313 karma · joined May 2, 2018
Feel free to reach out to me via: Email - FumblingBear@protonmail.com Twitter - @FumblingBear
I'm horrible at replying in a timely fashion, but always happy to engage with people.
I haven't had any experiences with exploding head syndrome either, though I do suffer from insomnia sometimes. I've gotten better at managing it nowadays, but for a long time I was unable to get good sleep without medication like Ambien.
Fascinating that we have so much in common though! It's actually really cool to know that although I'm the odd one out when it comes to most of the people I know, there are other people out there with similar forms of neural processing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences :)
My internal monologue is very much like yours, where it's mostly talking to myself the way I would out loud, but there's a deeper layer of abstract... connections?
The analogy of a thought web seems to work well to describe it. It's like a massive web of interconnected thoughts where new patterns and connections are constantly being created to associate relationships between concepts in my head.
I think everyone more or less has that type of underlying mechanism behind consciousness, though that may be a big assumption. What's interesting about mine is that I can often come to conclusions based on lower level abstract reasoning, especially as it relates to visual descriptors, without necessarily being able to articulate how I arrived at those conclusions.
To answer your last question, I don't think I've ever had an MRI done. The reason I was put on so many medications was because in my early 20's I struggled a lot with Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. They were severe enough that I self-admitted to an in-patient care facility to get treatment. During that 2 week period, I went from 2 medications (Zoloft + Wellbutrin) to 14 medications. During the time, I didn't realize that it wasn't normal or okay to be put on that many drugs at once in such a short period of time because I trusted the medical professionals and was in a particularly bad state of mind. In hindsight, I view what they did as incredibly abusive of the trust and faith I had in them.
Fortunately, I didn't have a mental breakdown or anything—I just notified them of my symptoms and they removed a fair amount of the medications. I left the facility with about 7 medications prescribed, to which my normal psychiatrist immediately discontinued the usage of all but the original stuff I was on (which was clearly the right choice).
All that to say, I do have some mental health issues (though therapy and medication has helped alleviate them all), but I'm unsure of whether or not there's a discernible neuronal cause for the aphantasia in particular. I'm considering an appointment with my Primary Care Provider to discuss the worsening of my memory because I've become more and more concerned that the levels of memory loss I seem to experience seems far greater than normal. Maybe that will provide some more insight?
Appreciate your comments and thoughts! It's nice to hear the perspective from someone on the other side of the spectrum!
When I'm tired, my inner dialogue is usually less active than normal, though it's never quite silent. It's more of a difficulty focusing on the streams of consciousness that slowly fades over time until sleep takes me. Sometimes, if I'm fading in and out of consciousness, I will have some imagery, but as far as I can tell, only when actually sleeping.
This can result in moments where something vivid happens in a dream, like a car crash, where I suddenly jolt awake with my heart pounding rapidly. However, I can't continue to imagine the visuals of what happened. I just know that I dreamed I was in a car crash.
>What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau?
If I'm in total darkness, only Eigengrau (thanks for the new word btw!) but if I'm in light, I see kind of a reddish hue that is from the light passing through my eyelids I assume. There are no visuals associated with the eyes closing in a conventional sense. The whole "counting sheep" method of falling asleep never made any sense to me because I didn't realize that people could literally visualize sheep jumping.
>Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...?
Unfortunately, no. I'd love to try some, but in my field of work I have to maintain a security clearance so taking drugs could compromise my job security. In the past, I have been on a cocktail of anti-depressants + anti-anxiety medication that caused me to have vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, but those were with my eyes open, so it just seemed real to me. As soon as I mentioned those symptoms to my psychologist, I was immediately taken off the medications they put me on.
>Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures?
I can't picture memories at all, but I can describe things from my memories. The way I process them is very strangely abstract. There is no visual portion to the memories at all. For example, as I mentioned in another comment, I can't picture what my parents look like, despite having had lunch with them yesterday for Easter. I can describe certain details about them, and have very pleasant associations with them, but I simply can't picture them. The descriptions I could offer up would be particular details I've explicitly observed and remembered about them.
I can't picture pictures either. If someone were to ask me to visualize an "apple" no picture appears, even if I spend a decent amount of time and effort trying to construct a visual. However, I can describe elements of what an apple is. It's sort of like the concept of a platonic ideal of a thing. I know attributes that are associated with the platonic ideal of apple, so by extension I can describe an apple. I just can't picture it. There's no visual reference in my processing for any element of internal thought.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with your visualizations! I'm kind of the opposite. My mind is constantly yapping and I find it hard to fall asleep at times due to the persistent monologue in my head. I tend to listen to podcasts or Youtube while I fall asleep because it lets my mind be quiet and get ready for sleep.
My lived experience is that I can remember key life events to some extent, but there is no visual experience with it. I don't remember what the last house I lived in looked like (less than 2 years ago) but if I were to visit it, I'd clearly recognize it.
One that kind of gets me is that I can't even picture my parent's faces. I can describe them, I have a ton of positive memories associated with them, and feel very strong feelings of love and affection for them, but despite having seen them yesterday for Easter, I can't picture them in my head. In some ways, that's strangely disorienting. It's frustrating to me to feel such a disconnect from things that are __very__ important to me.
But in some ways, it's freeing. I think I have a pretty strong resistance to traumatic imagery, because once it's gone, it's just gone. If I see something disturbing, it doesn't haunt me. I can't imagine terrifying things (at least visually), so when I compare my experience to friends who have hyperphantasia (or at least a decent ability to picture things), there's a lot that can get stuck in their heads that I just can't.
I try not to view the aphantasia as a good or bad thing. It's just part of how I am.
I'm not great at articulating directions to people due to the lack of visualization, and if someone asks me if I know where the x on y road is, I can't ever imagine it, but my general spatial orientation is totally fine and I can pretty competently navigate in both urban and wilderness spaces.
There's like a abstract idea of where I am in relation to other things at any given point, but I don't really know street names or things like that because they're just not that helpful for my ability to get around.
It's strange that I find it so difficult to explain—our brains are just good at compensating for shortcomings I suppose!
I've had some pretty extensive conversations with a buddy in one of the book clubs about this specific subject when we were talking about the ways we interpret a particular series (Malazan: Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson).
When he reads, he sees things as if they were a movie in his head. He has hyper clear visualization of all of the characters, and visual descriptors are very important to his reading because they help clarify the mental imagery that he sees.
For me, I barely remember visual descriptors at all. I have to relate the way certain characters act in a series based on their personalities and relationships to others and visual descriptions of story elements (from character to setting design) don't really matter much to me aside from importance to the narrative or theme.
As a result, I tend to focus a lot more on the meta-narrative, themes, and motifs in a story. That's not to say that he doesn't (we often discuss those things), but we have drastically different experiences when reading. It really enhances the book club, because our perspectives and the things that resonate with us are so different!
For example, combat scenes can be incredibly visceral for him, whereas for me it's more or less a means to an end when it comes to narrative impact. I think in terms of the implications of the results, but he enjoys the fights themselves. I also tend to focus a lot more on the philosophical musings in the text, whereas he finds that dialogue heavy scenes can be a bit boring or less impactful.
Hope that provides some clarity on what reading for someone with aphantasia can be like! Happy to answer any further questions if you have any!
I do have imagery when I dream, but in my waking hours, I __cannot__ picture things in my head. I can reason about objects based on experiences I have with them (i.e. describe them), but there is no "illusory" reference image. There's just nothing. It's difficult to articulate my method of internal processing, other than saying I have a constant internal monologue that is used to bring to mind whatever it is I'm trying to imagine, but imagery is completely non-existent.
Additionally, I've never heard these described as possible symptoms of aphantasia until this article, but "Aphantasia is associated variably with a reduction in both autobiographical memory and face recognition" really resonates with my experience. I don't have many memories from childhood, my adult memories are often vague and more based on feelings that I have of a period in my life rather than concrete details, and I have a difficult time with recognizing actors even if I've seen them in a lot of films.
I also have an exceptionally strong musical memory (borderline encyclopedic). I can quickly memorize music and have near perfect recall even when years go by without listening to it.
I'm with you in excitement towards further studies of these phenomena, but just wanted to chip in with my personal experiences with aphantasia!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
It's immensely frustrating to be watching a video in the photos app and swipe a tiny bit wrong only to lose all current progress in the video even after you swipe back. Even scrubbing controls for long videos (1+ hours) can be super finnicky and it's tough to select accurately. The traditional scrubbing method of holding while moving vertically to scrub at slower speeds doesn't seem to work either.
As a result, I'm often catching myself in frustrating situations where I'd like to just __UNDO__ whatever action I previously took was. Either jumping around a video to the previous timestamp, or undoing the close safari tab button I didn't mean to select, or any number of other things I accidentally press due to the options being just a little too close to each other.
It's just a mild annoyance, but it's something that would massively improve my experience with using the device, as someone who has spent a LOT of time in it nearly every day since release.
When I'm feeling down or depressed, I often want to engage in media that lets me wallow in those feelings as a cathartic sort of release. Would love some type of toggle that allows us to "match" a feeling or "improve" a mood. Sometimes we need a pick-me-up! But sometimes, I want to really sit with the discomfort of grief or loss and reading bleak books can help that resonate with me.
I anticipate within 3-6 months, other major offerings will have been ported over and have relative feature parity with their counterparts but with the benefit of the increased resolution and no screen door effect.
I was a day 1 purchaser who bought it fully expecting the device to just be an early access "dev kit" and have been shocked at how well it's fit into my day-to-day uses for a huge variety of things.
Some of the things I like to do with it:
1. Gaming with friends: I play Baldur's Gate 3 with a group of 4 every week and can very comfortably relax on my recliner while running a discord window and stream BG3 from Geforce Now with an app called Nexus+ just using a ps5 controller. It's a very seamless experience and one of the highlights of my week.
2. Reading comic books: I thing this is one of the most underrated things to do with the Vision Pro. Being able to adjust the size of comic panels to an enormous size helps me appreciate the linework and detail put into every page.
3. Software development/photo + video editing: I use my MacBook Pro + screen mirroring to get a larger screen in an immersive environment that I personally find less distracting to get into a focused state of mind for writing code or creative endeavors like photo + video editing.
4. Entertainment: Watching movies, tv shows, and 180 SBS videos like SliceofLifeVR's content has been awesome and incredibly immersive. I much prefer the Vision Pro to my TV for solo viewing. Obviously, this falls short when looking to share the experience with others, but a lot of my viewing is alone, so it's fine for me.
Things that haven't really worked very well that I wanted to like:
1. Reading books + taking notes: I read a lot for book clubs I host and envisioned this being a great way to have a lot of available space to spread out notes and things during book clubs on discord and just find it to not be particularly enjoyable compared to reading a physical book or kindle.
2. VisionOS Native productivity: I've spent a decent amount of time editing spreadsheets and writing documentation with the VisionOS Native Microsoft Office Suite + PDF readers but find that there's a lot of minor things that add up to make it a less usable product for productivity outside of the context of screen mirroring. I'm going to keep trying to figure out a workflow that works better for me, but just haven't yet.
For context, I'm in my late 20's and live alone currently, so there are a lot of people for whom this device doesn't make as much sense for—I'm solely describing my personal uses for it as a member of the likely target audience.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased that it can do a lot of things that I find fulfilling and entertaining with little to no resistance. I can confidently say that for the tasks I listed above, it's my favorite way of doing them by a pretty large margin.
Additionally, I use the Solo Knit Band (M) for all of my usage with no modifications and find it comfortable for around 5-6 hours with no breaks in wearing it. I fully recognize that this isn't the normal experience for many consumers, and I likely will upgrade to some type of Halo band when a company like BoboVR release an AVP product line, but out of the box, the comfort is more than enough for me to use for extended periods of time with no mods.
Since buying it on release day, I've used it probably 2-4 hours most days with some days of 10-12 hours and some days of no usage and it's become an integrated part of my lifestyle. If anyone has any questions for me, I'd be happy to answer about my experience with it.
Not working on the game or anything but found it moderately amusing as someone who owns the game!
This year I'm hoping to try one of these for the first time :)
I figure it's a pretty unique experience and helps me appreciate some of the local agriculture that's hard to find elsewhere.
It's no different than consumer GPU's. There will be enthusiasts who purchase the GTX 4090 for $2000 but the average consumer is far better off buying something like a 3060Ti for $340.
My favorite example of this is a site called Logical Increments [0] that clearly shows just how expensive pushing to the next tier of quality is as you scale up.
Generally there's 1-2 apps that are native MacOS apps that I require when developing, and the rest could easily be independent windows of safari, slack, teams, whatever to supplement the main screen.
Sometimes, you just know a thing or don't, and for me, spaced repetition cards helped a ton with the static things you just have to memorize (or derive). Knowing definitions is important—you're absolutely right that it's just one piece of the puzzle though.
Another game that did a similar thing (that I'm a HUGE fan of) is Spintronics [0].
It goes a whole step further from just creating analog circuits digitally and lets you build them both online and in board game form. I backed it on kickstarter and was amazed at how well the game turned out. Haven't finished it yet due to life getting in the way, but if you're looking for inspiration, their circuit simulator is available online for free.
As a fan of Zach-likes, I'd definitely be interested and play what you're cooking up :)
When those two things aren't in alignment, you can get a feeling of eye-strain. The way the lenses bend the light make it so the focal length that you're focusing on is further than the screen in front of you, so that isn't what is causing the eye strain.
Mind you, this is just my layman's understanding of the subject, so definitely take it with a grain of salt.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...
The entertainment aspect is a massive draw too—I don't want to downplay it by any means, but people were asking for some of the reasons that I want one, so I was genuinely answering with some of the features I envision using and how.
Additionally, I've spent the months since the announcement reading reviews and stuff from people who __have__ gotten their hands on the headset and they all seem to address any concerns I personally have.
Certainly not pushing anybody else to be impulsive for FOMO, but as an enthusiast, I'm pretty excited and am very fortunate to be able to afford something like this.
That aside, I'd imagine I'll use it for watching movies and tv since I live alone currently and could enjoy the immersion without blocking other people out. I already have a PSVR 2 for gaming so I'm not too worried about the potential or lack thereof for games. One thing I'm going to try out though is game streaming services like Geforce Now. If I can play really high fidelity flat games using a M+KB / Controller on the headset that would be awesome!
I'm sure it won't be perfect or anything, but I'm mostly just stoked about the possibilities I see with this thing.
I find it helps to discuss these things with others because oftentimes I can miss certain parts of a story or interpret events in a way that others interpreted differently. Those types of things can lead to super interesting conversations that teach us more about ourselves and the world around us so it's a fun way to get introspective and learn by deepening relationships with others!
They're usually about 1 hour long conversations that are very free-form, so there's not really a right or wrong way to do it—if you want to give it a shot, just find some people with an interest in reading something together and meet up for discussions!