To ask you all about your minds eye?

[GrampieRabbit]

I've had a really long running thread about this a few years ago, but I wanted to revisit it - firstly because I find it really interesting, and secondly for dissertation ideas

So I don't have a minds eye. I couldn't picture a tree in my head, or a house, or my baby's face. I couldn't tell you 100% which colour my room is painted in, or what colour my dads car is. I literally think in words.

This means I have trouble with directions, even to places I've been several times. My memory is absolutely terrible - my long term memory is practically non existent.

Does anyone else experience similar? There's a test you can take here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-340390544*

I know I want to do my dissertation on this condition. I'm so fascinated by it, and have been ever since I realised it was actually a thing (on Mumsnet!)

But I want it to be on aphantasia AND something. I was thinking aphantasia and memory.

But I remember that last time I had a thread on this, Mumsnetters with aphantasia (and myself) read extraordinarily quickly, and always had done from a young age. So I was thinking maybe I could test the strength of participant's minds eyes (couldn't work out the grammar for that phrase!), and then timing them whilst they read something. But might have to include some comprehension questions I guess to check they've actually read it.

Then I started thinking about the fact that people said they had always read quickly - so is this something we're born with? Could I figure out a way to test kids for it? Maybe a little too complicated?

My dissertation proposal's due in a couple of days. It can be really vague - I could probably just get away with writing 'aphantasia', but I want to get paired with the most appropriate supervisor, hence the forward thinking. Am waiting on DD to go to bed then I'll research some more, but these are just some initial ideas.

Please, please share your experiences of aphantasia and thoughts on interesting dissertation ideas

I am also a "super recogniser".

I forever recognise people, once I have an interaction with someone I don't forget their face. I can be a bit awkward as I think I must come across quite stalker like- " oh didn't we meet at a friend's house once 15 years ago" type conversation, leaving other people look strangely at me.
If I walk down the street I mentally clock people thinking " she used to work at the Customer service desk at tesco" or "that's the receptionist that worked at the vets 8 years ago" or, "that's My mother's friends daughter I was introduced to and spoke for 5 minutes three years ago."
Mostly I have stopped saying hello because I realise it's just me that rememers.

Was going to add: I'm a fast reader. I recognise faces pretty well, but not where I recognise them from (there's a lot of "I recognise you from somewhere, where did you go to school?")

Dont think ive got it but I do read quickly and have a terrible sense of direction.

I scored 40/40. I was talking to someone years ago about thinking in pictures where as others think in words.

I think that I need to do X Y and Z and picture myself doing X Y and Z.

In comprehension I can read a piece and understand and picture the scene but ask me questions about the piece and I can see the answer in picture form and I can describe it to you like I am describing a scene from a film but I am incapable of putting it down on paper.

I can't scroll back but the poster on the first page who said Wednesdays were yellow. I can definitely relate.

I read quite early but I am not a particularly fast reader.

I read first middle and last lines together and tend to make up what's going on in-between

This is fascinating, I had never thought about this before but it seems I'm super visual too, I have a constant movie in my mind. Scored maximum marks in the test, I see images of people/places I know as if they were photos. Hate watching movies of books I've read because they aren't how I imagined them and recognise people in the street from the tiniest interaction years ago.

I'm also a very fast reader. What I'm not good at is taking things in from movies, vidro clips etc, I have to really concentrate to follow the plot of a film and it makes my heart sink that so much stuff on the internet nowadays (BBC website I'm looking at you) is video clips rather than text. I also cannot concentrate on work or a conversation if there is music or TV on in the background, I think I get overloaded.

I might be a super visualizer but I am face blind to people I don't know that well or haven't seen in weeks or are in a different setting.

I practiced in bed last night after reading this. I almost managed to visualise a carrot. There was a vague smear of orange at the bottom of the picture, but the leaves were more like dandelion leaves and I couldn't make them change to nice, feathery, carrot fronds, no matter how hard I tried!
I could taste carrots though!!

This is fascinating. I can see everything perfectly in my minds eye, too. Scored highly on test. I think it's interesting when I think of 'where' in my brain I see them. I see it above my eyes, at the front of my brain. I also had no idea there were people who couldn't see things!

To add, as I've read others have said similar and it's reminded me-when I try and think about a loved one's face I only remember photos of them and I think in words only too, but I have very vivid and visual dreams! Which is weird isn't it-I wonder if it's to do with the level of relaxation?

This is completely fascinating, even among those who do see visually in their mindseye, there are differences of levels.

For example I didn't realise until fairly recently that people don't associate months and days with colours. In mind I am on a moebius strip of the year and I can place myself on that month and either look backwards or forwards to other months....obviously all shaded in beautiful colour.

However although I have reasonable face recognition then I don't recognise people I met 5 years ago once.

I also do have very vivid dreams where I'll try and tell my DH about them the next morning and realise they are very odd!

Oooh i dont know where i would fall

I read very fast, i prefer word instructions for driving and working equipment

I am dreadful with faces being in the wrong place...so have no problem with a mum in the playground, draw a complete blank if she is in town

I cant picture faces, which i do get upset about

But i do need to 'see' some things, like patioing the garden i need markers to see the size

All very interesting and i should probably not get upset about not being able to picture faces...i thought i was just crap

I'm a very visual person, I have a great imagination. But I also read very quickly. My memory is appalling though.

What about hearing voices? I was surprised to learn recently that dd does not hear voices in her head of either people she knows or actors she has seen on the telly. I could imagine a completely new episode of Lewis or Downton Abbey with the actors speaking the lines I made up, for them in their own voices and with correct accents. If I remember something somebody has said, I hear them speak it. Who is the odd one out: dd or me?

4691IrradiatedHaggis

When you read a novel, for example, how do you picture things in your head?
I don't. I just read them. My premise is that that's why aphantasia sufferers may be faster readers than those that don't - because they don't spend time picturing the scene.

See, I can't identify with aphantasia at all. (Just looked it up.) I am an extremely fast reader but I can vividly imagine the scenes in my head in each book I read! So this contradicts what you believe.

Your comment has just made me realise that people with aphantasia must be the ones who claim both to have been voracious readers as young children and that its totally fine for 8 year olds to read Game of Thrones because books don't have the same impact as films!

TBH I've always thought people who say that just lacked reading comprehension and were pointlessly motoring through books they barely understood as children, or were utterly lacking in imagination - but it makes sense that if they truly aren't automatically vividly seeing what they read in their heads they'd think that despite understanding the text...

Working memory provides an ‘inner voice’ and an ‘inner eye’. The ‘inner eye’, or visuo-spatial sketchpad is more developed in some people, the ‘inner voice’, or phonological loop, in others – and some people are more balanced between the two modes.

I came out as a strong visualiser, and I can conjure up images and play around with them, so a rainbow, the strongest image is one that I saw in my current location, but I can switch it around for the most recent one I saw, or a child's painting, or the TV show (now seeing George and Zippy )

I was an early and fast reader. I started recognising letters before I was 2 and had the reading level of an 8 year old on starting school before I was 5. I was reading books like Narnia before I was 8 and love that kind of rich world in literature. I get bored by mundane details in genres like chick lit.

I'm not great with getting to know names and faces, but once I know them I'm fine. In the classroom, I'll learn by the seating plan first then who the students are. Having spent much of my career as a supply teacher I've often had to get to know 300 students ASAP without the benefit of pre-knowing some from previous years. Having taught many thousands of students, it does begin to go fuzzy. I also struggle to identify people out of context which I think is more down to the scale of people I've met and the variety of environments they could have come from rather than the way in which my memory works. Saying the name of the school for context would unlock some of the memories.

My sense of place is strong. I learn routes easily and am landmark lead. DH has learned that if I give a contradictory verbal and hand cue, trust the hand. I get frustrated that he hasn't learned a route after the 10th time as it just doesn't occur to me that he hasn't mastered it after the 3rd time and it's only 2 years since we were there

I wonder if DH struggles with visualising. His perception of colour seems weak, he'd struggle with pink/ lilac and thinks they're the same. He rarely dreams apparently. Some vivid dreams I can recall years later and I often wake with a residual memory of a dream even if it's faded. I recently dreamed that I was telling the DCs off and remember the piles of random stuff (DM's hoard style) that they'd pulled out. I woke us both up shouting at them in reality!

wow this is so interesting! I wouldn't say I have no mind's eye but it's not a very good one! i'm
very, very unobservant of the physical world and also absolutely useless at directions and anything spacial. however I am very 'verbally fluent' and always have been.

I am about the most hyperphantasic person I knew, and it blew my mind a few years ago when I discovered there are people who read books and don't see anything. I have walked through Middleearth and Middlemarch, the slums of Victorian London and ridden the Grand National with Velvet Brown. I've fought in the trenches of WW1 and been to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. And most of it from my bed or a seat in a railway carriage or on a beach, but I remember them as well as my classroom on my first day at school or something. And it's not like a film, more like a film set, right in the middle of it, rather than in front of me on a screen.

It does explain why some people aren't so keen on reading novels, though.

I have very vivid dreams, in glorious technicolour. Some I still remember from years ago. Usually I know they're dreams, but I do have a couple of memories which I'm not quite sure if they were dreams or something which actually happened.

I don't tend to imagine touch - I might imagine standing in a cold stream, but I don't feel the cold that makes you catch your breath, or the feeling of it almost burning till your feet acclimatise and start going numb. I know how it would feel, but I can't feel it in the same way I see it, and I assume for aphantasic people, images are like that - they know it, but don't see it.

I'm good with sounds, too, and can recall people's voices and accents. I have a large bank of remembered poems in my head, which are basically song lyrics without music, though there is rhythm. I have fairly constant earworms, usually music, sometimes poetry, or other word patterns, like verb tables. Earworms are fine in the background, unless it's really annoying music which I will then notice and that foregrounds it. (Trying my hardest not to think of examples the Birdie Song.)

I mostly think in words, like a conversation, but for maths and things, it might be imagery - I am good at spatial awareness, and can mentally spin shapes round and so on. Also have a good sense of direction.

I can read fast - I think a lot of this because we didn't have a TV til I was 14, and I read a lot. I've also got a good memory - I am one of those who can remember where things are on a page. Not so keen on Kindle for that reason, particularly if studying. There's also something about physically writing rather than typing which helps things stick in my mind.

I still struggle to get my head round the fact some people don't visualise things like me. I mean, I understand it on an intellectual level, but it's so central to how my brain works, I just can't imagine how life would be without it, just as aphantasic people probably struggle to imagine what it's like in my head.

(Think I had something else to say, but work is getting in the way.)

I did the test in the link in the OP and it suggests I have hyper-aphantasia. I also read fast and whilst not an artist, I would say I can produce something reasonably accomplished when required.

Like a PP I can remember some things really vividly and from very early. I can remember lying in my pram (1960's so big coach built thing) with the hood up and screen over, in the rain, listening to the rythm of the rain on the hood of the pram and smelling that strange smell when it's rained on dust.

I can remember sitting on the outdoor step of the flat we lived in until I was about 15 months, I was playing with the dirt and can almost feel the grains between my fingers and the sun on my legs and also wondering where my mum was. It's quite bizzare as I cant remember what I had for dinner last week :o

When I can't remember something now, I have to go back to where I was when I thought of it. i.e. going to tell someone something and then when I get to them I've forgotten so have to go back to the kitche/my desk etc and then the tought pops back in again. Do people with aphantasia do that or wouldn't that help?

I remember the other thing I meant to add - I score highly on autism tests. I am good at systematising.

I have only recently found out about this, i always thought nobody could actually 'see' things in their head and it was just something teachers in school told us to do. I've asked oh and hes unavle to visualise either.
I cannot picture my children in my head, although i can describe them in detail because i look at their beautiful faces all day. I am awful with direction, i have to drive somewhere using my sat nav a lot before i could do it without, and then god help me at night time! I have always been a fast reader ever since i was a small child, i took that test and scored 8/40.

Theres a test????

Right back in a bit

17/40

So less vivid but dont have the thingy mentioned in the OP

Well that makes sense