Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits—how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives.
Cannot believe the ancient Greeks or Chinese didn’t figure out that we had these totally seperate experiences. I first learned about it on reddit. People on both sides were shocked.
The inside of my head is a movie screen. If I have a picture to help me along, I can keep the memory accurate and sharp. My memories are very short video clips, but I can see them clearly. I can picture sitting around the breakfast table after seeing Star Wars, 1977. I can feel and smell the cheap, smooth texture of my parents polyester comforter, when I was old enough to stand up and touch the top.
If I lost this ability, it would be tantamount to being blinded, no idea how I’d cope.
I kinda get how others do without. Sometimes solutions to problems come to me by instinct, gut feeling. Playing Solitaire on my phone I have no real memory of what’s in the draw pile, but I “know” there’s another red queen in there. But I have to be moving fast, otherwise I stop to smell the roses, look for the picture. Does that make sense? I’m imagining that instinct is much sharper in people without internal pictures.
EDIT: Tested my wife. She’s about totally eat up with aphantasia. No wonder I’m so fucking frustrated when she can’t describe a thing! “Harrison Ford. Can you see his face?” No clue, but she knows him when she sees him. “Can you picture an apple?” “Red.” I see every detail of an apple. I can “see” every pore in my wife’s nose. Fucking mind blowing.
Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Chinese had video recording or even photography, which seems to be the metaphor that allows people to explain what they do or don’t have.
I must have relatively weak mental imagery? I can imagine seeing an apple, or recall the visual memory of my fruit bowl, but I’m hard-pressed to extract any definitive visual information from it, like I could if I really was looking at it. I’m visualizing the fruit bowl, but how many apples am I visualizing exactly? If I decide I’m visualizing two, now I’ve lost the relationship between the banana and the orange. I can see the Mona Lisa, but where do her arms go, actually? Maybe sort of crossed somewhere? What’s going on behind her, some kind of green-brown pointy trees? Nope, there’s her cheek again and some paint cracks. It’s less like looking at a picture and more like dreaming of one.
This subject is always confusing for me and I’m not sure I’m not somewhere in between. I can “see images” but it’s not like watching a movie screen for me. The images aren’t… Crisp or clear or anything. And they move around (my brain only really fills in the bits and pieces I concentrate on), so parts of the image are fuzzy.
As a kid, I always lamented that images in my head wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to draw them out.
I can also just close my eyes and wee plain blackness. So it feels like neither description is one I fit into.
ZERO doubt my image memory is fuzzy, though rarely outright false. At 40 I saw a photograph of myself partying in the French Quarter at 30. Holy shit I don’t remember that guy. Like I said, a picture to help me along is a big help. Looking back over this century’s digital pics really burns the image in.
ALL of our memories are subject to question. But this is about seeing a picture in your head, not how accurate specific memories are.
If you say, “HORSE!”, I have an instant mental picture, like I’m looking at a photograph. I may not remember the exact picture of the horse I rode on the youth group trip, but I have a recollection of the general scene (from 40+ years ago). I’m sure it’s way off, but I have a picture.
Cannot believe the ancient Greeks or Chinese didn’t figure out that we had these totally seperate experiences. I first learned about it on reddit. People on both sides were shocked.
The inside of my head is a movie screen. If I have a picture to help me along, I can keep the memory accurate and sharp. My memories are very short video clips, but I can see them clearly. I can picture sitting around the breakfast table after seeing Star Wars, 1977. I can feel and smell the cheap, smooth texture of my parents polyester comforter, when I was old enough to stand up and touch the top.
If I lost this ability, it would be tantamount to being blinded, no idea how I’d cope.
I kinda get how others do without. Sometimes solutions to problems come to me by instinct, gut feeling. Playing Solitaire on my phone I have no real memory of what’s in the draw pile, but I “know” there’s another red queen in there. But I have to be moving fast, otherwise I stop to smell the roses, look for the picture. Does that make sense? I’m imagining that instinct is much sharper in people without internal pictures.
EDIT: Tested my wife. She’s about totally eat up with aphantasia. No wonder I’m so fucking frustrated when she can’t describe a thing! “Harrison Ford. Can you see his face?” No clue, but she knows him when she sees him. “Can you picture an apple?” “Red.” I see every detail of an apple. I can “see” every pore in my wife’s nose. Fucking mind blowing.
Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Chinese had video recording or even photography, which seems to be the metaphor that allows people to explain what they do or don’t have.
I must have relatively weak mental imagery? I can imagine seeing an apple, or recall the visual memory of my fruit bowl, but I’m hard-pressed to extract any definitive visual information from it, like I could if I really was looking at it. I’m visualizing the fruit bowl, but how many apples am I visualizing exactly? If I decide I’m visualizing two, now I’ve lost the relationship between the banana and the orange. I can see the Mona Lisa, but where do her arms go, actually? Maybe sort of crossed somewhere? What’s going on behind her, some kind of green-brown pointy trees? Nope, there’s her cheek again and some paint cracks. It’s less like looking at a picture and more like dreaming of one.
This subject is always confusing for me and I’m not sure I’m not somewhere in between. I can “see images” but it’s not like watching a movie screen for me. The images aren’t… Crisp or clear or anything. And they move around (my brain only really fills in the bits and pieces I concentrate on), so parts of the image are fuzzy.
As a kid, I always lamented that images in my head wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to draw them out.
I can also just close my eyes and wee plain blackness. So it feels like neither description is one I fit into.
Have you ever experimentally tested the accuracy of your recall? I read a study a while back that found that most people overestimated their accuracy.
ZERO doubt my image memory is fuzzy, though rarely outright false. At 40 I saw a photograph of myself partying in the French Quarter at 30. Holy shit I don’t remember that guy. Like I said, a picture to help me along is a big help. Looking back over this century’s digital pics really burns the image in.
ALL of our memories are subject to question. But this is about seeing a picture in your head, not how accurate specific memories are.
If you say, “HORSE!”, I have an instant mental picture, like I’m looking at a photograph. I may not remember the exact picture of the horse I rode on the youth group trip, but I have a recollection of the general scene (from 40+ years ago). I’m sure it’s way off, but I have a picture.