Can you misfold a protein in your head?
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Can you split a uranium-235 atom in your head?
Where my aphantasic people at, having no clue how realistic or not this is?
What is that?
Aphantasia is the inability to "see" or "hear" in your head. While it's surprising to learn that people think differently (both for people with or without aphantasia), it has almost no consequence for daily life, except maybe for making it more difficult to remember past events.
The wiki gives a pretty good presentation of the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
It only started to be studied recently; and the "visualizing a red apple" has become a meme on that topic.
Yeah I have aphantasia :(
I have the concept of an apple in my head, followed by the concept of rotating it, but I'm otherwise mind blind.
This post helped some people last time aphantasia came up so I’m just copy pasting the whole thing.
I had absolutely debilitating insomnia for my entire life. In the last couple of years I discovered something interesting. I’ve got a condition called aphantasia which means that I cannot see any images in my mind. For my whole life I heard the phrase counting sheep and thought it was a metaphor. Just like. Thinking about sheep since visualizing wasn’t something that I thought people could do.
Anyway, in researching about the condition I found an article online for an exercise where you can work on trying to visualize something. Basically you close your eyes and use the flashing remnants of vision to try to force a shape to exist. Sometimes you need to push on your closed eyes and a little pressure will cause some patterns to appear. You’re supposed to do this exercise while talking to someone outloud. Even if it’s just making a recording. The article I read said you must say it out loud or you will fall asleep. Me having never fallen asleep in my life without hours of concerted effort completely ignored this warning and much to my surprise it absolutely made me fall asleep within minutes.
Ever since then I’ve been able to use this technique to fall asleep every night. It’s like my mind finally learned how to do it. Most of the time I don’t even need to do these exercises any more.
That being said I was so pleased with this side effect I never even tried the say it out loud to try to improve mental images and I still can’t see anything in my minds eye. But being able to sleep every night without fail is a freaking miracle. So I highly recommend giving it a shot.
Here is the original instructions I found on it. https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/
Happy cake day!
That sounds really useful, I'll definitely try this, since I also always had trouble falling sleep quickly. Thanks!
No inner monologue OR picture reporting in
Only the void in this noggin.
damn that kinda sounds nice
It is somethings, tho I would like to be able to hear music in my head. That seems like a fucking super power.
Also I have a massive phobia of being isolated or stimuli deprived. I'm assuming due to my physical inability to create mental stimuli.
It's caused me to do some really awful things out of fear before. Would not recommend.
I think I'm pretty good at having music in my head, although the problem is that even a very realistic 4 measures stuck in your head is still just 4 measures stuck in your head.
Also, the longer I go whistling or singing something from when I heard it the more it becomes like the sung or whistled version with fewer details.
The opposite of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): The Fear of Missing In.
For future reference, it is completely realistic.
It’s like having Blender installed in your head.
I'm imagining moving verticies on the spinning apple with proportional editing now and it seems like a very quick way to ruin an apple.
Oooohhh, that's what they meant. Yes, I can create movies in my head for fun, and do it so much and so well that watching real movies can be disappointing. I do find it hard to just model like blender though without imagining more context that just the apple. It's easier for me to imagine rotating an apple in my hand than imagine it rotating without any reason behind it. My brain send to care about the where and gets bored if only made to focus on the what. Probably has something to do with my ADHD
Jelly. That sounds really entertaining!
But that's the part that really baffled me when I learned that people can "actually" see stuff in their mind: it feels that if I could see something, I would gain access to more or unsolicited information about the object or the scene.
When asked to think about rotating an apple, my brain goes "yes, an apple, I know the concept well. Rotating it is very realistic and doable." and that's it. If I could actually see it, I would be able to tell the color, tell the change in position of the stem, maybe there is a small leaf, idk; but that's not part of the "question" and thus feels really weird to me that people can do that and extract or extrapolate information.
I think I'm hyperphantasic because I can play fruit ninja in my head and smell the juice as it lands on me.
It's less fun when remembering an injury or every time one of my jokes hasn't landed.
This more reads as a phantastic person finding a cool friend in the test
Lucifer has told me to burn many things.
So pretty accurate.
Present and aphantasic!
Where it gets hard is when you're looking at a 6-membered ring with stereochemical centres and trying to visualize it in a 3D chair or boat. Then rotating that 3D shape around in your head keeping the correct stereochemistry.
Just imagine it's all being held/manipulated by an anime girl sitting in the chair/boat.
Rotating an apple was easy.
Then I tried putting a face on it. That didn’t work.
On a whim I searched for an image of an apple with a face on it, found one, and found it easy to rotate that imaginary apple and face.
I can imagine drawing a face on an apple, but find it harder to keep it in my brain if I rotate it.
I wonder if the brain has an easier time taking a “snapshot” of something you’ve taken in from eyesight and manipulating it rather than generating an internal image from scratch and holding that image while working with it.
I can rotate an apple in my head, but normally it doesn't stop rotating
Perpetual motion machine discovered.
When I was like 5-8 probably I used to not know how maglevs worked and assumed that the magnets just pushed them forward without any electricity. The maglev perpetual motion generator worked very well in my head though.
i can, but it's usually a mess of abstract shapes on the other side.
Have you ever tried to interpret those shapes for clues about the future?
yeah
That's so cute