Microblog Memes

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.

Like all good satire it is rooted in reality

Poe's law struck again.

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.

Maybe spending hours upon hours producing AI slop is the cure?

Do you get the Tetris effect where after playing you dream of Tetris?

I wonder if this guy ai slopped the same thing

Having Aphantasia (no minds eye) or Anendophasia (no inner voice) is just a different way of perceiving the world.

Here is an article that show that even though peops have these (I know because I am both) it does not need to affect their lives. I did not even know I had these until my late 50’s. Below is an article that shows this. A quote from the article.

“Surprisingly, within fields as varied as science, art, politics, and sports, some of the most innovative and successful figures openly acknowledge having Aphantasia.”

https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/world/20-famous-people-with-aphantasia/

This reminds me of the time I showed a design mockup with lorem ipsum text and a couple of people got really confused by it and were still confused even after I explained it's just filler text.

Your understanding of Aphantasia is a bit off, I think the folks in the second group are just stupid. I have complete Aphantasia, and if it was explained to me, I can understand what your plans for something would be. If I was shown a CAD model, it would be extremely clear. The things I can't do is see my wife's face in my head, or picture the last place I left something. However, that doesn't mean I couldn't describe to you what my wife looked like, or that I can't remember where I left something. Also, thinking abstractly is what people with Aphantasia are best at. I can't remember the specifics, but they are significantly more likely to end up in a STEM field where all they do is abstract thought (myself included)

I understand though, it's easy for me to think about how someone who can picture things in their mind would experience things, because I can see things with my eyes. But someone who has a mind's eye can't really understand what it would be like to not have one. Most things that people would think are issues for me aren't, I've just got different ways of remembering and thinking about things that doesn't require needing to see them in my head.

Pretty sure it was actually discovered by John Lennon in 1971 when he took some drugs but forgot to take some drugs.

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.

It's Twitter, so there's an excellent chance this is manipulative engagement bait. But it would be really, really interesting if heavy usage of AI image gen proved to be an effective kind of visualization "exposure therapy" for people with aphantasia. We've never before had the ability to so quickly and reliably convert words to images, so maybe experiencing that connection on demand a few thousand times is enough to activate those mental pathways for people who lack them? The closest we've had up to now is a Google Image search, and those results are much more varied, not as precisely tailored to the search term, and not something that people generally do over and over again for leisure.