Submitted 5 months 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.
@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 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.
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.
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.
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On the upside our kids aren’t going to be traumatised by pictures of apples.
WARNING your neurochip implant has detected copyrighted material in your imagination cortex. Please be aware that we are legally obliged to report repeat offenses to the authorities. For your protection, please refrain from picturing further copyrighted material.
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 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.
but there’s no way to know for sure
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For those who are a 4 or 5 on this diagram: What are your dreams like?
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.
I’m a 5. Dreams are fine. As realistic as I want them to be.
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”.
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.
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
am I the only one like this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Too fun and interesting to be a shitpost. Half my family are 1 the other half are 5. Woo!
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.
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.
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?!
We have hardware in the brain wired to recognize faces. For some people it’s not working too well, independently of the other abilities.
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…
I’m definitely a 4. The shape is there, but even that’s work.
My brain likes to hallucinates the bump map textures from the Xbox 360 era and hard line non pixelated shadows.
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 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?
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?
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.
You guys are gonna lose your shit when you find out some people don’t have an inner monologue.
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 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.
Isn’t 5 is called Aphantasia ? To be unable to visualize something in the mind?
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.
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’m somewhere between 5 and 4 if I’m really trying. Never felt like a handicap or anything before
ulterno@programming.dev 5 months ago
I am not on this scale.
How to draw an apple in the mind?
Colour? What colour?
That’s extra charge.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Make a ring in your mind, have it spin.
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. 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?
ulterno@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.