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Comment by codenesium | Hacker News Reader

The way I have described it is in the movie The Dark Knight they build the machine that uses phones to build something like sonar to see in environments. The way that is depicted in the movie is how I visualize things. I can navigate rooms or areas but I only see this vague representation of objects similar to how it's depicted in the movie. I have no problem with abstract concepts as a software engineer. But I can't visualize a face for example. It's a vague representation in my mind.

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Also, my memory is terrible. Poor recall from my childhood and even today. However, I'm good at improvising as an engineer and also as a musician.

I think of two different types of minds in this case, 'functional' and 'stateful.' Functional (like functional programming) minds do not use recall much, but instead build tools to react to situations. Stateful (with reactions in storage already) minds are good at recall and can react to known scenarios with greater precision.

I feel like you describe a functional one.

this is a really cool "dichotomy".

I was just discussing this in terms of "sages" which know things, they recall and store "stateful data"

and "seers" (like in the verb to see); them who don't know things but perceive them and observe them.

I’ve had this thought as well, though always regarded the “functional” skills to be more of a coping mechanism for the lack of high-throughput state. It’s not that I’m naturally good at systematic thinking, but that I’ve been forced to become competent, and I envy the person who can operate wholistically.

This description reminds me a lot of the fluid vs crystallized intelligence. The way that’s always been described to me is that younger people always have a faster brain but as we age, we can make up for our slowness in having a lot of experience to draw on.

Hello, fellow aphantasic.

Can you "see" motion? I can. I can easily visualize a ballerina doing a pirouette and a plié and gracefully moving her arms... but I'm seeing actual imagery. It's more like I see the gradient of an image. Frankly, it's like "seeing" pure motion itself, devoid of the image itself of the thing moving. This was quite a surprising realization when I first noticed this ability. I think, by the way, for dancers and sports and others involved in motion activities, this ability is probably natural for them and they don't think about it.

Do people with aphantasia daydream? How does it work? What about drawing?

When I was a kid I would spend hours constructing elaborate daydream worlds and plot lines. They were so vivid that I could have drawn them if asked.

Hello. For me it's monologue (inner dialogue) or vague/shadowy fleeting images. Or singing songs to myself. I can rarely keep an image in mind for more than a moment, and it's always mostly colorless, not detailed.

Fascinating!

While my mind is VERY visual, I have horrible music recall and music doesn't come naturally to me at all.

Nope, no daydreams here. And I cannot draw, though I am trying to learn (but it's hard to find time with young children), but that doesn't mean much. Famously, at least one of the people who started Pixar is an aphantasiac and, when they ran a survey of animators, IIRC, quite a few of them reported back that they also had/have it.

I daydream, I suppose -- just not in clear imagery.

I can actually draw really well, better than most people. But not super elaborate scenes. And I know that if I could actually visualize, it would be helping me a lot.

I also have excellent musical/audio memory. I can hear back songs almost perfectly in my head, in the right key and in full detail.

I’ve never come across someone who also claims to be able to reproduce songs perfectly in their head. I can do this. It’s mostly involuntary though. I can’t pick and choose which songs I ‘record’ onto my brain.

I don't daydream but I "self-narrate" - probably to a fault.

Like I'm not seeing anything. I'm just sort of writing a novel where I'm the main character if that makes sense?

It's similar to how I remember things.

I don’t see motion, but I can feel/experience motion. I don’t see images at all. The motion aspect is interesting and I can use it to experience outdoor activities or sports on demand.

Yes! I described it once like the sense from Daredevil or Toph from Avatar.

I can kind of feel shapes and directions in my mind. When it comes to colours, though, I have to "paint" "manually" over this mental sonar image.

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