10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
What’s the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
Hyperphantasia. A subset of that is prophantasia, where you can physically conjure a mental image in your field of vision, but that case is extremely rare.
Prophantasia is voluntary, and people not only control it, but as other comments point out, it feels like ‘self’. My brother, a PhD psychologist, has developed an interest in aphantasia. Aphantasics rarely hallucinate. So, from talking with him, we have a pretty good working hypothesis that schizoaffective disorder affects the same brain pathways as prophantasia, i.e. hallucinations that are not under voluntary or conscious control. (As an interesting side note, in highly-individualistic cultures, the voices and images more often feel malevolent and ‘other’ to sufferers, in contrast to people in collectivist cultures, who experience them more often as friendly and familial. It’s not necessarily maladaptive.)
I can’t “picture” things in my mind, but I get pretty strong “feelings” about relative volumes, lengths, shapes, etc. As a result I can eyeball measurements pretty accurately.
When it comes to physically organizing things in space, I literally have to guess and test, and just rearrange things until they work… But, I do still get that “feeling” about how it might work.
It’s the same with empathy. If I see someone about to injur themselves, I don’t “see” it, but it definitely get a flash of feeling and I’ll wince and feel the thing.
Is that aphantasia? I didn’t even know this was a thing, but… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
