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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Most people can “see” vivid imagery in their minds. They can imagine a chirping bird from hearing the sounds of one, for example. But people with aphantasia can’t do this. A new study explores how their brains work.
Growing up, Roberto S. Luciani had hints that his brain worked differently than most people. He didn’t relate when people complained about a movie character looking different than what they’d pictured from the book, for instance.
[...] That’s because Luciani has a condition called aphantasia — an inability to picture objects, people and scenes in his mind. When he was growing up, the term didn’t even exist. But now, Luciani, a cognitive scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and other scientists are getting a clearer picture of how some brains work, including those with a blind mind’s eye.
In a recent study, Luciani and colleagues explored the connections between the senses, in this case, hearing and seeing. In most of our brains, these two senses collaborate. Auditory information influences activity in brain areas that handle vision. But in people with aphantasia, this connection isn’t as strong, researchers report November 4 in Current Biology.
[...] The results highlight the range of brain organizations, says cognitive neuroscientist Lars Muckli, also of the University of Glasgow. “Imagine the brain has an interconnectedness that comes in different strengths,” he says. At one end of the spectrum are people with synesthesia, for whom sounds and sights are tightly mingled (SN: 11/22/11). “In the midrange, you experience the mind’s eye — knowing something is not real, but sounds can trigger some images in your mind. And then you have aphantasia,” Muckli says. “Sounds don’t trigger any visual experience, not even a faint one.”
The results help explain how brains of people with and without aphantasia differ, and they also give clues about brains more generally, Muckli says. “The senses of the brain are more interconnected than our textbooks tell us.”
The results also raise philosophical questions about all the different ways people make sense of the world (SN: 6/28/24). Aphantasia “exists in a realm of invisible differences between people that make our lived experiences unique, without us realizing,” Luciani says. “I find it fascinating that there may be other differences lurking in the shadow of us assuming other people experience the world like us.”
Reference: B. M. Montabes de la Cruz et al. Decoding sound content in the early visual cortex of aphantasic participants. Current Biology. Vol. 34, p. 5083. November 4, 2024. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.09.008.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday November 23 2024, @09:26AM (5 children)
Unless you want to work as a CAD designer, or a machinist, or anything that involves visualizing parts before modeling them or machining them.
I worked with SolidWorks for years. One of my colleagues - an accountant - could NOT visualize anything in space. He told me seeing the parts I was modeling on screen was always a ah-ha! moment when he saw them, but as soon as he turned away from the screen, he couldn't figure out which side of the part a threaded hole or a fillet he saw 5 seconds earlier was.
It's completely obvious to those of us blessed with the ability to visualize things in space in their head. But that guy was blind as a bat in his mental theater. It was even bewildering talking to him about mechanics and clearly getting the feeling that I was talking to an alien who had no concept of the obvious stuff I was describing.
The main takeaway here is: don't dismiss others' difficulties just because you don't have them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday November 23 2024, @04:29PM (1 child)
It can be EXPENSIVE. I distinctly remember a long time ago working on a waveguide routing problem where I could look and think and then knew it can't be done in 3d space but I was not permitted to not design it until I spent an hour or two in a CAD program mocking up a demo proving an intersection between two waveguides no matter the routing. I was so mad I had to waste all that time "when its obvious". That was back when I was a W-2 employee as a 1099 now I'd be like "sure I can spend all week on that if you want me to".
Its a perfect analogy to the four color theorem for map coloring. Some people intuitively "know" its correct but imagine having a shitty boss that demands a formal written proof of it before believing you. IIRC the four color problem wasn't proven until post Y2K and it took computer software to prove it so that's an enormous PITA and waste of effort.
I'm talking about stuff slightly more practical and less abstract than this, but not much:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object [wikipedia.org]
I can only imagine the agony of someone employed at a fab shop where the boss gets a drawing and demands the crew build one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trident [wikipedia.org]
One nice part about CAD/CAM and 3-d printing is the slicer software will refuse to render rebuildable stuff. At least stuff that can't be built in our universe. Just because you can draw it in 2d doesn't mean you can make it in 3d.
Anyway the above is how it feels when someone who can visualize stuff gets into an argument at work with someone who can't visualize stuff but is pretty stubborn about it. I imagine working at an integrated circuit fab must be a giant headache not because of the job, but because of the coworkers who can't do it, for example.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday November 25 2024, @06:30AM
The intuitive answer isn't always the right answer and it can be hard to justify something being impossible if you don't try. A good example is that if a bat and ball cost $1.10 together and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much are each? The first answer people come up with is usually wrong if they don't do the work.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2024, @07:04PM (2 children)
OP here. I didn't state it, but I don't have a visual imagination. I've never had any issue doing drafting or CAD when I took classes on the subject in HS and college, or used the 3D printers and CNC routers that I have at home, or any kind of spatial reasoning. If everyone with a visual imagination could use it to replace CAD, why would we have CAD programs in the first place?!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 24 2024, @04:01AM (1 child)
CAD allows greater complexity and finer resolution than visual imagination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2024, @01:23AM