Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia:
So why are some people more easily spooked by stories than others? We ran an experiment to find out.
[...] One reason some people are more easily spooked could relate to how well they can visualize the scary scene in their mind.
When some people listen to a story they automatically conjure up the scene in their mind's eye, while others have to focus really hard to create any sort of mental image.
A small proportion cannot visualize images at all. No matter how hard they try, they do not see anything in their mind. This inability to visualize is known as aphantasia.
Although we have known people vary in their ability to visualize for many years, the term aphantasia was not coined until 2015.
We don't yet know exactly how many people have aphantasia. But estimates vary at 1–4% of the population.
[...] If the ability to visualize images and scenes in the mind plays a role in how we react to spooky stories, what does that mean for people with aphantasia? How do they react when reading scary stories?
We ran a study to find out. We had people sit in the dark and read a number of short stories—not ghost stories, but ones with frightening, hypothetical scenarios.
[...] For most people who could conjure up images in their mind, their skin conductance increased when they read these stories. But people with aphantasia didn't show a significant increase in their skin conductance levels when reading the same scenarios.
There was no difference between the two groups when viewing scary pictures. This suggests aphantasic people's lack of a reaction to these stories wasn't due to a general dampening of emotional responses.
Instead, we concluded the lack of a change in skin conductance in these people with aphantasia is specific to being unable to visualize these fear-inducing stories.
[...] One study shows both the frontal and visual regions of the brain are linked to visualizing images. And in people with aphantasia, the connection between these two areas is weaker.
Another study found the pattern of activity in visual regions of the brain is correlated with the vividness of the mental images.
Journal References:
1.) Marcus Wicken, Rebecca Keogh, Joel Pearson. The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267)
2.) George I. Christopoulos, Marilyn A. Uy, Wei Jie Yap. The Body and the Brain: Measuring Skin Conductance Responses to Understand the Emotional Experience: [open], Organizational Research Methods (DOI: 10.1177/1094428116681073)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @02:32AM (18 children)
For so many years, I thought the "minds eye" phrase and other "mystical" things were just bullshit sold by Disney, and my similarly aphantasic family made this obvious. It wasn't until my late 20s that I realized they weren't just making stuff up to get attention, and "visualizing" was actually a thing and not some woo-woo cult shit.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Sunday October 31 2021, @03:39AM (10 children)
So, if I understand correctly, you're saying that you literally cannot picture anything in your mind?
That seems unbelievable.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @03:52AM (7 children)
Not the original AC, but yep. I have excellent spatial sense and positional reasoning, but the closest I would come to visualizing things would be more like a detailed knowledge of a wireframe model of the world. I always know which way is North.
However, I am also really shit at faces, and absolutely abysmal at recognizing people from photos. You can hold up a photo of someone next to them and I still won't be sure it's the same person.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:14AM (6 children)
I would say roughly the same about faces, but I've always just been bad at faces.
Detailed wire frame -- isn't this like being mentally color blind? A photograph without the detailed texture and colors?
Are you able to imagine a basic, wire-frame head (nose eyes ears shape of the scalp, perhaps hair) and then place a tree (leaves, branches, trunk) behind it? Can you assemble multiple items into a complex scene? (Add a truck in front of the tree? then visualize, roughly, all three of them together with over-lapping items?)
I can do the above, however not in great detail -- it's more of a hazy, fuzzy thing when I try to focus on all three of them at once. However, I can picture like in a movie where a leaf will break off and whoosh away in the wind (and keep picturing it, for as far as it wants to go -- with or without the tree, jumping near onto the leaf or far and picturing the leaf floating in the wind a small distance from the tree).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:57AM (4 children)
Nope. For instance, there is a bookcase next to my desk. If I close my eyes, I still know where each edge and surface is, but it's more an awareness of them rather than a picture. I do not 'see' them, I just know where they are.
Interestingly, I am RG colorblind. I wonder if it's related.
That's pretty much what I do when asked to visualize something. I don't 'see' them, I just construct an 'awareness' model from the description. It's not really wire-frame, that's just the easiest way to describe it to someone who can 'see'.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 31 2021, @05:06AM (3 children)
How much are you able to be aware of at a time? How many objects, or how much content?
How about things that don't have physical form, like the layout of a magazine? How do you maintain the order or positioning of items?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @05:36AM (2 children)
Probably both more and less than people who 'see' it. I have astonished people by being able to draw layouts from walking through somewhere once, while also amazing them at forgetting all their names and faces immediately. It's hard to describe, I would guess it's more like a kinesthetic awareness extended beyond the body.
Close your eyes, do you know where your left foot is? Do you see a picture of it on the end of your leg or just 'know' where it is?
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 31 2021, @05:58AM (1 child)
A little of both, tbh. They're roughly inseparable. When I'm thinking about reaching around the back of a part in an engine, I'm visualizing the part, and my hand, but from an out-of-body angle. Likewise when I'm brushing my teeth -- I'm "looking" at where the toothbrush is. Not at the level of "There's the brush, and that's my set of teeth," but a combination of feeling the bristles on my teeth and visualizing the bristles going over the brush and what parts of the tooth and gums the bristles are going over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @08:45AM
Try visualizing a beach. Sand, shells, seaweed, waves rolling in, Sun beating down, as detailed as you can make it, at the same time being aware of where your foot is. Now discard the picture.
The out of body angle thing isn't something I had even considered. I know where I am, where everything around me is* but there is no viewpoint to that knowledge. I suppose there is a center, as the 'knowledge' gets less accurate with distance, but not a viewpoint as such.
*I'm not talking any ESP bullshit here, I have to see stuff to know it's there. But then it is just placed in my "awareness map".
(Score: 2) by srobert on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:23PM
"Are you able to imagine a basic, wire-frame head (nose eyes ears shape of the scalp, perhaps hair) and then place a tree (leaves, branches, trunk) behind it? Can you assemble multiple items into a complex scene? (Add a truck in front of the tree? then visualize, roughly, all three of them together with over-lapping items?)"
But the head is attached to a body of a man. The man is walking an Irish Setter. There's a house behind the tree. And the truck is parked next to a fire hydrant. I can add a bear wearing a tutu walking towards them on the sidewalk on his back legs and carrying a parasol, while an elderly woman looks out on the scene from an upstairs window of the house. I can also imagine the entire scene from the perspective of the old woman, the man, the bear or the dog. And I can imagine what each of them is thinking and feeling about what they are seeing.
The only thing surprising to me is that, other people don't do this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:10AM
It's just as unbelievable to me that you can.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @08:28AM
As weird as it sounds, there are a lot of them. As another to the unbelievableness, a large number famous artists, sculptors and animators are also confirmed or believed aphantasiacs based on their comments and correspondence. Some modern animation houses today actively seek them out as some of their best prospects.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:19AM (6 children)
How do you organize information? Facts I almost feel like I pull from nothing -- I just "know". But how would you describe what a dollar bill looks like? I pull up a picture from the many times I've seen a dollar bill, and start naming features that I can remember. (Not that many -- I don't very often focus on a dollar bill.)
OTOH, today I inspected my vehicle. I can picture the rubber bottom-out pads (??) above the rear axle, the axle itself, the shocks, the tires, the emergency brake cable (wow that's loose..) and etc. It's just all there (perhaps in slightly separate images). when I think of atomic structure of water, I know it's two hydrogens and an oxygen, and I "see" them near each other (in the standard colored-ball Chemistry class style). I then remove the ball and make them fuzzy, that's more like what atoms ought to be -- points, really, with the electron cloud. From there I'll make it less of a cloud and more of an electron dot zipping around a bit, figure-8 style and such. If I zoom in on an atom I'll come to the nucleus, with more of those balls (protons), but then jump in a bit and it's like looking out from inside a translucent soccer ball -- I'm inside with the quarks and such, with a membrane around it all (there isn't, it's areas-of-effect of energy).
How do you "absorb" the description above? Is it just a list of words? How is it recalled? Do you create "stories" to remember the sequence of things, and if so, what do those stories consist of? What's the raw storage format? :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:03AM (4 children)
I tend to think in words, and remember in "touch" if that makes sense. I often trace outlines in the air and use my hands to describe objects when talking and thinking. Very spatially oriented, and very coordinated with my eyes open or closed. I can remember some "glimpses" of vision, but not much, and almost all from when I was very young (3-5): my younger sister practicing walking, my mother using a nursing pump, learning to swim. I remember kinesthetic sensations much more clearly and profoundly.
To describe something like a dollar bill, I would struggle. I know there's numbers in the corners, a border, a masonic pyramid, a bird and a president, some E pluribus unum style quotations and a serial number, but I couldn't give you much more without actually looking at one. I don't tend to be visually-oriented in the first place though - I hate movies, don't understand art (at all), horrible with faces and names, not especially attracted to bright colors or shiny things. I prefer the monochrome of night to daytime.
Your descriptions of "seeing" an water molecules is completely foreign to me. When I was younger, I would have thought you to be literally insane if you told me something like that. I don't have trouble remembering sequences, I just do. I don't use the address book in my phone, I know all the numbers.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:24AM (3 children)
Then, how do you think about something that you can't feel, such as a water molecule? The entropy of particles (subatomic or otherwise)? The nuclear forces holding protons and such together?
Admittedly, they're not exactly visual either, but I see the quarks coming close together and sort of "sticking", for example. For reflections, I see a photon approaching an electron, bumping it, absorbing, and then a photon shoots off at an equal angle. For the hydrogen bonds, I imagine cotton-like clouds off the Oxygen in the water molecule that come close to the hydrogens in other water molecules -- positive hydrogens and negative electron clouds.
How do you think about these things, specifically?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:41AM
I don't, generally, because it's not very interesting to me, and I don't understand the math involved well enough to learn about chemistry on my own (it seems to be impossible to find resources for ANYTHING that don't assume you can read greek and have expert knowledge of calculus). Electrons moving through a circuit though, the flow of molten plastics under pressure, the trajectory of a thrown ball through the air, I have no trouble thinking about these things, but I don't "see" them. The relationships are physical, I "feel" them, shape them with my hands, draw it on paper, think about metaphor and simile.
To really describe these things to you is very hard, because I know nothing else. I can only barely understand that you can visualize because it's so deeply embedded into culture and idiom, the same way I can understand what religion is, but have no idea how people actually believe in it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @07:29AM (1 child)
Not the same poster but I'm on the extreme edge of aphantasia in that I can visualize things, but just barely and I think you're missing at least one more important tragic element. For me, all visualizations are "foggy" at best. If you can imagine a beach with water lapping around, in color, with motion like waves while my version might just be sand and it might not even be in color. I don't have much control over what bit I render either. But the tragic element is when someone dies, without photos you'll never be able to recall their image. From what I gather you can look up images with reasonable recall, so you'll know what your mother or father or grandparents looked like even if you lost all your photos, after they have passed on. You know visually what your wife or husband looks like when they are in another room. What I have is more like a hashmap, where if I see them I know them, but recall isn't really possible. I've been away from my SO for a few days and right now I can only recall her fingers. I didn't intentionally memorize them nor will that be the bit I can recall next time I try. But recalling her face is nearly impossible.
You describe visualizing theoretical structures and I can say I don't do that. I recall reading "And He But a Crooked House" and basically having my eyes glaze over the visual descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22%E2%80%94And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House%E2%80%94%22 ). However, with software I have found I have a much better memory than my coworkers in regards to complexity and where code is put. I simply could track more code than they can. I don't find OOP separation of concerns to be as vital from an understanding standpoint. Not to say I ignore OOP, just spaghetti code doesn't hurt me as much as others. I think it is because I have more hashmap style memory so it is easier to look up concepts in my head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:40PM
Yet another different AC here. The way you put it is pretty much how I am, as well. I don't visualize things as much as remember having seen them. When I close my eyes I don't visualize, say, a chair, as I get a foggy idea of the Platonic ideal of a chair. But I'm still just dealing with a vague idea, not an image.
My eye doctors have always noted that I don't have much depth perception. I have some, but not as much as "normal" people do, so I have great difficulty judging distances. Perhaps we're not processing data from our eyes in the same way others do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @11:49AM
Not being able to make or use visual imagery allows for the mental constructions to avoid limiting yourself to 3 dimensions when memorizing things. With mental imagery there's always going to be a pull towards organizing mental stuff in a visualization friendly way. But, if you can't visualize, then you can organize pretty much however you like in as many dimensions as you'd like and you don't necessarily need to be able to worry too much about what things like hypercubes look like either. It can simply be a 4 dimensional cube equivalent and for many cases that's good enough. Otherwise, you'd focus more on the properties and technical aspects when mentally working with them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @04:16AM (2 children)
I'm not the only one who has lived in a real world of horror realized by interested parties in media, politics and medicine the last 19 months. It is finally ending here. It has not yet begun to end for others around the world. So forgive me if my attitude is somewhat sangfroid to "ghost stories" and other Halloween periphery now.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:53AM (1 child)
Firstly, sangfroid isn't an adjective.
Secondly, it doesn't mean what you think: it means composure in the face of danger.
"indifferent" is the word you weren't looking for because you tried to plug a smart French loanword in your sentence and failed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @08:30AM
That's very jeux de vie of you.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 31 2021, @05:51AM (1 child)
or enchanded by the "magic" of Christmas. I'm utterly bored with them, because all they are is crass commercial events nowdays.
All Halloween is to me is a reminder that the awful "holiday season" is about to start, complete with asinine advertisement for shitty plastic toys made in China, gaudy pointless power-wasting Christmas lights everywhere, fake cinnamon scents from Christmas-in-a-can spray cans at my local stores, trying to convince the wife that no, we don't need to eat 12,000 calories of food per person in one evening, only to do it again 5 days later, having to invite the fucking in-laws you never want to see the rest of the year and who don't really care much for you either, having to crack a fake smile and say "Merry Christmas" then "Happy New Year" without really meaning it to total strangers until, finally, when the fucking clock turn to 12:00 and the year rolls over, the fake jolliness lets off and I can finally go out and resume a normal life.
If Halloween and the subsequent holiday season it heralds hadn't been so thoroughly taken over by companies trying to peddle their wares and squeeze the last dollar out of people's pockets, I might just be convinced to be spooked a little. But all I see in it is the hand of capitalism giving you a giant finger.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:08PM
Why let those crass assholes get in the way? Give them the finger and harken back to a time when they didn't exist (and probably would have been burned at the stake if they showed up). If you let them destroy everything that isn't them, you play in to their hand. They WANT you to be a nihilist. Because that leaves them free to bulldoze it all into the trash heap so that when you get over it, there's nothing left but them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @05:59AM
Like "The Wailing."
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday October 31 2021, @07:47AM
The family was watching a Fantasia DVD just last night!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Sunday October 31 2021, @11:44AM (1 child)
Did they include people with a rational mind, who have long ago concluded that things like ghosts, vampires, zombies and such, just don't exist? Or did they just conclude that these people must have this 'aphansasia' condition?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @06:58PM
What aphantasia? How about plain indifference. As in "we're tired boss." ZFG / apathy - take your pick.
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Sunday October 31 2021, @01:38PM (1 child)
I have had 2 friends in my lifetime who are like this. The interesting common factor between them is they are both compulsive liars. I later came to understood that as they could not visualize their thoughts and needs, they spoke them instead, including fantasies, which explains the lying.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Monday November 01 2021, @02:53PM
Curious.
For a counter-balance, I have a very vivid, visual mind. You can say anything at all (an actual Klein bottle, with no passes-through-itself aspects, or a flying unicorn ridden by Hercules), and I have no trouble whatsoever visualizing that.
However, I'm honest to a fault. My visions, fantasy or otherwise, don't affect truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @02:37PM
anyone have a hack/mode for alynx to cheat the lighting? i can't get past stage 4? 'cause i keep jumping out of my skin at first sound (monster with bug on head)(*)... and i thought that hl2 ravencity? place was scary ...
(*) seems you can't commit suicide by walking of the balkony and shoting youself (and bug) in the head?
more on topic, methinks tv wouldn't be as popular if people could really "play movies in their head"?
(Score: 1) by SnorkleZ on Monday November 01 2021, @03:41AM (2 children)
I first ran into a problem in early grammar school - when we had nap-time we all had to rest on our towels, close our eyes and visualise a beach blah blah blah. I only saw a dark gray field and wanted to keep my eyes open. My first experience of many of teachers fallibility.
I read a book on bio-feedback written in the 70's - pretty cool - they were using bio-feedback to race toy cars. They mentioned having found that some people could not visualise and had discovered that they could determine who these people were by looking at the EEG while flashing a red light in their eyes. It was nice to discover that I was not alone. Finally believing that maybe other people actually could visualise (I had always thought that was just bull, since it is a tendency to think that everyone's mind works like your own) I asked my family. My mother also could not visualise while my father and sister were great visualisers.
Some years later I took an informal poll among my fellow engineers at work. All were great visualisers and I got comments like "how on earth do you do math"? How nice it would have been to visualise equations, curves and surfaces when I was in school! I had to do everything abstractly, and no, I was never very good at math, had to really work at it. But unlike all my fellow engineers I was great at English and writing.
One day I was reading a copy of an old Tibetan Buddhist book brought out of Tibet as a part of the flight from the Chinese in which it mentioned that some students in the monastery were incapable of visualising and fortunately ways to remedy that had been found long ago. No other details.
Fortunately a local monastery has very knowledgable monks with Geshe Lharam degrees, which involve 23 years of study. I asked one for advice and learned how they handle the problem:
Find a photo, preferably of someone you love very much - one's mother, spouse or for Buddhists a photo of perhaps the golden Maha Buddha statue at Bodh Gaya. Then holding the photo at eye level one focuses intently, fixing it in their mind. Then lower the photo and as soon as the image leaves the mind raise it again and re-focus on it. With lots of practice the photo can be lowered and the image remains. He also commented "Do not let the image go three dimensional - if you do you are in trouble!"
This tells me that the difficulty is in visual memory and simply training the visual memory strengthens it. In later years with different teachers I found that it was good and desirable for the image to go three dimensional - and here I had spent years fighting that! Never knew why he said that - probably part of the irritating teaching technique where things are tiered into different levels.
I hope someone finds the above useful or at least interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01 2021, @02:59PM (1 child)
Maybe it doesn't bear saying or maybe it does -- if your flat picture of the golden Budha comes out of the image (becomes three-dimensional) and probably starts talking to you, you're hallucinating! ;-D
When I started reading you actually raised the question, "What happens if you're looking at something and close your eyes?" -- and then you answered it. That's very interesting.
(Score: 1) by SnorkleZ on Monday November 01 2021, @08:14PM
Good point. The instructions I was initially given must have been on how to visualise memories, explicitly excluding creative visualisation. Uncontrolled visualisation would be hallucinations. It is common for students to have their visualisation float around or start walking and talking - students are reminded that THEY are in charge. I learned way back in Psychology 101 that the human brain, under sensory isolation, will invent hallucinations just to give it something to do. The example given was someone who suddenly saw pink ducklings start walking across the wall and up the ceiling.