“There are variants in everything human.”
August 6, 2024 2:09 AM Subscribe
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images? Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.
i have aphantasia and facial blindness and am always curious as to whether they're connected. If you have one or the other, do you have the other?
I also wonder if they're connected to these "brain issues" I have:
- never had a hangover
- don't dream
- cannot determine people'a age (even approx)
- can't draw worth a damn
- handwriting is inconsistent
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch
posted by dobbs at 2:52 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I also wonder if they're connected to these "brain issues" I have:
- never had a hangover
- don't dream
- cannot determine people'a age (even approx)
- can't draw worth a damn
- handwriting is inconsistent
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch
posted by dobbs at 2:52 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
The fMRI evidence make me think of the idea of the bicameral mind, and beyond that the idea of multiple overlapping threads of mind which have varying levels of interaction with each other. That the thread that happens to be the one speaking happens or happens not to interweave tightly with the threads internally seeing.
posted by lucidium at 2:59 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
posted by lucidium at 2:59 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
My wife has aphantasia; she describes being completely unable to visualise anything at all. Instead, she says it's primarily emotion and feelings associated with the thing being imagined. She can describe things vividly though, including visual information; she could imagine and describe a red crispy apple that tastes tart, for example, and how it feels to pick it up or eat it, but she would have no mental 'picture' of it at all. She 'just knows' that information.
I have a fairly strong visual imagination; I describe it as being somewhat like the star trek holodeck, but also knowing it's unreal, and difficult to hold multiple focuses (e.g. an apple floating above a beach with a gentle surf; I can 'focus' on one of those in great detail, but the other parts fade into background until I switch focus), so we've had a number of interesting conversations about this. Our kids both take after me.
The only time this has an noticeable impact for her is when it comes to decorating; I can easily visualise how the living room would look like with say, the sofa moved over there and the bookcase over here, while she prefers to measure things up and use graph paper and little pieces of paper - or just test it in the real world. Similarly for painting the walls; I can hold a picture of the room in my head and 'flip' through different colours easily enough; she can imagine the colours, or the room, but struggles with putting the two together. We've found a 'paint the room' site quite useful in that regard to provide pictures of the room in different shades.
She also hated those captchas where you have to rotate pictures to find the one that doesn't match; she breaks them down into relationships between sub-elements and finds those, but it's quite slow, while I just merrily rotate them in my head. Fortunately they're rarer these days (presumably as easily solvable by bots now)
I can't say we've noticed any particular advantages to aphantasia, but her mental health is significantly better than mine, despite similar stressors, so maybe TFA is correct that it may help buffer mental stress with not being able to visualise angry, shouting people!
edit: missed on preview, she does not have facial blindness at all. She can even describe faces of people she knows, but reports not 'seeing' them at all.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:02 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I have a fairly strong visual imagination; I describe it as being somewhat like the star trek holodeck, but also knowing it's unreal, and difficult to hold multiple focuses (e.g. an apple floating above a beach with a gentle surf; I can 'focus' on one of those in great detail, but the other parts fade into background until I switch focus), so we've had a number of interesting conversations about this. Our kids both take after me.
The only time this has an noticeable impact for her is when it comes to decorating; I can easily visualise how the living room would look like with say, the sofa moved over there and the bookcase over here, while she prefers to measure things up and use graph paper and little pieces of paper - or just test it in the real world. Similarly for painting the walls; I can hold a picture of the room in my head and 'flip' through different colours easily enough; she can imagine the colours, or the room, but struggles with putting the two together. We've found a 'paint the room' site quite useful in that regard to provide pictures of the room in different shades.
She also hated those captchas where you have to rotate pictures to find the one that doesn't match; she breaks them down into relationships between sub-elements and finds those, but it's quite slow, while I just merrily rotate them in my head. Fortunately they're rarer these days (presumably as easily solvable by bots now)
I can't say we've noticed any particular advantages to aphantasia, but her mental health is significantly better than mine, despite similar stressors, so maybe TFA is correct that it may help buffer mental stress with not being able to visualise angry, shouting people!
edit: missed on preview, she does not have facial blindness at all. She can even describe faces of people she knows, but reports not 'seeing' them at all.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:02 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
flabdablet, you can have my mental radio station, I don't want it. It likes to ruin my sleep by playing Van Halen's Jump (or something equally boisterous) two hours before my alarm is set to go off :/
I don't think it's connected to aphantasia, though. I have no trouble visiualizing things, but the radio is going all the time.
posted by antinomia at 3:23 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I don't think it's connected to aphantasia, though. I have no trouble visiualizing things, but the radio is going all the time.
posted by antinomia at 3:23 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
Can't visualize worth shit. Can recognize faces OK but only after I've seen them a lot.. Very bad at describing them; ask me what colour somebody's eyes are and I typically won't be able to tell you. Frequently astonished to find that an actor whose performance I'm enjoying is the same person whose performance I've also enjoyed in some other production. I often disappoint my beloved by failing to notice new clothes or haircuts until they're pointed out to me. No worse at guessing ages of faces I'm actually looking at than most people I know.
Dreaming is fully immersive including visuals, sound, touch, proprioception, emotion. I draw reasonably clear and well proportioned diagrams but trying to draw sketches, even of things I'm looking at directly, just wastes everybody's time. Handwriting quality is OK but suffers from lack of regular practice. Good at 3D spatial rearrangement puzzles even when presented as images. Good sense of place in space and judging how well things are going to fit in gaps, which comes in handy when parking.
What seems to be happening with my visual memory is that I pretty much exclusively store extracted feature sets rather than raw imagery, and that converting extracted features back into imagery just doesn't work.
Temperamentally very calm, though I think most of that is down to having spent many years deliberately cultivating patience as a reaction to teenage rage and frustration being so uncomfortable.
I can get hangovers without even drinking, just by being made to wake up before my body clock gives me permission to. That clock is fucked up as well, having only the most tenuous relationship with the day/night cycle. If I give it free rein, I cycle at a roughly 26 hour rate and the only way I can sustain anything close to a 24 hour cycle is by staying up all night and sleeping to mid-afternoon.
posted by flabdablet at 3:26 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
Dreaming is fully immersive including visuals, sound, touch, proprioception, emotion. I draw reasonably clear and well proportioned diagrams but trying to draw sketches, even of things I'm looking at directly, just wastes everybody's time. Handwriting quality is OK but suffers from lack of regular practice. Good at 3D spatial rearrangement puzzles even when presented as images. Good sense of place in space and judging how well things are going to fit in gaps, which comes in handy when parking.
What seems to be happening with my visual memory is that I pretty much exclusively store extracted feature sets rather than raw imagery, and that converting extracted features back into imagery just doesn't work.
Temperamentally very calm, though I think most of that is down to having spent many years deliberately cultivating patience as a reaction to teenage rage and frustration being so uncomfortable.
I can get hangovers without even drinking, just by being made to wake up before my body clock gives me permission to. That clock is fucked up as well, having only the most tenuous relationship with the day/night cycle. If I give it free rein, I cycle at a roughly 26 hour rate and the only way I can sustain anything close to a 24 hour cycle is by staying up all night and sleeping to mid-afternoon.
posted by flabdablet at 3:26 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
Van Halen's Jump
Thanks for that. Too kind.
posted by flabdablet at 3:29 AM on August 6 [9 favorites]
Thanks for that. Too kind.
posted by flabdablet at 3:29 AM on August 6 [9 favorites]
I'm aphantasic, which I only realised in my 40s. Like many, I'd just assumed that when people talked about seeing images in their minds while awake, vision was being used as a metaphor.
I'm somewhere between a 4 and a 5 on the scale shown in the article. I can design and build complex 3D things, but there's essentially no visual element when I'm thinking about them. It's more like I'm feeling them with my hands and describing them with words. I can think about colour and texture and place things in a three-dimensional space, but I don't 'see' anything - it's all conceptual.
I do dream in images, and even in colour, so I know what the experience is like in abstract. If you're not aphantasic, I'd describe it to you as being a bit like trying to call up the detail of something in a dream that you mostly forgot just after you woke.
Being able to see clear images in my head when I'm awake would probably be overwhelming if I was able to do it now. Like a psychedelic trip with no way out.
posted by pipeski at 3:39 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I'm somewhere between a 4 and a 5 on the scale shown in the article. I can design and build complex 3D things, but there's essentially no visual element when I'm thinking about them. It's more like I'm feeling them with my hands and describing them with words. I can think about colour and texture and place things in a three-dimensional space, but I don't 'see' anything - it's all conceptual.
I do dream in images, and even in colour, so I know what the experience is like in abstract. If you're not aphantasic, I'd describe it to you as being a bit like trying to call up the detail of something in a dream that you mostly forgot just after you woke.
Being able to see clear images in my head when I'm awake would probably be overwhelming if I was able to do it now. Like a psychedelic trip with no way out.
posted by pipeski at 3:39 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I'd just assumed that when people talked about seeing images in their minds while awake, vision was being used as a metaphor
I know, right? Finally working out that this was not a metaphor but rather something that most people just do on the regular was mind-blowing for me. And yeah, thinking about that, it probably took me until my 40s as well.
posted by flabdablet at 3:51 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
I know, right? Finally working out that this was not a metaphor but rather something that most people just do on the regular was mind-blowing for me. And yeah, thinking about that, it probably took me until my 40s as well.
posted by flabdablet at 3:51 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
Being able to see clear images in my head when I'm awake would probably be overwhelming if I was able to do it now. Like a psychedelic trip with no way out.
I'm between a 1 and 2. It has its advantages when you're bored - I can just lean back in the chair and let my mind wander through virtual landscapes. Tranquil rural fields, with beautiful flowers, bright yellow rapeseed crops and scruffy hedgerows, or walking along a near white sandy beach with the tropical waters gently running up in a light surf, dappled sunlight from the light, fluffy clouds, no people except maybe far in the distance, walking their dog or flying a kite... It's restful. Or if I'm making something, I can visualise and try things out without putting hands on anything.
Less fun is how my mind can leap to visualise threats; walking in the real world in a forest or dark street at night can be near terrifying, with snakes slithering through the undergrowth at my feet, or WTF was that lighter flash of something behind that tree/corner; plastic bags, a big piece of white moss, an ad board, all of them can be transformed into threats in a fraction even when my logical mind reminds me there are no bears or big cats outside zoos here, and very few human predators interested in me.
And pre-dreams as I'm falling asleep are often a litany of my failures, and clear visuals of places when I felt most alone and in despair, everything almost as vivid as the day I was there (one particular one from my early 20's, alone in the rain, leaning against a brick wall in an empty street, with nowhere really to go and feeling like no-one cared if I stayed alive is a regular repeat), or a running display of disappointed or angry faces of those I know when they find out how much of a fraud I am... but that's depression for ya.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:59 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I'm between a 1 and 2. It has its advantages when you're bored - I can just lean back in the chair and let my mind wander through virtual landscapes. Tranquil rural fields, with beautiful flowers, bright yellow rapeseed crops and scruffy hedgerows, or walking along a near white sandy beach with the tropical waters gently running up in a light surf, dappled sunlight from the light, fluffy clouds, no people except maybe far in the distance, walking their dog or flying a kite... It's restful. Or if I'm making something, I can visualise and try things out without putting hands on anything.
Less fun is how my mind can leap to visualise threats; walking in the real world in a forest or dark street at night can be near terrifying, with snakes slithering through the undergrowth at my feet, or WTF was that lighter flash of something behind that tree/corner; plastic bags, a big piece of white moss, an ad board, all of them can be transformed into threats in a fraction even when my logical mind reminds me there are no bears or big cats outside zoos here, and very few human predators interested in me.
And pre-dreams as I'm falling asleep are often a litany of my failures, and clear visuals of places when I felt most alone and in despair, everything almost as vivid as the day I was there (one particular one from my early 20's, alone in the rain, leaning against a brick wall in an empty street, with nowhere really to go and feeling like no-one cared if I stayed alive is a regular repeat), or a running display of disappointed or angry faces of those I know when they find out how much of a fraud I am... but that's depression for ya.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:59 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
i have aphantasia and facial blindness and am always curious as to whether they're connected. If you have one or the other, do you have the other? ✅
I also wonder if they're connected to these "brain issues" I have:
- never had a hangover ❌
- don't dream ✅
- cannot determine people'a age (even approx) ✅
- can't draw worth a damn ✅
- handwriting is inconsistent ✅
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch just a terrible memory overall
One thing I’ve always wondering, as someone who listens to a lot of guided meditations (but never visualises them), when you are told to ‘feel yourself sinking into the chair/bed’ do people actually feel or visualise this?
posted by ellieBOA at 4:05 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I also wonder if they're connected to these "brain issues" I have:
- never had a hangover ❌
- don't dream ✅
- cannot determine people'a age (even approx) ✅
- can't draw worth a damn ✅
- handwriting is inconsistent ✅
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch just a terrible memory overall
One thing I’ve always wondering, as someone who listens to a lot of guided meditations (but never visualises them), when you are told to ‘feel yourself sinking into the chair/bed’ do people actually feel or visualise this?
posted by ellieBOA at 4:05 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Also I’m a 4 on their scale and I can hear music in my mind.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:09 AM on August 6
posted by ellieBOA at 4:09 AM on August 6
Tranquil rural fields, with beautiful flowers, bright yellow rapeseed crops and scruffy hedgerows
Here's one for you from the internal DJ
posted by flabdablet at 4:15 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Here's one for you from the internal DJ
posted by flabdablet at 4:15 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
In theory this could be addressed by going Options/Display/Preferences and removing the ticky from the 'no internal visual Display' checkbox. What we didn't plan for is that the user won't imagine the Preferences menu now.
posted by Ashenmote at 4:26 AM on August 6 [11 favorites]
posted by Ashenmote at 4:26 AM on August 6 [11 favorites]
I totally have this, never thought about it until once in a philosophy class the professor told us to close our eyes and picture a purple cow, then when we'd done that asked questions like "Was it facing left or right or straight at you? Did it have an udder? Did it have horns?" Mine was like a haze of purple at best. I also have face blindness to an extent and tend to recognize people by their hairstyle or if they have something especially distinctive about them (in that same philosophy department, I tended to mix up the professors who had grey hair and beards, there were so many of them.)
I do also have a constant musical soundtrack in my head that is very vivid (right now it's playing "Jump", thanks for that.) I just went to Youtube to check and see if I was "hearing" it in the right key- I was!
posted by Daily Alice at 4:34 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I do also have a constant musical soundtrack in my head that is very vivid (right now it's playing "Jump", thanks for that.) I just went to Youtube to check and see if I was "hearing" it in the right key- I was!
posted by Daily Alice at 4:34 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I am hyper fantastic 🙂 - the opposite of aphantasia. I have a powerful visual imagination. I can often conjure up a scene from memory and notice things I'd not noticed at the time. This is a flawed process and prone to false memories, but often it's accurate too. I'm also fairly face blind. I can draw well, but I often don't recognise people I know.
I also have continuous musical ear worms.
posted by Zumbador at 4:37 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I also have continuous musical ear worms.
posted by Zumbador at 4:37 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I'm aphantasic - not faceblind, have hangovers, dream but have trouble remembering them, can't draw for shit.
Like others I only found out late in life that other people can actually see things in their mind, always thought it was a metaphor
posted by mbo at 4:41 AM on August 6
Like others I only found out late in life that other people can actually see things in their mind, always thought it was a metaphor
posted by mbo at 4:41 AM on August 6
That scale doesn't capture my experience. I can visualise, and I think it's photorealistic, but only things I've actually seen, and only for a split-second - not long enough to focus on the image to get a proper look at it; not long enough to see it move. Stuff I can't do, for instance:
Other sense imaginations are pretty strong. When I look at something, I know what it would feel like to touch it. Reading a book, if a character puts a coffee cup down, I have a strong sense of the coffee cup being near their right hand on the table. I have music in my head at all times; I also have a constant inner voice (that's how I think, and if external noise drowns it out, I can't think and it's awful). I have no trouble imagining the smell of thyme, or the flavour and crunch of cucumber. I know how it would feel to pick up something heavy, and to put it down again. I can conjure the sense of sinking into a chair or bed, I just can't see the way my view of the room changes as I do so.
And my dreams are immersive, photorealistic, in full video. I know I'm falling asleep when I start visualising stably enough for the pictures to move.
When I have a migraine, sometimes the aura phase removes my ability to visualise completely, so that it's just blank inside my head. When that happens, I also can't make proper sense of what I'm seeing in front of me. I have to read words one letter at a time, and then work out what that spells. I look at someone and I see eyes, a nose and a mouth, but they don't make a face. I can still do mental arithmetic, but I can't solve anagrams, which seem to involve some kind of fast visual processing.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 4:46 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
- the exercise at the start of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, drawing a person's face from memory (I can't hold anyone's face in my mind for long enough to draw it)
- meditation / self-hypnosis exercises in which you walk along a beach, or imagine your consciousness floating up above your head, or really visualise anything at all
- picture a purple elephant with a top hat on? No - I can do "purple" and "elephant" and "top hat", but only one at a time. The elephant doesn't stay put long enough for me to turn it purple or set a hat on its head. (But if I'd seen a picture of a purple elephant with a top hat on, I could get a glimpse of that picture.)
- memory techniques involving picturing things in specific places or in weird combinations
- revisiting memories at all immersively. I can get a flash of how my childhood home looked from the driveway, but I can't go in and walk around.
Other sense imaginations are pretty strong. When I look at something, I know what it would feel like to touch it. Reading a book, if a character puts a coffee cup down, I have a strong sense of the coffee cup being near their right hand on the table. I have music in my head at all times; I also have a constant inner voice (that's how I think, and if external noise drowns it out, I can't think and it's awful). I have no trouble imagining the smell of thyme, or the flavour and crunch of cucumber. I know how it would feel to pick up something heavy, and to put it down again. I can conjure the sense of sinking into a chair or bed, I just can't see the way my view of the room changes as I do so.
And my dreams are immersive, photorealistic, in full video. I know I'm falling asleep when I start visualising stably enough for the pictures to move.
When I have a migraine, sometimes the aura phase removes my ability to visualise completely, so that it's just blank inside my head. When that happens, I also can't make proper sense of what I'm seeing in front of me. I have to read words one letter at a time, and then work out what that spells. I look at someone and I see eyes, a nose and a mouth, but they don't make a face. I can still do mental arithmetic, but I can't solve anagrams, which seem to involve some kind of fast visual processing.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 4:46 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
Some implications for therapy: Five things I’ve learned about aphantasia as a therapist.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:56 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:56 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
Another face blind person, between 2-3 on the scale. I'd describe what I visualize as a bad AI rendering.
Let's talk about the other things:
- Internal 24/7 radio ✅
- never had a hangover ✅ (But I've been drunk under 5 times)
- don't dream ❌ (I do, just mostly about people I don't know or haven't met)
- cannot determine people's age (even approx)❌ (I have some ideas)
- can't draw well ✅ (only by tracing haha)
- handwriting is inconsistent ✅
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch ??? (Not sure)
-Mental mathematics ????? (with finger counting)
-Anagrams ✅ (but wordle is sometimes hard even with the right letters)
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 4:59 AM on August 6
Let's talk about the other things:
- Internal 24/7 radio ✅
- never had a hangover ✅ (But I've been drunk under 5 times)
- don't dream ❌ (I do, just mostly about people I don't know or haven't met)
- cannot determine people's age (even approx)❌ (I have some ideas)
- can't draw well ✅ (only by tracing haha)
- handwriting is inconsistent ✅
- terrible memory for things I see but incredible memory for things I hear or touch ??? (Not sure)
-Mental mathematics ????? (with finger counting)
-Anagrams ✅ (but wordle is sometimes hard even with the right letters)
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 4:59 AM on August 6
Internal DJ: yes, but the jerk doesn't take requests.
Hangover: I had an EXTREMELY nasty one once when I was younger and never drank like that again. Drinking enough to get tipsy and silly = no problem.
Dreams: really vivid.
Peoples' age: I can guess
Can't draw: can't draw.
Handwriting: consistently horrible.
Memory: honestly it's remembering peoples' names that gets me.
Math: I'm not good at calculating stuff in my head, I'm fine with concepts
Anagrams: no problem
What I'm bad with is directions. If I'm going someplace I've been many times, but approaching from a different direction, I get super confused. And even when looking at a map I know north/south is up/down, but I have to consciously remind myself west is left and east is right. When trying to follow choreography/exercise instructions (raise your left hand then move your left foot sideways) I get confused easily.
Also a lot of ADHD traits, fwiw.
posted by Foosnark at 5:15 AM on August 6
Hangover: I had an EXTREMELY nasty one once when I was younger and never drank like that again. Drinking enough to get tipsy and silly = no problem.
Dreams: really vivid.
Peoples' age: I can guess
Can't draw: can't draw.
Handwriting: consistently horrible.
Memory: honestly it's remembering peoples' names that gets me.
Math: I'm not good at calculating stuff in my head, I'm fine with concepts
Anagrams: no problem
What I'm bad with is directions. If I'm going someplace I've been many times, but approaching from a different direction, I get super confused. And even when looking at a map I know north/south is up/down, but I have to consciously remind myself west is left and east is right. When trying to follow choreography/exercise instructions (raise your left hand then move your left foot sideways) I get confused easily.
Also a lot of ADHD traits, fwiw.
posted by Foosnark at 5:15 AM on August 6
I have:
- Aphantasia (absolutely no visual imagery)
- About 90% face blind
- I dream, with vivid images. Sometimes when I'm almost asleep I can deliberately visualize things or people. (Or I dream that I can.)
- I can draw but only from a photograph. Nothing from memory.
- Internal radio, and I can play back any song I'm familiar with in my head or even imaginary ones (If you said "Imagine Willie Nelson singing David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes with an orchestra" I can do that.)
- I can do pretty good math in my head but it's all tricks I've learned. (52 x 6: 50 x 6 is 300, 2 x 6 is 12, add them)
- Sound is the only sense I can "internalize". I don't smell things when I think of them or feel things when I imagine touching them.
- Pretty good at anagrams but sometimes I write the letters in a different order to solve them
- Almost no sense of direction.
Speaking of migraines, once in my 30s my wife had a bad migraine and asked me to navigate through a building because "the map in her head had disappeared." I said "MAP in your HEAD?" and that's when I realized I had no mind's eye and other people did...
posted by mmoncur at 5:22 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
- Aphantasia (absolutely no visual imagery)
- About 90% face blind
- I dream, with vivid images. Sometimes when I'm almost asleep I can deliberately visualize things or people. (Or I dream that I can.)
- I can draw but only from a photograph. Nothing from memory.
- Internal radio, and I can play back any song I'm familiar with in my head or even imaginary ones (If you said "Imagine Willie Nelson singing David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes with an orchestra" I can do that.)
- I can do pretty good math in my head but it's all tricks I've learned. (52 x 6: 50 x 6 is 300, 2 x 6 is 12, add them)
- Sound is the only sense I can "internalize". I don't smell things when I think of them or feel things when I imagine touching them.
- Pretty good at anagrams but sometimes I write the letters in a different order to solve them
- Almost no sense of direction.
Speaking of migraines, once in my 30s my wife had a bad migraine and asked me to navigate through a building because "the map in her head had disappeared." I said "MAP in your HEAD?" and that's when I realized I had no mind's eye and other people did...
posted by mmoncur at 5:22 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I have a brilliant older sibling who is asphantastic and has prosopagnosia. Some years ago we tried comparing memories of our childhoods, and it was striking how very different our memories are. I probably count as a maladaptive daydreamer, but I also have prosopagnosia. I was staggered when she told me that she would probably not recognize the park we played in when we were kids, if she were dropped into it unexpectedly today; I find myself back in that park under trees that have long ago disappeared retracing the paths between the hills perhaps on a weekly basis. I know where individual tree roots were, and where the grass was bald under individual trees. I know it minutely. But then, it is also my happy place, the place I go deliberately to reset my feeling of being safe and where I belong.
When we finally were able to figure out the oldest common location that my sibling did remember, it was the street we lived on when she was already in university, at that time only coming home in the summer - and what she could remember was the feeling of the dip in the sidewalk a few steps before our gate. That was important to her because it meant she was about to be home. She certainly couldn't remember if the house was made of brick, or what colour it was painted. She could only remember spatial lay out.
But her primary means of thought is relationships and ratios. She's a programmer and complex systems and pattern variations are easy and natural for her. She always wins card games because she always remembers every card she has seen, and then effortlessly forgets them when the next card game begins, never muddling if the seven of spades was played already in the last game or this one.
It makes sense that she should have prosopagnosia. She has no visual memory to speak of. But why do I have prosopagnosia? I am just as capable of seeing faces in clouds and the floral patterns of curtains as anyone else - I have the infantile face-seeking instinct. I just have a terrible ability to match faces and features. I can remember someone's nose - but I can't remember who has that nose, or put it together in my mind's eye with their cheekbones or their eyes. I can remember their eyes, but you don't get to stand that close to people, and I can't put it together with their mouth - which I could remember - but I have to know them really really well before the shape of their philtrum is an easy mental construct. It turns out I can't remember names unless I know something salient about a person, and then I can remember their name - and only after I learn their name can I reliable recognize them in their usual context. Outside of that context I draw a blank. If I don't know anything personal about you, I can't remember who you are. I have a vague idea that there were several women at the meeting and some of them were blonde... but anyone of them could have said any of the points that were raised. They are all interchangeable. Needless to say school and my work life was problematic as a result of this. How do you not recognize someone you work with everyday?
As a young adult I was curious about my deficiency in remembering and recognizing people, although I hadn't yet heard of prosopagnosia, or realized how very challenged I was in this respect. I had a bus commute, and I studied the people taking the bus with me, trying to figure out if I had ever seen them before. As soon as I made up or observed things about them, it all started to stick. The man who wore the same beige raincoat and always blew his nose when he got on the bus got the name "Snuffy". A probably-not-conventionally-attractive woman with curly dark hair who was conventionally dressed and made up got the name "The Pretty" - and now I can't forget them. I know the way her hair looked in 1980, when seen from one side, I can instantly bring back the sense of the weight of it and the different colours in as it brushed against her shoulders in a three quarters profile. I can easily remember the flick of the handkerchief Snuffy used, the tail of it trailing as he whisked it back away again into his pocket... They are probably both dead and yet they are somehow as vivid as they were five years after I stopped taking that bus.
My sister reads voraciously, plenty of fiction. I thought perhaps my ability to create images in my mind came from being a voracious reader of fiction and creating images from the descriptions I was constantly reading. But since her reading didn't give her the ability to create visual images, that can't be why I can do it.
And meanwhile my ability to create visual images has been steadily decreasing through my life. As a small child I could create a full wide screen panorama of detail, a rain drenched forest with the glistening green light, swaying flower heads heavy with moisture, the humidity, the stirring air, the feeling of barometric pressure in my nose and ears and blood vessels, the crumby soft red soil - it was as sharp as being there and it was primarily visual. But as the decades tick by the visual component is fading. It's becoming words, spatial awareness and tactile and kinetic recreation only. I think the constant voice over of my thoughts is taking over the other perceptions and if I were to live long enough, some day I would only think in the sound of my own voice, droning. Images now require me to zero in on them. If I think apple, I have to actively construct the dappling of a royal gala or the deep hue of a red delicious, or the green the denotes an under ripe Macintosh...
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:27 AM on August 6 [9 favorites]
When we finally were able to figure out the oldest common location that my sibling did remember, it was the street we lived on when she was already in university, at that time only coming home in the summer - and what she could remember was the feeling of the dip in the sidewalk a few steps before our gate. That was important to her because it meant she was about to be home. She certainly couldn't remember if the house was made of brick, or what colour it was painted. She could only remember spatial lay out.
But her primary means of thought is relationships and ratios. She's a programmer and complex systems and pattern variations are easy and natural for her. She always wins card games because she always remembers every card she has seen, and then effortlessly forgets them when the next card game begins, never muddling if the seven of spades was played already in the last game or this one.
It makes sense that she should have prosopagnosia. She has no visual memory to speak of. But why do I have prosopagnosia? I am just as capable of seeing faces in clouds and the floral patterns of curtains as anyone else - I have the infantile face-seeking instinct. I just have a terrible ability to match faces and features. I can remember someone's nose - but I can't remember who has that nose, or put it together in my mind's eye with their cheekbones or their eyes. I can remember their eyes, but you don't get to stand that close to people, and I can't put it together with their mouth - which I could remember - but I have to know them really really well before the shape of their philtrum is an easy mental construct. It turns out I can't remember names unless I know something salient about a person, and then I can remember their name - and only after I learn their name can I reliable recognize them in their usual context. Outside of that context I draw a blank. If I don't know anything personal about you, I can't remember who you are. I have a vague idea that there were several women at the meeting and some of them were blonde... but anyone of them could have said any of the points that were raised. They are all interchangeable. Needless to say school and my work life was problematic as a result of this. How do you not recognize someone you work with everyday?
As a young adult I was curious about my deficiency in remembering and recognizing people, although I hadn't yet heard of prosopagnosia, or realized how very challenged I was in this respect. I had a bus commute, and I studied the people taking the bus with me, trying to figure out if I had ever seen them before. As soon as I made up or observed things about them, it all started to stick. The man who wore the same beige raincoat and always blew his nose when he got on the bus got the name "Snuffy". A probably-not-conventionally-attractive woman with curly dark hair who was conventionally dressed and made up got the name "The Pretty" - and now I can't forget them. I know the way her hair looked in 1980, when seen from one side, I can instantly bring back the sense of the weight of it and the different colours in as it brushed against her shoulders in a three quarters profile. I can easily remember the flick of the handkerchief Snuffy used, the tail of it trailing as he whisked it back away again into his pocket... They are probably both dead and yet they are somehow as vivid as they were five years after I stopped taking that bus.
My sister reads voraciously, plenty of fiction. I thought perhaps my ability to create images in my mind came from being a voracious reader of fiction and creating images from the descriptions I was constantly reading. But since her reading didn't give her the ability to create visual images, that can't be why I can do it.
And meanwhile my ability to create visual images has been steadily decreasing through my life. As a small child I could create a full wide screen panorama of detail, a rain drenched forest with the glistening green light, swaying flower heads heavy with moisture, the humidity, the stirring air, the feeling of barometric pressure in my nose and ears and blood vessels, the crumby soft red soil - it was as sharp as being there and it was primarily visual. But as the decades tick by the visual component is fading. It's becoming words, spatial awareness and tactile and kinetic recreation only. I think the constant voice over of my thoughts is taking over the other perceptions and if I were to live long enough, some day I would only think in the sound of my own voice, droning. Images now require me to zero in on them. If I think apple, I have to actively construct the dappling of a royal gala or the deep hue of a red delicious, or the green the denotes an under ripe Macintosh...
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:27 AM on August 6 [9 favorites]
ManyLeggedCreature, my mental images are also super transient. Little blips of approximated images. This can feel pretty reasonable when picturing something in passing, like the landscapes mentioned upthread, but falls apart when I’m actually asked to close my eyes and imagine something. I get a series of fuzzy possibilities at best, like my visual cortex is throwing out some half rendered sketch mockups of various possibilities of what an apple could look like. Generally not with clear definition or color unless it’s specified directly. Like, I don’t even know how color can be fuzzy, but it is?
Also moderately faceblind here. I recognize people better than I can picture their faces, for obvious reasons.
posted by deludingmyself at 5:32 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
Also moderately faceblind here. I recognize people better than I can picture their faces, for obvious reasons.
posted by deludingmyself at 5:32 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
This topic reminds me of the recent study that found that perhaps as many as 50% of people do not have inner monologues. So, I ask those of you here with aphantasia: do you have an inner monologue or not? I wonder how those things might combine and what that is like.
I have a vivid "mind's eye", but about 10 years ago I had an eye stroke that seriousy impacted my regular vision, and since then my dreaming is hyper-realistic, as if my brain is trying to keep my waking perception of the world going.
posted by briank at 6:01 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I have a vivid "mind's eye", but about 10 years ago I had an eye stroke that seriousy impacted my regular vision, and since then my dreaming is hyper-realistic, as if my brain is trying to keep my waking perception of the world going.
posted by briank at 6:01 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
MonkeyToes, that therapy link is absolutely eye-opening! Thank you, I shall be printing that out and taking it along to my next counselling session.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:04 AM on August 6
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:04 AM on August 6
My visualizations are flickery images that won't stay still...and it wasn't until a recent conversation that I realized that was at all unusual. I'd read an article on aphantasia, curious about what people must go through--the poor things, unable to see objects in their minds like us normal people--and then read about how normal people were able to hold clear, steady pictures in their mind. Then I started asking friends--when you see things, do they hold still? Or do they mutate and change constantly, like one of those early AI videos? Can you picture a string of numbers well enough to read it--or a string of letters? And I was shocked by how they could just, like, see a word in their imagination, without it warping and shifting and changing around.
I've tried to figure out if there's some timing to it. If I'm really engaged in trying to visualize something, it does seem like there's a sort of...beat?...rhythm?...to its changes, but when I tried to time them (using a keyboard timer to tap out the changes), the whole thing fell apart and I couldn't get a picture at all.
At some point in thinking about it, I realized this is also my trouble with driving directions--roads sort of jumping around, snaking around to come out in different places than they're supposed to, when I'm trying to picture how to get somewhere. (Luckily GPS does not have this problem.)
I wish I knew what to do about it! Practice doesn't appear to help. Is it just something neurological? (Wait, is that covered in TFA? I have a strange nerve problem that won't let me read the article before commenting...)
posted by mittens at 6:08 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I've tried to figure out if there's some timing to it. If I'm really engaged in trying to visualize something, it does seem like there's a sort of...beat?...rhythm?...to its changes, but when I tried to time them (using a keyboard timer to tap out the changes), the whole thing fell apart and I couldn't get a picture at all.
At some point in thinking about it, I realized this is also my trouble with driving directions--roads sort of jumping around, snaking around to come out in different places than they're supposed to, when I'm trying to picture how to get somewhere. (Luckily GPS does not have this problem.)
I wish I knew what to do about it! Practice doesn't appear to help. Is it just something neurological? (Wait, is that covered in TFA? I have a strange nerve problem that won't let me read the article before commenting...)
posted by mittens at 6:08 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
So, I ask those of you here with aphantasia: do you have an inner monologue or not?
I do not have aphantasia but I also do not have an inner monologue - I thought they were metaphorical! I can "hear" a voice in my head if I do it on purpose, but I don't have any sort of verbal commentary going on all the time. (I do often get the brain radio, though, generally pretty clearly and accurately.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:10 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I do not have aphantasia but I also do not have an inner monologue - I thought they were metaphorical! I can "hear" a voice in my head if I do it on purpose, but I don't have any sort of verbal commentary going on all the time. (I do often get the brain radio, though, generally pretty clearly and accurately.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:10 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I used to feel like I had perfectly good visual imagery but I eventually realized that it's not actually very visual. When I read a book, I certainly feel like I'm visualizing the scenes. If you tell me to picture an apple floating above a beach with a gentle surf or a purple elephant with a top hat, I can do it and I can tell you things about the image. The view at the beach is out toward the water from the sand, the apple is red, it's floating ten feet or so above the edge of the water. It's a cartoon elephant facing me almost head-on, its trunk is slightly curled, the top hat is black.
But if I try to really examine the mental image I realize how vague it all is. In fact, I'm not sure there's really a visual element to it after all. It feels visual. I have information that normally comes from seeing - spatial relationships, colors. But it's like I have that information without really actually seeing anything.
And many aspects of the image are entirely unspecified. Does the elephant have tusks? Can I see its tail? Unspecified. I feel like the cartoon image has outlines, but are they black or white? I'm not sure. Are there clouds in the sky at the beach? Unspecified.
posted by Redstart at 6:11 AM on August 6 [6 favorites]
But if I try to really examine the mental image I realize how vague it all is. In fact, I'm not sure there's really a visual element to it after all. It feels visual. I have information that normally comes from seeing - spatial relationships, colors. But it's like I have that information without really actually seeing anything.
And many aspects of the image are entirely unspecified. Does the elephant have tusks? Can I see its tail? Unspecified. I feel like the cartoon image has outlines, but are they black or white? I'm not sure. Are there clouds in the sky at the beach? Unspecified.
posted by Redstart at 6:11 AM on August 6 [6 favorites]
Recently someone must have been going through very old threads, and favorited a comment of mine in this 2015 thread about aphantasia. It was fun to revisit that thread as a result, and folks who are interested in this might enjoy reading that one too.
It's still true that I'm somewhere around a 4 on that visual scale, although honestly the scale doesn't even really make sense to me because what's actually happening is that I'm thinking about the flower in words, not really visualizing it at all, though if I actively try I can maybe get a vague idea of an image.
I don't have prosopagnosia, exactly - I know someone who does have it and I'm nowhere near as incapable of facial recognition as she is. But I'm not good at faces, either. It takes me many times of meeting someone to get even a slightly handle on what they look like. And after 25 years with my partner if we go off separately in a store I'm still not entirely certain I'm going to recognize him when I find him again, as I can't really picture him when we're apart. (But I always do recognize him when I do find the aisle he's in.)
I'm not really sure whether I'd say I have an interior monologue, but I would say my internal life is very words-based. Closer to the written word than the spoken word, though. I'm less hearing a voice than I am writing or reading a text about my experience.
posted by Stacey at 6:25 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
It's still true that I'm somewhere around a 4 on that visual scale, although honestly the scale doesn't even really make sense to me because what's actually happening is that I'm thinking about the flower in words, not really visualizing it at all, though if I actively try I can maybe get a vague idea of an image.
I don't have prosopagnosia, exactly - I know someone who does have it and I'm nowhere near as incapable of facial recognition as she is. But I'm not good at faces, either. It takes me many times of meeting someone to get even a slightly handle on what they look like. And after 25 years with my partner if we go off separately in a store I'm still not entirely certain I'm going to recognize him when I find him again, as I can't really picture him when we're apart. (But I always do recognize him when I do find the aisle he's in.)
I'm not really sure whether I'd say I have an interior monologue, but I would say my internal life is very words-based. Closer to the written word than the spoken word, though. I'm less hearing a voice than I am writing or reading a text about my experience.
posted by Stacey at 6:25 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
So, I ask those of you here with aphantasia: do you have an inner monologue or not?
Yes, and sometimes it gets stuck on particular phrases and won't shut up. Often I realize I'm actually subvocalizing my inner monologue, moving my tongue and possibly also my jaw a little.
posted by Foosnark at 6:29 AM on August 6
Yes, and sometimes it gets stuck on particular phrases and won't shut up. Often I realize I'm actually subvocalizing my inner monologue, moving my tongue and possibly also my jaw a little.
posted by Foosnark at 6:29 AM on August 6
I'm probably a 1.5 (I don't have the fully-photographic recall I think is implied in a 1) and also whatever phrase describes being able to...feel in my imagination? Like:
when you are told to ‘feel yourself sinking into the chair/bed’ do people actually feel or visualise this
100%, and it only requires a bit of effort to keep my adhd brain from rabbiting away off to something else. I would say I feel the feeling more than visualize it, but upon examination I suppose I kinda am visualizing it too.
I'm not great at faces, especially if there's anything more prominent - glasses, a hat, a distinct hair style or color - my mind will grab onto that instead of the facial features.
Huge inner monologue, and often multiple voices as I have several parts with their own perspective and desire to yammer on about it.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:32 AM on August 6
when you are told to ‘feel yourself sinking into the chair/bed’ do people actually feel or visualise this
100%, and it only requires a bit of effort to keep my adhd brain from rabbiting away off to something else. I would say I feel the feeling more than visualize it, but upon examination I suppose I kinda am visualizing it too.
I'm not great at faces, especially if there's anything more prominent - glasses, a hat, a distinct hair style or color - my mind will grab onto that instead of the facial features.
Huge inner monologue, and often multiple voices as I have several parts with their own perspective and desire to yammer on about it.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:32 AM on August 6
I’m face blind to the point that I can’t recognize my own family in a crowd. But I have an excellent visual mind. When I’m reading I tend to “see” what’s happening like I’m standing off to the side watching the action. When I remember scenes in books I love I don’t remember the words, I remember what I visualized. When I can’t sleep I visualize old spaces I loved and walk through them, opening drawers and poking around. My dreams are lush and include 5 senses, I can eat, read, smell, touch, and hear. I have a good sense of direction, find it easy to navigate with maps and aerial imagery, and can pretty much always tell you which way is north.
I also can’t draw, have terrible handwriting, and no sense of pitch so I can’t sing or play an instrument.
Brains! They are weird!
posted by lepus at 6:35 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I also can’t draw, have terrible handwriting, and no sense of pitch so I can’t sing or play an instrument.
Brains! They are weird!
posted by lepus at 6:35 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
DOS vs Mac
posted by fairmettle at 7:19 AM on August 6
posted by fairmettle at 7:19 AM on August 6
What I'm bad with is directions.
Thank fuck for Google Maps and Waze!
MonkeyToes, that therapy link is absolutely eye-opening!
People with hypophantasia have worse nightmares than the rest of us ‼️
On my way to therapy now and sharing so many things from that article!
posted by ellieBOA at 7:56 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Thank fuck for Google Maps and Waze!
MonkeyToes, that therapy link is absolutely eye-opening!
People with hypophantasia have worse nightmares than the rest of us ‼️
On my way to therapy now and sharing so many things from that article!
posted by ellieBOA at 7:56 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I'm aphantasiac and people always ask me how I can remember what people look like, or describe things I've seen if I don't visualize it and I'm always kind of weirded out by that question. I mean, I just remember. Do neurotypical people actually call up a vision of something and then describe that vision instead of just remembering that, for example, Trump has a terrible combover? Isn't that kind of slow? Like, step one invoke inner vision somehow, step 2 examine vision, step 3 actually remember that Trump's hair is awful?
I may be on the not so intense end of the aphantasia spectrum, I'm bad at faces but not actually face blind, I dream but I don't really recall dreams in any detail after I wake up.
And the whole "inner monologue" thing also kinda weirds me out. I'm all, normal people actually hear voices that don't exist but I'm the neuroatypical one? You sure about that?
Sure, my thoughts are often in words but they're words not sounds. Like, how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator speaking the words instead of just reading them?
I think, I analyze thoughts, I plan and consider, why would that have to go through the extra and time wasting step of transforming those thoughts into an audio stream?
And if I'm in a really good flow state I can bypass words altogether and just THINK without any intermediary between me and the thought which is so much faster than words can ever be. I don't manage to get my brain into that sort of high flow state often but when I do I feel like I accomplish a lot more than I do when I'm forced to think in words.
posted by sotonohito at 8:11 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I may be on the not so intense end of the aphantasia spectrum, I'm bad at faces but not actually face blind, I dream but I don't really recall dreams in any detail after I wake up.
And the whole "inner monologue" thing also kinda weirds me out. I'm all, normal people actually hear voices that don't exist but I'm the neuroatypical one? You sure about that?
Sure, my thoughts are often in words but they're words not sounds. Like, how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator speaking the words instead of just reading them?
I think, I analyze thoughts, I plan and consider, why would that have to go through the extra and time wasting step of transforming those thoughts into an audio stream?
And if I'm in a really good flow state I can bypass words altogether and just THINK without any intermediary between me and the thought which is so much faster than words can ever be. I don't manage to get my brain into that sort of high flow state often but when I do I feel like I accomplish a lot more than I do when I'm forced to think in words.
posted by sotonohito at 8:11 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
those of you here with aphantasia: do you have an inner monologue or not?
Yes, and it competes with the internal radio station, a bit like how voice-guided navigation on a phone will break into the music when it needs to say something about an upcoming turn. I can also play with it, giving it different accents and attitudes and so forth. This is a bit fraught - for a while there I was stuck with Albert the Drunk, who is kind of belligerent, really doesn't want to leave, and would leak into my actual speech if I wasn't concentrating on it.
Mostly what my inner world is is absurd. I imprinted on Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies as a kid, and routinely map quite a lot of the human behaviour I encounter onto those archetypes.
how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator speaking the words instead of just reading them?
I'm a fast reader and for me the inner narrator is more like an epiphenomenon than an essential part of the process. I can hear my own mind reading "aloud" in here but I don't have to re-analyze what I'm saying; the meaning of the writing arrives slightly ahead of the sound of it. A possibly related skill is that I can ruin somebody else's train of spoken thought by echoing back everything they say delayed by about a tenth of a second, like a human version of Benn Jordan's speech jammer. I don't need to understand what they're saying in order to do that, but even so it only works in English.
posted by flabdablet at 8:25 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
Yes, and it competes with the internal radio station, a bit like how voice-guided navigation on a phone will break into the music when it needs to say something about an upcoming turn. I can also play with it, giving it different accents and attitudes and so forth. This is a bit fraught - for a while there I was stuck with Albert the Drunk, who is kind of belligerent, really doesn't want to leave, and would leak into my actual speech if I wasn't concentrating on it.
Mostly what my inner world is is absurd. I imprinted on Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies as a kid, and routinely map quite a lot of the human behaviour I encounter onto those archetypes.
how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator speaking the words instead of just reading them?
I'm a fast reader and for me the inner narrator is more like an epiphenomenon than an essential part of the process. I can hear my own mind reading "aloud" in here but I don't have to re-analyze what I'm saying; the meaning of the writing arrives slightly ahead of the sound of it. A possibly related skill is that I can ruin somebody else's train of spoken thought by echoing back everything they say delayed by about a tenth of a second, like a human version of Benn Jordan's speech jammer. I don't need to understand what they're saying in order to do that, but even so it only works in English.
posted by flabdablet at 8:25 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I have pretty much total aphantasia. I found out that most people weren't like this 30 years ago in college when my cognitive psychology prof told me I was lying when I said that the visualization theory of mind couldn't be true because I literally didn't see anything in my head.
As for the other things people are mentioning:
I think in abstract, kinesthetic, and verbal ways.
I have a continuous inner monologue and can't imagine life without it.
I occasionally hear music in my head.
I have moderate face blindness.
I make visual art successfully IMO. But I can't draw from memory.
I have a pretty bad memory, esp. long term memory.
I can't conjure tastes or smells in my mind, but I cook well and experience those senses well.
I dream in technicolor.
I do have depression and other mental health issues.
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:27 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
As for the other things people are mentioning:
I think in abstract, kinesthetic, and verbal ways.
I have a continuous inner monologue and can't imagine life without it.
I occasionally hear music in my head.
I have moderate face blindness.
I make visual art successfully IMO. But I can't draw from memory.
I have a pretty bad memory, esp. long term memory.
I can't conjure tastes or smells in my mind, but I cook well and experience those senses well.
I dream in technicolor.
I do have depression and other mental health issues.
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:27 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
Like, how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator speaking the words instead of just reading them?
I do have an inner monologue but it isn't required or anything. I don't hear text unless I want to. And it generally shuts up when I'm making art.
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:28 AM on August 6
I do have an inner monologue but it isn't required or anything. I don't hear text unless I want to. And it generally shuts up when I'm making art.
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:28 AM on August 6
normal people actually hear voices that don't exist but I'm the neuroatypical one?
"I hear voices. But I ignore them and just carry on killing." - Sean Lock
posted by flabdablet at 8:32 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
"I hear voices. But I ignore them and just carry on killing." - Sean Lock
posted by flabdablet at 8:32 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
Oh and I'm also easily overwhelmed by noise and visual stimulus. We associate this with autism but I'm definitely not autistic. I don't know if there might be some sort of connection with my aphantasia or if I just have my own unique set of brain quirks.
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:38 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
posted by quiet wanderer at 8:38 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
> how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator
This made me curious, so I had a look for research on reading speeds. Apparently on average, people read only a little faster than they speak, 238 wpm vs 183.
posted by lucidium at 8:41 AM on August 6
This made me curious, so I had a look for research on reading speeds. Apparently on average, people read only a little faster than they speak, 238 wpm vs 183.
posted by lucidium at 8:41 AM on August 6
I'm a professional artist and feel like I'm about a 4 on this scale.
- Internal 24/7 radio ❌ (it shows up sometimes with a song fragment on loop but goes away after a while, also I have found a song that I can mentally play for a bit to get rid of an earworm)
- never had a hangover ❌ (not many, I don't drink much, and I try to drink a lot of water when I do)
- don't dream ❌ (I have a massive pile of dream notebooks, I don't remember every night's dreams and have never managed a lucid dream)
- cannot determine people's age (even approx) ❌
- can't draw well ❌ (it's literally my job, has been since the turn of the century, I can sit down and just start drawing shapes and end up with some dramatic perspective shot that would have taken kid me forever to work out the hard way)
- handwriting is inconsistent ❌ (I have put time and energy into deliberate choices about my letterforms)
- decent memory I guess? I never really think about it. More gaps in finding words now that I'm past fifty.
Now that I think about it I have a very well-trained mind's eye that can do some complex things, but it has absolutely no connection to the part of my brain that turns visual input into things I am Actually Seeing. With a little effort I can imagine a rotating purple elephant with a top hat and a flirtatious look and nothing else (I draw furry porn, I can imagine the heck out of that) all I want but I can't see it sitting in a chair next to me like Roger Rabbit matted over a film plate.
There's a story in Chuck Jones' autobiography: one day one of the animators in his studio had a car crash and a concussion; when he came back to work he could crank out drawings a lot faster, because now he could imagine the final images as being projected on the paper and trace them off. I have gotten a tiny taste of this in the past when very high on the right strains of marijuana but it's hard to really maintain, there's a Ballmer Peak happening here where if I get too high then my mind's eye goes either entirely offline or starts looping on nonsense like "triangles that are also spirals if you turn them in the correct five-dimensional way", and neither of those is really conducive to drawing, or really having a very good time.
It is relatively simple to train your mind's eye, just go find a good course on drawing and make it a constant part of your life for a half a decade. But going from "there is a place in the back of my head where I can imagine things" to "I can splice my imagination into the processing pipeline from my eyes to my lived experience" is not something I think we as a society really know how to do.
posted by egypturnash at 8:52 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
- Internal 24/7 radio ❌ (it shows up sometimes with a song fragment on loop but goes away after a while, also I have found a song that I can mentally play for a bit to get rid of an earworm)
- never had a hangover ❌ (not many, I don't drink much, and I try to drink a lot of water when I do)
- don't dream ❌ (I have a massive pile of dream notebooks, I don't remember every night's dreams and have never managed a lucid dream)
- cannot determine people's age (even approx) ❌
- can't draw well ❌ (it's literally my job, has been since the turn of the century, I can sit down and just start drawing shapes and end up with some dramatic perspective shot that would have taken kid me forever to work out the hard way)
- handwriting is inconsistent ❌ (I have put time and energy into deliberate choices about my letterforms)
- decent memory I guess? I never really think about it. More gaps in finding words now that I'm past fifty.
Now that I think about it I have a very well-trained mind's eye that can do some complex things, but it has absolutely no connection to the part of my brain that turns visual input into things I am Actually Seeing. With a little effort I can imagine a rotating purple elephant with a top hat and a flirtatious look and nothing else (I draw furry porn, I can imagine the heck out of that) all I want but I can't see it sitting in a chair next to me like Roger Rabbit matted over a film plate.
There's a story in Chuck Jones' autobiography: one day one of the animators in his studio had a car crash and a concussion; when he came back to work he could crank out drawings a lot faster, because now he could imagine the final images as being projected on the paper and trace them off. I have gotten a tiny taste of this in the past when very high on the right strains of marijuana but it's hard to really maintain, there's a Ballmer Peak happening here where if I get too high then my mind's eye goes either entirely offline or starts looping on nonsense like "triangles that are also spirals if you turn them in the correct five-dimensional way", and neither of those is really conducive to drawing, or really having a very good time.
It is relatively simple to train your mind's eye, just go find a good course on drawing and make it a constant part of your life for a half a decade. But going from "there is a place in the back of my head where I can imagine things" to "I can splice my imagination into the processing pipeline from my eyes to my lived experience" is not something I think we as a society really know how to do.
posted by egypturnash at 8:52 AM on August 6 [1 favorite]
My visual imagination is, from what I can tell, extremely rich and detailed by most standards. However, the most minute details are forever changing, squirming around frame-to-frame like the way Hollywood prefers to visually represent LSD. That isn’t how I see things, but when I imagine things the surface texture always swims slightly, continuously.
I assume this is why when an Art Director explains what they want to an artist in a review meeting, I can correctly guess the exact framing, composition and even color balance of the image the artist will create, but no amount of years of practice will ever, ever allow me to draw it myself. I “see” it, but I can’t draw a perpetually moving target.
And this is probably why I love working with AI-generated art so much. An initial fixed render for me to take and manipulate in Photoshop, or go back and modify the starting structure with ControlNet.
Because I already know exactly what I want, but after years of frustration I am 100% certain that no amount of practice or effort will ever, ever budge the needle on my ability to draw things myself. I need a third party at a very specific step in the loop, and I aggressively do not want some other monkey injecting their vision into the process.
Stable Diffusion with ControlNet is, for someone like me, very nearly the ideal tool.
posted by Ryvar at 10:06 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I assume this is why when an Art Director explains what they want to an artist in a review meeting, I can correctly guess the exact framing, composition and even color balance of the image the artist will create, but no amount of years of practice will ever, ever allow me to draw it myself. I “see” it, but I can’t draw a perpetually moving target.
And this is probably why I love working with AI-generated art so much. An initial fixed render for me to take and manipulate in Photoshop, or go back and modify the starting structure with ControlNet.
Because I already know exactly what I want, but after years of frustration I am 100% certain that no amount of practice or effort will ever, ever budge the needle on my ability to draw things myself. I need a third party at a very specific step in the loop, and I aggressively do not want some other monkey injecting their vision into the process.
Stable Diffusion with ControlNet is, for someone like me, very nearly the ideal tool.
posted by Ryvar at 10:06 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
Like many others, I thought all of this was just different shadings of figures of speech until a few years back.
I'm completely aphantasic and have zero inner monologue. When I think of how things look or sound, or think about relations between abstract concepts, I use something that is in no way visual or auditory or verbal. I can only describe it as though thought were a sense in and of itself.
I'm fascinated by the idea (from the article) that this is all somehow to do with signal integration / blocking. It makes it feel like maybe one day I could just cross my brain in the right way like those Magic Eye images and have an inner light turn on.
Weird adjuncts:
- I get uncontrollable earworms very often (Summer of '69 for 3 weeks whilst working in a call center was probably the nadir...) but I emphatically don't hear them.
- I have very poor name / face recall unless I make a concerted sustained effort after meeting someone irl.
- I have an extreme (you could call it photographic only... damn figures of speech again!) navigational sense and memory. I can walk a new trail all day, walk around a city for the first time or drive somewhere new and then reliably repeat the same route years later for the second time. When I'm doing this I know what landmarks are coming up next that I'm going to look for, and I can describe them in advance.
- I do (I think) have visual dreams sometimes, but my dream memory is incredibly fleeting so this is more of a gut impression. I have very rarely "heard" a voice saying my name or a single word when in sleep transition, and I find this absolutely terrifying, it starts me awake with my heart racing.
posted by protorp at 10:49 AM on August 6
I'm completely aphantasic and have zero inner monologue. When I think of how things look or sound, or think about relations between abstract concepts, I use something that is in no way visual or auditory or verbal. I can only describe it as though thought were a sense in and of itself.
I'm fascinated by the idea (from the article) that this is all somehow to do with signal integration / blocking. It makes it feel like maybe one day I could just cross my brain in the right way like those Magic Eye images and have an inner light turn on.
Weird adjuncts:
- I get uncontrollable earworms very often (Summer of '69 for 3 weeks whilst working in a call center was probably the nadir...) but I emphatically don't hear them.
- I have very poor name / face recall unless I make a concerted sustained effort after meeting someone irl.
- I have an extreme (you could call it photographic only... damn figures of speech again!) navigational sense and memory. I can walk a new trail all day, walk around a city for the first time or drive somewhere new and then reliably repeat the same route years later for the second time. When I'm doing this I know what landmarks are coming up next that I'm going to look for, and I can describe them in advance.
- I do (I think) have visual dreams sometimes, but my dream memory is incredibly fleeting so this is more of a gut impression. I have very rarely "heard" a voice saying my name or a single word when in sleep transition, and I find this absolutely terrifying, it starts me awake with my heart racing.
posted by protorp at 10:49 AM on August 6
A lot of the stuff in the article MonkeyToes linked to above, about implications of aphantasia for therapy, didn't really make sense to me. The author talks about how hard it is for people with aphantasia to remember the past or imagine the future, as if that can only be done through clear visual imagery. I wonder if she believes blind people have the same difficulties. I guess I probably have hypophantasia - a low level of visual imagery, but not a complete absence of it. So I don't know what it's like to have absolutely no visual imagery. Maybe it really does make it hard to remember or imagine things. For all I know, maybe those things really are hard for blind people too. I don't know why they would be, though.
The "visual" images in my mind are so vague I'm not sure they even are actually visual. But my autobiographical memory is excellent and so is my imagination. And what I imagine feels vivid enough and contains enough vision-related information that I was in my 40's before I realized that it might be deficient in any way. For example, I gave myself the prompt "girl in a forest" and let an "image" pop into my head: A girl in the middle of a small clearing in a dark forest. Beams of sunlight shining into the clearing, dust motes sparkling in the sun, dark green shading into black around the clearing. It looks painted in a medium-realistic style, like an illustration in a children's book. The trees are evergreens. A few small flowers bloom at the edges of the clearing. From the darkness under the surrounding trees, several pairs of eyes shine, looking out at the girl. I can picture the shade of dark green that dominates the forest and the golden sunlight. Or can I? Do I really see the colors or do I just know what the colors are? Do I really see the beams of sunlight or do I just know there are beams of sunlight? If I try to focus on what they actually look like - are there multiple beams or just one? Where exactly are those sparkling dust motes? - I find that it's really all pretty vague in my mind. It's more like the idea of sunbeams and sparkling dust than an actual picture. The appearance of the girl is entirely unspecified. I have the vague sense that she's around 5-8 years old, but the fact that she's there is just something I sense rather than actually see.
When I asked my daughter to picture a girl in a forest, it was clear that her image was much clearer and more visual. The girl was about her own age - 21 - with dirty blond wavy hair and freckles, seen from the chest up, with deciduous trees in the background, fairly widely spaced with not much understory vegetation. If I want to, I can fill in a lot of the gaps in my mental imagery. If I haven't imagined the girl's hair color or clothes, I can decide to do it and then add them. But I have to deliberately do it and it takes time and effort. The other people in my family say an image simply pops up with all or most of the details completely filled in and they just look at it they way they would look at something in real life. And when I ask them to imagine something and then ask for details I hadn't specified, they supply them so readily that it's clear that their brains really are doing what they say they are. Clearly I lack an ability they have. But my memory and ability to imagine possible futures or made-up scenarios are every bit as good as theirs, probably better.
posted by Redstart at 12:25 PM on August 6
The "visual" images in my mind are so vague I'm not sure they even are actually visual. But my autobiographical memory is excellent and so is my imagination. And what I imagine feels vivid enough and contains enough vision-related information that I was in my 40's before I realized that it might be deficient in any way. For example, I gave myself the prompt "girl in a forest" and let an "image" pop into my head: A girl in the middle of a small clearing in a dark forest. Beams of sunlight shining into the clearing, dust motes sparkling in the sun, dark green shading into black around the clearing. It looks painted in a medium-realistic style, like an illustration in a children's book. The trees are evergreens. A few small flowers bloom at the edges of the clearing. From the darkness under the surrounding trees, several pairs of eyes shine, looking out at the girl. I can picture the shade of dark green that dominates the forest and the golden sunlight. Or can I? Do I really see the colors or do I just know what the colors are? Do I really see the beams of sunlight or do I just know there are beams of sunlight? If I try to focus on what they actually look like - are there multiple beams or just one? Where exactly are those sparkling dust motes? - I find that it's really all pretty vague in my mind. It's more like the idea of sunbeams and sparkling dust than an actual picture. The appearance of the girl is entirely unspecified. I have the vague sense that she's around 5-8 years old, but the fact that she's there is just something I sense rather than actually see.
When I asked my daughter to picture a girl in a forest, it was clear that her image was much clearer and more visual. The girl was about her own age - 21 - with dirty blond wavy hair and freckles, seen from the chest up, with deciduous trees in the background, fairly widely spaced with not much understory vegetation. If I want to, I can fill in a lot of the gaps in my mental imagery. If I haven't imagined the girl's hair color or clothes, I can decide to do it and then add them. But I have to deliberately do it and it takes time and effort. The other people in my family say an image simply pops up with all or most of the details completely filled in and they just look at it they way they would look at something in real life. And when I ask them to imagine something and then ask for details I hadn't specified, they supply them so readily that it's clear that their brains really are doing what they say they are. Clearly I lack an ability they have. But my memory and ability to imagine possible futures or made-up scenarios are every bit as good as theirs, probably better.
posted by Redstart at 12:25 PM on August 6
My mental radio station became frighteningly real one overcast middle of the night driving through a part of Utah with no roadway lighting and no other cars on the road.
It was exactly like listening to a far away AM station that goes in and out separated by staticky intervals of multiple stations all playing at once, and featured Beatles songs from 'underground tapes' I had never heard before (I hate the Beatles) and a bunch of other strange stuff. It took awhile but I finally heard the call letters: KCUF FM — I was a CU student at the time.
I thought it was weird because I remembered turning off the radio earlier so the other two people in the car could get some sleep. I didn’t realize how weird until I tried to turn it off again and my right hand did not move from the steering wheel. I tried to speak to wake my companions up, but I couldn’t. Then the hallucinations started; a rabbit with brilliantly shining eyes had run out on the road from the opposite side earlier that night, and when I jerked the steering wheel so it would pass under the car instead of the tires, it altered course to track the tires (really the left headlight, probably), and I ran over it with both front and rear, thump-thump. That same rabbit ran out at me at least half a dozen times that night with the same alteration of course, but I didn’t jerk the wheel and there was no thump.
The spell was finally broken when one passenger woke up and noticed my head wobbling back and then straightening again. When he spoke I was able to wake all the way up instantly, respond verbally, pull over, and brake to a stop. I think of the interval when I was still driving but actually asleep, yet somehow kept myself from falling all the way asleep, which lasted well over an hour I believe, as one of the greatest exertions of will of my entire life.
Nowadays when I haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before and try to visualize something by closing my eyes, I often am doing the visualization, then the image briefly becomes startlingly better and more detailed, then it transforms into something bizarre with nightmarish overtones, and the next thing I know I open my eyes and 30 to 45 minutes have passed.
This makes me think that for me, most visualization borrows some of the apparatus of dreaming, but I hesitate to speak for anyone else.
When I had a large sub-dural hematoma on the left side, my internal monologue went completely silent, and when I talked I had a general idea of purpose, but no idea what I was actually going to say. My partner told me that for two or three weeks I was almost disturbingly voluble, articulate and grammatically correct in my speech, as well as highly metaphorical, but said a lot of things that were barely appropriate and made people uncomfortable.
posted by jamjam at 12:35 PM on August 6 [5 favorites]
It was exactly like listening to a far away AM station that goes in and out separated by staticky intervals of multiple stations all playing at once, and featured Beatles songs from 'underground tapes' I had never heard before (I hate the Beatles) and a bunch of other strange stuff. It took awhile but I finally heard the call letters: KCUF FM — I was a CU student at the time.
I thought it was weird because I remembered turning off the radio earlier so the other two people in the car could get some sleep. I didn’t realize how weird until I tried to turn it off again and my right hand did not move from the steering wheel. I tried to speak to wake my companions up, but I couldn’t. Then the hallucinations started; a rabbit with brilliantly shining eyes had run out on the road from the opposite side earlier that night, and when I jerked the steering wheel so it would pass under the car instead of the tires, it altered course to track the tires (really the left headlight, probably), and I ran over it with both front and rear, thump-thump. That same rabbit ran out at me at least half a dozen times that night with the same alteration of course, but I didn’t jerk the wheel and there was no thump.
The spell was finally broken when one passenger woke up and noticed my head wobbling back and then straightening again. When he spoke I was able to wake all the way up instantly, respond verbally, pull over, and brake to a stop. I think of the interval when I was still driving but actually asleep, yet somehow kept myself from falling all the way asleep, which lasted well over an hour I believe, as one of the greatest exertions of will of my entire life.
Nowadays when I haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before and try to visualize something by closing my eyes, I often am doing the visualization, then the image briefly becomes startlingly better and more detailed, then it transforms into something bizarre with nightmarish overtones, and the next thing I know I open my eyes and 30 to 45 minutes have passed.
This makes me think that for me, most visualization borrows some of the apparatus of dreaming, but I hesitate to speak for anyone else.
When I had a large sub-dural hematoma on the left side, my internal monologue went completely silent, and when I talked I had a general idea of purpose, but no idea what I was actually going to say. My partner told me that for two or three weeks I was almost disturbingly voluble, articulate and grammatically correct in my speech, as well as highly metaphorical, but said a lot of things that were barely appropriate and made people uncomfortable.
posted by jamjam at 12:35 PM on August 6 [5 favorites]
how the hell can you read quickly if you have to "hear" some inner narrator?
My inner monologue is how I think, but it's not exactly how I read; and even though I "hear" it (it's definitely in my voice), it's running far, *far* faster than I would be able to process actual spoken input. This suddenly strikes me as a very odd thing, but I've always assumed it's the same for everyone.
I've gathered from talking to friends that the way I read is definitely not the same for everyone. I was a very early reader, and reading feels like what my brain was made for. (The onset of middle-aged presbyopia is doing a real number on my sense of self.) I take in words in groups, using punctuation marks as anchors (something I only realised after struggling to read a book written without the use of commas or quotation marks). I have a sense of how the words are pronounced as I read, and it's necessary to my understanding, but I'm not experiencing them as an inner narration. I don't read sequentially enough for that.
This is very difficult to describe! I'm almost hearing with my eyes. Typos and other misspellings jar like mispronunciations.
I also have a sense of how words are spelt when I hear them spoken. It's not quite inner subtitles, but if I don't know how to spell a word I've heard, I have no grasp of it at all. It's just a sound. I need an accompanying spelling, even if I've invented it myself.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:06 PM on August 6
My inner monologue is how I think, but it's not exactly how I read; and even though I "hear" it (it's definitely in my voice), it's running far, *far* faster than I would be able to process actual spoken input. This suddenly strikes me as a very odd thing, but I've always assumed it's the same for everyone.
I've gathered from talking to friends that the way I read is definitely not the same for everyone. I was a very early reader, and reading feels like what my brain was made for. (The onset of middle-aged presbyopia is doing a real number on my sense of self.) I take in words in groups, using punctuation marks as anchors (something I only realised after struggling to read a book written without the use of commas or quotation marks). I have a sense of how the words are pronounced as I read, and it's necessary to my understanding, but I'm not experiencing them as an inner narration. I don't read sequentially enough for that.
This is very difficult to describe! I'm almost hearing with my eyes. Typos and other misspellings jar like mispronunciations.
I also have a sense of how words are spelt when I hear them spoken. It's not quite inner subtitles, but if I don't know how to spell a word I've heard, I have no grasp of it at all. It's just a sound. I need an accompanying spelling, even if I've invented it myself.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:06 PM on August 6
I talked to my therapist about the article and she differentiated between poor autobiographical memory and implicit memory which is there regardless.
On and I'm also easily overwhelmed by noise and visual stimulus.
Have you looked into sensory processing issues?
posted by ellieBOA at 2:27 PM on August 6
On and I'm also easily overwhelmed by noise and visual stimulus.
Have you looked into sensory processing issues?
posted by ellieBOA at 2:27 PM on August 6
I think I am pretty aphantasic. I can call up visual information very clearly, but the subjective experience of that is nothing like seeing. But at the same time, it contains information that I can't very easily put into words. Like if I wanted to imagine an apple, I can imagine the intricate color patterning on a Gala apple where green and red mix together. But I don't see it in more that scraps and momentary flashes.
On the other hand, my thoughts and memories are very strongly tied to an experience of spatial position, which I think is connected to the proprioceptive sense. I can remember where something is in the junk drawer not by visualizing it, but experiencing where I would have to put my hand to grab it. A lot of this does originate from visual information though. I don't have to have put my hand on the thing to remember where it is. I can easily rotate and reposition images in my mind, but I need to be able to see the original image to do it. I also engage this positional sense when thinking about completely abstract things. Sometimes, when I am deep in thought, this can lead to moving my hands around as I mentally reposition ideas in space.
I have some ability to hear sounds in my head. When I was younger, I would often involuntarily call up memories of people saying single words and hear them in my head. Now that doesn't happen so much, and I have less ability to intentionally hear things in my mind, but I can still hear songs in my head. I have an internal monologue, but I'm not sure I experience it as hearing. I don't think it has a particular pitch, say, or even tone of voice or cadence. But I can intentionally add those things to it, such as when reading dialogue.
posted by eruonna at 3:04 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, my thoughts and memories are very strongly tied to an experience of spatial position, which I think is connected to the proprioceptive sense. I can remember where something is in the junk drawer not by visualizing it, but experiencing where I would have to put my hand to grab it. A lot of this does originate from visual information though. I don't have to have put my hand on the thing to remember where it is. I can easily rotate and reposition images in my mind, but I need to be able to see the original image to do it. I also engage this positional sense when thinking about completely abstract things. Sometimes, when I am deep in thought, this can lead to moving my hands around as I mentally reposition ideas in space.
I have some ability to hear sounds in my head. When I was younger, I would often involuntarily call up memories of people saying single words and hear them in my head. Now that doesn't happen so much, and I have less ability to intentionally hear things in my mind, but I can still hear songs in my head. I have an internal monologue, but I'm not sure I experience it as hearing. I don't think it has a particular pitch, say, or even tone of voice or cadence. But I can intentionally add those things to it, such as when reading dialogue.
posted by eruonna at 3:04 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
The faceblindness thing is so interesting because hyperphantasia is linked to autism which is linked to faceblindness. I'm hyperphantasic and I've sort of theorized it's because I visualize in such specific detail that the angle of light and shadow is integral to how the information is encoded, so until I've seen someone in a lot of different angles and lightings etc. I don't have "stored" in my brain how they look. I can visualize someone's face extremely well but I couldn't, say, visualize it cast in shadow if I hadn't seen that before.
I also have eidetic memory, which the non-fantasy version of is described thus: ""Examples of people with a photographic-like memory are rare. Eidetic imagery is the ability to remember an image in so much detail, clarity, and accuracy that it is as though the image were still being perceived. It is not perfect, as it is subject to distortions and additions (like episodic memory), and vocalization interferes with the memory ... By contrast, photographic memory may be defined as the ability to recall pages of text, numbers, or similar, in great detail, without the visualization that comes with eidetic memory. It may be described as the ability to briefly look at a page of information and then recite it perfectly from memory. This type of ability has never been proven to exist."
When I close my eyes, I can still "see" the scene or object I was looking at in highly realistic detail for a rather significant amount of time. I thought this was true of everyone for most of my life. It is apparently more common in children and virtually nonexistent in adults, but I'm developmentally disabled so that sort of tracks. I still don't really understand how non-eidetic memory works. You mean you just close your eyes and you can't see anything? Even thought it was just there a second ago? I understand for aphantasia but people who can visualize well and have non-eidetic memory make me question my entire concept of memory...
posted by brook horse at 4:27 PM on August 6
I also have eidetic memory, which the non-fantasy version of is described thus: ""Examples of people with a photographic-like memory are rare. Eidetic imagery is the ability to remember an image in so much detail, clarity, and accuracy that it is as though the image were still being perceived. It is not perfect, as it is subject to distortions and additions (like episodic memory), and vocalization interferes with the memory ... By contrast, photographic memory may be defined as the ability to recall pages of text, numbers, or similar, in great detail, without the visualization that comes with eidetic memory. It may be described as the ability to briefly look at a page of information and then recite it perfectly from memory. This type of ability has never been proven to exist."
When I close my eyes, I can still "see" the scene or object I was looking at in highly realistic detail for a rather significant amount of time. I thought this was true of everyone for most of my life. It is apparently more common in children and virtually nonexistent in adults, but I'm developmentally disabled so that sort of tracks. I still don't really understand how non-eidetic memory works. You mean you just close your eyes and you can't see anything? Even thought it was just there a second ago? I understand for aphantasia but people who can visualize well and have non-eidetic memory make me question my entire concept of memory...
posted by brook horse at 4:27 PM on August 6
Oh, related: does anyone remember specifically what they were looking at when they learned information? With many of the facts I recall I picture either the scene with the person who told me that fact (or if they aren't there directly, what I was doing while listening to them), the video or social media post I saw something in, or the layout and location of the text I read. Some things I don't recall where I learned them but many of these memories go back into childhood and are usually summoned if only briefly when recalling the fact itself.
posted by brook horse at 4:31 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
posted by brook horse at 4:31 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I definitely don't have aphantasia, and I'm the exact opposite of faceblind (when watching tv, I'm the one who unerringly knows who that one actor is, and what we last saw them in, even if their look has drastically changed).
I don't get hangovers, but that's because I don't drink :D
I do have a constant ongoing internal monologue that I barely notice most of the time. I'm not sure how I'd know what to say when speaking if I didn't.
I also have an ongoing musical track, mostly a result of my room mates' constantly giving me earworms, or my inability to remember all the words to a song I heard part of recently.
I have vivid dreams that I often remember after I wake up, in color and in detail.
I also have a trick for falling asleep that involves imagining myself moving deeper and deeper into a kind of old-money mansion, through dark wood paneled walls lit by sconces pouring out dim warm light, pushing my way through rooms filled with people in fancy dress, often holding drinks - like a giant cocktail party. I just wander through, opening doors, walking down hallways, until eventually I've pushed myself into a dream and I'm asleep.
As for what happens for me - someone up-thread mentioned picturing a flower. I immediately saw in my mind, kind of floating in empty grey space, a flower with pale purple/lavender petals, and a yellow spiky center, with a pale green stem with leaves. It was a cut flower, not growing out of the ground. Five petals total, darker toward the outside and lighter toward the inside, with pale lines of darker color pushing in from the edges. I have no idea what kind of flower that is or if it even exists, or if it's something I saw somewhere once; that's just what I got.
I have a housemate who is lightly aphantasic, and the conversations we have about it are fascinating - I love the whole topic, glad I got to read and think about it today! It's so wild, how different we can be from others without even knowing it.
posted by invincible summer at 7:23 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I don't get hangovers, but that's because I don't drink :D
I do have a constant ongoing internal monologue that I barely notice most of the time. I'm not sure how I'd know what to say when speaking if I didn't.
I also have an ongoing musical track, mostly a result of my room mates' constantly giving me earworms, or my inability to remember all the words to a song I heard part of recently.
I have vivid dreams that I often remember after I wake up, in color and in detail.
I also have a trick for falling asleep that involves imagining myself moving deeper and deeper into a kind of old-money mansion, through dark wood paneled walls lit by sconces pouring out dim warm light, pushing my way through rooms filled with people in fancy dress, often holding drinks - like a giant cocktail party. I just wander through, opening doors, walking down hallways, until eventually I've pushed myself into a dream and I'm asleep.
As for what happens for me - someone up-thread mentioned picturing a flower. I immediately saw in my mind, kind of floating in empty grey space, a flower with pale purple/lavender petals, and a yellow spiky center, with a pale green stem with leaves. It was a cut flower, not growing out of the ground. Five petals total, darker toward the outside and lighter toward the inside, with pale lines of darker color pushing in from the edges. I have no idea what kind of flower that is or if it even exists, or if it's something I saw somewhere once; that's just what I got.
I have a housemate who is lightly aphantasic, and the conversations we have about it are fascinating - I love the whole topic, glad I got to read and think about it today! It's so wild, how different we can be from others without even knowing it.
posted by invincible summer at 7:23 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I'm wondering what people mean by "internal monologue" and whether I have one. I often imagine things I could say or write or mentally plan out what I'm going to say or write. I sometimes (often?) have a thought in words. I think I sometimes repeat to myself something I just said or heard. But I also have a lot of thoughts and feelings that are not expressed in words. I remember something from the past or imagine something and it's just feelings and images. I think I often decide what to do moment to moment without talking about it to myself - just envision doing it and then do it.
Do those of you who say you have an internal monologue mean you sometimes think things in words, or that you're constantly thinking things in words? Are imagined or remembered conversations with other people part of what you call your internal monologue? Outside of the times when you're deliberately imagining a conversation with someone else, are the words in your head addressed to yourself or to someone else or neither?
posted by Redstart at 7:58 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
Do those of you who say you have an internal monologue mean you sometimes think things in words, or that you're constantly thinking things in words? Are imagined or remembered conversations with other people part of what you call your internal monologue? Outside of the times when you're deliberately imagining a conversation with someone else, are the words in your head addressed to yourself or to someone else or neither?
posted by Redstart at 7:58 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
This thread is giving me lots of feels. I only found out about aphantasia and that I probably have it in the last few years.
I have an inner monologue, in fact I hear the words when I read (or plan what to write or say) and when I tried to read the comments above without hearing them I just couldn’t.
I recognize faces and places. I definitely hear music including plenty of ear worms.
My handwriting is consistent, as in consistently illegible.
The weirdest part for me is that when I think of an image the feeling is like an apple out of reach on a high shelf. Like it’s right there but I can’t touch it. Uggghhh!!!
posted by billsaysthis at 11:00 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
I have an inner monologue, in fact I hear the words when I read (or plan what to write or say) and when I tried to read the comments above without hearing them I just couldn’t.
I recognize faces and places. I definitely hear music including plenty of ear worms.
My handwriting is consistent, as in consistently illegible.
The weirdest part for me is that when I think of an image the feeling is like an apple out of reach on a high shelf. Like it’s right there but I can’t touch it. Uggghhh!!!
posted by billsaysthis at 11:00 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
You mean you just close your eyes and you can't see anything? Even thought it was just there a second ago?
Yep. (Barring afterimages from looking at something bright, which are clearly not what you're talking about.) For what it's worth, I'm (probably) autistic, but hypophantasic.
Related, I think: a while back I saw someone talking about how, if the lights suddenly went out, they just used the image in their head to navigate around the room. Very much not a thing I could do; I'd be relying on proprioception and muscle memory (and I bump into stuff even when I can see it, so this would likely not go well).
Oh, related: does anyone remember specifically what they were looking at when they learned information?
I often remember the context I was in, but generally with a strong spatial component: which building I was in, which room, what I was sitting on, where the book was on the shelves, how far through the book and whereabouts on the page the information was. Or who I was talking to, and where they were sitting relative to me. Or where I was walking when I had the thought. There's usually a fleeting glimpse associated with the memory, but the spatial awareness is much stronger and more sustained.
It's a bit disquieting for me when I realise I know something without having any associated context to tell me how I know it. I tend to trust that information less.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:35 AM on August 7 [1 favorite]
Yep. (Barring afterimages from looking at something bright, which are clearly not what you're talking about.) For what it's worth, I'm (probably) autistic, but hypophantasic.
Related, I think: a while back I saw someone talking about how, if the lights suddenly went out, they just used the image in their head to navigate around the room. Very much not a thing I could do; I'd be relying on proprioception and muscle memory (and I bump into stuff even when I can see it, so this would likely not go well).
Oh, related: does anyone remember specifically what they were looking at when they learned information?
I often remember the context I was in, but generally with a strong spatial component: which building I was in, which room, what I was sitting on, where the book was on the shelves, how far through the book and whereabouts on the page the information was. Or who I was talking to, and where they were sitting relative to me. Or where I was walking when I had the thought. There's usually a fleeting glimpse associated with the memory, but the spatial awareness is much stronger and more sustained.
It's a bit disquieting for me when I realise I know something without having any associated context to tell me how I know it. I tend to trust that information less.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:35 AM on August 7 [1 favorite]
I'm wondering what people mean by "internal monologue"
There is a voice in my head that never stops. It's there in my dreams; it's there the whole time I'm awake. It's there in my earliest memories. It's fallen silent only once: for a fleeting moment when my brain was rebooting after the one and only time I fainted. Even when I went under general anaesthetic, the voice woke up before I did.
Right now, it's trying out different ways to phrase what I'm typing here, and my fingers are typing out what it settles on. It's also singing along to the music I'm listening to, remarking that a muscle in my leg is twitching and my head itches where the headphones touch it, and running through my to-do list.
"A" voice is probably not the right way to put it. It's more of a hubbub, made up of many threads. One thread is dominant, and "loudest"; if I were talking out loud (or subvocalising), that's the thread I'd be expressing, and it's the one I'm thinking of when I say I have an inner monologue. But I'm simultaneously aware of lots of threads, and also aware that there's stuff going on under the surface that's too quiet to hear unless I consciously elevate it. If I don't have something I'm deliberately, consciously thinking about, the dominant thread will find something to occupy itself, and that's when rumination happens. I generally try to avoid that.
I reason by talking to myself. I remember by talking to myself. I process emotions by talking to myself. I make sense of my environment by talking to myself. There's other sensory stuff going on, especially when it comes to memory, but absolutely everything has to go through a language layer. I'm aware that this isn't true for everyone, and I find that fascinating!
It's very noisy in my head though, and sometimes I wish I could turn it off for a bit.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:53 AM on August 7 [2 favorites]
There is a voice in my head that never stops. It's there in my dreams; it's there the whole time I'm awake. It's there in my earliest memories. It's fallen silent only once: for a fleeting moment when my brain was rebooting after the one and only time I fainted. Even when I went under general anaesthetic, the voice woke up before I did.
Right now, it's trying out different ways to phrase what I'm typing here, and my fingers are typing out what it settles on. It's also singing along to the music I'm listening to, remarking that a muscle in my leg is twitching and my head itches where the headphones touch it, and running through my to-do list.
"A" voice is probably not the right way to put it. It's more of a hubbub, made up of many threads. One thread is dominant, and "loudest"; if I were talking out loud (or subvocalising), that's the thread I'd be expressing, and it's the one I'm thinking of when I say I have an inner monologue. But I'm simultaneously aware of lots of threads, and also aware that there's stuff going on under the surface that's too quiet to hear unless I consciously elevate it. If I don't have something I'm deliberately, consciously thinking about, the dominant thread will find something to occupy itself, and that's when rumination happens. I generally try to avoid that.
I reason by talking to myself. I remember by talking to myself. I process emotions by talking to myself. I make sense of my environment by talking to myself. There's other sensory stuff going on, especially when it comes to memory, but absolutely everything has to go through a language layer. I'm aware that this isn't true for everyone, and I find that fascinating!
It's very noisy in my head though, and sometimes I wish I could turn it off for a bit.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:53 AM on August 7 [2 favorites]
I hope researchers can find a way to codify these internal levels of qualia. For me, if a normal experience of a thing goes:
posted by lucidium at 3:23 AM on August 7
- External physical event
- Nerves trigger reflexive response
- Nerves transmit information to brain
- Brain processes information into basic elements
- Elements are synthesised into parts of the experience
- Experience goes into working and further memory
posted by lucidium at 3:23 AM on August 7
For people with aphantasia: the best description I can give you of visual imagination, is that it’s a lot like the upper left viewport default view of the Unreal Material Editor, seated right in the place where headaches occur.
A primary focal object in a maximally nondescript environment, which can be poked, prodded, orbited around, relit, changed to different shapes and colors/patterns/animations. And, with minimal effort, dragged into a more complex scene with an entire “world” context …and with considerable effort that space can be populated with people.
Part of the reason I actually enjoy the tech art aspects of my job slightly more than the tech designer parts is that, for me at least, the tech art toolchain in Unreal nearly perfect matches the phenomenon of visual imagination / the mind’s eye.
posted by Ryvar at 8:24 AM on August 7 [1 favorite]
A primary focal object in a maximally nondescript environment, which can be poked, prodded, orbited around, relit, changed to different shapes and colors/patterns/animations. And, with minimal effort, dragged into a more complex scene with an entire “world” context …and with considerable effort that space can be populated with people.
Part of the reason I actually enjoy the tech art aspects of my job slightly more than the tech designer parts is that, for me at least, the tech art toolchain in Unreal nearly perfect matches the phenomenon of visual imagination / the mind’s eye.
posted by Ryvar at 8:24 AM on August 7 [1 favorite]
Huh. I always thought that 'minds eye' was metaphorical too. I guess I have aphantasia, though I can see images in dreams, I can remember faces, etc. I have an internal monologue, if I want it to be, it can be music. My handwriting is perfectly fine, and I have no mental/physical conditions (ADD, autistic, depression whatever).
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:15 AM on August 7
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:15 AM on August 7
my mental images are also super transient. Little blips of approximated images. [...] when I’m actually asked to close my eyes and imagine something[,] I get a series of fuzzy possibilities at best, like my visual cortex is throwing out some half rendered sketch mockups
this is the best description i've read of my visualization ability. images that i can "picture" mentally are almost split-second; it's difficult to "hold" them in my head, and trying to requires concerted effort.
when i do close my eyes and concentrate, the images i can sustain are more like... impressions. an out-of-focus, dimly powered projector playing on a backdrop of eigengrau.
posted by a flock of goslings at 7:07 PM on August 7 [3 favorites]
this is the best description i've read of my visualization ability. images that i can "picture" mentally are almost split-second; it's difficult to "hold" them in my head, and trying to requires concerted effort.
when i do close my eyes and concentrate, the images i can sustain are more like... impressions. an out-of-focus, dimly powered projector playing on a backdrop of eigengrau.
posted by a flock of goslings at 7:07 PM on August 7 [3 favorites]
I have zero visual imagery but I do have a pretty much constant inner monologue. It's mostly vocalized thoughts like "That was a weird noise" or "While I'm walking through here I should stop and put away the laundry." If you've ever seen "Peep Show" it's exactly like that. If I'm alone I tend to say the monologue out loud, although that's a choice and I don't have to do it.
I read very fast. I do something like speed reading where I read lines or a paragraph at once, and I don't "hear" the words as I'm reading them. I tend to miss details when there's lots of dialogue unless I deliberately slow down and make myself hear the words, which I can do just fine but not quickly.
I'm a visual thinker according to quizzes that measure that, and I can do visual things like finding a book on a shelf quickly. I know this isn't much of a flex but I can find "Waldo" instantly every time. But no visual imagery. When I close my eyes it's nothing but black.
posted by mmoncur at 3:35 AM on August 10 [2 favorites]
I read very fast. I do something like speed reading where I read lines or a paragraph at once, and I don't "hear" the words as I'm reading them. I tend to miss details when there's lots of dialogue unless I deliberately slow down and make myself hear the words, which I can do just fine but not quickly.
I'm a visual thinker according to quizzes that measure that, and I can do visual things like finding a book on a shelf quickly. I know this isn't much of a flex but I can find "Waldo" instantly every time. But no visual imagery. When I close my eyes it's nothing but black.
posted by mmoncur at 3:35 AM on August 10 [2 favorites]
I have a strong visual SENSE but not the best visual IMAGINATION. When looking at a picture or real situation, I'm extremely perceptive to tiny visual details and small differences in things like colour, proportion, and arrangement - but only when I SEE it in front of me; if I try to imagine it from scratch, I quickly start to feel tired and frustrated, as if I can't quite grasp it accurately. When I need to project things with my imagination, I usually compensate by mocking them up, using tools like photoshop or even laying out crude models or floor plan items, or taking photos from different angles, to help me actually SEE instead of visualize, how things will interact in real space.
Interestingly to me, my visual memory is absolutely wildly good BUT it's because I convert visual memories into vivid words and remember the words. I recognize faces easily, especially if they have a distinctive feature that I can quickly name.
For instance I once made fast friends with a friend-of-a-friend who had an extremely sharp narrow nose. When I met him, I thought to myself, delightedly, "Ah, the word 'aquiline' was made for exactly that kind of nose!" Then I didn't see him for 2 years. When I saw him again, he had gained weight, completely changed his hair, gotten new glasses, and grown a thick beard - he looked totally different! I looked at him and thought, in words, "Oh yes, this is the 'aquiline' guy. But wait, that word doesn't fit any more". His nose ... wasn't aquiline any more! His nose was completely unremarkable and if I'd had to choose a single-word descriptor of him it would not have been nose-related at all. Now usually I wouldn't pry, but with this particular person, we'd had an instant rapport and some very deep familiar convos right off the bat, so I felt he wouldn't mind if I noticed his nose. So the next time we made eye contact, took the liberty of stroking my nose with one finger, and raising my eyebrow, to silently ask him in a way he could ignore if he wanted, "uh, did you get a nose job?" His eyes widened, and he burst out laughing and said Yes! He couldn't believe that after barely knowing him, then TWO years apart, and all the other facial changes he had deliberately engineered to camouflage the change, I had still noticed his nose! But it wasn't quite my EYES that had noticed, it was my word-brain. I've had a lot of similar instances in the past which I find personally really funny, it seems weird to notice tiny details about how things look but in the medium of words. But it's how my brain is!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:03 PM on August 10 [3 favorites]
Interestingly to me, my visual memory is absolutely wildly good BUT it's because I convert visual memories into vivid words and remember the words. I recognize faces easily, especially if they have a distinctive feature that I can quickly name.
For instance I once made fast friends with a friend-of-a-friend who had an extremely sharp narrow nose. When I met him, I thought to myself, delightedly, "Ah, the word 'aquiline' was made for exactly that kind of nose!" Then I didn't see him for 2 years. When I saw him again, he had gained weight, completely changed his hair, gotten new glasses, and grown a thick beard - he looked totally different! I looked at him and thought, in words, "Oh yes, this is the 'aquiline' guy. But wait, that word doesn't fit any more". His nose ... wasn't aquiline any more! His nose was completely unremarkable and if I'd had to choose a single-word descriptor of him it would not have been nose-related at all. Now usually I wouldn't pry, but with this particular person, we'd had an instant rapport and some very deep familiar convos right off the bat, so I felt he wouldn't mind if I noticed his nose. So the next time we made eye contact, took the liberty of stroking my nose with one finger, and raising my eyebrow, to silently ask him in a way he could ignore if he wanted, "uh, did you get a nose job?" His eyes widened, and he burst out laughing and said Yes! He couldn't believe that after barely knowing him, then TWO years apart, and all the other facial changes he had deliberately engineered to camouflage the change, I had still noticed his nose! But it wasn't quite my EYES that had noticed, it was my word-brain. I've had a lot of similar instances in the past which I find personally really funny, it seems weird to notice tiny details about how things look but in the medium of words. But it's how my brain is!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:03 PM on August 10 [3 favorites]
Similarly, once I was reading on the subway and a woman sat beside me. Neither of us had an eyeline to each other's face because my head was tilted down. But I glanced up and saw her hands and recognized her as a childhood friend - because her FINGERNAILS had always been distinctive to me! And it's not like her fingers are all that weird, but my word for them was "efficient". Like, her nails are the absolute bare minimum, they look like little square mosaic tiles on the ends of her fingers, like her body made the absolute least amount of nail it needed to make. I saw those efficient nails on her phone and literally knew it was her before I looked at her face!
Diagnoses - gifted + ADHD for sure, with lots of interest in visual hobbies. I have some traits that align with autism spectrum - insane pattern spotting being a major one lol. But I'm not autistic. Most people would probably say I'm above-average at reading facial expressions, body language, intent, and understanding other people's emotional landscapes and motivations.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:12 PM on August 10 [1 favorite]
Diagnoses - gifted + ADHD for sure, with lots of interest in visual hobbies. I have some traits that align with autism spectrum - insane pattern spotting being a major one lol. But I'm not autistic. Most people would probably say I'm above-average at reading facial expressions, body language, intent, and understanding other people's emotional landscapes and motivations.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:12 PM on August 10 [1 favorite]
I have developed a weird image-related problem in my later years.
When I wake up in the middle of the night in a completely darkened room and sit up in bed, I will very often 'see' the entire room and the objects in it as if a ghostly and very dim, completely indirect light source were illuminating the scene.
When I turn my head I’ll 'see' a different part of the room just as if I were really looking at it, but when I get up to go to the bathroom and reach out to touch a wall or table on the way by, it generally turns out to not actually be there! And I experience a sensation of disorientation and am prone to stumble at that moment. Then when I finally touch something I recognize and realize where I really am, the image dissolves and I’m thrown back on my usual not very vivid or complete mental picture of the room and its contents.
But more than a few times, the image has refused to go away! And when that happens, even though I recognize the thing I’m touching, I no longer know how to get from that object to the bathroom, or where anything is in the room, and I’m forced to get down on my hands and knees and crawl around so that I don’t crash into something and fall, and I have to tell myself with words where a light switch is located in the room, going from thing to thing and telling myself what’s next to the object I’m touching until I get to the switch and real light drives the false image out of my mind's eye. Not fun, let me tell you.
posted by jamjam at 11:33 AM on August 11 [2 favorites]
When I wake up in the middle of the night in a completely darkened room and sit up in bed, I will very often 'see' the entire room and the objects in it as if a ghostly and very dim, completely indirect light source were illuminating the scene.
When I turn my head I’ll 'see' a different part of the room just as if I were really looking at it, but when I get up to go to the bathroom and reach out to touch a wall or table on the way by, it generally turns out to not actually be there! And I experience a sensation of disorientation and am prone to stumble at that moment. Then when I finally touch something I recognize and realize where I really am, the image dissolves and I’m thrown back on my usual not very vivid or complete mental picture of the room and its contents.
But more than a few times, the image has refused to go away! And when that happens, even though I recognize the thing I’m touching, I no longer know how to get from that object to the bathroom, or where anything is in the room, and I’m forced to get down on my hands and knees and crawl around so that I don’t crash into something and fall, and I have to tell myself with words where a light switch is located in the room, going from thing to thing and telling myself what’s next to the object I’m touching until I get to the switch and real light drives the false image out of my mind's eye. Not fun, let me tell you.
posted by jamjam at 11:33 AM on August 11 [2 favorites]
Most people would probably say I'm above-average at reading facial expressions, body language, intent, and understanding other people's emotional landscapes and motivations.
Not challenging anyones concept of what they are, but it's worth pointing this out because it's something a lot of people don't know: many autistic traits are spiky like this. We're either very much more (hyper) or very much less (hypo). The spiky profile.
The stereotype of an autistic person is struggling to understand social context, body language, non verbal communication, lacking insight into other people's emotional state. Definitely true of many autistic people.
But some of us are exceptionally good at noticing patterns in humans as well. Micro expressions, picking up on subtle clues about another person's state of mind, being able to make intuitive guesses about people.
The stereotype that autistic people lack empathy is probably the biggest reason why many female people (as well as male people who don't fit the stereotypical masculine profile), don't realise they're autistic, and that's a real pity.
posted by Zumbador at 12:41 PM on August 11 [5 favorites]
Not challenging anyones concept of what they are, but it's worth pointing this out because it's something a lot of people don't know: many autistic traits are spiky like this. We're either very much more (hyper) or very much less (hypo). The spiky profile.
The stereotype of an autistic person is struggling to understand social context, body language, non verbal communication, lacking insight into other people's emotional state. Definitely true of many autistic people.
But some of us are exceptionally good at noticing patterns in humans as well. Micro expressions, picking up on subtle clues about another person's state of mind, being able to make intuitive guesses about people.
The stereotype that autistic people lack empathy is probably the biggest reason why many female people (as well as male people who don't fit the stereotypical masculine profile), don't realise they're autistic, and that's a real pity.
posted by Zumbador at 12:41 PM on August 11 [5 favorites]
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posted by flabdablet at 2:25 AM on August 6 [8 favorites]