Wow. This explains a huge amount, I’m slightly stunned. I had always assumed people were speaking metaphorically when they talked about seeing with the mind’s eye. I think I’m about a 4.8 on the scale shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Can definitely relate to @spacedcowboy’s "orrery" model, though in my case it generally received as a source of annoyance, not a superpower sadly :) and to the sdam you describe @deafpolygon.
> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.
I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.
What would you say some of these pros and cons would be? I don’t think anyone really speaks about the possible negatives of having strong mental imagery would be
I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.
My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.
Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.
So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.
I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct.
Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
i also have aphantasia. it’s interesting to say the least. as a side effect of aphantasia, i also experience sdam (severely deficient autobiographical memory) in which i don’t recall clear events in my life (i only know that certain things happen, but in general it’s all just a blur) and i have difficulty recognizing people in a crowd (even loved ones).
Interesting to hear that someone also has sdam (I didn't know the term before).
For me it's like knowing about major events but everything older than 3 years is just blurred. Imagine a beach-leveling-net behind a car that just evens out the beach... also I have troubles put events in an chronological order.
The more you know...
Wow. This explains a huge amount, I’m slightly stunned. I had always assumed people were speaking metaphorically when they talked about seeing with the mind’s eye. I think I’m about a 4.8 on the scale shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Can definitely relate to @spacedcowboy’s "orrery" model, though in my case it generally received as a source of annoyance, not a superpower sadly :) and to the sdam you describe @deafpolygon.
> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.
I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.
fascinating to find the differences (though maybe not for the people with aphantasia)
Another article that touches on this in a different way is temple grandin's paper on how animals think
https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
I'm one of those people that has a very weak mental "imagery". It comes with its own positives and negatives.
What would you say some of these pros and cons would be? I don’t think anyone really speaks about the possible negatives of having strong mental imagery would be
I’ve written about this before …
I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.
My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.
Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.
So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.
I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
traumas for one. not being able to picture some traumatic event surely helps
i also have aphantasia. it’s interesting to say the least. as a side effect of aphantasia, i also experience sdam (severely deficient autobiographical memory) in which i don’t recall clear events in my life (i only know that certain things happen, but in general it’s all just a blur) and i have difficulty recognizing people in a crowd (even loved ones).
Interesting to hear that someone also has sdam (I didn't know the term before). For me it's like knowing about major events but everything older than 3 years is just blurred. Imagine a beach-leveling-net behind a car that just evens out the beach... also I have troubles put events in an chronological order. The more you know...