aphantasia
Jul. 22nd, 2016 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaSome number of years ago I stumbled on this blog post, "I don't see anything when I close my eyes".
The author says that he can't mentally "see" objects in his mind—for instance, if asked to imagine a red square, while he knows intellectually what it looks like, he can't really imagine/see it unless it's in front of him.
I found this fascinating to stumble upon, because I thought this was how everyone was. When people talked about seeing a picture in their mind, I thought it was just kind of a figure of speech, but this dude's post + various anecdata indicates most people actually do this, and I'm the weird one for not being able to picture things!
Anyway, this week I found a couple cool articles on this topic! Turns out researchers are starting to look into this, which I find exciting, because it seemed like such a tricky and quirky thing to study that we'd never get actual scientists on it, and yet here we are. Also it has a name now: "aphantasia."
Also, another person reports he's also unable to mentally "hear" music, which is fascinating to me. I can hear music in my mind, quite vividly, and have composed whole songs that way; it feels weird that not everyone can do this.
Other tidbits:
* I'm really curious if there are any good artists with visual aphantasia. I actually liked art a lot as a kid and drew lots up through middle school, but I wasn't excellent at it. I imagine with more training/effort I could've become good, but I wonder if I'd eventually hit difficulties once I got to Serious Business stuff? Like, I can imagine composing music without being able to hear music in the mind, but it'd be a huge pain in the ass, you'd be pretty reliant on synthesizer-like tools to experiment with sounds, and I imagine not having the ability to turn over different approaches in your mind would make iterations/improvements harder. But maybe not!
* Amusingly, I think this explains why I found it so impossible to find an approach for meditation that worked for me. A bunch of meditation guides have stuff like "start by imagining a white dot in your mind," and I think that was supposed to be the easy part, but I would get stuck there, trying and trying to conjure up a thing in my mind that just was not happening. Once I read a guide on walking meditation it all made much more sense.
Also if anyone else shares this experience let me know, because I'm super curious, join the aphantasia club etc etc
The author says that he can't mentally "see" objects in his mind—for instance, if asked to imagine a red square, while he knows intellectually what it looks like, he can't really imagine/see it unless it's in front of him.
I found this fascinating to stumble upon, because I thought this was how everyone was. When people talked about seeing a picture in their mind, I thought it was just kind of a figure of speech, but this dude's post + various anecdata indicates most people actually do this, and I'm the weird one for not being able to picture things!
Anyway, this week I found a couple cool articles on this topic! Turns out researchers are starting to look into this, which I find exciting, because it seemed like such a tricky and quirky thing to study that we'd never get actual scientists on it, and yet here we are. Also it has a name now: "aphantasia."
Also, another person reports he's also unable to mentally "hear" music, which is fascinating to me. I can hear music in my mind, quite vividly, and have composed whole songs that way; it feels weird that not everyone can do this.
Other tidbits:
* I'm really curious if there are any good artists with visual aphantasia. I actually liked art a lot as a kid and drew lots up through middle school, but I wasn't excellent at it. I imagine with more training/effort I could've become good, but I wonder if I'd eventually hit difficulties once I got to Serious Business stuff? Like, I can imagine composing music without being able to hear music in the mind, but it'd be a huge pain in the ass, you'd be pretty reliant on synthesizer-like tools to experiment with sounds, and I imagine not having the ability to turn over different approaches in your mind would make iterations/improvements harder. But maybe not!
* Amusingly, I think this explains why I found it so impossible to find an approach for meditation that worked for me. A bunch of meditation guides have stuff like "start by imagining a white dot in your mind," and I think that was supposed to be the easy part, but I would get stuck there, trying and trying to conjure up a thing in my mind that just was not happening. Once I read a guide on walking meditation it all made much more sense.
Also if anyone else shares this experience let me know, because I'm super curious, join the aphantasia club etc etc
