My recollection from undergrad, decades before the term "aphantasia" was coined, is that B.F. Skinner testified to not having a mind's eye, thus declared it not to be a thing for anyone.
From what am seeing of reviews of Nick Chater, also a behaviorist, and author of The Mind is Flat, he might also be an aphant who believes his own lived experience to be reflective of everyone else's.
It sounds like ideas myself held, around the time first heard the anecdote about Skinner. This being the first clue that Skinner's experience, per the anecdote, that my experience, was somehow outside the norm.
Such ego-centric introspection (for evaluating how one's thought processes work, to declare that they are not as rich as others claim thought processes to be, is still introspection) can lead to very limited models of mental phenomena.
Andreesseen might also be an aphant who doesn't know any better.
https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116242597841379892
Given how the classic awakening of aphants is "Wait, you mean others really do see pictures in their heads?! That's not just a metaphor? They really see things in their heads!?!?!?" behaviorism can sound quite appealing, as its failure to explain mental phenomena we don't experience doesn't stand out as a weakness.
Eventually, many of us learn that our experience of the world is not dispositive. Not all of us do.
Attached: 1 image Pardon the everything app screenshot but the self-immolation of Andreessen is a sight to behold He got so upset that people call him out for his “I don’t have feelings” tweet that he is storm-posting about how he is not bothered and definitely has no feelings or any inner self
So, I don't know how much this could be attributed to the British Medical Journal suffering from enshittification, but their recent article on the mind's eye (phantasia) started out with a well-known fallacy. Not a great sign for the publication.
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s411.short
To be clear, phantasia is about *wakeful* mental imagery. Plenty of people with #aphantasia have visual dreams. It's a fascinating topic if you want to give it some attention. The New Yorker recently put out a great piece 🧠
In 1880 Francis Galton studied people’s ability to create mental images in their mind’s eye. Most people were able to do so, but scientists seemed to struggle more. In 2015 Zeman and colleagues labelled this inability aphantasia. The ordinary visual ability they called phantasia and the heightened ability hyperphantasia. People with aphantasia, aphantasiacs, have poor autobiographical memory and dream conceptually, not visually, but they may still be good artists. They may be on the autistic spectrum and have relatives who are also likely to be aphantasiac. And they don’t suffer from a disadvantage that some phantasiacs have, when, having formed visual images of people and places in novels, they are disappointed or even angry when those people and places are realised in a movie and don’t correspond to the images that they have formed in their mind’s eye. People with Charles Bonnet syndrome are blind but nevertheless see visions, labelled as hallucinations, in their mind’s eye; presumably they are phantasiacs. The American radio journalist Susan Stamberg (1938‒2025), who was the first woman to host a national news programme in the USA, is credited with having observed that “the pictures are better on radio,” presumably contrasting it with television. When asked what she meant she explained that “anything you can imagine is better than anything you can see.”1 Using Stamberg’s epigram as a book title,2 Adam Carroll-Smith described how, as a sports reporter for a UK national newspaper agency, he would write his report based on the radio commentary, thanks to which “I had an excellent visual image in my mind, which I could then commit to paper.” In 2005 England's cricketers were playing Australia in the fourth test match at Trent Bridge. Carroll-Smith missed Jonathan Agnew's commentary on the final moments of the match, about which he commented …
Neil Moffatt
Preston von Gabbleduck
sport of sacred spherical cows
ts 🚇
Pascal Leinert
The vOICe vision BCI 🧠🇪🇺
The vOICe vision BCI 🧠🇪🇺