9mo ago

Just going through the motions

81 comments

I blame the aphantasia, a lotta y'all's weirdness made a lot more sense once I learned you can just make up pictures in your head
- The fact that a lot of people can't actually terrifies me.
  
  Why?
  
  Its kind of like considering blindness as someone who can see. It feels like removing a vital part of the human experience to someone who has come to rely on the ability.
  
  Is it really this significant? I don't think people usually describe it this way. I, for one, really don't feel like I miss out on a lot.
  
  What I'm attempting (and maybe failing) to say is that it's a key part of how you perceive the world. To you it isn't really a big deal, but people who do think this way just view their own thoughts in a fundamentally different fashion, and the idea of such a big difference in that regard is kind of scary or upsetting to think about for some people. I personally think I would be very sad if I suddenly developed aphantasia, even though I don't think my imagination is as vivid as others.
  
  interesting. i'd say it's not really that important, but then again i'd probably have a very different opinion if i didn't have aphantasia.
  
  For me, I wouldn't equate my ability to visualize things in my head to sight, but maybe hearing or smell. Could I interact with the world without it? Absolutely. But I do a ton with that ability. I hold lists, draw maps, plan routes, visualize models, check the contents of my fridge while at the grocery store. It also helps me make connections between disperate pieces of data. A lot of this I could do with a pencil and paper, but it's so much faster to pull it up in my head.
  
  Wait… the way you describe it now…
  I was always told of photographic memory being some super power and thought “Hey, would be neat if I had THAT!”
  Was that just the ability to daydream all the time? I imagined people with like literal cameras for brains that could take a picture of a book page and read it later like a text document.
  This whole time, I might have had that mystical power all along and aphantasia people just overstated how accurate it was?
  
  That's a good question. I don't think I've met anyone in person who claimed to have a photographic memory. I definitely don't do the "recalling long strings of numbers" thing that TV shows imply. But I can pull up a fairly accurate picture of the inside of my fridge and take inventory.

81 comments