Microblog Memes

I know a guy who has aphantasia and is using AI image generation to actually see what he’s thinking about. He explained that his imagination is more like an itemized list.

Phantasia, at least to a certain point, can be trained. During all the constant busing to my college, whenever I couldn't use my laptop from the person seating on the side of me, imagined things, then tried to create mental images of them.

Another weird thing is, that I found out, my dyspraxia could be made much less worse, almost on par with the average person at least, by using a better pen. Probably in my case it's a mixture of having a weird skin that makes things hurt that shouldn't, and people really wanting me to learn dexterity with "ball games" (read: football, played on hot asphalt) as a kid.

Yeah, ngl I was like shoot, do I need to start doing some ai image shit?

if that's true, that would be an interesting development, and help understanding and treating it

"condition" makes it sound like it's a problem lol, it's just a variation of thought

Could also be part of a significant portion of people have undiagnosed aphantasia.

Learning that some people can't mentally visualize anything, but pictures of memories that they can't modify since they have no imagination felt wild.

God is dead in this timeline

That guy IS the onion

see the thing is I can't even tell if I can do this or not

like I can think of something and know the shape and quality of it, but I don't see it in my mind

I'm a mechanical designer, I design tooling and machines all day, and my hobbies include woodworking and 3D printing functional stuff. right now I'm thinking of the design of a kumiko lamp, and the grid pattern I want to use, but I just don't see it. it's the same with the essentially lego tooling I design at work, I know this block has this shape and connects to this other one with this surface, and the assembly of 10 parts looks like whatever, but I do not see that shape when I think about it. it's more that I know the description of it

I can lucid dream, though, so that's pretty sweet

I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it's weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn't occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn't just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don't notice, because if you've lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.

As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn't realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren't, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I'd have no way of knowing.

Shit's trippy as hell.

For me, the best way I can describe what it feels like for me is: I can imagine an apple and I get a feeling as if I was seeing it, but I don't actually see it. I don't see an image in front of me. I only feel like I'm seeing an image, and I have to focus pretty hard to see anything in detail, but I can still use it to, for example, try and manipulate something in 3D, or try to remember what I was doing on a given day by trying to walk back through a place. I don't know under what category that makes me fall under.

Same. I genuinely don't understand what life is like without this. If I need to remember that there's a specific thing in the basement, I'm visualizing what's in the basement and looking at each thing. Do these people just like have an actual list in their head for this?

if I'm not at home and need to walk my spouse through something like checking for a tripped breaker, I'm visualizing the whole process so I can explain it in detail. How does the other side do this? No judgement, I'm genuinely curious how it works.