this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
667 points (97.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
5324 readers
4240 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
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
Why?
Its kind of like considering blindness as someone who can see. It feels like removing a vital part of the human experience to someone who has come to rely on the ability.
Is it really this significant? I don't think people usually describe it this way. I, for one, really don't feel like I miss out on a lot.
What I'm attempting (and maybe failing) to say is that it's a key part of how you perceive the world. To you it isn't really a big deal, but people who do think this way just view their own thoughts in a fundamentally different fashion, and the idea of such a big difference in that regard is kind of scary or upsetting to think about for some people. I personally think I would be very sad if I suddenly developed aphantasia, even though I don't think my imagination is as vivid as others.
interesting. i'd say it's not really that important, but then again i'd probably have a very different opinion if i didn't have aphantasia.
For me, I wouldn't equate my ability to visualize things in my head to sight, but maybe hearing or smell. Could I interact with the world without it? Absolutely. But I do a ton with that ability. I hold lists, draw maps, plan routes, visualize models, check the contents of my fridge while at the grocery store. It also helps me make connections between disperate pieces of data. A lot of this I could do with a pencil and paper, but it's so much faster to pull it up in my head.
Wait… the way you describe it now…
I was always told of photographic memory being some super power and thought “Hey, would be neat if I had THAT!”
Was that just the ability to daydream all the time? I imagined people with like literal cameras for brains that could take a picture of a book page and read it later like a text document.
This whole time, I might have had that mystical power all along and aphantasia people just overstated how accurate it was?
That's a good question. I don't think I've met anyone in person who claimed to have a photographic memory. I definitely don't do the "recalling long strings of numbers" thing that TV shows imply. But I can pull up a fairly accurate picture of the inside of my fridge and take inventory.