@chemoelectric@troed@axbom I see lots of issues with labeling LLMs as AI, but I don't think true artificial intelligence needs to think in pictures. AI doesn't need to copy humans, and not all humans think in pictures: I don't, and I can't, I have #aphantasia
Heading into Final Destination 2 as I fold laundry. Thanks to #aphantasia, I get to rewatch movies and still be surprised every time 😂 #mutantfam#horror
I think I’ve got the hang of drawing/sketching a straight line. For me, that’s an accomplishment. I need to resort to guide points, but it works. On to basic shapes!
Huh, was curious about aphantasia after hearing that it might be linked to other things, and even though I was pretty certain I had it, turns out I've hypophantasia, which basically means I can't see mental images when trying to visualise things.
But I also know I wasn't always like this.. It's only been in the past.. 5-10 years that I haven't really been able to visualise things.
A few years ago I learned that aphantasia was a thing -- when people talked about seeing something "in their mind's eye" or "visualizing" something they were not being purely metaphorical. Apparently I'm one of the single-digit percentage of the population that do not "see" things in my head.
It feels really weird to learn that there's some extremely common mental process that I just do not have that almost everyone else does.
I have a number of question for people who report #aphantasia :
Do you daydream at all, and if you do, how does that work without visuals?
How does your memory work in general? Assuming you remember seeing things, being in places, meeting people, how does that work?
When you need to describe the appearance of something, how do you go about doing that? Do you plan ahead and memorize lists of features while the thing is in front of you?
Thanks! I’m trying to wrap my brain around this phenomenon I can’t experience myself so if you take some time to educate me I’ll be forever grateful.
The advantage of having #aphantasia is that I never have to say that “I can’t unsee” something. I literally unsee things the second I stop looking at them. 💁♀️
The downside is that it makes remembering faces and the names that go along with them next to impossible. 🙃
Aphantasia is what they call it when you can’t see stuff in your “mind’s eye”, it’s latin for “no imagination”. It was a term originally coined by Dr Adam Zeman who did a study in 2015 that I responded to. I am an aphant and I spent most of my life believing that this is the normal state of affairs. When my secondary school art teacher got frustrated with me during still life drawing, they said “just visualise it in your mind’s eye” which completely threw me – I assumed that this was a turn of phrase or a metaphor or something. I didn’t realise that most people genuinely do have mental imagery.
In this video, Dr Adam Zeman summarises Aphantasia – the inability to imagine thingsI think in terms of “facts” and “statements”. If I ask you to picture a sunset in your mind you are probably able to see a lovely orange glowing sun setting over a beach with waves gently lapping across pink coral sand. I don’t see any of that stuff but I know, theoretically what sunsets look like and I can pick language that describes how that sunset might interact with other stuff (like a sandy beach). What I can’t do is “picture” anything in my head.
Living with Aphantasia is welll… all I’ve ever known. It’s my lived experience. I don’t believe it’s ever held me back in any major ways. I’m not very good at visual art but I never set out to be an artist (perhaps there was alway an unconscious bias there?). There are a few things about being an aphant that annoy me.
I am very bad at facial recognition. I’m not face-blind, I know my wife and family when they are there in front of me. However, I’m awful at recognising people “out and about” or actors in movies. I am often reminded by my mother of occasion from my childhood where, upon seeing a photo of the famously beautiful model Heidi Klum, I remarked “she looks just like Gollum from Lord of the Rings”. I’m not consciously aware of how my facial recognition faculties work (or don’t work) but I’m sort of vaguely aware that it’s quite brittle and “fact based”. For example, person in question has have big eyes and black hair and a particular shape to their nose or mouth and so does other person. This can make for some very embarrassing interactions.
When it comes to aesthetics, I know what good looks like but I find it hard to replicate. I often get excited about DIY projects and dream of replicating styles that I’ve seen in showrooms or other peoples’ houses or even fancy hotels. However, when I get home, I see how the room is now and I can’t picture how I want it to look. This is a struggle when I’m buying a house – they always tell you to “look past” the current appearance and imagine how it could look. Pahahahaha – I’d love to be able to do that! I have the same frustrations when it comes to all visual creative endeavours – web design, drawing, even designing the invites we sent out for our wedding. This is a major reason that I specialise in backend/server-side and machine learning code rather than frontend as part of my day job.
A third and final frustration I’ll talk about here is mindfulness and stress relief techniques. Many meditation and stress relief exercises involve statements like “imagine a warm beam of sunlight that beams up and down your body and relaxes your muscles” or “imagine going to your happy place” or “imagine you’re holding all your stress in a balloon and you’re going to let it go and it will float away”. None of these work for aphants like me. What does work for me is breath work and actual videos (for example, the headspace “thoughts as traffic” analogy which I couldn’t picture ‘in my head’ but I can appreciate as a cute cartoon)
Headspace’s “thoughts as traffic” animation is cute and I don’t have to try and visualise it.Overall though, I can’t say that Aphantasia is particularly problematic for me, it’s all I’ve known for 30-something years and, as such, I’ve just generally “got on with it”. However, learning about Aphantasia, interacting with Dr Zeman and being able to put two-and-two together later in life (“oh that’s why my art teacher said that stuff and that’s why I’m not great at painting”) has been very positive for me.
I’m planning to write a series on aphantasia and how I “work around” it. If you have questions or are curious about it, I’d love to hear from you. Or, if you are a fellow aphant, drop me a message and say hi!
Paulina, a hypnotherapist with #aphantasia, explores the relationship between hypnosis and the absence of mental visualization and answers: Can aphantasics be hypnotized?
"My whole life, I’ve been aware—sometimes painfully so—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses: A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of 'visual creativity,' among others."
A question for my fellow #aphantasics re #audiobooks: I find it difficult to listen while doing any other task. One exception is long, boring stretches of highway driving.
I just realized today that this might be due in part to my #aphantasia — I really have to concentrate hard when I’m listening to a book. Understanding what is going on means evoking feelings and words rather than images.
Being #ActuallyAutistic with auditory processing issues may play a role as well.
Hey neurodivergent friends - we've got a lot of good places to discuss across fedi and I've been thinking that we don't always have a place the share with each other across groups for specific conditions. Maybe there is and I just haven't found it yet 😅
At any rate, I made a group for us: @neurodivergents
I like that they have basic moderation, which can help conversations. I'm not trying to impose my own will on anyone, and I envision it as a self-governing community group
So, IG is offering subscriptions. Every single person I follow who has any kind of business is now restricting content to subscribers only. My #aphantasia makes IG my most used social media. This makes really bothers me.
#TodayILearned I have #aphantasia; ask me to create a mental image of something in my head, I can’t do it, it’s just a black void. Even my dreams are conceptual. It finally explains why I struggle reading fiction because I can’t recreate the places and characters; almost as soon as the book finishes describing something I’ve forgotten it. #Today
This also likely depends on practice & how much you read. Another factor for visualizing is accuracy. When I read I have to contain myself to not imagine alternatives to what is actually described.