Aphantasia poll

Post Reply New Topic

IGNORE THE POLL IT'S F*****G CRAP. I SHOULDN'T HAVE POSTED IT. IT'S JUST ONE MORE THING FOR PEOPLE TO TREAT ME LIKE A F*****G IDIOT OVER.

^You are no idiot firemonkey! I always appreciate your posts.

The whole point is that it is very difficult to define aphantasia. Especially from the inside. We all only know what we know, and have absolutely no idea about what lies outside of that.
I feel there is a LOT of useful information here. There are connections between aspects of this that are fascinating. The problem is that wherever we try to draw a line between categories of people, it turns out the line is fuzzy, or in the wrong place, or not there at all. We are stuck with the quandary of trying to put into boxes, things which don't fit into boxes.

Seconded. Hope my previous comment wasn't taken as a put-down. It wasn't that at all.

I apologise for losing my rag.

Close your eyes and imagine a red star.What picture do you see?



For me it's definitely 1.

Me definitely six.

I can tell you every modern nation that was once part of the ancient Roman Empire. I can visualize a map of modern Eurasia and north Africa, and can superimpose of map of the ancient Roman Empire on top of it, and then can just tick off what I see in my head. Its like breathing. Nothing to it. Italy in, France in, Greece in, England and Wales in, Scotland outside, Germany part in and part out, Syria in, Israel in, and so on.

But thats just in two D.

Apparently, some folks can do that in three D. There is a chemist here who 'sees' three dimensional molecules in his head. And some engineer talked about being able to rough draft three D engines in his head before he even got to the drawing board.

I "saw" 6. Then I thought about it and "saw" a very small, fairly bright, slightly orangy dot on a blackish background, much the same as how Mars looks in real life when viewed from Earth without a telescope.

I totally get this … and it can cause great frustration . Especially if they say with your minds eye, picture this ?
????? Uhm yeah right ?????? What do I see ? I close my eyes and usually that is a shade of blue inside my eyelid .
WHAT..WHAT..WHAT…. It’s only blue in there . Or used to be purple for a longtime ( a deep shade of purple)

You probably already know this, but "picturing" things doesn't usually refer to making yourself "see" things just as you would if your eyes perceived the real things they were looking at. That would be a rare gift. It's a more vague kind of "seeing" than that.

Possibly, visual imagination could be demonstrated to a subject and to observers by getting the subject to perform with closed eyes a new task normally requiring actual vision in a room that was reasonably familiar to them. If they succeeded then they must have had enough visual imagination to do it. If they failed then that would suggest total aphantasia. But it assumes there are no other mechanisms by which the task could be achieved. The subject wouldn't be allowed to feel their way around. I sense it's an imperfect test but offhand I can't think why.

Uhm… this might be a oddity, but , I got nothing except the inside of my eyelids .

Seems I may have other compensations my brain does to make up for this issue.
I do conceptualize well . And sometimes every so often can form resulting image?? At the end of extensive conceptualizations . Usually have to be in, The process of a physical issue.

I'm the polar opposite of aphantasia. I can see the red star ("6") in my mind's eye, though I don't literally see it. For me to literally "see" stuff with my closed eyes, I'd have to be in an altered state such as a deep meditative or dream state (I sometimes lucid dream).

I can visualize something 3d, turn it around, etc. I can visualize a building or structure I'm going to walk around in, in my mind's eye.

Nonetheless, I don't literally see it. I can just visualize it really vividly. Vividly enough to get lost in what I'm visualizing and tune the rest of the world out. But it's not the same as literally "seeing"