You say “apple” to me and I’m #1, glossy skin, insides, all that
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5’s are not handicapped in the slightest. They’re so “normal” that mankind is just now figuring out we’re far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
EDIT: Showed this to my wife and she was somewhat mystified as to what I was asking. Pretty sure she’s a 5. I get frustrated as hell when I ask her to describe a thing and she’s clueless. “Did the radiator hose pop off, or is it torn and cracked?” “I don’t know!”
EDIT2: The first Star Wars book after the movie came out was Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. I feel like I got that title. What’s it mean to you?
My sister has #5 and I can ask her to make a response if you want OP.
Last we talked about it she said if she tried really hard she can see come colors and shapes but that’s about it.
The best conversation about it we ever had went something like this (keep in mind were both autistic and when together dont always communicate like neurotypical people do):
*while driving*
her: “get in that turn lane to the right”
*i do the 👆hand tricks and turn*her: “when I don’t want to do that I always think in my head ‘never eat soggy waffles’ and remember that east is left and right is west”
me: “that’s not even correct, but like WHY would you do that??”
her: “to remember how to turn”
me: “why wouldn’t you just do the hand things?”
me: “like imagine them in your head and-”her: “MUST BE NICE HUH?”
*we both explode in laughter*she didn’t even mean to make a joke about it, that’s just genuinely the way she remembers lefts and rights
also this meme has become a common occurrence whenever the topic is brought up
Also a pretty interesting thing I remembered while writing this is a clip on TV (can’t remember what show it was) where they asked a room of people to draw a bicycle then they made it IRL by welding it and told them to ride it a block or two and back. Only 1 of ~15 did it correctly, one girl got it exactly but forgot the peddles. Pretty interesting how they could all imagine a bike but couldn’t draw it correctly
The left/right story might be a different thing. Was in my 40s until I could instinctively know left from right. Before that I would snap my left fingers, or mime it, because I’m sinister and can’t snap my right.
Only way I got better was saying to myself, “This is bullshit and you’re all growed up. Work on this thing.” Somehow I got better, can’t say how.
I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I’m a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
The left/right story might be a different thing.
very well could be, our genetics are a concoction of adhd, autism, anxiety, depression, etc etc
i used to be able to know without doing the L R hands in highschool, but I guess that skill faded over time 🤷♀️
personally it’s not big enough of an issue for me to do anything about bc taking a wrong turn is way more embarrassing than doing a L R hand.I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I’m a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
that’s interesting, my sister has done some stuff with a CAD program for 3d printing and it wasn’t an issue for her. What specifically do you have trouble with?just realized you were probably talking about a mental map rather than a 3d modeling program 😂, my sister has the same issue and hates driving because of it
Do you guys sometimes also get the weird feeling of: “this is my body, this is planet earth, this is my flat and I live here.” Sometimes that happens. And when that happens, I usually think about things like how the universe came to be the big bang, the laws of physics fighting each other until settling on a seady state. Then the Earth is created, millions of years of evolution go by and here you are, sitting on the toilet. The entire chain of thought only lasts for about five seconds and then you’re again stuck with the feeling of “I am back here on planet Earth”. Do you guys also get that sometimes?
That’s what happens when you get character switched to.
Kinda? I usually drift about how the hell we even reached our current situation from the beginning of the universe; how, despite being a huge collection of cells and bacteria, we understand ourselves as a single unit
Yes, though it’s when I start thinking about my layman’s understanding of quantum mechanics or other small science, then I look around and think, “How the hell? What is this and why am I in it.”
No
I don’t know how to explain it but mine is in constant flux.
I’ll bounce between full on 3d animated cutscenes to like “Old ass TRON style wireframes of the object”
I have severe 5 aphantasia. It was such a relief when a name was put to it.
Hahaha same! I started asking every person I know about it because I was so curious. Like, that can’t be real, you can’t see stuff. But everyone I know seems to have some level of actual visualization except me. And I am an okay artist, just need references and a lot of trial & error when drawing.
Is this new, somehow? I’ve always recognized that the people around me think differently. I even recognized that there was a spectrum.
I’m definitely a #1, and always recognized that about myself. I’m like to write, and I think that activity demonstrates the spectrum well. Stephen King once said that he doesn’t understand why people struggle with writing. He just pictures the story in his head, and writes what he sees. When I read that, I instantly recognized myself. That’s how I write.
But I also know that some people write almost like they are putting together a puzzle. They choose certain words that go together well, and they are constructing their narrative brick by brick. I think poetry is often constructed like that, and I think those prose writers have a more poetic sensibility than others, and that sort of writing reflects it. That might explain why I really don’t care for that style of writing much, because I am extremely bad at poetry. That construction style just doesn’t work for me.
5 here … I just recently learned that mind’s eye actually meant an image.
am I the only one like this?
We’re a 1, we can see, smell taste and even move the apple around along with an entire environment around it.
What we can’t do very well is thinking with words, though that has slowly been changing the past few years where we can think a little bit with words, however it’s mostly thoughts as emotions, objects and feelings of action.
Instead of thinking “I need to walk to the kitchen for water” we just think of ourselves physically getting up and getting the water with the sense of urgency and need. BuT when speaking/writing the way we do that is by remembering the visual words and hope they’re spelled out physically and what emotions/visuals connect with. Ie a physical apple in our mind have connections to the physical feelings of saying “Apple” [c.Eng], “manzana” [c.Esp], “りんご” [c.Jp] then each of those would have connections to spellings, grammatical connections, factoids, etc kinda like a language web.
But yeah anywho idk if anyone else thinks like that but it makes learning different languages hard, having to learn Spanish rn is like a full time job and after this we’re learning German, Dutch and then some other languages for the challenge/fun.
One time I had a dream about the ascii game I played. I dreamed it both IN TEXT, and my brain produced images of the people, places, and things at the same time as I usually imagined them.
This one is a cluster fuck for me… I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.
Don’t really know how that fits in.
Face blindness (prosopagnosia) seems a different thing altogether, though you would think they’re related.
Thats so weird! As I was reading one of the other comments I realized that I can almost live in the fantasy world of a book, but no one has a distinctive face…
Yep, this is my club. Also, I can only remember few faces of people I went to high school with. Others are just blurred to central attributes.
Other thing is, for long I noticed that peoples faces fall in distinct groups according to their appearence even though they are not related. I always thought that they had a similar distant ethnic background and that genes relating to appearance had a type of “quanta” that can’t be completely diluted, which causes faces to fall in groups.
Now I’m starting to realize that it’s just me and my face-blindness averaging my memories of peoples appearances, creating those groups.
We have hardware in the brain wired to recognize faces. For some people it’s not working too well, independently of the other abilities.
What do you mean to the point of putting it in real space in your hand? Like you can just hallucinate it at will and view it with your eyes open as if its in the room with you?!
this is just language semantics. you’re not special
Either that or aphantasia, a well documented phenomena, is a thing.
People aren’t good at describing their own thoughts.
Riiight, but like, I can make some shit up about a fancy ass apple “The surface is mostly red, mottled with large swaths of not yet ripe green and yellow patches. It’s waxed, shiny skin reflects rays of a nearby lightsource behind me. There’s a slight bumpiness to it, almost like goosebumps, but not as pronounced, with darker spots at the apex of each peak. My mouth is watering.”
Meanwhile, if I try to picture an apple I actually don’t see shit because I have aphantasia, so…
Not everyone is like you.
i definitely believe you
Well, I believe the scientific literature.
How ignorant do you have to be to believe people cant accurately describe not having actual images in their mind.
How unobservant do you have to be to see that people are talking past each other on this subject?
Except they arent. There are multiple clinical studies on this.
For those who are a 4 or 5 on this diagram: What are your dreams like?
They can be amazing or terrible. Fly, go through days in dreams, sex, get chased by a monster. Lucid dreams. I also have sleep paralysis, so it can get pretty fucked up. It’s like having another life. Best part is I should be too old to have nocturnal emissions. Worst part is you can be so scared you wake yourself up (and your partner) by screaming. Or, in a few instances, choking or hitting your partner in your sleep.
But you see things vividly in your dreams?
Like, I’m a 1 on this scale. I remember and imagine very visually. I can picture an apple sitting on a plate on a table and it looks real. In fact, my mind imagined it being slid onto the table, and the apple rocked on the plate as it slid to a stop. My imagination has a physics engine.
I also dream vividly, the experience feels very lifelike. The few lucid dreams I had tended to fade quickly when I realized I was dreaming. I’d love to be able to cause, and then maintain, that state.
Pretty lifelike. Full color/sensory immersion, even to the point of feeling things like cold, heat, wind, hearing loud noises, smells etc. Sometimes, if ive been really sleep deprived, it can take me a solid few minutes to realize Im even awake and in the “real world”.
I’m a 5. Dreams are fine. As realistic as I want them to be.
I’m probably about a 4, maybe 3.5, on this scale. It kinda sucks not having any idea what it’s like to actually be able to visualize things, so I don’t even really know what I’m missing.
Kinda the point of the headline. Apparently you’re not missing much or the ancients would have figured it a handicap, named it and studied it.
Far from a handicap, I was reading that scientists and mathematicians are mostly 5s. Maybe you can save CPU cycles and think in more abstract terms?
I’m a software engineer, so that tracks.
Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.
I am definitely a number 1, I couldn’t imagine not being able to imagine. I can go beyond one. I can visualize the apple and taste it as I begin to eat said apple.
Discover the trick as a kid, when denied food from my abusive mom boyfriend. He made me stand in a corner while they ate dinner. I used this skill to bring a cheeseburger into existence and then began to eat it. Even felt full afterwards. Of course that sensation only lasted couple hours, but was still interesting trait to discover.
Solid 5 here. And I love to read. I love the smell of books, I love the feeling in my hands and I love the stories of course. I don’t have an image of an character in my head, I don’t have an image if the landscape, but I still enjoy it.
