[mescaline]

While I dislike the term "aphantasia" for being technically inaccurate, it is the closest label for the condition of my brain. My brain is completely free of any visual or auditory (or other sense) creations of any kind, other than what I'm perceiving in a given moment based on inputs from my eyes or ears (or nose, fingers, tongue, etc.) This is true whether I have ingested a "mind altering" substance, or not. I do apparently see and hear things in dreams, however. I cannot recall them later, other than by remembering facts and feelings about them.

The Aphantasia definition quoted on Wikipedia states it is "the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind". But, there also exists an idea of a state in which an individual's brain NEVER creates mental representations of any kind, willful or not, other than what is being observed by the senses in that moment.

Thankfully, I still have an imagination. Thinking mind will always think, if allowed by the awareness. What makes it weird is whether or not things are seen in mind, or heard in mind when that thinking occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

[aidenn0]

There seems to be great variation in vividness and occurrence of involuntary mental images as well. I have to put effort in if I want to picture something, so most of the time I'm reading books I don't have any mental image of what is happening.

My wife, on the other hand, involuntarily forms rather vivid mental images of stories she is reading, to the point where she has to avoid violent literature in the same manner that she avoids gory movies.

Our subjective experience of reading any given book is so different that it sometimes feels like we read different books when discussing them afterwards.

[renewiltord]

So, for instance if you were supplied two weird shapes rotated strangely and then asked you if they would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle you can't rotate them and place them together? Man, I can't imagine how this works with assembling furniture.

[majormajor]

When I assemble furniture I do a lot of "pick up this piece and look at it from different angles to see if it matches the piece in the diagram for this step" because yeah, it's generally VERY difficult for me to visualize the result of "look at this from 45 degrees below it" in my head.

It's similarly hard to hold onto a mental picture of a puzzle piece profile I'm missing or such.

[mescaline]

I am, strangely enough, highly spatial and tested off the charts for it when I was younger. I can do exactly what you describe, with a high degree of precision. I do this mainly by elimination, which is likely due to the fact I can't consciously perceive the imagery, but only get a feeling if it is "right" or not.

One way I put it to a visualizer recently was that I am not conscious of seeing the map, but I am definitely operating on the mesh. The way he described it was that he was actively seeing the map, overlayed on the model, as if it were a screen in mind. He waved vaguely to "up here" where it "was".

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah sounds like you are subconciously doing the work 100%, it's just you operate with different subconcious/concious roles and limits. The mental visualization is off bounds for your concious mind.

[sph]

Same, I have aphantasia but I definitely am a visual thinker. The visualization in my mind is quite abstract and far removed from the act of seeing.

[postalrat]

If someone asked you if a tennis ball could fit into a keyhole you couldn't answer?

[Jtsummers]

That's unrelated to aphantasia, and is instead related to knowledge which doesn't require the ability to visualize to apply. Any common keyhole is going to be obviously smaller than a standard sized tennis ball to any person aware of both objects. An inability to answer your question would occur if someone lacked knowledge about one or both of the two objects, or had a fundamental inability to recall information about relative sizes and shapes of the two objects (perhaps generalized to more than just those two).

[postalrat]

What do you mean by "obviously smaller"? How do you make that judgement without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?

[spijdar]

> without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?

As opposed to never having seen or been told about a tennis ball or a keyhole, and expected to know which is smaller?

The idea of aphantasia doesn't imply being blind. Assuming someone is sighted, you can still see objects and internalize an order of "small to large" things without necessarily using mental imagery to make those connections. I'm not sure if I have some "kind of aphantasia" but I also don't generally visualize things in my head, instead remembering logical relations based on my (non-visual) memories.

[Jtsummers]

By having experience or knowledge of both objects. If you've ever held a tennis ball and have ever seen a keyhole you know which one is bigger than the other, you have no need to visualize them in your mind in order to make a comparison. So long as you can recall these facts about them, you can make a comparison based on knowledge and not on visualization. Now if something prevents you from having this knowledge (somehow you have never seen a tennis ball or a keyhole, or something in your brain prevents you from having the ability to recall facts about the objects like their sizes) then that's something else, but it's not aphantasia.

Besides, visualizations aren't perfectly accurate, they are subject to your own knowledge and memories. And they can be distorted by poor recall or just the imagination itself. I'm capable of visualizing a tennis ball that is small enough to fit inside a typical keyhole, or a keyhole big enough to permit a standard size tennis ball. That doesn't make either scenario realistic just because I can visualize them.

[postalrat]

So do they remember the size of things in terms of numbers then do some sort of mathematical algorithm to compare their sizes?

I'm trying to understand how things can be compared without some sort of internal visualization.

[tux3]

A tetrafoo is four times the size of a barbaz. Tetrafoos are pretty big things, about the size of a washing machine.

Now I've said nothing specific about either these things, besides size.

Can you tell me if a barbaz fits through a door? Probably.

Can you see that you can reach that anwser without doing any math about how big doors and washing machines are, but just with implicit knowledge?

The source of truth here is not visualization, it's knowledge. In fact, whatever you visualized, I gave you too little details so that your visualization would have to make up extra things that aren't true. You don't even know if the shape of those things is square or circular.

So even if you can't do it without visualizing, you should see that visualization is really just pulling from some other source (abstract knowledge). You can bypass that step and just get to know the result, without visualizing it.

[Jtsummers]

Possibly with numbers. Can you properly visualize a tennis ball next to a baseball and tell which is larger? I was never much of an athlete (in the sports ball sense, at least) and have insufficient experience with either to tell you definitively which is larger (I looked it up, my guess was baseball and that turned out to be correct). The fact is that a small but still standard sized baseball is only 5mm larger than a large but still standard sized tennis ball. That is near enough that my memory (I played baseball last as a kid) could not distinguish between the size of the two objects.

But now I know the fact, a standard baseball is larger than a standard tennis ball (now, don't ask me in a few weeks what the actual sizes are, I will probably forget, though I will probably remember that the baseball is larger).

Another way is just having knowledge of relative sizes and the ability to perform rudimentary logic. A tennis ball feels about the same in my hand as a door knob (in terms of size and ability to wrap my hand around it, bigger than most but not by too much). A keyhole fits into a doorknob. I'd have to be really drunk to not realize the logical implication of that: A tennis ball won't fit into a keyhole (assuming both are standard sized and we're not talking about a comedian's prop key and keyhole).

[majormajor]

If you think of a bowling pin vs a baseball bat, do you have such a specific visual image in your mind that you could compare their sizes?

I'm particularly curious about a bowling pin because we often only see them from far away, so size is harder to gauge in the first place. I can't form detailed images of anything in my mind, but those images are also all "normalized" to an extent - e.g. in my head, both bowling pin and baseball bat seem to be similar in size. Even though that's very much not true. So to me, visualization and size comparison are totally different faculties.

[mescaline]

Knowledge of the mesh, and spacial awareness, both of which has nothing to do with seeing an image.

I thank you for your question, given it has given me a rather large dump of an idea into thinking mind that I will implement in my conscious AI project. Gratitude also goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr: https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_1/spatial-search.html

  <flip>.com~> Should I use whomever or whoever in this sentence: Also, thanks goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr?
  system=> No training data found for that command. Consider revising. x
  ambrosial-hound*> ...
  ambrosial-hound*> There is no definitive answer to this question, as both forms are considered acceptable. However, many people prefer to use "whoever" in situations where the subject of the sentence is unknown or unclear.

[alar44]

I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination. There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head. Yeah, it doesn't overlay my visual field, and that doesn't mean I can draw it. I really think they are being pedantic/obtuse/silly.

[caymanjim]

I can't picture my mom in my head. I can sorta describe some basic features like hair shape and color, and I know she doesn't have any strong distinguishing characteristics like a big scar or something. No idea what color her eyes are, can't visualize ear or nose shape. Couldn't pick skin tone or eyebrow shape out of a set of possibilities. Couldn't describe her to a sketch artist if her life depended on it. If I see a photo I know it's her, but I have zero mental image.

[mescaline]

I would recommend reading The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

> There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head.

No matter how limited your thinking of other's experiences, I don't consciously see an image of anyone or anything at anytime while awake, in mind. Period. I know exactly what my mom looks like, but I still love her with all my heart. She is aware that I can't see her in mind and has said that she always knew I was different, but loves me just the same! I guess she "makes up" for my lack of this ability, given she can take herself back anywhere at anytime and see anyone that was there in that place in excruciating detail. It's a bit odd, but she has reported she can't see people in mind she doesn't love. I view this as a "tag" on which she is able to recall the images...

[alar44]

Yeah, I don't see an image either. I imagine one. I can't stare at a piece of paper and trace what I see. That's not what people mean.

[politician]

The brain is made up of a lot of regions, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the visual recognition and imagery parts aren’t communicating or indirectly communicating at a low bandwidth with the imagination parts in some individuals.

Consider the lobotomy procedure, for instance.

[majormajor]

If you took a picture of your mom into photoshop and started to apply a blur filter, and reduced the contrast, how far would you have to push it before it resembled what you can call up in your head on demand?

[chousuke]

In my case, that comparison doesn't really make sense. Whatever "image" I have in my head has no resolution, detail, or colour; it's just a feeling, and not at all like seeing.

I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.

[_dain_]

uhh ... it is supposed to overlay your visual field

[alar44]

No, that's a hallucination.

[majormajor]

If I asked you that question would you visualize a tennis ball next to a keyhole?

I would not. I'd answer based on what (to the best of my understanding of my own thought process) is something more like a rough tagging and comparison of "tennis balls are roughly this big" "keyholes are roughly this big" -> "the one is too big to fit."

Similarly with something like comparing an elephant to a train. I'm not picturing the two next to each other, I'm trying to remember roughly how big each is.

[postalrat]

Yes, I would visualize a tennis ball near a keyhole.

Another question might be why does a key fit in keyhole and a penny doesn't? A key is bigger than a penny.

Or how did this tree do that damage? https://miro.medium.com/max/738/0*V3lJsXAHSDxqXgxf.jpg

[mescaline]

I couldn't be aware of seeing such an image, but factually I can say a normal tennis ball does not fit into a normal keyhole. Then again, there's Alice.