Aphantasia 💭

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Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery.

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The community icon is a reference to this popular test for one's level of visualization vividness:

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Is it a spectrum? Or a true/false? (piefed.social)

submitted 6 months ago by roflo1@piefed.social to c/aphantasia@lemmy.world

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I don’t know if I have it. And a bunch of quizzes and articles don’t seem to answer my questions. So here goes…

I can “picture” a lot of things. But more often than not, these depictions are not really “visual”.

I was intrigued when (about 10 years ago) my SO said that she could close her eyes and it was just like if someone turned on a projector behind her eyes. I’ve never experienced anything like that.

If I’m asked to picture a red apple, I will believe that I did just that. But I don’t “see” a color. You might say that I experience the feeling associated with “red”.

And some times it’s the opposite. I recall a feeling, but it turns to shapes and colors in my mind (though I still wouldn’t describe it nearly as “vivid” as actually seeing something colorful).

Even more, if someone describes a scene, I can “redraw” it in my mind, but it might resemble an impressionist painting. Or I “see” lines gradually sketching something on paper.

Remembering real experiences do “draw” something in my mind, first with muted colors, and then I superimpose the appropriate colors on top.

Somehow colors seem to be involved in some way or another (I’m terrible at picking colors that “look good”, even when I have them in front of me).

Maybe I do have aphantasia. Or maybe I’m looking too much into it. Any thoughts?

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[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

It's a spectrum.

You know how in The Boy, Black Noir imagined cartoon characters?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dxj60QZj5U

Some people can only picture base representations for a memory, some get cartoony versions, some get it on 4k 120fps, and some people get jack shit.

Almost nothing about human variation is regulated by just one set of genes to make something truly binary. And to look at it at the scale it could be considered binary, it's just one tiny aspect of a much larger system that has redundancies.

Even literal blindness isn't binary, some people legit have "daredevil sight" and can't see consciousnessly but still has reaction because their subconscious is still wired up to the eyeballs.