[kneel]

The mass recoginition of Aphantasia and the rise of screentime seems somewhat correlated. They might be reinforcing one another, multiple avenues of cognition could be warping in unprecedented ways.

Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.

[ben_w]

Screen time correlates with:

• Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-...

• Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global...

• Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula...

Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.

[pavlov]

Isn’t this essentially the same concern that Socrates had about writing according to Plato:

“… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

[light_hue_1]

Nope. Not even remotely.

Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.