Submitted 10 hours ago by shalafi@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://i.imgur.com/OlhiGci.jpg
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.
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On the upside our kids aren’t going to be traumatised by pictures of apples.
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.
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.
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.
@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. youtu.be/ewsGmhAjjjI
I am not on this scale.
How to draw an apple in the mind?
Colour? What colour?
That’s extra charge.
I’m a #5 on that scale.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Good heavens! I learned about the memory palace in a Hannibal Lector book, thought it was genius, assumed everyone could do that.
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 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.
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).
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. 🤯
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 subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
But aren’t you visualizing the assigned character’s faces? I think we all have varying amounts of this depending on what it is. It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
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.
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.
Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I’d get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain.
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.
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.
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
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.
The left/right story might be a different thing.
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.
I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I’m a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
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?
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.
I’m definitely a 4. The shape is there, but even that’s work.
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?
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.
My brain likes to hallucinates the bump map textures from the Xbox 360 era and hard line non pixelated shadows.
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’m a 5, yet I can have extremely vivid dreams that are exactly like I am in that world. I can perfectly picture peoples faces from the past too while dreaming. So the ability is in there somewhere. 🤷♂️
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human brain only has five possible states :P
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that I have a good visual imagination but it 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 think “I 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.
am I the only one like this?
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 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.
Too fun and interesting to be a shitpost. Half my family are 1 the other half are 5. Woo!
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.
I’m somewhere between 5 and 4 if I’m really trying. Never felt like a handicap or anything before
One time I had a dream about the ascii game I played. I dreamed it both IN TEXT, and my brain produced images of the people, places, and things at the same time as I usually imagined them.
the_q@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
You guys are gonna lose your shit when you find out some people don’t have an inner monologue.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 1 hour ago
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?
Glide@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
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.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
I’m convinced lots of people actually don’t think
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Vibes or visuals
shalafi@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
nailbar@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
My inner monologue even reacted to your comment when I read it 😅