you’d remember the fact of where you put things, or if something’s lost, you’d go around to the places where logically you were likely to last have them.
TIL that some people remember where stuff is by picturing their location mentally, that’s cool!
Comment on People With Aphantasia Can't Visualize Anything. So How Do They Dream?
luthis@lemmy.nz 3 days ago
I struggle to understand how you could exist this way. Like how would you remember where you put things if you can’t see it in your memory?
tae_glas@slrpnk.net 3 days ago draco_aeneus@mander.xyz 3 days ago
I have Aphantasia, and it has a lot less impact than you might think. Just like you I’m able to retrace steps in my mind, or to imagine objects, or recall visual facts from memory (E.g., tell you the colour of someone’s hat, or the shape, etc), or to solve a maze in my head before drawing it on paper, etc, etc.
Pretty much the only thing I cannot do that people with Phantasia can is picture images in my head. E.g., I cannot picture a cow and then rotate it in my mind. I can imagine the concept of a rotating cow, but there’s no head picture that goes along with it. Other than that, I cannot think of any real task that is in any way more difficult (or even really different) from people with Phantasia.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
i mean you can just remember the words “keys are on the kitchen table”, it’s not exactly rocket science.
But personally i have a sort of pseudo-visualization, best comparison i’ve come up with is like a computer without a monitor: the information is there but it’s just not properly presented visually. It also kinda uses the sense of knowing where your limbs are (proprioception), so i sorta “feel” things in my mental projection and just know what colours and stuff they should have.
A wireframe view like this should very very broadly get the idea across, i don’t literally see this but it’s closer than regular visualization:
ImageShrimpCurler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
That’s interesting. I think sometimes I can visualise something quite well, but most of the time it feels more like what you’re describing.
delcake@piefed.zip 3 days ago
There are definitely degrees to aphantasia. Rather than complete inability to visualize in the mind, I’d hazard a guess that most (myself included) can visualize to a minor degree in bursts. That might not make a lot of sense describing it to someone who doesn’t experience things that way, but if I focus, I can have a brief moment of imagining the visual features of something or someone but it fades quickly.
But as others have said here, there are far more ways than purely visual that such memories are stored and recalled. Spatial memory is comparatively strong for me as one example, such that if I close my eyes and focus on it, I can make myself “feel” like I’m in another room I’m familiar with entirely. Anyone who has ever wandered around their room in complete darkness or with their eyes closed probably knows what this feels like.
As it relates to this article, I’ve always heard that those with aphantasia can still have visual dreams since the two experiences rely predominantly on different parts of the brain. At least in my case I’d claim aphantasia but also no issues with experiencing dream visuals.
Sorry to yap so much, but I find it so extremely interesting that people can have such wildly different experiences within the mind like this, such that someone can sound totally bonkers to someone else if they don’t share the same experience. Inner monologues are another related phenomena where it’s fun to watch people try to explain what it’s like to each other.
Uli@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I have this condition and when I’m trying to remember where I put something, I try to bring up the memory of when I was setting it down. I may not visually see what it looked like, but I can still recall the state of mind I was in, where I was, what I was thinking at the time. Even if I don’t see what I was seeing, I remember being there and seeing what I saw. It’s just more akin to a text adventure.
Not sure how universal this is, but when I close my eyes while falling asleep. I frequently notice a sort of glowing blue light that radiates outward from the center of my vision. It’s like a pulsing ring of blue that expands outward from the center.
During this time, I can experience a very mild capability to visualize things. Like if I try really hard, I can invent cartoon characters and visualize them as I’m falling asleep.
Then, when I’m actually asleep, I have vivid full color dreams with enough detail to believe it’s real basically all of the time.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 days ago
It continues to boggles my mind how so many people are walking around with a narrator and movies playing in their head, and how I went through decades of life before I realized that was a thing
How do I know where my keys are? I just remember the location of my keys…I don’t see them, I remember their location. It’s one of a million little quantifications of the environment my brain does for me automatically all the time. In fact, I generally notice and remember where all the keys I see are, because I think of keys as an important object to keep track of
I won’t remember what they look like, except as a very general impression. I’ll probably remember if they’re big or small bunches of keys, or if they’re on a lanyard, but I probably won’t remember if a keychain is red or green. I’ll remember it’s on a side table near the door, or on this side of the room.
But I’ll remember qualia of the keys. I’ll remember if I see an individual put them down somewhere, and if there’s something interesting about the keys I’ll probably remember that, but generally? I probably won’t remember much except the general location
At the end of the day, I remember what I notice, which is generally what matters to me subjectively. My mind stores everything as impressions
misk@piefed.social 3 days ago
Not being able to visualise images has no bearing on whether you can conceptualise surrounding space (positions, distances) or you wouldn’t be able to function at all. While aphantasia is not a medically recognised condition and therefore not exactly well studied there’s a lot to suggests it partially overlaps with autism. This in turn would explain tendency for bottom-up thinking - your brain has to systemise everything to understand it. At least that’s my intuition as someone with both.
farmgineer@nord.pub 3 days ago
Why would I need to somehow ‘see’ where I put something? It’s data. My database doesn’t store pictures of things, it stores the information about the things. I put the keys on the counter by the door as I do 95% of the time I enter the house. I don’t need some picture for that.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 3 days ago
seems a lot harder to index a contextual bit on an optical database.
I remember everything through visual indexing. think of it like taking snapshots of my instruction set based on what I’m looking at.
decades ago I worked in a factory that had robotics involved. I got laid off. two years later they called me in to see if I wanted my old job. I came back and got back to work like I left for the weekend. leadership was dumbfounded. they never saw anything like it and asked me how I did it.
I explained it to them but they didn’t really believe me when I told them I have a mnemonic memory that works off visual indexes. if they had changed the UI for the robots, I would have needed to be trained all over again. since they didn’t, all my training had been triggered by the visual format of the interface.
thing is, I can trigger this directly as well. If I Imagine the UI I still remember the different functions and input commands to move those big fanucs, even 20ish years later.
my point is, for someone like me it’s difficult to imagine how efficient it would be to remember contextual information in basically text format.
not knocking it, it’s just…different.
LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
My mom gained aphantasia from (we believe) years of undetected epilepsy and TBIs. She loses her things constantly. I have no idea if the two are related in her case. She also has really bad ADHD and the part of her brain that turns what she wants to say into actual sounds is fucked up so she stutters and forgets words and just replaces things with “Thingy”
It’s fascinating to be honest. The stutter and word forgetting thing started after a horse riding accident. It’s okay, though, because she proved she can be a rodeo champ. She stayed on for over 8 seconds. (My mom always mentions the rodeo champ part to lighten the story a bit)
gnu@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
You just remember where you put the thing, the concept of where it is still remains even if you can’t visualise it. Similarly I can still remember routes and recognise people even though I can’t really visualise either.