2ukenkerl wrote:
strings wrote:
I have aphantasia, and see no mental images. I was unaware of it until fairly recently, and for many decades I just assumed people were wildly exaggerating when they said they could see things in their mind's eye. In my case, at least, I never felt I was missing out on anything, and I suppose I just developed my own way of thinking about things without the benefit of imagery, and without realising anything was lacking. I believe all my thought processes consist of holding a silent internal dialogue with myself.
Same here. I STILL don't know if they actually see things in that way.
It seems to me it is almost impossible to know whether people are talking about the same levels of visual imagination when the topic of aphantasia is being discussed. To me, it is self-evident that I never "see" the slightest hint of a "mental image" when I think about something. On the other hand, I do in some indefinable sense "know what things look like." But I really have no way of judging whether my sense of knowing what things look like might in fact be exactly the same thing as someone else's description of "seeing vivid images." As I said before, I just assumed for decades, to the extent that I ever thought about it at all, that when somebody said they could see mental images, they were just wildly exaggerating (compared to my feeling of "knowing what things looked like").
But I can't see any way in which this could actually be tested. The "Aphantasia Quizes" that I have encountered (some from a research group at the University of Exeter in the UK) don't really provide any clarification, I find. There is no real guidance on how to give responses between the extremes of "seeing vivid images" and "seeing nothing at all," since the concept of "seeing in the mind's eye" is not really defined. And maybe it can't be defined. A bit like asking if the colour I "see" when looking at an orange is the same as the colour you "see."
27 Nov 2022, 9:14 pm
