Aphantasia... apparently 3% of the world has it. Any aphantasists in here, who've had success improving their condition?

Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 189 points –

10 years ago, I'd have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I'm interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn't feel such a lonely frustrating issue.

edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn't giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf

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I have aphantasia. And also extreme crippling insomnia, it has been the last 3 or so years that i learned that other people can actually visualize at all. I always thought it was a metaphor. In my searching about a way to potentially improve it I found this article.

https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/

And it absolutely cured my insomnia. I can sleep easily for the first time in my life. Didn’t do a lot for the aphantasia but i did manage to successfully get an image or two a couple of times. Mostly i just love that i can finally sleep without hours of lying in bed beforehand.

I also have severe insomnia since childhood, so your comment is REALLY interesting to me, thanks for responding. This is the kind of stuff I was hoping to come across, some sort of common experience linking the condition. Very interested to hear from other aphantasic people to see if they also experience insomnia.

I mentioned image streaming below to someone else. Tried it briefly but got frustrated and stopped. 100% going to give it a concerted effort because I'd gladly swap my left nut for the ability to sleep like a normal person, cheers for this info.

Can I ask, do you remember any of those '24 backup techniques'? Unfortunately the important links are now dead

Not who you replied to, but you can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine (archive.org) to view an older snapshot of the site

Thanks, I did try that. Unfortunately the links themselves were still dead when I put them into wayback machine

I’m sorry i don’t, i just did the eye rubbing thing.

I managed to find some additional info from the reference Dr, seems the info is now in an expensive book and therefore not public. Found a wordpress doc from him with 5 additional techniques though which I've added to the main post