469
TIL that some people do not have an inner voice and think in different nonverbal ways.
(humanities.ku.dk)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
469 points (96.8% liked)
Today I Learned
17901 readers
57 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says "go to the kitchen," how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?
If I told you "a pink and brown dog," you can't "see" that dog in your mind at all?
The map would be tough. If someone showed me the map and said, go to the kitchen, I would try remember, turn left then right then its around to the left. I would remember it in words, not visually.
Brown and pink dog...in my mind I see a hazy face of a poodle with fluffy pink ears. I can't see the full dog. I can't walk around the image and explore it more. Its just a hazy partial visual that flashes in my mind for a moment.
Not op, but I have a very weak ability to visualise. The data is more abstracted. A map is a set of spacial connections that define an area. My brain has learnt to pull that from a map. What I can't do is recall the map to figure out additional information. If my brain didn't think it was relevant when I looked at it, the information is likely gone.
There are definitely pros and cons to it. I'm not limited to what I could visualise, when thinking. This lets me dig deeper into more complex ideas and patterns. It also makes other tasks a lot harder. I struggle a lot with faces and appearances.
As for the dogs, I have an abstracted "model" in my mind. The size and breed of the dogs is undefined. There are 2 dog entities in my mind. 1 brown, which is quite generic, the other has pink attached to it, that cross links it with poodles etc.
I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.
So you basically visualize maps as graphs? You’re the human equivalent of the A* algorithm!
It's spacially based. It makes more sense in 3D. It's just as compatible with echolocation as visual data. (The soundscape of a room tells you a LOT about your surroundings). I believe it's based within my visual system, just stripped of the superfluous visualisations. Interestingly, I can actually map mathematics into the same structures.
I'm doing a piss poor job of explaining it. Language lacks the nuance to describe it well, and I lack the skill to bend it into shape.
next question: how many times would you have to walk a new space (like a house) to remember it?
I can remember it fairly quickly. My spacial sense is particularly good. I can easily get a sense of negative space (hidden rooms etc) as well as good predictive skills. My personal problem is when maps get large or don't overlap. It's either mapped well, or not. It can take me a while to join up multiple smaller sub maps in my mind. (Think office or stadium sized spaces).
I can remember the layout and draw it, but can't see it in my head. Building layout is very concrete and is easy to know things like 'My office is at the end of the hall on the third floor.' When asked to describe a person I'm limited to very basic descriptions - short/tall, heavy/thin, black/white. My coworkers were making fun of me recently because i described someone as tall, maybe white, possibly red hair.
I'm not the OP either but my brain seems to work the same way that yours and theirs do. I'd say you did a good job of describing how it works for people like us.
One difference though is that you don't seem to have the visual recall that I do. I don't have a "photographic" memory but I could probably recall the hypothetical map as a visual object and examine it for additional information that I didn't notice the first time.
You may actually be better at this than I am. Describing my results as "unstable" would charitable. I also don't get dog breeds, just amorphous and blurry blobs with rorsarch like colors slapped on them.
That's akin to what I get. The core structure is there, but it's almost a sense of what should be there. It's akin to seeing things out of the corner of your eye, while overtired. Your brain tells you what it is, and you accept it, it doesn't necessarily match what you are actually 'seeing'.
I 'know' how dogs move, I 'know' their body structure. I can force that down to a single image, but it wants to be so much more. All the senses of 'dogness' compressed into a single entity.
I definitely have both. I can even visualize things with my eyes open. I switch back and forth between modes depending on the content I'm working on in my head.
Are you able to build complex visualizations while maintaining eye contact with someone? Once the concept becomes complex enough, I have to break eye contact with them (usually staring at nothing above their heads) and unfocus my eyes. Once I do that, the sky's the limit on how complex the mental visual can get and be abstracted, but something about staring at a face (reading realtime facial reactions?) consumes the part of my brain I need for the very complex visuals.
That sounds pretty similar to me. I have to really be focusing to do it, if I were looking at someone and trying to do it, there would be a lot of competing sensory information. I could do something but it would keep getting broken up by distraction. It definitely works best just in a nice quiet room.
Same. I thought it was that way for everyone. I can have a full conversation in my head while visually building something in a 3D mental image.
So kind of like Werner Herzog then, who once stated that he never, ever dreams. But he keeps having visions with his eyes wide open, in broad daylight, all the time. He describes them in his terrific book "Of Walking in Ice."
His thing sounds different. I do dream (often prolifically), and when I visualize with my eyes open it tends to be something I'm trying to visualize such as a new paint color, furniture placement. I'm pretty good at it, my visions usually work out pretty well when taken to action. I'm imagining them more than really seeing them, but I'm able to do it well enough to accomplish the tasks I need to visualize.
I'm so bad at furniture arranging and color matching. But I'm excellent at stacking boxes or other items in a small space.
I know this isn’t true of everybody with alphantasia, but what I do in this situation is I get lost. I can’t visualize walking through the space while I study the map, and I can’t bring the map to mind when I'm actually there. Some people with aphantasia have no trouble finding their way around, so I think in my case it must be that I’m missing some innate sense of direction as well that visualization might have helped me to compensate for, if only I could.
Correct. I’m not 100% on the aphantasia spectrum, so if I think about it then I might get the briefest flash of some dog, like an afterimage at best, and I can’t hold it in my mind, or manipulate it, or see any details or color. It’s not even really a complete outline or anything either that flashes for that quarter-second.
When I read a book, I don’t know what the characters or places look like. But I have always been able to draw really well. So it’s really a mystery how this all works.
For me it's even weirder than that. Those pictures exist in my mind and I can "feel" them there but the conscious part of me that's supposed to see them can't see shit. I can describe to you the things that are in them or even draw them out as they exist in my mind, but I can't see them. The part of me that's giving directions? It can "see" the map of the building and my position in it just fine like it's staring straight at a live minimap, but the conscious part of me that should be able to visualize that stuff? Nothing. I close my eyes and try to visualize that dog and I see nothing but black. But I can feel the presence of the image that the part of me that does the mental conjuring of images is making.
It's like turning the monitor off on a computer. Everything is still running even though you can't see it.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
There's a kitchen off the hallway just past the bathroom on the left. No magic path to follow. I hate those video games where you just wander around! I can't see a dog - i don't know what kind of dog, size/shape of its parts, what parts are brown, what parts are pink, ... If you said poodle or German shepherd, and i focused hard i could get sort of a loose wire frame outline.
If I told you "a pink and brown dog," you can't "see" that dog in your mind at all?
Jim Pickens's cat popped into my head. Sigh.
for me some reason a pitbull