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Comment by dempseye | Hacker News Reader

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery.

I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible.

And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see sheep?

Notwithstanding my apparently poorly functioning mind's eye, I've never had any problem with spatial reasoning, and have scored +2sd in tests with a spatial ability component. I find myself able to "feel" the forms in a way that seems to have nothing to do with vision.

Does anybody else recognize this experience?

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This is precisely my experience. The interesting thing is that I recognize faces extremely well, perhaps even to the level of super-recognizer, contradicting the guy in the article. I also score really well on spatial reasoning tests and do extremely well at mathematical and abstract reasoning. I wonder if there's a connection.

As far as the nature of my minds eye, I definitely don't see pictures at all, but as you said "feel" abstract forms. When I imagine a familiar relative, I don't see an image, but rather I'm reminded of important abstract features of the person. It's as if my minds eye operates on abstractions rather than concrete representations. I also attribute my math ability with being able to manipulate these sorts of abstract visual/spatial feelings, which leads me to believe there's a connection. Even as a programmer my abstract visual/spatial machinery is working to operate on mental representations of the program state.

I wonder differences in ability on this abstract visual/spatial <---> vivid concrete representation axis can help explain differences in programming/math ability.

I'll put it this way:

I have no problem imagining a physical system in my head and running a simulation of it, but it is as if instead of receiving the output of the simulation as images on a screen I am receiving it in the form of instantaneous knowledge of the state of the system.

It feels very similar to modelling program state in my head while debugging or whatever.

Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross' discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic. It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop and think of a sunset. The first sunset image I get is almost involuntary. For me it will be cliché, like a stock photo, but I can alter it, or add detail. (Other people may get fantasy landscapes or particular sunset memories).

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people they shared the space with.

There is a language problem here where it is impossible to be sure that when people describe subjective experiences in the same words they are actually having the same qualitative experience.

I don't take it too seriously. It's just a jumping off point for a conversation about an interesting perceptual quirk.

He says second monitor. My wife just said she sees as though her glasses are off at first. Very visual words from neilk and her both.

Unlike glasses or monitor, my "collections of attributes" when asked to actively generate a sense of things ("Picture X") seems more non-visual attributes.

Picture a chair: wood, cool to touch, weighs this much in the hand, makes a scraping noise when slid, fairly clean design with straight high back, no arms but indents for buttocks, sturdy, can be stood on to reach things. I just don't see an imaginary visual of one.

// I can mentally/visually flip through an endless card deck of them, like nielk's Google Image Search example. I don't feel like I can visually put an imaginary one in an imaginary room in my mind.

There are some ways to test it though. For the past 15 minutes I've been taking "photographs" of people in this coffeeshop in my mind, closing my eyes, and trying to read details from that photograph. I take in a lot of detail but part of it is reconstructed. Like I remembered the guy had a green trilby hat, and my brain did a Google Image Search for "green trilby" and pasted it on the guy. When I opened my eyes, I saw it was actually a green plaid trilby. But in my mind's eye the image was realistic, even though I obviously hadn't truly seen it.

For me it is usually either a spatially disconnected weak image not anchored anywhere, or when I try to picture things within my field of vision it is like my imagination is being shown as a reflection in glass, like when you look out through a window at the real world and see your room faintly in the reflection, where I see my imagination like that reflection.

The strength of it varies with my focus and general mental state (it is easier when I'm relaxed).

Great description, and makes me feel less handicapped for not having a very vivid mind's eye.

I wounder though whether somebody with aphantasia could really understand that description. After all, they would have to actually visualise a reflection to get to grips with it.

Ditto on all counts.

I've only recently become aware that the way I experience or remember the world is in any way unusual. I'd always thought that mental imagery was a metaphor for something or hyperbole. It also explains why my memory seems deficient. I've no problems with facts, but I have no memory of being a participant in events.

Contrary to the article, I have no problem recognising people. It's like I keep a hash of faces. If I close my eyes I'll have no idea what the person in front of me looks like.

The whole thing has me slightly sad.

No problem recognising people here either. It's like a hash, as you said. I'd say it operates more like a bloom filter in my head, as I will always remember an image if I see it again, but previously unseen images can still occasionally spark a feeling of recognition.

Oh interesting. That is a better fit, yes.

Ditto on the sheep thing. Thought it was a figure of speech. Ditto on the score. Gobsmacked. Curiously, I'm considered by peers as good at rendering concepts or architectures into drawings. Hmm.

Also, when I see movies derived from books I know whether they depict the same setting I took from the book. I know if the characteristics mesh, but don't really recall "seeing" the settings while reading.

Tend to ace those spatial tests. I slaughtered all my friends in Descent -- I almost immediately had each entire spatial 3D map in my head and knew where to go to get anywhere regardless of ship vs map orientation.

So yes, I recognize your experience almost exactly.

This is another thing: people complain about film adaptations on the grounds that they look different to the mental image of the characters, setting, etc., that they formed while reading the book. I never understood that.

Interesting, I had never even considered that people could have a hard time with that.

I was taking this test and thinking it was stupid, since well, duh, you just have to imagine it, I do basically all my remembering that way.

Yes, that is my experience exactly. No mental images at all. I've tried to learn, but nothing has worked. Yet I can drive somewhere once on vacation, and a decade later drive the route without a map.

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