tilthat: TIL a philosophy riddle from 1688 was recently solved. If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability, distinguish those objects by sight alone? In 2003 five people had their sight restored though surgery, and, no they could not.
nentuaby: I love when apparently Deep questions turn out to have clear empirical answers.
I had a conversation about this decades ago and it stuck with me. It's bothered me all this time. I have to believe our color perception is at least close if, biologically, we have rods and cones that operate in the same way, and brain structures that work the same. (To keep it simple I'm not considering colorblindness).
What I find really fascinating is some higher level things that I didn't realize were different between people.
Some people see things in their mind's eye and those with aphantasia struggle to do so if at all.
Some can envision and manipulate things in 3d and some have a harder time with this.
Some people like me with ADHD have what is called time blindness, "difficulties with tasks related to time, such as estimating how long an activity will take, sticking to schedules, and recognizing when it's appropriate to start or finish tasks." (Healthline.com). My perception of time is .. limited but it is hard to describe exactly what I'm missing because I don't know what it is like to be normal.
I'm sure there are other examples as well.
Some people have an inner monologue, like they hear a voice narrating their thoughts. I dont have that. I have aphantasia too but apparently there is no relation no matter how weird I think both groups are.
Ah right. That was the one I was forgetting. I'm often talking in my head to think unless I'm thinking visually.
If I may, how does your thinking work?
I'm not so much narrating my thoughts as using words to think things. E.g. in my head I say, "how do they do that? I have to have words to express the thoughts"
Or another example: when I am typing I am basically "dictating", but by speaking inside my head and typing what I "say".
Are you able to just ...conjure concepts and ideas without words, somehow?
There really is no good parable to describe my thought process. It’s abstract. I’m often quicker to conclusions than my peers so there’s that. If I had to look at pictures and read an audio book along the way it would be slower.
I can think about a painting, but it doesn’t appear in my head other than I’m thinking about the facts about it. I know that The Scream by Munch is a ghostly figure holding his head screaming and walking on a.. bridge? That is just remembered stuff about it that I pulled from my thoughts and memories. I don’t know the color theme, direction he’s walking or other details. I can probably spot the real one in a comparison with a similar painting so it’s stored somehow, I just can’t access it as is. I can’t draw for shit.
I can think about a page of a paper that I’m going to write. I can form the concepts, rules, theme, paragraphs and flow of it and have it all done in my head before I start writing. Then I type it down at 100 wpm until the page is full. At no point did I hear anyone narrating or think about what any of the words would look like when printed out. It was all abstract until I started thinking about how to put it on paper.
So fascinating.
I really wished I could write like that. Probably because of poor working memory (thanks ADHD) I can't hold that much stuff in my head prior to writing. Certainly not a bunch of raw wordless concept blobs (or whatever?) plus flow an form and all that. Jeez. I invariably write things as I go. I might have a vague sense of what I want to write. Certainly nothing "done" before writing.
I can "see" a rough approximation of The Scream in my head. Enough to draw an inaccurate copy. I can draw other stuff (cars, bicycles, cats whatever) by visualizing them to greater or lesser degrees.
My kid has aphantasia and described it like you did. Remembering facts about it but not so much the actual image itself. Interestingly she is quite good at drawing.
I’ve heard that it’s much easier to learn how to draw when you can make an image in your head and trace it down on paper. It’s still possible to become good at drawing with aphantasia but in my case, I can’t make up new imagery from my thoughts so I have never had that as a reason to draw, if that makes sense. I just don’t know what to draw, so I don’t.
Art does nothing for me anyways, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I have never looked at a painting, sculpture, dance, theater or other physical forms of expression and felt anything about it. I can only objectively observe it, like ”this painting of a boat is blueish and painted with oil on canvas” or ”this person moves their legs and arms in this fashion while singing about loneliness”. This might be more due to autism than aphantasia though. Still it probably contributes to why I can’t draw.
Interesting. I hadn't considered art might have no effect on some. Interesting that autism could play a role there.
My kid usually draws from a picture or something. I do that sometimes too. (Well I don't draw much anymore).
My wife can't draw. She has tried numerous times. I infer there's some capability of looking at a pic and abstracting it into lines or shades or whatever and then putting that on paper. Well, she doesn't have that.
She does not have aphantasia. So she can see a cat, say, in her mind's eye but can't translate that onto paper I guess?
I suppose the more detailed you can picture something the easier it would be to draw it if you have the ability to translate pic to paper.
I read once an exercise where you have people draw a bicycle without using a picture. The results are often laughably inaccurate. I guess because some folks think they know how the thing works but don't. Or haven't paid enough attention. But presumably if, like me, you have had bikes for years, worked on them, know how they work, and paid attention to all the details you can make a very accurate drawing.
That is interesting. There is undoubtedly some learned skill involved regardless of mind’s eye.
I can draw a bicycle correctly, for the same reasons as you, but it will not be pretty. The frame will be 2 parallel lines all over and it will be drawn from a perfect side angle. I could draw a derailleur the same way, or the insides of several types of steering column.