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BBC News has an article about a newly described condition called "aphantasia", where people can't visualize an imaginary scene:
Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex [paywalled].
Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they find hard to convey to others."
How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability of human experience."
If you think you have aphantasia or hyperphantasia and would like to be involved in Prof Zeman's research he is happy to be contacted at a.zeman@exeter.ac.uk
If this is true, isn't it fascinating that we have apparently always had two groups of people: those (majority) who could "count sheep" in order to fall asleep, and assumed that everybody could, and those (minority) who thought that "counting sheep" was just some weird expression, surely not something actual people could actually do.
Personally, my mum once advised me to count sheep; I could visualize them jumping over the fence, but it didn't help much in getting me to sleep. Clearly the genes for this "aphantasia" are not linked to those for insomnia.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 27 2015, @10:58AM
How the "time sequence" thinking?
I've noticed (maybe wrong) that people who get a situation "at a glance" pay this with some difficulties in perceiving the "temporal flow context" - I don't know how to put it... metaphorically speaking, sorta like "good painters are rarely good musicians".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by slinches on Thursday August 27 2015, @06:00PM
I would say maybe average, at best. Probably where that's most noticeable is that my feel for musical timing is fairly poor. If I'm singing along to a song, I'll often come in at the wrong time after a pause and will occasionally jump to the wrong verse when the lead ins are similar. Oddly, that doesn't translate to rhythm as I can hear and keep up with a rather complex beat without much effort. It's just that somehow the language processing and chronological sequencing doesn't flow along with it. It also makes me a rather bad umpire in baseball.
Although, I think it hasn't limited me too much because, in many cases, I can compensate for the poor timing by substituting visual/spatial relationships between things. Then the pieces all move together like clockwork where the relationships hold as a function of time, even when time itself may not progress smoothly. A neat effect from that is that is allows me to reverse time in my head and rewind or replay a set of motions or interactions in slow motion.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 27 2015, @08:20PM
I guess most of the people strongly oriented towards one of the extreme of the "spatial/temporal perception" range develop mechanisms to compensate.
For my case, I'm more of a sequential thinker, I can get to "see the whole" but it's tedious (somehow passing through the "how these pieces evolved to this snapshot of the whole").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 28 2015, @01:39AM
This is a really interesting subthread you guys have here. It puts me in mind of stuff I've heard over the last three years about brain hacking. People have used electrical stimulation while trying to learn new tasks, and have reported non-trivial gains. Wonder if we can use similar techniques to train ourselves better to think like you do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 28 2015, @08:29AM
TANSTAAFL - maybe the price to pay will become apparent later. One thing is certain, I ain't going to risk electrical brain stimulation; smoking is enough for me, don't want to add something on top of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford