joeyh

Aphantasia

joeyh at

How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind Fascinating.

Do you see images in your mind's eye, or only abstract things? Colors? Or nothing?

For me it's less pictures and more abstract things. I can picture my mom's face right now, but it's about things like the quality of her gaze, tilt of her head and not an exact shape or image. When I imagine a beach I remember vividly the salt air, the warm sand, the waves rumble, the horizon all around, but it's not any kind of photorealistic picture. A sufer is a vague shape, maybe a human outline, plus movement vectors for the surfer and the waves.

I also have dreams that include complete source code to programs that I can edit in my dreams (and often works if I type it in, unless the programming language was also dreamed up). And I can visualize entire routes on well known roads and trails (hours and hours of them), but it's all about the turns, the rises and falls, the outlines of the view at any point along the way, the feeling of a place, but never any images.

Never any colors, come to think of it. Triangle? Sure, and I can rotate tetris peices in my head and slot them into place. But red triangle? No, it's just 3 angles with lines.

joeyh at 2016-04-23T18:54:22Z

I think my memories are more abstract and general, but involve emotions, images, shapes, colors, and sounds. In my mind's eye I can also conjure detailed images and sounds if I feel like it, which I have to be careful about thinking about memories, or I will convince myself I remember more than I actually do. The detailed imagery I can conjure up might be due to the time I've spent sketching, but then I can conjure up detailed sounds and music, and I've never really studied music or anything.

Dreams where I'm coding are actually more like mild nightmares. I can't really read it, and the code never works...

Charles Stanhope at 2016-04-24T00:59:53Z

This whole topic has made me more aware of my internal processes. Apparently my "mind's ear" is not as adept as my "mind's eye". I find it easy to imagine and manipulate visual images, but I struggle more with aural things. For instance, imagining melodies played with different instruments requires much more concentration than any visual manipulations I can cook up.

Charles Stanhope at 2016-04-25T15:47:43Z