aphantasia check

[mindstalk]

(Pasting from a registration-only forum)

I've seen discussions here and elsewhere about aphantasia, the inability to have mental imagery. One thing that strikes me is that they've been mostly about reading fiction, about whether some of us are having a mental movie playing as we read. It's the sort of unreachable subjective experience that's hard to compare, leaving open the possibility that at least some people are having the same experience I am but labelling it differently: I would say I have imagery, but also that it's vague and ghostlike, not at all like hallucinating a full color experience. (I'm also not sure how much I spontaneously 'movie' my fiction, vs. sometimes making a deliberate effort to visualize a scene.)

But there are things I do with my imagery which have measurable outcomes. Most trivially and accessibly, I can play out a game of tic-tac-toe in my head, or play it blindfold, and I would be indeed visualizing a board and 'seeing' whether rows are completed, not doing math on a list of coordinates. I can imagine trying to play blindfold chess though I expect I would be overwhelmed by the detail[1]. I can do multi-digit multiplication or long division in my head much as I would on paper, 'writing' the numbers on mental scratch paper and remembering their positions. I've discovered geometry proofs in my head, and I can run a simple orrery of Earth and Moon motions around the Sun, to explain why the phases of the Moon look the way they do or why most artificial satellites rise in the west.

So for aphantasia people... are these things you simply can't even attempt? Or would you do them differently? I can maybe imagine less visual approaches to the arithmetic, and maybe a numeric coordinate-based approach to tic-tac-toe or even chess, but the others seem inherently visual. Naively, asking whether you can do visual tasks seems more definitive than asking how vivid imagery is.

[1] Chess masters are said to rely on high level functional grouping of pieces, and the experiment behind that is somewhat relevant: asked to look at a board and reconstruct it from memory, they do quite well if it's from a real game and thus makes sense, but on random boards they do no better than the rest of us.

Comments

[come_to_think]

I can't do any of the complicated things you mention. However, I can visualize a regular dodecahedron and count the vertices and edges.

[queenlua]

I don't think I can really do any of the things you mention. When I play tic-tac-toe in my head I'm not really "seeing" the board in any way.

I think the best description I've read of this phenom is from this dude's page on aphantasia:

There was a series of psychology experiments where they'd show the subject two side-by-side pictures, usually line drawings of a bunch of blocks together, and ask whether the two objects so depicted were the same. Sometimes they were; sometimes they were mirror images.

People reported that they way they solved these problems was to 'rotate the first object in my head until it was in the same orientation as the other one, and then see if they were the same'.

Can you solve those problems? How would you describe the process? I don't suppose you do it from the local connectivity properties or anything like that.

The best I can describe it is that I have a more abstract (than purely visual) knowledge of how the object is constructed. For example, you know abstractly what a cube is like without having to actually see it in your head (I hope).

Take a object made of four cubes; three of them in an L lying on its side and one of them stacked on top of one of the leg cubes (sorta the canonical one-is-a-mirror-image-of-the-other object). I don't see it in my head. I do know that if I saw an isometric picture of it, there would be one cube in the lower left cormer, another cube to the NE of that, another cube to the SE of that, and another cube on top of the last one. I could draw that picture trivially. But I don't actually see that picture in my head.

If I'm given a picture of that object and a picture of object B, and am trying to figure out if they're the same or mirror images, I'll kind of 'feel' the first object with my hands (in a virtual way, the same way you might 'see' things with your eyes closed) and feel the second object with my hands and see if they feel the same way. Or I'll use some more theoretical trick like saying, "If I were walking along object A so that I had to take a right turn at the L, I would walk into a sticking-up cube after I took that turn. Would that be true if I were walking on object B?" Maybe that's what you mean by local connectivity properties.

I'm sure a blind-from-birth person, feeling object A and object B in a fixed orientation, would be able to tell if one could be rotated to be the second, without using any visual skills. Or heck, they can find their way around their houses without having a visual representation. I don't know if they do it the same way I do, but at least it proves it can be done.

[mindstalk]

Interesting.

On another site I had someone say that they can't play tic tac toe in their head at all, which is what I was aiming for, whether there's a measurable difference in cognitive achievement; in that case, yes.

If you play ttt in your head, how would you describe if it not visual? Tactile? Spatial (awareness of location of objects)?

I still wonder if some of us are having similar experiences (awareness of shape and location, say) but interpreting/labeling them differently (visualization vs. something else.)

[queenlua]

Sort of spatial, yeah. I definitely can't see anything resembling x's / o's / lines in my head, but I have a sort of vague mental idea of "where stuff is" and an abstract notion of what the items are, if that makes sense?

Your theory is kind of interesting. I definitely agree that awareness of shape/location is a thing I have in these exercises, and don't quite know how I'd describe that, other than, not-visual-for-sure.

[brin_bellway]

>>I can run a simple orrery of Earth and Moon motions around the Sun, to explain why the phases of the Moon look the way they do or why most artificial satellites rise in the west.

I'm not aphantasic, but my visual imagination isn't good enough to pull this one off, and I was wondering:

Does the sun tend to rise and set in the correct directions in your dreams?

My dreams generally don't have correctly oriented suns (most recently I had a dream involving being caught off-guard by a solar eclipse while trying to figure out bus schedules, and when I woke up it occurred to me to put two and two together with [the place and time provided by the bus schedules] and [the sun] and work out that it was rising in the northwest), and I'm curious whether being more able to grok the movements of major celestial bodies has helped you with that sort of thing.

[mindstalk]

I have no memory of the sun appearing in my dreams, so can't help you there.