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IsabellaLinton
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07 Apr 2021, 10:27 am

I have quite severe Aphantasia (inability to picture things visually), and Prosopagnosia (face blindness).

I'm kind of obsessed with printed photographs of people and places from my life. I have thousands carefully arranged in albums, and one of my special interests is collecting vintage frames to display old family pictures. I even print pictures of my ancestors from Ancestry.com and frame them. Photos mean the world to me and provoke really strong emotions.

I just realised that maybe I love photos so much, because I can't picture anything without them. I never made that connection before. The photos allow me to see what I'd otherwise be incapable of visualising. I can't even picture my boyfriend's face without a picture in front of me. It's that bad.

I was wondering if anyone else who has Aphantasia or face blindness loves / collects photos?



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13 Apr 2021, 7:17 am

That is Deep . Were Probably on The Opposite Ends of The Spectrum. i See Everything in a Photo & it Can Affect How i Feel



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22 Apr 2021, 5:32 pm

Sometimes I will print the picture of the person I am working with / for (from the company directory) and hang it on my wall - it helps me to attach the project goals to something concrete.
One of the top "Memory Olympics" memorizes cannot remember faces very well but can remember entire decks of cards and thousands of digits. He decided to try and improve his scores on "memorizing faces" by assigning numbers to facial features like eye color (etc). Josh Foer in his book "Moon Walking with Einstein" said "he figures that if he cold convert faces to numbers then memorizing them would be a cinch".


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Mountain Goat
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22 Apr 2021, 5:39 pm

IsabellaLinton wrote:
I have quite severe Aphantasia (inability to picture things visually), and Prosopagnosia (face blindness).

I'm kind of obsessed with printed photographs of people and places from my life. I have thousands carefully arranged in albums, and one of my special interests is collecting vintage frames to display old family pictures. I even print pictures of my ancestors from Ancestry.com and frame them. Photos mean the world to me and provoke really strong emotions.

I just realised that maybe I love photos so much, because I can't picture anything without them. I never made that connection before. The photos allow me to see what I'd otherwise be incapable of visualising. I can't even picture my boyfriend's face without a picture in front of me. It's that bad.

I was wondering if anyone else who has Aphantasia or face blindness loves / collects photos?


I can struggling picturing what people look like including what I look like at times! I thought this was prosopragnosia?

But I think I only get it with people as I am the opposite when it comez to things like motor vehicles or bicycles. I see patterns that others don't pick up. Yet peoples faces can be a problem if I do not expect to see them.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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23 Apr 2021, 5:15 am

IsabellaLinton wrote:
I just realised that maybe I love photos so much, because I can't picture anything without them. I never made that connection before. The photos allow me to see what I'd otherwise be incapable of visualising.


That makes perfect sense. Good discovery.


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FleaOfTheChill
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23 Apr 2021, 7:38 am

I never got into taking pictures, but now I wish I wish I would have. I can't visualize things in my head at all, and to a lesser degree, I do have some face blindness. I feel you on the boyfriend talk, I can't picture my own children's faces. I can remember the details, and explain them verbally, but do I see them? Nope. At least I had the sense to take pictures of them when they were young.

A few years back, an uncle of mine gave me a few decent sized boxes of old family photos he had gotten when my grandmother died. I have no idea why he didn't want to keep them or give them to one of his own kids...I was into genealogy, so I guess he figured they should go to me. I'm thankful for it. I get to see things like my great grandmother and my grandma and grandpa now when I want to. It's nice. I'm emotionally whacked to say the least ( yay alexithymia) so for me there isn't much of an emotional response from the pictures, but there has to be to some degree, I guess, or I'd never look at them for anything except genealogy research. And I do look at them for no point beyond looking at them, especially my grandparents. I think it's safe to say that I miss them sometimes.

For the most part though, it's the history of those pictures that blows my mind though, and an understanding of how lucky I am to be in possession of those pictures. I even have some tin types and daguerreotypes in there. It's been an interesting side project over the years trying to identify all of those people and how they are related to me. I'm nowhere near done. Thankfully the boxes came with a lot of old letters and labels (thanks to a great great grandmother who had a compulsion for saving and writing down everything), so that helps. I've learned a lot about distant relatives because of all of that stuff.