I'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it.
I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia. I don't see images. It took until I was in my 40's to realised that this wasn't most peoples experience.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
I get my ideas completely from inner monologue. But my ideas are mostly related to developing automated systems etc, I don't really need imagery for that, although I think I need to sense some sort of graphs or how things work together on the higher level.
I write a lot, including fiction, and I feel my aphantasia probably shapes what I like to read and write in ways I wasn't aware of (before realising aphantasia was a thing, and that I have it), but it doesn't stop me either.
E.g. when reading I tend to skim over writing that spends a lot of time describing the visual appearance of things unless the words themselves are beautiful to me, because no matter how well written the descriptions are, they don't achieve anything for me beyond the shape of the prose itself.
(I love the structure and flow of language, so there are absolutely moments I find myself reading visual descriptions because of the descriptions themselves)
When writing, I prefer to write relatively sparse prose that focuses on how things works and relates to each other, and dialogue, rather than trying to evoke imagery that I can't see for myself when reading the text back.
Best way I can describe it is as a different sense.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
Thank you for this description. It almost exactly matches my experience that I had trouble putting into words. I can "model" the things I'm asked to remember/visualize, but I do not really "see" it.
The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.
So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
Is it common for people with aphantasia to not realize it until well into adulthood?
One of my good friends has it, didn't realize it until he was married (~40 years old) and his wife "figured it out." He doesn't care for fiction - especially written fiction, but movies/TV to a lesser extent - I always wondered if that's related. Aside from that, you'd never know - he's a good photographer and excels with mechanical stuff (rebuilding/modifying vintage motorcycles in particular).
The reason so many people with aphantasia don't realize until adulthood is that we do everything you do. There's no real difference in capability, many things are identical or very similar, but the mental experience is different.
My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
I didn’t find out it was a thing until I was 38 or 39. And yes, I daydream. But it’s not like watching a movie. I don’t know how to describe it besides my mind wanders and there’s a narrative.
I think it is the case where you just assume that people are embellishing or being metaphorical about those things and you just refuse to consider for a moment that they are actually seeing something. But it does give this thought that why do people like to embellish or be metaphorical so much? I guess the answer is that they are not!
"seeing" is a pretty vague word. It has like 3 different meanings just in the context of discussing aphantasia. They are seeing something, but they're not seeing it. You see?
Slightly off topic, but it's interesting to see the same phrase "the long now" pop up in different contexts independently and mean very different things:
Both are pretty obscure references for now, but I can easily imagine a world where they both become widely known in separate groups. Like the word "legacy" has hilariously different connotations for software engineers as compared to _everyone else_
One thing you notice immediately is _god_ how they babble... It's uncomfortable listening in on a bunch of AI:s insisting to each other how "they'll keep everything peaceful" over and over again
I tried doing the same thing, happy to see it worked out for somebody! I just didn't have the capital or social safety net to get the farm off the ground, so I eventually had to sell the farm and go back to coding.
Someday though...
Emigrating halfway across the world is not cheap in the first place.
Greece is also not cheap for where it stands on the economic level compared to the average income, especially back in 2018 when Dylan did it, and especially for property even outside of urban areas. Euboea is not super remote either, it's about an hour or two's drive from Athens depending where you go.
So sure, the farm might not make money, but I would wager he had a good amount saved up between him and his family to make the transition possible.
Yes, this really is an example of someone who "made it" and made a large amount of money that has allowed them to turn around and choose a simpler life. "Oh, I just moved myself and my family off to a little Greek island estate I bought and farming it (along with my existing money) is what provides for us..."
Money may not buy happiness buy money buys you all the freedom you could possibly need to do anything that fits your whimsy.
The way I see it, the problem with LLMs is the same as with self-driving cars: trust.
You can ask an LLM to implement a feature, but unless you're pretty technical yourself, how will you know that it actually did what you wanted? How will you know that it didn't catastrophically misunderstand what you wanted, making something that works for your manual test cases, but then doesn't generalize to what you _actually_ want to do?
People have been saying we'll have self-driving cars in five years for fifteen years now. And even if it looks like it might be finally happening now, it's going glacially slow, and it's one run-over baby away from being pushed back another ten years.
People used to brush away this argument with plain statistics. Supposedly, if the death statistics is below the average human, you are supposed to lean back and relax. I never bought this one. Its like saying LLMs write better texts then the average huamn can, so you are supposed to use it, no matter how much you bring to the table.
The self driving car analogy is a good one, because what happens when you trust the car enough to do most of your driving but it suddenly thrusts the controls upon you when it shits the bed and can't figure out what to do?
You suddenly realise you've become a very rusty driver in a moment that requires fast recall of skill, but your car is already careening off a cliff while you have this realisation.
[The "children of the magenta line"](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2015/05/msp2015050...) is a god explanation of this, and is partly why I often dissuade junior devs from pretty user friendly using tools that abstract away the logic beneath them.
funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?"
After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
You can try creating a profile as a woman. I did, five years ago, on a site that advertised itself as being dedicated to "affairs" between married people.
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
Depends on protocols, but hence why EMS’ job is recognition of the right issue (the best we can do), there are things we can evaluate to determine if we think its an aortic aneurysm even at the emt level to rule that out before making the determination to give aspirin (eg: comparing bilateral blood pressures, checking for pulsating masses)
a heart attack is far more common than an aortic aneurysm.
would comparing bilateral blood pressure (which I assume the patient could do themselves) be enough? I'm not asking for medical advice, just like... what would _you_ do if it was you who had sudden chest pain?
Id encourage you (generally, outside of hn) to lookup the symptoms of a heart attack and aortic aneurysm.
A aortic aneurysm can present with a pulsating mass in the abdomen, and is more common in older people and smokers. The inner lumen of the aorta starts to separate and blood can flow differently or be restricted, eg: right arm bp may be different than left arm. But absence of that doesn’t rule it out entirely.
Whereas a heart attack is going to feel pain in the chest, perhaps radiating to the jaw, shoulder, back, maybe nausea, sweating, and an impending sense of doom.
Automated bp cuffs are pretty inaccurate imo, we use them at the tail end of transport to the hospital and they usually spit out wild numbers. An auscultated bp with a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer is the gold standard.
Bottom line, If you are having chest pain, call 911.
I googled a bit and I'm not sure I would follow the new advice simply because it totally depends on getting help to you fast enough such that they can determine if its a heart attack or something else.
In the writer's case that help never came, so personally if I had to choose I'd rather go with the risk of guessing the symptoms wrong and making things some percentage worse vs a possible death.
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