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But actually it feels more something like:
class Apple {
public:
string color;
string shape;
string taste;
string recipes[];
};
I know what an apple is, I know stuff about it and what properties it has, but it produces no picture (nor code btw...) in my head.
Same here. I know what things should look like and everything but theres no actual picture there, just an abstract concept.
Your recipes are a local string!? Are you storing duplicate recipes for apple pie in your Apple class and your sugar, flour, butter, salt, water, cinnamon, and lemon classes?
This is everything I haven't seen before. If I am running a table top game like D&D my monsters are literally a list of traits and regurgitated descriptions with no visual details in my own mind. This works out pretty well somehow.
5 here. I explain it to people as a relational database.
Solid 1. Reading a book is like watching a movie to me.
My boyfriend used to say that he would never read a book more than once, because he already thoroughly pictured the whole thing. But when watching a movie, he would catch new things on every rewatch. I never understood until now.
I can watch a movie in my head on demand. I thought this was something everyone can do!
Unfortunately doesnt work for movies I haven't seen ;)
I can rotate a cow in my mind.
are lighting and physics applied
they are now
Call me when you can rotate a cow with your mind.
Question: when you picture something in your head, do you actually see it clearly, as if it's right in front of you?
I don't. My girlfriend claims that she does. I can imagine things on a level 2 or 3, but it's just a thought in my head, not a detailed image manifesting in front of me.
I'm a 2 on this scale. I can "see" the image. But it's not like it's in the world in front of me. It's not like 3D goggles have drawn a virtual object on the table in front of me. If I'm picturing a football, I'm not just imagining the football; the picture in my mind is of the lawn, and trees, and sun, and whole environment where I am standing looking down at a football.
When I picture something, I can see it clearly, it's in my mind's eye. I see it, but it has it's own environment. It's like my eyes are outputting the actual primary PC desktop, and my mind's eye is a separate virtual desktop in a different area, but running off the same processor. For people who haven't experienced this, I would describe it like dreaming. In a dream you're seeing things, but not with your eyes. It's like a dream scene, but my eyes are open and I'm getting visual input too.
I often zone out, or miss parts of what people are saying because I can easily start concentrating on my mental imagery. I find online video meetings incredibly difficult to keep up with because I can easily end up re-living some other fun activity I did recently and concentrating on that instead. I have a bunch of fidget toys on my desk to get me through these online meetings (if I focus on the fidget toys, then my mind doesn't go to its secondary virtual desktop).
No, I see things in an internal space that doesn't exist physically.
It's difficult for me to intentionally do; if I'm just thinking it happens naturally but trying to force it to happen so I can study it is difficult. But it's not like I hallucinate objects into the room with me. Like, I'm looking at a table across the room, and I'm imagining a pepsi can sitting on it. My mind re-creates the image of the table with the pepsi can on it.
Something I think I'm noticing: My "mind's eye" doesn't have peripheral vision, I get a fairly narrow field of view that's about like my central vision. I don't imagine in widescreen.
The way I would describe this would be to make another comparison to thinking in general. Do you have an internal narrator, or have songs get stuck in your head? If you do, you are thinking with your "mind's ear," so to speak. If you are at all familiar with this concept, even if you can't imagine absolutely anything you want to hear, it's a great analog for what it's like to use your "mind's eye." In the same way you don't literally hear what you think, you don't actually see what you think either. You just use those parts of the brain to create the sensation and experience it in some way. It doesn't overtake your primary vision and literally activate photon receptors in your eyes, but it can distract you from that sensory information since you're using that area of the brain.
Really I am interested in how literal your girlfriend is there, because if that's not a miscommunication, that just sounds like on-demand hallucination. I could clearly imagine something in front of me. I could manipulate it, I could imagine any of my senses to interact with the object, but at no point does it appear to literally exist in the world as if it's a hallucination. That would be an insane ability to have, and I don't think that's what people generally mean when they use their "mind's eye."
I’ve always thought this was really hard to describe. I think I’m a 1. The idea of fully picturing something is such a natural thing, but I also don’t know what level of vivid people actually mean.
When I picture the apple, I could easily write a detailed paragraph about what it looks like. I could even easily picture an environment for it that just sort of comes into frame (always on an apple orchard, during the afternoon).
I can easily even put myself in that space mentally.
I’ve just never thought about this being something other people can’t naturally and quickly do that when I saw this question, I assumed people were describing actually fully fooling their senses into the thing physically appearing before them.
I picture it like another monitor or render layer that I can flip to, manipulate, and test in to work out concepts.
I'm convinced that most cases of aphantasia are just a result of the difficulty in commutating the experience of visualizing something.
To me, "seeing" something in my mind's eye isn't really similar to actual visual perception. I can imagine an apple and rotate it in my mind but I would describe this as more of an exercise in understanding what that would look like. I can "see" the stem, the striations of color, the shape, the imperfections move as the apple rotates. However, I do not actually visually perceive the apple as if it were a physical object reflecting photons into my eyes, stimulating my retina and causing the conscious perception of the apple. I think this is likely true for others.
If people could actually visually perceive or mentally project whatever they're imagining into their actual vision, then I believe people would be much better at drawing. You could just imagine this vivid image on the paper and essentially trace it.
I've heard the counter argument that this isn't the way drawing works. I still think that most people draw poorly because of the way that your mind's eye works, and not because of the way that drawing works. When they put pencil to paper, the truth about the inadequacy of their visual concept becomes apparent. Their mind was tricking them into thinking they held a complex visual idea but really, it was a vague conception.
I'm convinced that holding something in your mind's is far closer to "understanding" than it is to "seeing".
I can "see" the stem, the striations of color, the shape, the imperfections move as the apple rotates
I have aphantasia, and I can't do this.
I always thought aphantasia was a thing you either had entirely, or not. I thought it ought to be a scale but I never heard anyone say it was until today. I'm a 4.
There was an interesting comment when this image was posted to reddit 6 years ago.
quadraspididilis
I'd call myself a 3, but I don't find the twitter illustration very accurate. The apple isn't low resolution like in the drawing, but it is insubstantial. Like hold your hand a couple of inches in front of one eye and then try to read this; you can still see your hand, but it's mostly see-through because your brain is mostly ignoring that eye. My experience of picturing the apple is like that, but the apple is in focus. Also, I have a hard time holding the image for more than a second.
This is me, but with a very faint ghost hand. I also can't hold it still. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I become a 5. Sometimes if I have an edible I can hold on to images longer.
I feel like i understand so much more now about myself and others. This is why I struggle to make art that isn't just copying something. This is why I struggle with role-playing games.
For most of my life, I assumed 'Close your eyes and picture x' to be a turn of phrase, not something you actually do.
Full on 5. There is no picturing. I can imagine things, I can reason things, but picturing, no, none, nothing.
I find recalling a picture and a smell are the same in my mind I can describe it, but there is no visual.
Solidly 5 (no visual dreams either or much of any sense memory in general) and I thought "picture this" and similar sayings or instruction was figure of speech until aphantasia as a word became popular...less than a decade ago? idk I learned of it during covid I think.
4 1/2. I can "plot" various shapes, etc. but it isn't visual, it's spacial information. It's like an un-rendered car file. Also, the more I concentrate on a detail, the less I perceive of the whole.
I guess when it comes to visualizing things, the apple I'd see would be between a 1 and a 2.
But to me when I try to fully imagine an apple, I also imagine how I can feel the texture of its skin, the weight of it in my hand, the taste and sensation when taking a bite out of it, the smell of the juice, the stickiness of my fingers afterwards, etc.
Or is this also included in the scale? Because then I guess it's a 1.
Between a 4 and a 5. I also have no inner monologue, just thoughts in the form of impulses and instincts
Can you picture other stuff? Anything that’s not human faces? Prosopagnosia is real, and I have it too.
1 i can make a 3d model with full detail color reflections and picture it at any angle
2 when I don’t think about it, 1 with some effort.
A complete 5 for both me and my partner, but her daughter has 1 to the point of "watching movies in her head" when she's bored. Her uncle is the exact same way, at least as a child.
I’m a 5 on this scale. I was 50 years old when I discovered aphasia. When discussing this with my father I realised he has eidetic memory. This prompted me to think back and I remembered that used to see pictures in my head but it changed when I had traumatic head injury at 7 years old.
-1.
I can daydream so hard that it should be studied
It's complicated for me because it's not a specific one? It depends on my present state of mind and stuff, like when I try to visualize an apple I can kind of do it but sometimes it's a little staticky, or my mind just kind of cycles through a bunch of what feel like video feeds? Like memories of times i have seen an apple played as YouTube videos in a series? Except some of them are purely imagined?
Sometimes I can have a pretty much perfect mental visualization of what I'm thinking of though.
I can see a kind of a framework. If I imagine a wooden cottage in a mountain scenery, what I see is just metadata. I "see" the following:
Then I can take a look at the mountain scenery. I "see":
Next, let's take a look at the valley. I "see" for example:
If I "look" at the forest, I "see", among others:
Etc.
But, when I'm "looking" at the trees, I never see the actual tree, only a knowledge of "here's a tree". And while "looking" at the forest, I do not see the rest of the scenery, only the tree. I can of course go back to seeing the whole scenery with the cottage in it, but now I only "see" the information "there is a mountain scenery with a valley, and a cottage exists within the scenery". Okay, the valley has appeared in a more stable fashion now that I've taken a look at the image.
So, shortly put, I do get very precise instructions for how to draw the image, but I do not see the image. The only way I can actually see it is to take physical pencils or an image editing program and actually draw a picture according to the instructions. This is also how my memories work. Everything is just metadata. A very thorough metadata that can be used for drawing a very precise replica of what I have seen, but no real visual information.
I can even "paint" the abovementioned scenery more precisely:
(Et cetera. I could "zoom" into different things in this "image" forever, and yet I cannot see it or anything it. Every time I zoom, I just get more information on what's visible – more "instructions for what to draw" if I ever wanted to make the image visible by bringing it physically to existence. I could also probably make the river flow to some specific direction or have the "undefined coniferous trees" defined more precisely, but those are not "visible" in the original image I got when I chose "a wooden cottage in a mountain scenery" as the image I'll be observing, so it means I'm kind of "painting over" the original image if I define them.)
So I'm a 1, except for faces. Does anyone else get this?
If its a face I know, then it's a 2. But if I'm reading or listening to fiction, faces are more like a 4. Everything else appears in vivid detail when described - clothes, surroundings, etc. - I can even conjure tastes and smells, but I really have difficulty holding onto a face in my mind. It's made me appreciate fan art.
Faces are processed differently by our visual system. There is a condition called prosopagnosia or face blindness which affects about 2.5% of the population. I wonder if there are milder forms that are not as well known or studied.
I have dyspraxia and my facial recognition is utterly shite
Full on 5. Maybe a 4 if I try really hard. But I still have a "big imagination", I just can't see it in my mind.
I have hyperphantasia, according to some crappy online test I took a few months ago.
It certainly has its advantages, like it occasionally combines with my relatively good memory for moments of photographic memory.
But it can also be somewhat depressing at times, like other people get excited to visit some castle or whatever and I'm just like "I've seen a castle before, I can just look at it in my head for the most part", which makes such trips significantly less interesting...
I'm usually 1, sometimes 2 when I'm tired. I can imagine whole storylines as if they were movies, which made planning comic panels super easy to me. I was just imagining the whole scene in my head first and then extracting key frames 😆
I think I'm a 3-4? Its such a hard thing to gauge. I've known people who are 1s and 5s
5 :3