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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

It makes me wonder how much of this is pseudoscience, especially internet discourse around it.

How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?

How much of this is just people having a normal human experience of not seeing literal visuals getting confused by people who are a much more figurative in the description of their own experience?

Kinda reminds me of smoking weed in high school and there was always the kid who roleplayed that he was seeing a bunch of green men in the room.

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There is obviously a spectrum at work, as some people seem to be better at visualizing things in their mind than others. This does not surprise me at all.

What does surprise me is that most discussions on aphantasia are very similar to those on religious experiences. Some of us can talk to God, while others are pretty sure He does not exist, because they never get an answer.

Most scientists have given up on trying to prove that God does or does not exist. But quite a lot of ink had been spilled to get to that point. And it seems we still have some bytes to go in the phantasia discussion.

There are now three distinct methods to measure visual imagery objectively, without relying on someone's description of the vividness.

Here is a video in which prof Joel Pearson describes them: https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0 , IIRC Joel Pearson was involved in developing each of the methods, so I'm sure you can find his publications on the subject as well.

>How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?

The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.

I address the "maybe we describe our experience differently" in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139321

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