How does it affect your ability to enjoy books? Or type of books you’d enjoy?
Do you tend to prefer more visual medium like video(movies, tv), or comic books?
How does it affect your ability to enjoy books? Or type of books you’d enjoy?
Do you tend to prefer more visual medium like video(movies, tv), or comic books?
You both seem nuts to me. I can conceptually imagine, but obviously cannot see things in my head because I’m not schizo, my surroundings don’t disappear but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate descriptions and conjure concepts from them, just not imagery.
I think all this aphantasia stuff is just trappings of the English language and having “imagine” have the word “image” as a root, which is wrong, because imagination is more about concepts, it’s a unique data structure that’s not related to jpegs or photons and doesn’t involve them. But some people conflate the two because their language doesn’t allow them to think otherwise so they assume concepts are literal images in their head, and others with enough self-awareness to know they don’t actually “see” anything in their head assume they have an issue/divergence. It’s so bizarre to watch.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can’t relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.
Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it’s hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.
I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can’t visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc… I can’t automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the “image” may just as well be green.
*edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic
I’m not going along with this tiktok diagnosis shit when the way I see it I have extremely fundamental problems with the plausibility of the entire concept.