this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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I had that same reaction. "You mean you can see it? No like, really see it, not just think about seeing it? What the fuck?"
When i zone out, i can have full conversations with people ive never met in my mind while walking to work.
Basically flying blind through traffic, unless something relevant registers on my "conscious" mind.
It's funny, really, because aphantasia is supposed to be fairly rare, but every time a thread like this comes up, folks come out of the woodwork saying "Oh, yeah, that's me." Makes me wonder if it isn't a lot more common than believed, but people just don't realize they have it. There don't seem to have been any real studies done on it.
I can have conversations in my mind, but there's no visuals associated with it. It's like a radio broadcast vs. a TV program. I can think about the description of an object, and recite back its physical qualities, but I can't visualize that object at all.
These conversations that never happened don't always go well, so I whish I could have less of them.
Same same, i try to be aware of it and ground myself when i do catch it drift into just verbalising anxiety with no real benefit.
Especially when i should be enjoying reality instead, like during a movie, concert or hike
I can see it, separate it into parts, rotate it around, put it back together, etc etc. I design things entirely in my head visually before actually building them. I assume that's how most engineers/artists operate.
Yeah, I've always been a shit artist for I assume the opposite reason; I can think of a thing in a macro sense, like "I want to draw [thing], it has these features', but when it comes time to actually draw those features, I can't pinpoint exactly what they look like. It's like reading a few sentence description of a tree, and then trying to draw one purely based on that description - you can get a general sense for what it looks like, but not the fine detail needed to accurately represent one visually.
Incidentally, I have a difficult time commissioning art as a result, because I have an idea of what I want, but I have a hard time communicating the finer details. AI generated art has actually been really helpful for me in this regard; I can see something and know if it's what I want or not, so being able to give an AI art generator a broad description and get back 100 images from which I can pick a few and tell an artist which parts of each one I want has made it much easier.