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Many people have no mental imagery. What's going on in their brains?

15 points by johngossman

by 10yearsalurker

0 subcomment

Wow. This explains a huge amount, I’m slightly stunned. I had always assumed people were speaking metaphorically when they talked about seeing with the mind’s eye. I think I’m about a 4.8 on the scale shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Can definitely relate to @spacedcowboy’s "orrery" model, though in my case it generally received as a source of annoyance, not a superpower sadly :) and to the sdam you describe @deafpolygon.

by rags2riches

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> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.
I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.

by m463

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fascinating to find the differences (though maybe not for the people with aphantasia)
Another article that touches on this in a different way is temple grandin's paper on how animals think
https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

by tingling168

1 subcomments

I'm one of those people that has a very weak mental "imagery". It comes with its own positives and negatives.

by deafpolygon

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i also have aphantasia. it’s interesting to say the least. as a side effect of aphantasia, i also experience sdam (severely deficient autobiographical memory) in which i don’t recall clear events in my life (i only know that certain things happen, but in general it’s all just a blur) and i have difficulty recognizing people in a crowd (even loved ones).