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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone that identifies as having aphantasia here been able to improve their ability to visualize imagery?

I dabbled in CAD to design an ergonomic keyboard (a hobby). CAD, especially parametric CAD, can be a bit challenging to learn. Even when I was away from the keyboard, I would try to prototype or solve problems in my head. One good thing about CAD is that I could quickly check whether what I visualized was correct or not. I feel it really improved my visualization skills as long as I did it regularly.

To generalize, it may be useful to find a hobby that makes you visualize things frequently and allows for a quick feedback loop.

(I also tried different games, but didn't derive any benefit from them.)

So... for what it's worth I think I have a fairly good spatial reasoning ability (probably from playing lots of games that involve building things, math, and building things as a kid), but I don't have any imagery that comes with it, it's more like I'm thinking about the relative position of things in my head (e.g., this is to the left of that, which is behind that, etc.,)

Below is a video of a simple CAD project. See if you can do it in your head. I think my spatial reasoning is decent, but I needed to learn how to visualize objects to help me reason about, e.g., what a specific extrusion would result in. If you find it easy, then great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muq7YUH8tao

I've tried various exercises over the years, but to no success. Funnily enough, I'm alright at drawing. I just can't plan things out in advance until I pencil in an outline of a thing. It's a firmly iterative process (not that all art isn't) where I don't tend to have much of an idea of where the art will take me until it's actually drawn.

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