was hit, what kinds of sounds and smells there were, etc. alongside a sort of fight announcer narrating the fight like a boxing match.
You mean 5s can't even remember the visual aspect of memories?!
I'm a 2 or 3 and I can't imagine this, that sounds horrible.
I'm a 4, and I'm very poor at remembering people's faces. Same goes with memories, I realized early on that I have really shit memory especially if I rely only on visuals. These days I just try to deduce past events based on information I'm sure of. I also figured out a few years ago that I can remember my day a lot better if I'm narrating the events to myself in real time and compiling a script in my head, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to remember much other than the events that affected my emotions more intensely.
Like all the time?
Wait, clarify for me.
If you are a 5 and cannot visualize at all while awake, how do you know your dreams were vivid? Can you imagine the dreams once awake and picture them? Otherwise how can you know how vivid they were?
Maybe my question is dumb haha, i just cannot grasp not being able to use ones mind to imagine.
Interesting, this is my own theory so take it with a grain of salt. But I think everyone has wild confusion with the subject of the minds eye. We are all just recalling things, it's the same thing.
I believe the difference between 1-5 is much smaller than online discussing would make us think.
I can "see the apple" and I can "feel it crunch" but not actually. I'm just recalling the "idea" of those sensations.
If I stare off in my environment, I can place the apple on a table, I can "pick it up" but there is no apple. I'm simply recalling what it feels like to take that action, or what I would think based on previous experiences it would feel like.
I don't think anyone is able to legitimately hallucinate things into their reality (within reason of course haha, mental conditions and such) and I always leave these discussions feeling like people who align with 5 think 1's can legitimately create objects in their reality.
But I can only experience my mind, so we will probably never have a solid answer to this.
I would also be very interested to know if people who align with 5 are able to "train" themselves up the scale.
Do you ever experience hallucinations? Like see people or animals in the corner of your eye that turn out to be just shadows or a coat. I’m a 1 and I sometimes experience vivid hallucinations when I’m really tired or have just woken up. Like I have a recurring hallucination that I occasionally get. Sometimes when I wake up I see a spider hanging above my head. Then I jump out of bed and notice that nothing is there.
I can't actually see the image with my eyes, I don't believed people actually can but I suppose it can be. I can see flashes of black and white stills in my mind but that's it. My dreams are the same just with weirdly numb feelings. Like when you are in vr and someone touches you, you have the feeling in your mind but don't feel anything physical.
This one is a cluster fuck for me... I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.
Don't really know how that fits in.
Face blindness (prosopagnosia) seems a different thing altogether, though you would think they're related.
Thats so weird! As I was reading one of the other comments I realized that I can almost live in the fantasy world of a book, but no one has a distinctive face...
Yep, this is my club. Also, I can only remember few faces of people I went to high school with. Others are just blurred to central attributes.
Other thing is, for long I noticed that peoples faces fall in distinct groups according to their appearence even though they are not related. I always thought that they had a similar distant ethnic background and that genes relating to appearance had a type of "quanta" that can't be completely diluted, which causes faces to fall in groups.
Now I'm starting to realize that it's just me and my face-blindness averaging my memories of peoples appearances, creating those groups.
We have hardware in the brain wired to recognize faces. For some people it's not working too well, independently of the other abilities.
What do you mean to the point of putting it in real space in your hand? Like you can just hallucinate it at will and view it with your eyes open as if its in the room with you?!
For individual objects it is difficult to impossible for me to create the exact image.
For directions however, I can do a visual "fly" over the roads which I believe I should be going down, to make sure I'm going the right place. The roads are clear images, but not to the same effect of watching a video of someone driving along said roads.
I'm coming to think there is a lot more nuance to this than the 5 images let on.
It's just that spatial skills are separate from the visualization ability, and are judged separately. I've been told even that people with aphantasia can do the ‘memory palace’ mnemonic technique, though I can't quite see how.
Human brain only has five possible states :P
I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can't see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it's all very vague and shadowy.
Yes this is me. I have to 'zoom in' to get details
How many Au/ADHD can do this vs non-neurospicy? Just curious of there’s a difference or likeliness one way or another.
I can see and manipulate objects in my head. I can make up voices or objects in my head and “hear” them. I can remember a smell, but I couldn't make one up - iow I could slice an imaginary apple and imagine the smell. I can feel an object’s texture without touching it.
I can’t imagine not having these things in my head.
Have taught Au/ADHD kids who range from one to five. I'm an ADHD one, but one of my favorite students is a total ADHD five.
Seems like it's all over the place.
Adhd “levels”? A quick look around gets anywhere between three and seven levels of adhd depending on the website. Got a reference by a reputable org that lists what levels mean?
I assumed it was just the numbers on the image, not the level of ADHD. As in "a person with ADHD who matches with number 5 on the imagination scale in the OP".
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.
That is what I meant.
I don't know how to explain it but mine is in constant flux.
I'll bounce between full on 3d animated cutscenes to like "Old ass TRON style wireframes of the object"
I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.
This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.
(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)
When I read "you see a mouse run by" I saw it like a movie. The background was rather generic, a wooden floor, chair leg in the foreground, warm lighting, but that's it. But I clearly saw the little gray mouse, pausing for a second, whiskers twitching about before continuing on.
I am utterly broken as to rotating objects in my head. Took me until I was into my 40s to figure out that my brain simply doesn't work.
Standardized tests in 70s-80s elementary, rocked out on every subject until spatial reasoning. Didn't give up because I found it hard, really tried my little ass off, couldn't do it, mostly guessed.
Say I get an antique shotgun and tear it down. I'm mostly mystified as to reassembly, very little online to explain old stuff like that. Have to have my young friend across the street come over and figure it out. He's a born mechanic, hates the work. 🤷🏻♂️
Interesting... I can't do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child's crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn't bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.
Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman's voice, but I can't hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren't speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying "Clang!"
This whole thread is blowing my mind. Second you said car chase I imagined a red car chasing a yellow car, but that may be because you mentioned color. Woman's voice? I get a somewhat husky tone, not saying anything in particular, but if she was, I'd hear it. No idea what authors are on about with voices being "contralto" and such. And yes! I can hear the clang!
Speaking of mind blowing... I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you've said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn't relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to "see" even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I'm sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think "Ooh that's pretty." Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.
I thought that that's what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!
I don't mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I've only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You're saying that you can see anything you want... Excuse me because I'm going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.
But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I've always been good at "using my imagination"? I love reading fantasy novels and they're not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I'm better than most people at geometry. Strange.
Spatial skills seem to be separate from visualization. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter said they can't visualize, but do very well with rotating objects in the mind and fitting shapes together.
As to your question, people indeed can imagine smells, tastes, and sounds. Smells are supposedly one of the strongest factors in evoking memories — although my own olfaction was always questionable and got worse with age, but some strong smells still elicit recall from ages ago, e.g. the mechanical smell of subway around here when I haven't been in it for fifteen years.
Another commenter said they can imagine the taste of a dish from its ingredients, which I can do only approximately.
However, I'm pretty good with imagining sound, particularly music — while knowing jackshit about music theory. This actually brings some annoyance, as I'm trying lately to finally do some music production, and it never sounds quite like I want it to.
Is this new, somehow? I've always recognized that the people around me think differently. I even recognized that there was a spectrum.
I'm definitely a #1, and always recognized that about myself. I'm like to write, and I think that activity demonstrates the spectrum well. Stephen King once said that he doesn't understand why people struggle with writing. He just pictures the story in his head, and writes what he sees. When I read that, I instantly recognized myself. That's how I write.
But I also know that some people write almost like they are putting together a puzzle. They choose certain words that go together well, and they are constructing their narrative brick by brick. I think poetry is often constructed like that, and I think those prose writers have a more poetic sensibility than others, and that sort of writing reflects it. That might explain why I really don't care for that style of writing much, because I am extremely bad at poetry. That construction style just doesn't work for me.
@KoboldCoterie you can still be an artist. You'll just have to rely more on references but it's possible. There's one person that made a video about it that I saw some time ago. https://youtu.be/ewsGmhAjjjI
I find it gets better with practice to some degree, if I go for a long stretch reading more or less fiction I find it affects my imagination and ability to visualize with more or less detail and memorability. I don't think it'll bridge the gap to 5 necessarily, but it might bump a 4 to a 3 or a 2 to a 1.
I thought it was either 1 or you have aphantasia. Didn't realize there was a range.
This reminded me of a sort of similar topic, and curiously enough it's about reading, and might provide some insight into your question.
Some years ago, I happened on a thread in which the OP asked people whose voice they "heard" when they read.
I couldn't even make sense of that question. The only time I "hear" voices when I read is when a character speaks. The rest of the time, I not only don't "hear" the words - I'm not even really aware of them. My eyes follow the lines while my brain instantly translates the words I'm seeing into images and concepts and the like. And yes - it's like a movie playing out inside my brain, and yes, I'm a #1 on this chart.
But apparently there's a not insignificant number of people who "hear" a book inside their heads just as if someone else was reading it out loud. Instead of visualizing things, they remain focused only on the words - the representations - and somehow glean from them alone the necessary details.
I wouldn't be surprised if those people are also generally #5 or thereabouts on this chart, and again what it is is that their brains don't directly envision things but instead rely on descriptive representations.
I don't get how it works either, but self-evidently it does.
I hear a narrator if I decide to; otherwise the words just go directly into my brain like you described. I just had Morgan Freeman read your comment to me for funsies.
Afaik the two are unrelated. I'd guess the ‘narration’ rather might be tied to the internal monologue. E.g. I'm around 2 or 3 on visualization, but have lots of monologuing going on constantly, and likewise ‘hear’ the text being read unless I specifically try to skim. It's also worse in the second language, which is English for me, while I can read my native language faster — I've noticed before that the second language requires more brain processing and isn't absorbed as directly.
Do you have the internal monologue, when not reading?
The ‘speed reading’ technique, of which you might've heard, is all about turning off the internal narration while reading and just absorbing the text directly. However, studies show that for most people, the narration helps comprehension and recall; and also that everyone or nearly everyone has subvocalization when reading, i.e. involuntary muscle movement of the throat, mirroring the words that they're reading.
It depends on the situation.
I actually have it sometimes when I read - like when I'm reading something purely conceptual, like a question on a forum.
Basically, as near as I can tell, if it's a written description of some tangible thing or place or event, I jump straight to visualizing it and the words don't really register. But if it's conceptual - an expression of an idea or philosophy or such - I "narrate" the words to myself.
I also have an internal voice - my own - when I write, presumably because I can't directly share my visualizations, so have to translate them into words right from the start.
When I'm not reading, it seems to split broadly the same way - I only have an internal monologue regarding things that are conceptual. If it's available to my sensorium, then my consciousness of it is simply those sensory impressions without the accompanying words, so no internal monologue.
But if it's something conceptual, or something I'm sharing with someone else, then I translate it into words.
Well, it seems that you don't have the internal monologue as a mandatory part of your everyday life, instead using it sporadically as a helping instrument — which also translates to you not using it when reading, for the most part.
Although it seems weird to me that you're using narration for conceptual things, and not ones describing tangible stuff. Since you're a borderline case, you might want to commit yourself to one of the neuropsychology departments, for us normies to study what the hell is going on in your brain.
I think you missed the point of this thread.
Wow! No, I've never "heard" a novel. Some writing is easy enough, like a meme where, "You just read this in Morgan Freeman's voice." OTOH, I didn't "hear" it, but somehow I read it that way in my mind's eye/ear.
I might be a 5 on the hearing scale! That's really something to think on.
The current prevailing theory is that we (4 here) actually do create the images much the same as you 1s, we're just not consciously aware of it. Our brains are doing the same thing behind the scenes, and they just translate it differently. Some personal "evidence" of this that I have are that when I'm high, I have an easier time visualizing, and that I dream VERY vividly.
I have a feeling that this is also influenced by people that experienced (emotional) trauma. Some people dissociate from their feelings as a result of things that happened in the past, and this can also impact their ability to visualise things. (Because their brain is protecting them from re-experiencing their trauma)
Mine is probably related to physical trauma. Well, not trauma, but more abnormalities. I have arteriovenous malformations in my brain, around my visual center, and very poor eyesight. The two likely combine in such a way that I don't get/rely on visual information as much.
Conversely, I have very good audio processing. I love music, wordplay, anything with sounds and words.
It's pretty amazing how we can adapt to use the mental tools we have to still live in a 'normal' way even when we are very weak in certain aspects.
I can only speak for myself (#5) here, but I can barely enjoy books. If they're any sort of fiction, where I have to imagine a world, characters, objects, ... it's very exhausting. I read fiction books in school, but haven't picked up a fiction book out of my own will in years. But I do enjoy non-fiction books, especially when they convey Ideas you don't need (or maybe can't) picture visually.
Side note: I found people who read a lot (of fiction) often being critical of movie adaptations. I never understood this, because even 'meh' movies offer a far superior experience than just reading the book to me. It took me a while to realize that movie adaptations are a kind of 'disability aid' to my aphantasia.
The medium of books are qualitatively different from movies. With movies it's all about the context, the action, the dynamism, the mood. With books, it's more of a mind meld with the author, and you get richer subtext, connotations, shadings of meaning, and inner monologue.
If you've ever seen a movie that tries to hew exactly to a novelistic source (e.g. the Discworld movies), it's an extremely plodding thing. If you've ever read a book that tries to carry a story onwards from a cinematic source (e.g. Star Wars EU), the pacing and treatment feels very different. It's unavoidable.
It's unfortunate about aphantasia limiting your enjoyment of books. I wonder if my "1" referring to the chart above limits my involvement with nonfiction and purely conceptual writing.
I'm a total and absolute 5 no visualization no inner monologue and I absolutely love fiction.
That guy just doesn't like fiction. Fiction has plenty of "facts" and events. That make it plenty enjoyable. It's no different then a nonfiction history book. Just it's not about earth.
So his lack of visualization has nothing to do with his dislike of fiction.
Be just doesnt like it.
Super interesting that you enjoy fiction so much. What I struggle with most is that visual language is often very dense in information, but I can't do a lot with it. Imagine something like this:
"Light spilled in through the high windows, tinting the hallway into beautiful autumn colors. It looked as if the sunlight was dancing, but of course nothing moved except the dust suspended in the air."
I would read this and think: cool, I bet this would look amazing if I could see it, but all the information I can actually use from these sentences is "A hallway has high windows, it's maybe morning or evening". Everything else is either visual or obvious to me. So fiction books are more exhausting, because I constantly filter out things that I can't really use. It's like I'm reading a text where a person constantly rambles and can't get to the damn point. I'm really curious how or why this is different for you? Another thing I find annoying is, that usually when reading fiction books, you constantly have to amend your mental model. I presume this is relatively easy for people without aphantasia, although I might be wrong. Let me explain with this example:
"blah" said A. "blah?" B responded. A said "blah blah" as he stood up from his chair. "blah!" B said back, while A turned right and walked out the door.
This order is the exact opposite my brain expects. I'd like know the room layout and who is sitting/standing where first, then the characters can interact with each other in my already complete internal model. This might be a me-thing, but if non-aphantasia people can image images as easy as I can imagine sounds, making changes to the model must be super easy.
Also, I do think fiction books and non-fiction history books are very different. Simply because an author can build a world, story and characters to convey some deeper meaning or overarching theme, or use strong imagery or metaphores. All of that is more uncommon for historic books from my experience. The above example in a history book would probably look something more like "Orange light entered the hallway through the high windows". And even if non-fiction history books were similar to fiction, history is a tiny part of non-fiction! There are tons of other subcategories that differ greatly from fiction.
Good to know.
Gosh, have to say there are more aphantasics around than I would have guessed.
Most days I'm about a 3, sometimes it's more like 4. If I'm reading a book or doing something like that, where I'm really focusing on the visualization, I can get to 2. The only time I ever get to 1 is when I'm laying in bed at night about to fall asleep.
I have real trouble sleeping sometimes, and one of the things I do to help is put on instrumental music (lately, a lot of jazz sax), and then pick some random scenario, like:
"if I could be king of the world what policy changes would I make?"
Or "if I ever get to have kids, what kind of things would I most want to teach them?"
Or "Let's design the perfect floorplan for my dream home"
And as I begin to drift off, but while still consciously aware, I can see things in stunning detail, but it's always like they're semi transparent. That's not a great example, because there's no backdrop, but it's the best I've got.
I play DND with a "theatre of the mind" battle system (no map or miniatures, we just remember where we are) with a a dude who's a 5 and I have no idea how he does it.
I play DnD with a lot of theatre or the mind. I'm a 5 (also 5 with all other mental sensors).
It isn't to hard, you just remember the description, the detail and context.
If the story is engaging, it is easy.
I'm a big fan of story, some writers rely too much on imagery, great writers story transcends the imagery.
E.g. I can't stand Tolkien, too much time describing (for me) pointless visual detail. Love Pratchett's work, the story and subtext are amazing.
Solid 5 here. And I love to read. I love the smell of books, I love the feeling in my hands and I love the stories of course. I don't have an image of an character in my head, I don't have an image if the landscape, but I still enjoy it.
No snark, but how do you test this?
Like I can picture an apple, but it’s not real, so how do I know if I’m a 1 or a 4?
If you think of how an apple looks and you get a visual representation, depending on how detailed it is. If not, you're a 5.
I think the "test" is to describe a scene, then ask details that weren't explicitly described, but would be necessary to fill in the gaps. It requires honesty (nothing to prevent 5s from making up answers post-hoc or 1s just feigning ignorance.)
If he see something with one eye but not the other, is it real?
I think it's the amount of detail when you picture it. Can you rotate it, cut it, maybe take bite out of it?
Describe the apple you see in your imagination. Color? Texture? Shadows? Environment? Can you draw your image?
There is some flexibility here; I tend to have different levels (1-4) based with numbers scaling to how awake I am. (More awake = less detail)
Did you try to think of a real apple but got a not real picture of it? Can you change it into some different thing? Can you change it to a realistic picture if you want?
Do you guys sometimes also get the weird feeling of: "this is my body, this is planet earth, this is my flat and I live here." Sometimes that happens. And when that happens, I usually think about things like how the universe came to be the big bang, the laws of physics fighting each other until settling on a seady state. Then the Earth is created, millions of years of evolution go by and here you are, sitting on the toilet. The entire chain of thought only lasts for about five seconds and then you're again stuck with the feeling of "I am back here on planet Earth". Do you guys also get that sometimes?
Kinda? I usually drift about how the hell we even reached our current situation from the beginning of the universe; how, despite being a huge collection of cells and bacteria, we understand ourselves as a single unit
That's what happens when you get character switched to.
Yes, though it's when I start thinking about my layman's understanding of quantum mechanics or other small science, then I look around and think, "How the hell? What is this and why am I in it."
I am probably 1/2, but creating images in my mind is not something I do on a daily basis, which is probably why I lack creativity in certain areas. Also I had hard time remembering faces for most of my life, and only recently it get slightly better.
Also I've noticed that the more I think about how something looks like the less I am able to picture it in my head, sometimes even not being able to remember my crush's face which is probably strange as fuck.
Attention is a big part for me to remember a thing. I never remember actor faces, even less so — names.
Names are hard for me in general. Unless I see it in chat or use the name for sufficient amount of time, there's no chance I'll remember it. That's one of my problems with movies: I never remember actors or directors, I remember characters and scenario.
Too fun and interesting to be a shitpost. Half my family are 1 the other half are 5. Woo!
This is really about how much abstraction you have in your thinking. I've seen people be very heavily on the #1 side when i was a kid, and it was always baffling to me that people seem to be unable to talk about objects if they don't have very detailed descriptions of superficial details that seemed completely irrelevant to me.
I'm somewhere between 5 and 4 if I'm really trying. Never felt like a handicap or anything before
When tying your shoelaces what images or dialogue do you have in your head?
Uhhh... none.
Is that a thing that happens for some people?
I was answering the "how does one navigate life" question towards the end lmao.
Op's post was a long and winding road. It's hard to know what to react to.
That's fair. Thank you for the light criticism. I edited it :)
I don't remember ever having any. When I was learning I looked at them while doing it, and after I had it down it was muscle memory.
am I the only one like this?
fuck you, I'm imagining a rainbow tapdancing apple with a top hat on a Roomba on a taxi
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There are times I can be "sucked into" a book. I'm in there, seeing the story like its real. I forget about everything else momentarily. Very jarring when my concentration is broken, and suddenly I remember who/where I am.
Also once had the classic "dreaming in code" when stuck on a programming project in school. Words can't properly describe the experience, besides I was dreaming in code. I shot out of bed and immediately typed up the working solution to the problem I was stuck on.
I’m probably about a 4, maybe 3.5, on this scale. It kinda sucks not having any idea what it’s like to actually be able to visualize things, so I don’t even really know what I’m missing.
Kinda the point of the headline. Apparently you're not missing much or the ancients would have figured it a handicap, named it and studied it.
Far from a handicap, I was reading that scientists and mathematicians are mostly 5s. Maybe you can save CPU cycles and think in more abstract terms?
I’m a software engineer, so that tracks.
I'm #4 on this chart at any given time when awake. When I'm waking up from a dream its like #2 and actual dreams are generally #3.
Ok imagine a six sided die. Roll it in your mind. What number is on top
Oh wait can people really imagine something with that amount of detail in their heads??(#1) I (#3) always thought the idea of sonething is enough
I am good at design, can visualize how something will look when it's done but no don't SEE in my mind like that when I imagine how things look. It's a different sort of knowing. Cannot hold an image and rotate it in my mind and absolutely can't read a map that isn't facing the right way, there is a blindness.
Surely not antphasic because I do see in dreams, same as through eyes. And I do KNOW how things look when they aren't in front of me, and can know what imaginary things might look like too, but it doesn't at all feel like seeing it with my eyes.
Love reading. Love love love it, learned when I was very young, same age I was learning to talk, actually, like a language not a skill. And I do have an internal ear, when I remember music I hear it in my mind and it is so much like hearing it in my ears. Imagining how something looks does not feel the same as seeing it.
Or Indians, they're kind of known for their mind games.
I'm mostly a 5 occasionally a 4 with occasional flashes of 1 when reading a particularly immersive book.
I'm a 5.
Probably why I prefer graphic novels and was not really into textual books that much. I wish I could play a whole movie in my head while reading a book. I'm so jealous.
My dreams are super vivid though, and lucid dream often. And I remember my dreams in heavy detail. My dreams are like a 1 or 2.
I think I'm 1, but there's no way to know for sure. I find it easier to call out sounds rather than visuals. I can't "hear" a voice or a sound if I want to. Visuals seem to require more will for the same fidelity.
draw something from memory on a piece of paper, and then draw the same thing again while looking on a photo. --> can you tell the difference between the two drawings?
That's a different skill, my hands don't have to coordination draw from reference.
but I cant draw so well qwq
Solid five on this one, sometimes I can even feel/taste/smell it if applicable. Mostly happens when I think of sharp things though cause then I feel it from when I cut myself, literally did it while writing this comment. Is this an autism thing or do I just have multiple layers of mental fuckery?
While we're at it, when I start falling asleep reading a novel, it just keeps going in my head, like a movie. And believe it or not, the plot is usually a logical progression from where I left off. Stephan King is perfect for this, but that may be because I've read his books so many times. May also be because his prose flows so smoothly for me that I can just roll with it.
1 or two and rotatable.
I can't imagine not doing #1, the only way I'll do other numbers is if you're asking me to imagine a hand drawn apple, colored or not, etc.
I am not on this scale.
How to draw an apple in the mind?
Colour? What colour?
That's extra charge.
Make a ring in your mind, have it spin about one of its axis.
Make another ring inside the first, have it spin on a different axis than the first.
Make a third ring, put it inside the first two, have it spin on a different axis than the second.
That is as far as I can go, it's hard, but I can make it look right if I concentrate, and it has to be in one particular orientation. I absolutely can not get a 4th ring into the mix, the details get fuzzy and I can't get it to move right. How far can you go?
I tried visualising 4 dimensions once or twice, but it doesn't really work out for me.
So I have no way to get that 4th axis for the 4th ring.
It's extremely easy upto the 2 rings and I am also able to change the axes while moving them.
The moment I add a 3rd ring, the difficulty seems to abruptly increase, making me take quite a while to imagine it and even the slightest diversion, making me forget the simulation.
I just realised that in your explanation, you didn't explicitly require orthogonal axes. Now it makes more sense to try the 4th ring. Perhaps I will try doing that when I am about to sleep, after doing the 3 rings for a while and see if I am able to do so.
There is a way to cheat yourself out of this, by first making the animation and watching it on a screen and then internalising it. I will keep that for later, after knowing how well I can do without it.
I also feel the need to say that while in my above description, I am able to do something similar to visualisation, that doesn't really help me in drawing stuff. Even when I try using a 3D CAD program, that way of visualisation ends up making it harder for me to make it. Instead, I need to force myself to reduce the extra information of touch and feel and taste, to make it easier for me to model it and it takes further effort to make a 2D projection.
Considering your specific example with an apple, what about other senses, what happens if you try and recall texture, smell and taste?
We’re a 1, we can see, smell taste and even move the apple around along with an entire environment around it.
What we can’t do very well is thinking with words, though that has slowly been changing the past few years where we can think a little bit with words, however it’s mostly thoughts as emotions, objects and feelings of action.
Instead of thinking “I need to walk to the kitchen for water” we just think of ourselves physically getting up and getting the water with the sense of urgency and need. BuT when speaking/writing the way we do that is by remembering the visual words and hope they’re spelled out physically and what emotions/visuals connect with. Ie a physical apple in our mind have connections to the physical feelings of saying “Apple” [c.Eng], “manzana” [c.Esp], “りんご” [c.Jp] then each of those would have connections to spellings, grammatical connections, factoids, etc kinda like a language web.
But yeah anywho idk if anyone else thinks like that but it makes learning different languages hard, having to learn Spanish rn is like a full time job and after this we’re learning German, Dutch and then some other languages for the challenge/fun.
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Do you have shares in imgur or something? Use a different image host that doesn't delete your images for not upgrading.
Stop supporting enshittification.
I've been using imgur to save random images for what feels like a decade and not a single one has been deleted
You're not in UK. UK banned imgur because the crown is trying to build a database of internet users to oppress and imgur said no.
No, imgur isn't banned, they were threatened with a fine, and it wasn't because of the online safety act, it was because they were tagging user data with suspected age range, and selling browsing habits of children. The ICO said that they had to come up with a plan to exclude the child data from sale or they could be liable for a fine. Rather than implement a simple filter on the database, they implemented a complicated geofencing filter because they took offence at being regulated at all.
Wow that's a lot of pointless words. They were told to implement an internet user tracking system or be fined, but since they have no desire or obligation to do so they chose to cease operating under those rules. This has nothing to do with children and everything to do with tracking adults, there's your 'simply'. Trying to spin this as 'protect the children' is completely worthless word garbage.
You are factually incorrect and clearly haven't read the ICO report, falling for the corpo spin instead.
I understand that you believe what you're saying but I don't think you're factually correct. You're parroting the propaganda of a censorship and tracking regime that has no sincere desire to help children in any way.
The good news is that this is already teaching a whole new generation of UK citizens the value of VPNs and encrypted paths out of the ever-tightening information noose the UK has been trying to create for the last 41 years.
You think I disagree with you about the OSA. I don't. I disagree with you about imgur. Imgur is a greedy corp who deleted a bunch of old posts but excluded ones with a subscription and sold child browsing habits and blamed it all on the OSA when the investigation predated the OSA. It was already illegal to sell children's data without parental consent in the UK for years and years. They're not the good guys fighting for internet freedom they're painting themselves as.
It wasn't all old data that they deleted, but it was a lot. Why trust a corporation with your memes? You're on Lemmy for a reason. You know how this ends.
this is just language semantics. you're not special
Either that or aphantasia, a well documented phenomena, is a thing.
People aren't good at describing their own thoughts.
Riiight, but like, I can make some shit up about a fancy ass apple "The surface is mostly red, mottled with large swaths of not yet ripe green and yellow patches. It's waxed, shiny skin reflects rays of a nearby lightsource behind me. There's a slight bumpiness to it, almost like goosebumps, but not as pronounced, with darker spots at the apex of each peak. My mouth is watering."
Meanwhile, if I try to picture an apple I actually don't see shit because I have aphantasia, so...
Not everyone is like you.
i definitely believe you
Well, I believe the scientific literature.
How ignorant do you have to be to believe people cant accurately describe not having actual images in their mind.
How unobservant do you have to be to see that people are talking past each other on this subject?
Except they arent. There are multiple clinical studies on this.