SamdellCan you rotate an apple in your head? (by Shen)
limelight79A friend of mine has that condition where she can’t visualize things. I wonder how she would like this comic. My guess is she’d crack a joke about it being a good thing she can’t do this.
I’ve got aphantasia and honestly the comic kinda reminds me of how I feel ‘left out’ but I also spent most of my life trying to draw and only found out about the term a few years ago making me realize I spent so much time following a dead end. that’s just a me thing tho
I should preface this by saying that this is just my opinion and that I may be completely wrong.
I’m convinced that for 99% of people thinking they have aphantasia, it’s just a miscommunication about what it means to “see” something in your mind. When people picture something in their mind, they can’t literally see it in the way that they would see something with their eyes. Seeing something in your mind is just having an understanding of what it would look like.
People will say that they can “see” whatever you’re asking them to “picture” but they only ever hold an understanding of what the thing would look like. This understanding can be elaborate but there is not actually an experience that could be perhaps better described as a visual hallucination.
If you visualize a cube in your mind, you don’t actually see it. You just understand where all the lines, faces, and vertices would be. If you rotate it in your mind, you understand how those angles and the appearance would change at each moment as it rotates. You can even superimpose where these lines would go onto something you’re looking at, but still you don’t actually see it there, you just understand how you would perceive it, where the edges would go, what it would obstruct.
The reason that I’m convinced that people only hold concepts and visual understanding in their minds and not actual images is that most people are pretty bad at drawing. When people do start drawing, they create a representation of the sparse landmarks that actually made up their visual idea and then they have to start filling in the details using reasoning and logic. Artists and people who practice drawing get better at this, are more attentive to detail and learn techniques to make more convincing images. If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they’d be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.
blaue_FledermausIt's not as clear as real vision, but if I close my eyes I can really "see" a visual image of the thing I'm thinking of.
Really like a "visual hallucination" as you said, but it clearly exists in, how can I say? "Another space"?
It doesn't automatically translate to the muscle movements required to draw it.
Interesting. Maybe if there’s a spectrum of ability for visualizing things, I’m just closer to aphantasia than I am to vivid mental images which rival visual perception.
Mine certainly don't rival visual perception, unless I'm focusing on a detail they are mostly blurry, and as I said it works better with my eyes closed.
I suspect that for schizophrenics the images are so vivid they break out of the "imagination box", or are vivid because the "barrier" is broken.