Quote: Lee @ 26th August 2015, 1:56 PM BSTI was recently amazed to find out that my girlfriend has this. I couldn't get my head around it, I thought she was mental.
And she keeps coming back to you?
Aphantasia - absence of a "Mind's Eye" Page 2
An article in today's Daily Mail about this today.Has something happened or is it just coincidence?
Quote: billwill @ 26th August 2015, 12:17 PM BSTAphantasia -- abscence of a "Mind's Eye"
I am an aphantasian, are any of you the same?
Read all about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34039054
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/aphantasia-minds-eye-blind.html?_r=1
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/23-the-brain-look-deep-into-minds-eye
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I remember asking people on this matter to describe how they visualise a bus. Do they see it as being (i) in front of them or (ii) somewhere external not in juxtaposition with them per se or (iii) a small thing like a toy bus in their minds.
Most struggled with it and said they just visualise things. It was that natural to them they couldn't describe it.
This has caused problems for me in the past. I spent many decades walking into meeting rooms and the like week after week feeling beforehand that I had no idea what they would look like as if I hadn't been there before. It can lead to additional - and unnecessary - anxiety.
It is just a conceptual thing for me, that sort of stuff, rooms, a mixture of silence and sounds and feelings and like a sort of cube behind the left eye with a concept of distance.
As for people, it is in my mind all about their character, interests, vibe, any aura almost.
It is possible to train up for visuals. I know how to do it now but have to contrive it. The sunny beach. The miseries at work with whom we spent a couple of hours each Wednesday and vaguely the pot plant in the corner.
But humour or not, Gordon's point is absolutely spot on.
One thing that is interesting is that billwill is a science and technology man and I am almost all on the arts side so it isn't exclusive to one or the other.
Quote: Stylee TingTing @ 27th August 2015, 9:50 PM BSTIn my opinion - the methodology used in the reported experiments is unscientific.
The use of the word 'scientists' to describe 'psychologists' is controversial.
The BBC online 'test' is unscientific: the use of the adverbs 'moderately' and 'reasonably' is open to subjective interpretation; the test doesn't include a factored-in 'validity quotient', which should be de rigueur in any tests which rely on subjects' verbal statements.
I remain agnostic.
I do agree on all those points. The one crucial thing is that they keep saying visualise this or that thing but don't say how it is to be visualised. People may be visualising in different ways. Also there is that thing about what is automatic or not. None of what they are asking is automatic and I don't automatically visualise. It worries me a bit when I feel as someone with no qualifications in that area I know more about what to ask people and how to approach it. Plus their use of the word "envision" suggests there is an American angle.
My brain produces images when I'm listening to music, not always entire "video clips", sometimes just colours and structures. Usually progressive rock or electronic music evokes more vivid imagery in my mind's eye than let's say blues.
You're a music fan too, Horseradish, no "brain cinema" for you?
You are high.
Quote: Gordon Bennett @ 27th August 2015, 10:21 PM BSTMy brain produces images when I'm listening to music, not always entire "video clips", sometimes just colours and structures. Usually progressive rock or electronic music evokes more vivid imagery in my mind's eye than let's say blues.
You're a music fan too, Horseradish, no "brain cinema" for you?
When you ask the question, I have to work at finding an answer. I took to music very early - writing down the Top 20 at 7 - and I do know that with Young Gifted and Black and Abraham Martin and John and Tears of a Clown and Bridge Over Troubled Water there was a strong sense of colours linked to feelings. I think the first two were purple and green as in felt until I was long into my 20s. I know where some of that emanates. I had songbooks with covers of different colours but it is much more random, eg some of it is environmental and obvious. Bridge Over Troubled Water would be light blue. Much of that is in the area of very mild synesthesia.
I recently chatted on a forum to a guy who is retired. When he worked, he managed part of Britain's coast that I know. We spoke about one beach which opens up panoramically as you drive over a hill and in that context I mentioned British Summertime by Everything But The Girl, the musical sound of which evokes the sea. That song lyrically is in part about such a scene when young in a family car and it has the association of that particular beach for me but I'm not sure I'd see it directly. That is why the song is there. To conjur a feeling of association rather than big vivid pictures. At most I'd see a flash of blue and have the idea of a wide stretch.
Ventura Highway. That to me is the ultimate "non-oily" freedom on the road song. It's America at its best, it's being in a car, it's the sea ahead, it's certainly being breezy in the breeze, it's freedom, it's movement, it's even slightly quirky and mysterious or exotic what with the alligator lizards in the air which being green could be representational of yucca or other plants noted on the side of the road when sailing by. It is very, very, visual - cinematic - in feel to me but I still don't think I'm getting actual pictures there. It's detailed vibe.
Quote: Gordon Bennett @ 27th August 2015, 10:27 PM BST
I can't see it. 
And not because of aphantasia.
The "Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire," is very subjective and probably highly inaccurate.
If you get in touch with the project at Exeter University they also send you another questionnaire, one that requires more wordy answers and as such doesn't enable direct comparisions or 'scores'
To be frank:
It is the people with a mind's eye who are crackers and living in some sort of nightmare world. Presumably there they are talking with their neighbours about the roses they are all admiring. At the same time they are having internal pictures of the bread roll they had for breakfast, a waste bin on the M62, a mongoose and the younger Ann Widdecombe. How the hell is that manageable? Amusement arcades are bad enough with all of the revolving pears and aliens being zapped. Flashing lights everywhere you turn accompanied by tuneless noise. And they are just on the outside so f**k knows what happens when all of that also hits the mind's eye.
This is quite fascinating.
When I try to visualise something, I certainly can't hold an image of it in my mind but I can conjure up a not-very-detailed fleeting image of it.
I'm also appallingly bad at discriminating between similar faces on TV and in films. The result being that, when watching a film, I often can't tell if the man I'm watching is the same guy who was in the previous scene or if he's someone completely different.
I can readily tell Vic Reeves from Bob Mortimer, and I can easily distinguish Morecambe from Wise, and Sean Connery from Woody Allen because all those people have very different faces and also faces I know very well but, in the 2006 film, "The Departed", I had the greatest difficulty telling Matt Damon and Leonardo di Caprio apart.
Before watching the film, I hadn't seen much of Matt Damon or Leonardo di Caprio and so I sat there for ages, watching each man appear without the other in scene after scene, thinking both were the same person and totally failing to realise they were two different actors playing two different characters.
Am I suffering from Aphantasia or is there simply something wrong with my facial-recognition mechanism?
Quote: Rood Eye @ 28th August 2015, 10:43 AM BSTI'm also appallingly bad at discriminating between similar faces on TV and in films. The result being that, when watching a film, I often can't tell if the man I'm watching is the same guy who was in the previous scene or if he's someone completely different.
Happens to me everytime I'm watching an American CSI-styled show. I think that's because they're all REALLY looking pretty similar and the stories usually don't interest me that much. Plus: my real problem is to memorise names, so if two guys look very similar the fact that one is named Jones and the other one Henderson doesn't cure my confusion.
Roodeye: I too have extreme difficulty in Facial Recognition. I have to see the same face many many times before I readily recognise it and I have the same difficulty with approximattely similar TV/Film characters.
I suggested to the team at Exeter University that poor facial recognition and Aphantasia are part of the same thing, but they thought not.
Poor Facial Recognition (Prosopagnosia) is being studied at University College London.