So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
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@hvangalen It's complicated. But dialogue is very much the wrong word for any of it, I think, since it implies questions and answers between two entities. There isn't anything to have a dialogue with: it's all just me, connecting with things and ideas and noticing 3rd party connections between exterior things and ideas. And the verbal part (there's a LOT of verbal) is at least as likely to be storytelling, narrative, as it is to be a commentary on events and my surroundings or internalities.
@ElyseMGrasso @hvangalen No aphantasia, and very much like Elyse, only I'd add in a very bizarre sense of balance. Options in decision-making have mass. Visualised components have tangible levels of elegance and "rightness". Mental calculations, particularly when estimating things like the number of boxes needed to pack up a house are weighed on the balance and adjusted until they feel right.
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@hvangalen It's complicated. But dialogue is very much the wrong word for any of it, I think, since it implies questions and answers between two entities. There isn't anything to have a dialogue with: it's all just me, connecting with things and ideas and noticing 3rd party connections between exterior things and ideas. And the verbal part (there's a LOT of verbal) is at least as likely to be storytelling, narrative, as it is to be a commentary on events and my surroundings or internalities.
@ElyseMGrasso Yeah perhaps monologue is a better term in hindsight.
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@falcennial Yeah it's an interesting "affliction"! I first read about it a decade ago, blissfully unaware it was a thing. The author of the article also thought that "too see it in ones mind" was a figure of speech and not a real thing
I struggle reading books because of it. It really takes a toll to try and make sense of descriptions of environments, I just skip them but later they seemed crucial to the plot and it flies all over my head. I can read manuals and historic annals just fine.
It's only a couple of years since I realised that there were people who can see things with their eyes shut. I thought "the mind's eye" and the like were just figures of speech.
I have Prospagnosia as well, and didn't work that out until a few years ago. I don't think there's any correlation between them, as far as I know. -
So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen As someone who does not think in words until the thoughts need to be expressed to others: Wow, is this honestly the less common attribute? Because that would explain a lot.
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen This was difficult to answer. I'm Aphantastic and when I decide to think about something there's i guess speech-like something to it, but also vibes when I'm not actively thinking about something? Like I'm pretty good at just shutting off the internal noise.
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen my inner monologue used to be speech-like but has become more vibes only in my 40s
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@ElyseMGrasso @hvangalen No aphantasia, and very much like Elyse, only I'd add in a very bizarre sense of balance. Options in decision-making have mass. Visualised components have tangible levels of elegance and "rightness". Mental calculations, particularly when estimating things like the number of boxes needed to pack up a house are weighed on the balance and adjusted until they feel right.
@AbramKedge @hvangalen I don't do mass, I don't think, but I do 3D packing very well. Fill a pickup truck with topper completely while leaving a view port from the rear-view mirror to the back gate. Fill a milk crate with odd shaped squashes making as much use of the available volume as possible, but so the next crate stacked on top won't damage any of the squashes...
I'm not sure how that works without visualization. It's probably related to being good at jigsaw puzzles without visualization.
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@AbramKedge @hvangalen I don't do mass, I don't think, but I do 3D packing very well. Fill a pickup truck with topper completely while leaving a view port from the rear-view mirror to the back gate. Fill a milk crate with odd shaped squashes making as much use of the available volume as possible, but so the next crate stacked on top won't damage any of the squashes...
I'm not sure how that works without visualization. It's probably related to being good at jigsaw puzzles without visualization.
@ElyseMGrasso @hvangalen oh I'm obsessive with packing efficiently! Absolutely love it.
I think it originated with working for a house moving company for five years - you can't waste space when you're fitting four homes into one 2000 cubic feet Mercedes truck, in Austria or Switzerland (no backup trucks to pick up the extra).
When we had an estate sale team in preparing for our big moving sale, they thought they'd need two skips for all the discarded things. Nope, I did all the putting-in-skip, used two thirds of its capacity.
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@ElyseMGrasso @hvangalen oh I'm obsessive with packing efficiently! Absolutely love it.
I think it originated with working for a house moving company for five years - you can't waste space when you're fitting four homes into one 2000 cubic feet Mercedes truck, in Austria or Switzerland (no backup trucks to pick up the extra).
When we had an estate sale team in preparing for our big moving sale, they thought they'd need two skips for all the discarded things. Nope, I did all the putting-in-skip, used two thirds of its capacity.
@AbramKedge @hvangalen Do you have stereoscopic depth perception? I have a near eye and a far eye, and never the twain shall meet. So visual data lacks some 3D-ness, for me, but the world does not.
A word that keeps coming up when I try to think about how I organize the world is 'kinesthetic'. It's not the right word, but it's less wrong than some alternatives. I feel like people who focus on aphantasics' visual cortex and ignore -- I don't know, the spine? maybe? are sort of missing the point.
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen Since I learned of aphantasia, I've thought a lot about how my mind works. Yes, inner dialogue, heck, even back and forth between groups of individuals, rehearsing how I think people might behave because that's how my brand of shyness and autism works: defusing unexpected behavior, preventing startlement and freezing up, by calculating what could happen. The written words that show on the page mimics my inner world. But do I hear distinct voices of the people I rehearse on that inner stage?
No. Not really. Recognize?
Yes.
Which leads to the visual, to the mental images. I can, for example take a book and rotate it is my head. I can take a cereal box and turn it to read the opposite side, the bottom, doing it mentally. I can imagine a fighter jet, seeing the nose cone, yawing it around, seeing the exhaust, flipping it, seeing the weapons under the wing, the flaps. Do I see actual images?
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I have what is called visual intelligence. I understand aesthetics, symmetry, composition in a snap. Photography is my art form. But do I see mental images? That's what discussion with people like @ElyseMGrasso made me realize:
No pictures.
No mental images.
It's all recognition. I recognize what I'm looking at internally. Like turning my iPhone around as I thumb type this to see the camera package, and that the exterior is orange. I'm evoking a mental pattern to match or a mental logically imagined structure, and feeling that I am seeing, hearing—but not really either seeing nor hearing. It's recognition.
My dreams, however, feel truly visual, vividly colorful, tangible. But I've read that' is the mental process of the brain exercising the visual and sensory processes in order to write memories into "permanent storage." The visual sensation might be phantom sensation because the REM state activates parts of the brain imagining does not.
Anyway, that's my theory of my visualization at the moment. Hope this impromptu essay is helpful at some level.
#actuallyAutistic #aphantasia #writer #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon
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@AbramKedge @hvangalen Do you have stereoscopic depth perception? I have a near eye and a far eye, and never the twain shall meet. So visual data lacks some 3D-ness, for me, but the world does not.
A word that keeps coming up when I try to think about how I organize the world is 'kinesthetic'. It's not the right word, but it's less wrong than some alternatives. I feel like people who focus on aphantasics' visual cortex and ignore -- I don't know, the spine? maybe? are sort of missing the point.
@ElyseMGrasso @hvangalen I do, even though the right eye is increasingly useless.
I'd love to be able to somehow experience how you plan and refine your spatial organisation. I bet that quietly observing your choices would convey a lot about your inner processes - or perhaps not! It's like reverse engineering a very different world, all the context would have to be reconstructed.
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@hvangalen Since I learned of aphantasia, I've thought a lot about how my mind works. Yes, inner dialogue, heck, even back and forth between groups of individuals, rehearsing how I think people might behave because that's how my brand of shyness and autism works: defusing unexpected behavior, preventing startlement and freezing up, by calculating what could happen. The written words that show on the page mimics my inner world. But do I hear distinct voices of the people I rehearse on that inner stage?
No. Not really. Recognize?
Yes.
Which leads to the visual, to the mental images. I can, for example take a book and rotate it is my head. I can take a cereal box and turn it to read the opposite side, the bottom, doing it mentally. I can imagine a fighter jet, seeing the nose cone, yawing it around, seeing the exhaust, flipping it, seeing the weapons under the wing, the flaps. Do I see actual images?
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I have what is called visual intelligence. I understand aesthetics, symmetry, composition in a snap. Photography is my art form. But do I see mental images? That's what discussion with people like @ElyseMGrasso made me realize:
No pictures.
No mental images.
It's all recognition. I recognize what I'm looking at internally. Like turning my iPhone around as I thumb type this to see the camera package, and that the exterior is orange. I'm evoking a mental pattern to match or a mental logically imagined structure, and feeling that I am seeing, hearing—but not really either seeing nor hearing. It's recognition.
My dreams, however, feel truly visual, vividly colorful, tangible. But I've read that' is the mental process of the brain exercising the visual and sensory processes in order to write memories into "permanent storage." The visual sensation might be phantom sensation because the REM state activates parts of the brain imagining does not.
Anyway, that's my theory of my visualization at the moment. Hope this impromptu essay is helpful at some level.
#actuallyAutistic #aphantasia #writer #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon
@sfwrtr @hvangalen @ElyseMGrasso 100% applies to me. Great job describing it. Same thing with dreams, they’re very vivid. The rest of the time it’s patterns (like going from A to B) but not something I can really visualize.
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen @mayintoronto this is helpful to me: in my Internal Family Systems work with clients, aphantasia changes how I guide the work. I was not aware of the inner-dialogue possibility! My own inner world is very visual/vibes, it's good to know what to ask, about how others experience it.
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen my inner thoughts are almost entirely voiced
Picturing things in my head is an extreemly active skill to use and is at best an animatic with little visual detail
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T tofticles@helvede.net shared this topic
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So I just read something and that makes me wonder...
Do people with aphantasia (like myself) more often have an inner dialogue that is "speech-like", you know actually speaking words in a language
Or (like me), more often just "vibes" and their inner thoughts only becomes language once these need to be expressed
(I also added the options for people who have no aphantasia [have phantasia I guess] so we can compare results
)Boosting is appreciated
️@hvangalen I think the 'no aphantasia' is kind of a finnicky double negation
How we process thoughts are so interesting and funny and weird, so hard to Imagine what it must be like in someone's head when that person's thought process is so different from ones own.
Like, if you have aphantasia, can you imagine what it must be like to not have it? I would think not, but having phantasia doesn't mean I can imagine what it's like not to have it, either!
