This…this is satire, right?
yes
I don’t see a /s tag so idk
This has to be satire please God
God is dead in this timeline
deleted by creator
Could also be part of a significant portion of people have undiagnosed aphantasia.
Learning that some people can’t mentally visualize anything, but pictures of memories that they can’t modify since they have no imagination felt wild.
Ive only recently been able to visualise things, but only when im close to sleeping. My wife got annoyed at me when I first discovered it because I couldnt stop laughing at the amount of detail I was able to make on a fence. Only problem is now when im awake and unable to do it, im more aware of the ability I dont have.
Also, people who can just make shit up and see it in their heads, how do they get anything done? I feel like id just be imagining stuff all day long
people who can just make shit up and see it in their heads, how do they get anything done? I feel like id just be imagining stuff all day long
Yep, that’s literally what daydreaming is. People do it all the time, especially kids at school. I spent most of primary school exploring fantasy worlds in my head, while the teachers were trying to snap me out of it.
When I learned that there are humans out there who can’t picture even simple things within their minds, I felt confused.
I was able to create entire worlds before going to bed when I was a kid, fantasy worlds to explore.
I thought all humans could picture things in their minds.
All people can unless they are in the extreme minority that suffer from highly particular neuropathic disorders that render them absolutely dysfunctional as human beings. Having a weak drive for creativity and imagination is not the same as suffering from a clinical incapability.
Aphant here! I would actually love your theory to be true but unfortunately no amount of training or practicing makes me better or even able to visualise. Believe me, I spent many years trying and practicing art before I heard about aphantasia and realised thats what I have.
If I looked at 10k slop pictures and their corresponding prompts I wouldn’t be able to imagine the outputs any more than I already can (which is not at all).
Likewise I can’t do meditation or self-hypnosis where the guide says stuff like “imagine you’re lying on a beach” etc. At least it makes me immune to those stage hypnotists who try to get someone suggestible up on stage.
That last bit may also be you someone who can’t easily enter trace. There are less visual guided meditations (i like energy work which involves tactile imagination), but some people just struggle with the mental state guided meditation aims for
Stage hypnosis is fake, anyway. You can’t hypnotize somebody unless they want to be hypnotized.
It’s so trippy to me because I’m opposite of that. If I’m daydreaming, I see the worlds inside my head almost as clearly as the real world, to the point where they overlap. I can be looking at a street in the real world and wherever my daydream is taking me, I see that as well on top of the real world.
I find it both fascinating and hard to imagine (ironically) how someone could see absolutely nothing in their head if someone told them to think of a tree growing out of a lake or a car that is also a three story house.
If there is one thing that upsets me about living, it’s that I will only ever experience the world once and through one perspective.
Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It’s as though there is some particular step between “add the object to the environment, conceptually” and “render the object” that doesn’t happen for me.
The very tired imagery when going to bed is Hypnagogia and isn’t visualizing, it’s more akin to dreaming which also isn’t visualizing.
If those 2 things are why you think you aren’t a total aphant, you’re probably a total aphant.
I’m a total aphant as well.
Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.
I’ve tried to work with things in that state as well thinking maybe it could translate as well. Its a very interesting state though. If I try too hard it’ll wake me up and go away. If i don’t try enough, nothing happens, but when it’s just right, I can somewhat influence it.
I’ve had some success in the past transitioning into lucid dreaming from that state as well.
If I could have your brain for a day, I would, so I could experience what it’s like for you! I’m so curious about how differently people think. It’s kinda like how I can somewhat picture what it might feel like to be a man or a plant or non-human animal, but I can never know for sure. There are these experiences that we just will never get to have due to our own physical limitations and it’s a bit frustrating to me.
I think I can imagine what it’s like for you, based on your description, but I will never know for sure. So frustrating!
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
That’s kind of wild. I can’t visualise anything in my head. My internal monologue and thoughts are entirely symbolic and linguistic.
Yeah, for some folks aphantasia comes with weakness/absence of other kinds of imagination, like audio or spatial, and for others it doesn’t. I feel like I have a decent sense of audio imagination - I can “play back” a memory of a song, and my experience is like a ghost of hearing. It is as though there is a second set of ears somewhere in my head that doesn’t “feel” the same as originally hearing it, but elements of the song I never really thought much of - maybe an audio glitch in the recording or a quirk of the voice or some non-instrument sound effect - also play back as just part of this “flat”, single-layer stream.
I never really thought much until now that I might have a duller audio imagination than others, because what I do have is at least closer to the experience of hearing than my spatial sense is to seeing.
So… You kind of percieve a symbolic representation of space, a sort of platonic ideal version? Must be a very different experience for you to read books than it is for me.
I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
Maybe that’s not true… https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
I love The Egg ❤️ that story changed me as a person when i was in my early 20s xD I was even thinking about that story when I wrote my comment. By far one of the coolest depictions of empathy.
I have gotten to the point that I could design furniture in a spreadsheet. That’s mostly what I do already; I’ll design it in FreeCAD, I use the Spreadsheet workbench as a table of all critical dimensions, and then I’ll build the CAD model from there, but I draw less and less of the model. I usually just take a copy of the dimension spreadsheet with me into the workshop, very rarely relying on drawings unless I’ve got some intricate joinery to lay out.
I’m working on a case for my grandfather’s flag, and I modeled a part of the thing as a sanity check.
I might just do it as a challenge to myself, design and build a piece of furniture in LibreOffice.
That last paragraph really hits me. I wish I could experience either of your perspectives as someone in a middle ground. My mental pictures are like theyre made of smoke. They form and quickly warp and dissipate. They also take effort to form
The way you describe your mental images sounds equally beautiful and frustrating haha. I can relate, actually! When I have racing thoughts, it’s like everything is flickering in my mind, thousands of images and I can’t hold on to any of them. Maybe it’s not so much smoke in my case, but more like a vicious hailstorm, hitting your face all at once like little projectiles.
I prefer daydreaming to that scenario. It’s easier to slow down if I’m going through stories in my mind that I want to write. That’s when I see two “realities” at the same time. But when it’s just thoughts, like random everyday thoughts, it’s like a slideshow on speed and oh, let’s also add a random song and play that on top over and over. There was a month where I had the Burrito Burrito Taco Taco song from South Park stuck in my head 24/7. So fucked, man. Many years ago my boyfriend told me that he didn’t always think of something. That sometimes his head is just empty, in zen mode and he’s relaxing. I thought he was joking because don’t everybody have projectile-thoughts in their heads all the time? Nope. Not everybody has. And not everybody see words and numbers in colors with texture and taste either.
Brains are so chaotic and strange and unique and wonderful ❤️
I don’t know if training would help alone, forcing your brain to create new neuronal connections is probably necessary.
Personally that came from deep painful emotional instances in my early life where I had nowhere else to hide but within myself. I have 3d imagination in which I can create full environment and caracters. It is entirely different from dreaming that I remember while waking up,. Memories or half awake dreams that I make operational decisions.
I actually had the reverse issue of you. I had to learn not to imagine what was discussed, saw or dreamed since some people would discuss things I didn’t want to imagine. It made my memory worse though.
https://youtube.com/@codeparade
Since finding this developer, I have been trying to visualize 3D environmental as 4D. I can create some new axial rotation, but I am still trying to determine how to find the actual 4th vectorial rotation in objects. Unusual problem to have I guess.
Just watching his video “I published a math paper” from your link and he’s very good at explaining things for the layman (me)
Can you imagine other senses like the heat of beach sand?
I can’t. Scents, tastes, and sounds are out too. When I am aware of having dreams (which is rare) I don’t ever remember any actual sensory information, just concepts. Those concepts can be quite detailed, but it’s the idea of them rather than the perception of them
I can only imagine sounds. I also have no visual memory either. I can only remember a description of how something looked which means I also have bear total face blindness. My wife jokes that I should always keep a photo of her around because if she ever went missing I wouldn’t be able to tell the police what she looked like.
My wife is like this, and she keeps trying to find her people, but everyone can picture an apple on a table that isn’t there.
But like you described with the memory she can do that but cant edit it, so she has a really good memory.
Imagination was discovered by John Imagine in 2023 when he tried to run a genAI prompt but forgot to turn on the computer
Pretty sure it was actually discovered by John Lennon in 1971 when he took some drugs but forgot to take some drugs.
You’re actually both right, Lennon actually took so many drugs that he astral projected to the 2020s. He tried to use chat gpt while he was projecting into the future, but he didn’t know what a computer was so he didn’t turn it on
And then wrote the song A Day in the Life about it… “I’d love to turn you on…”
Wrong. It was created by the Imagi people before John Imagine appropriated it.
50K prompts was a nice touch lol
It’s blatant satire, doesn’t pass the sniff test - it’s too obvious. Funny tho!
After AI comes BI.
GenAI is turning the gooners gay!
It’s Twitter, so there’s an excellent chance this is manipulative engagement bait. But it would be really, really interesting if heavy usage of AI image gen proved to be an effective kind of visualization “exposure therapy” for people with aphantasia. We’ve never before had the ability to so quickly and reliably convert words to images, so maybe experiencing that connection on demand a few thousand times is enough to activate those mental pathways for people who lack them? The closest we’ve had up to now is a Google Image search, and those results are much more varied, not as precisely tailored to the search term, and not something that people generally do over and over again for leisure.
People with aphantasia may not realize that most people can “see” images they generate in their minds. Some with aphantasia say they thought using the word “see” in that context was a metaphor.
The evidence just keeps stacking for me
What killed me is when people say like “picture yourself on a beach” and people are actually just doing that. My whole life it was a metaphor
I think I’ve slightly frustrated people when they asked me something like “how do you think this chair will look in the corner of the living room?” and all I really could say was “yeah it’s a nice chair, has about the same colour as the sofa”
👋 (have aphantasia)
Same!
Always wanted to ask, do you read fiction? It’s like watching a movie for me, can’t imagine reading would be any fun otherwise.
Also have it, the fun parts of fiction for me are the dialog and (being a scifi nerd) the thought experiments. Most of my reading focuses heaviest on what’s being said by the characters - which, luckily, happens to be where most of the meat occurs anyway. Long descriptive sections just kinda go by like white noise, though I try to catch and remember any important notes that may be referred to later, but more as concepts - e.g., “big wall” as a concept, not an image. If you ask me for the physical description of a character in a book in which they have been physically described, odds are high I’d come up empty, but I could probably give you a solid summary of their character as they have acted and based on what they’ve said.
Seeing a book like a movie seems extremely limiting to me.
There’s so much more depth to books than to film. Limiting them to the visual aspect would be like ripping off 90% of the pages.
That sucks. How do you handle / have you handled art projects in school?
That was just trial and error. Just because i can’t visualize stuff in my head doesn’t mean i can’t evaluate concepts and how they might be together. If you have the ability to imagine stuff in your head you might think “oh yeah that is a terrible idea to put these two concepts together” whereas me i can’t tell that unless i have seen it before and internalized it in a non-visual way. Like say you wanted to draw a bouquet of flowers, if you looked at different flowers you could start placing them in your mind together. For me i would have to had to see it before and remember “x and y flowers together don’t look good”. But if i haven’t seen them before then id either have to try drawing them together for the project, or if we’re talking about flowers maybe i could make a bouquet and see it that way before putting it to paper
Edit: also i don’t think it’s really that bad. I never knew it was any different than how other people did stuff until the past decade or two when more people started talking about it. One of my friends shared his experiences with it and i was just like “that’s normal, isn’t it?”
you might think “oh yeah that is a terrible idea to put these two concepts together” whereas me i can’t tell that
You know what’s funny? Even though I can visualize things internally, I imagine it being better than I can make it in real life. Especially woodworking, I end up making mistakes at the design level. When two pieces of wood don’t sit flush because I bungled the proportions in my mind, oh it’s the worst.
That is insanely fascinating! And it’s super cool to me that you found ways to work with it, to the point where you didn’t even notice you had it! Ever since I learned about this a few years ago, I’ve been wondering if a childhood friend had it. She always had to draw or find pictures of things before she could decide if she liked how they look. One time we had to pick a flower that we liked from a provided list of flowers. We’d all seen them before (common flowers to our residence), but she had to look up each one in a book, before she knew which one she liked. I was describing them to her, so she wouldn’t have to look them up, and she knew that this was the red one that grows outside the school and that one was the blue one that grows in the park and so on, and she still had to look them up. After your comment, I’m almost positive she had it and no one knew. The human mind is fascinating!
Yeah definitely possible. When i learned about it i ran to my wife of over a decade and asked her if she can see things in her head. She thought it was a silly question and goes on to tell me when she reads books it’s like a whole movie in her head and i told her for me it’s just words in a book lol.
Yeah. People who have that in my job tend not to do well.
Well imagine that.
As a person who CAN imagine and hear my mind speak… I can’t imagine that.
When AI isn’t factual it’s called “hallucination” lmao
ratlimit is a well known shitpost account btw
You ate the onion.
That guy IS the onion
What does it mean to hit 50k image prompts?
Are people like recording how many prompts they’ve used and then bragging about it?
Yes, this is their life now.
Yes. Let me tell you a story about a time when imagegen was even worse bullshit like it is today. Back in the day we had to replace every single subject with ‘Danny Devito’ because that was the fashion at the time and you could never be sure if the model is hallucinating in a way that you wanted. Thus I had thousand of images with danny devito and call it my devito-phase. At that point your brain is trained to recognize Danny Devito in the fraction of a second, and he will appear in your dreams. That person made 49990 shitty images instead of idk baking bread or doing anything with their life. Pathetic
So, I heard of aphantasia (the lack of a ‘mind’s eye’ or ability to visualize) after I noticed a pattern in my customers at the job shop: The creative types that needed something made that was out of their wheelhouse (the musician who wanted to design an accessory for their instrument, the sculptor who needed a water hose…thing for their studio, the carpenter who needed a duct attachment for his saw) I could describe what I was going to do in words to them and they got it.
The business school BMW driving golf shorts Karens who had an idea they wanted to “invent?” If I showed them a CAD model, it had to be correctly colored. The wood part had better be brown or it was outside their capacity to comprehend. Absolutely no ability to think abstractly. I wonder if this had been pounded out of them by whatever caused the rest of their personality. Or, if the inability to visualize just pipes people into business school.
Yeah that wasn’t aphantasia (someone with aphantasia would have no problem understanding your model; probably even less than someone without it, in fact); that was them having their heads so far up their own arse they weren’t able to see and think properly (and lack of experience doing the latter).
Your understanding of Aphantasia is a bit off, I think the folks in the second group are just stupid. I have complete Aphantasia, and if it was explained to me, I can understand what your plans for something would be. If I was shown a CAD model, it would be extremely clear. The things I can’t do is see my wife’s face in my head, or picture the last place I left something. However, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t describe to you what my wife looked like, or that I can’t remember where I left something. Also, thinking abstractly is what people with Aphantasia are best at. I can’t remember the specifics, but they are significantly more likely to end up in a STEM field where all they do is abstract thought (myself included)
I understand though, it’s easy for me to think about how someone who can picture things in their mind would experience things, because I can see things with my eyes. But someone who has a mind’s eye can’t really understand what it would be like to not have one. Most things that people would think are issues for me aren’t, I’ve just got different ways of remembering and thinking about things that doesn’t require needing to see them in my head.
I do have a mind’s eye, and quite a capable one apparently. I’ve seen some people say they imagine in flat shades or even in black and white, I can imagine and remember things as clearly as I can see. I can imagine the cross section of an engine running. I can’t vouch that my mind correctly models firing order and timing of an engine of more than two cylinders but if I focus on one cylinder the details are right.
I also have quite a capable mind’s ear. Pretty much all day I hear my thoughts in my head as if they’re being spoken, I can also imagine music. I just tried it out by imagining the Top Gun anthem as played on the SNES’ sound chip with that orchestra sound that was used on the console quite a lot. Not a problem.
It utterly fascinates me that some people outright can’t do that.
The BMW driving golf shorts Karen probably suffered from bike shedding. A lot of faux leadership types often feel the need to contribute something, even if it’s something mundane, into “complex” (in their eyes) projects.
Honestly you want them to be picky about the color because they might be picky about something else that would be harder to control.
Having Aphantasia (no minds eye) or Anendophasia (no inner voice) is just a different way of perceiving the world.
Here is an article that show that even though peops have these (I know because I am both) it does not need to affect their lives. I did not even know I had these until my late 50’s. Below is an article that shows this. A quote from the article.
“Surprisingly, within fields as varied as science, art, politics, and sports, some of the most innovative and successful figures openly acknowledge having Aphantasia.”
https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/world/20-famous-people-with-aphantasia/
My brother has aphantasia but is a better artist than me. And I spend most my day in my minds eye. I have to explain to people that half the time Im looking at something I’m not actually even seeing through my eyes anymore. I completely check out like I’m dreaming
Makes me wonder if it’s good for our society to allow such creativity challenged people to obtain such positions of power.
We need more people with imagination
As a designer, clients who obsess over the control of rendered materials are red flags.
One major problem there is the images used to do so in software are usually from completely different batches of materials than what you’re going to receive in reality.
This reminds me of the time I showed a design mockup with lorem ipsum text and a couple of people got really confused by it and were still confused even after I explained it’s just filler text.
Feels trolly, but touches on a good point: when we use a tool, we start to see the world through its eyes.
The Essence of Technology is By No Means Anything Technological
Sarcasm as an art form can’t survive the internet.
I’m having a hard time telling if this is trolling or idiocy.
Poe’s law struck again.
Like all good satire it is rooted in reality
