[igpay]

While writing this article, I learned that Ed Catmull has aphantasia. It's amazing to me that someone with a Turing award for work on computer graphics can't mentally "see" those graphics when he closes his eyes. It'd be really eye-opening to somehow get his (or anyone else's) mental state into my own brain, just to try it out for a little.

Interesting that we share some conceptual similarities in how we think about numbers, but they're expressed through different pathways (language vs. visual.) I wonder if the people who imagine pen-and-paper stuff when doing mental math just don't have these pathways set up, and instead recall memories of math-adjacent experiences in lieu of another internal representation of numbers.