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aphantasia check
(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.
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.