Hmmm, I really can’t relate to this at all. I still kind of struggle to believe people like this exist (I do believe it, but despite having tried interrogating aphantasiac people I find, I’ve never gotten a good sense of what it feels like from the inside).
It would be easier for me to imagine if these people were profoundly retarded. But I haven’t seen any indication that they have any functional deficiency.
Like, for me, autobiographical memory and visualization is a very core part of how my mind functions. Like if I’m at the store, and try to remember what food items I need to buy, I visualize how my kitchen looks, and see if anything is missing.
Or if I get paranoid about whether I remembered to lock the door to my home, I just kind of, remember, and then a “video” of me locking the door appears, and then I know I locked it.
When I tell aphantasiacs this, and ask them what goes on in their mind when they do the same task, they either tell me that they just write down stuff beforehand, or they tell me what they need just pops into their heads unconsciously.
Which I find hard to believe to be honest. Like, it doesn’t make sense that minds would have two fundamentally different ways to achieve the same task.
The only area where I’ve noted some deficiency is, asking them heavily 3-d geometric questions like “If you have a mirror in your bathroom, how many of them would you need to stack horizontally to span the width of the wall the mirror is hanging on?”. But even non-aphantasiacs have problems with that.
I’ve heard the explanation that aphantasiacs do have all the machinery, and do the visualization thing, but that the visualization is not accessible. I find that hard to believe. I’ve also heard people say the opposite. That visualization actually isn’t loadbearing, its just a kind of post-hoc narrativization. That’s also hard for me to believe.
Yeah, the friends and family Blake Ross reached out to would’ve probably shared your incredulity, like that last friend who ended with how always-on visualisation is “what makes us human, right?”
I’ve only met one full-blown aphantasiac in my life, a pure math postdoc at I think UC Berkeley. He could not visualise a rotating cube to save his life, and flunked the shape rotator sections of the IQ test he was administered as a child. But algebra was “ridiculously easy” to him, so that’s what he ended up specialising in.
Hmmm, I really can’t relate to this at all. I still kind of struggle to believe people like this exist (I do believe it, but despite having tried interrogating aphantasiac people I find, I’ve never gotten a good sense of what it feels like from the inside).
It would be easier for me to imagine if these people were profoundly retarded. But I haven’t seen any indication that they have any functional deficiency.
Like, for me, autobiographical memory and visualization is a very core part of how my mind functions. Like if I’m at the store, and try to remember what food items I need to buy, I visualize how my kitchen looks, and see if anything is missing.
Or if I get paranoid about whether I remembered to lock the door to my home, I just kind of, remember, and then a “video” of me locking the door appears, and then I know I locked it.
When I tell aphantasiacs this, and ask them what goes on in their mind when they do the same task, they either tell me that they just write down stuff beforehand, or they tell me what they need just pops into their heads unconsciously.
Which I find hard to believe to be honest. Like, it doesn’t make sense that minds would have two fundamentally different ways to achieve the same task.
The only area where I’ve noted some deficiency is, asking them heavily 3-d geometric questions like “If you have a mirror in your bathroom, how many of them would you need to stack horizontally to span the width of the wall the mirror is hanging on?”. But even non-aphantasiacs have problems with that.
I’ve heard the explanation that aphantasiacs do have all the machinery, and do the visualization thing, but that the visualization is not accessible. I find that hard to believe. I’ve also heard people say the opposite. That visualization actually isn’t loadbearing, its just a kind of post-hoc narrativization. That’s also hard for me to believe.
Yeah, the friends and family Blake Ross reached out to would’ve probably shared your incredulity, like that last friend who ended with how always-on visualisation is “what makes us human, right?”
I’ve only met one full-blown aphantasiac in my life, a pure math postdoc at I think UC Berkeley. He could not visualise a rotating cube to save his life, and flunked the shape rotator sections of the IQ test he was administered as a child. But algebra was “ridiculously easy” to him, so that’s what he ended up specialising in.