Aphantasia... apparently 3% of the world has it. Any aphantasists in here, who've had success improving their condition?
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
You are viewing a single comment
This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I've always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I've never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don't understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there's a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It's not that my memory is particularly good but I can "synthesize" shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I'll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it's incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I've never heard before. I can play that enough times to "drive out" the other one but not enough to "light up" the new one and I'm fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven't found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I'm also one of those people that's terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone's name and face within minutes of meeting them. I've started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I'm supposed to know and run through them every night. It's a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I'm one of those people that never forgets a face.
Ahhh finally I have met someone who understands the curse of an eidetic memory for sounds. Earworms can be absolutely maddening when your brain is playing the Cheeky Girls song on a loop for days.
Very interesting that you have a good visual mind but still struggle to remember names and faces. Have you ever tried using mnemonic techniques for memory, eg linking a name to something amusing, or a memory palace? Can't remember the whole string anymore but about a decade ago I memorised the 8-digit alphanumeric code for my train ticket to prove a point. BG96 is all I have these days (big goat with 9 horns and 6 legs). Apparently the sillier the story, the easier it is to remember (something to do with brain responding to novelty).
Are you referring to Method of Loci? I've experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don't remember how long they were. It wasn't that useful though. It took me a really long time to "store" numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn't have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the "memory space" was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated "walk-throughs" ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn't thought about in decades
I think I'm much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can't really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I "look" at the image in my mind I can't really see her face. It's hard to describe. Almost like there's an image with a tag that says "link to wife's face here" without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of "line art" version of her face. I don't have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.