Comment by ozten
12 hours ago
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
Greetings fellow music-hearer.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.
Hmm I'm pretty sure I have some degree of aphantasia, because I read a lot but I never visualize what's going on (or not consciously, at least).
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national math competitions once.
Maybe though, it's because i was drawing helper figures on paper instead of imagining them.
I have no problem with figure matching IQ style tests, as opposed to one of the sibling posters.
Edit: oh interesting, lower in the article. I have absolutely no problem with spatial navigation, on the contrary, I'm better than many people. But for example if we're retracing our steps on a mountain path I can't tell you in advance what were the landmarks to look for. I will recognize them as soon as we see them or notice we're missing any landmarks though.
Visualizing for me has always been like touching something with my eyes closed. I can't "see" the object, but I have a feeling for all the shapes and contours. You can feel which way a key is in your hand and where each ridge is without having to see it. I solve geometry problems the same way. I can't see the whole thing at once, but I can move my sense of feeling across arbitrary scenes.
That’s exactly how it is for me.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
Funny you should ask. In high school I was regarded as highly intelligent, I was near the top of all of my classes and widely read, with an excellent memory for facts and figures. (Though no visual memory whatsoever).
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
>How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.
Not the other guy, but I can think about how they look without actually 'seeing' them in my mind.
I was good at mechanical drawing in college, meaning I could visualize the view of something from different sides. But, generally there was a perspective to work off of.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
Yes. Different people answer this differently: I'm 100% aphantasia while awake, but dream vividly as if it were real life. However, once I'm awake, I can recall the dream but can't visualize it, the same way I can't visualize a previous experience in real life.
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?
If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.