Comic Strips

Wait are there people without inner monologue?

Like, I think I can imagine an apple rotating, but it’s not like you actually see it the way you’d see an actual apple in front of your eyes, right?

That highly depends on your specific definition of that. But personally I can do things like think of a place I've been, and basically walk around like I'm controlling a video game character. "Seeing" the place as if I was there.

Aphantasia is a spectrum, but even when you can visualise a full realistic scene it should be easy for most people to tell the difference between that and seeing something physically. When you can't tell the difference that's a hallucination.

It's only total aphantasia if you can't visualise an image in your mind at all. I believe then you'd get more a concept of an apple than an image or other depiction of an apple but that's only my understanding from hearing other people talking about it.

No, but you should be able to imagine the relative change in the angles and orientation of points on the apple - like, if you carved your name on it, you could imagine rotating it so only part of your name is visible and the remaining letters start to skew

Sorta sounds like your job / routine is making you stressed and unable to focus

I can't really imagine the combinations you described.

If someone described a sunset or other vivid cliché, that would spark what in your inner eye?

Oh, no, that's not a dead end! Holding mental focus is a skill you develop and you can practice it, and doing exercises specifically for that will help you learn to draw

I should preface this by saying that this is just my opinion and that I may be completely wrong.

I'm convinced that for 99% of people thinking they have aphantasia, it's just a miscommunication about what it means to "see" something in your mind. When people picture something in their mind, they can't literally see it in the way that they would see something with their eyes. Seeing something in your mind is just having an understanding of what it would look like.

People will say that they can "see" whatever you're asking them to "picture" but they only ever hold an understanding of what the thing would look like. This understanding can be elaborate but there is not actually an experience that could be perhaps better described as a visual hallucination.

If you visualize a cube in your mind, you don't actually see it. You just understand where all the lines, faces, and vertices would be. If you rotate it in your mind, you understand how those angles and the appearance would change at each moment as it rotates. You can even superimpose where these lines would go onto something you're looking at, but still you don't actually see it there, you just understand how you would perceive it, where the edges would go, what it would obstruct.

The reason that I'm convinced that people only hold concepts and visual understanding in their minds and not actual images is that most people are pretty bad at drawing. When people do start drawing, they create a representation of the sparse landmarks that actually made up their visual idea and then they have to start filling in the details using reasoning and logic. Artists and people who practice drawing get better at this, are more attentive to detail and learn techniques to make more convincing images. If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they'd be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.

Furthermore, unlike "seeing" when you picture something while conscious, I think dreams actually do include visual hallucinations that can seem similar to actual visual perception.

picture this
I'm a bag of dicks
put me to your lips

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