Timeline for Mathematicians with aphantasia (inability to visualize things in one's mind)
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 2, 2022 at 0:11 | comment | added | MurphyKate Montee | Hmm. If I close my eyes and think about “green” I don’t see green. It would be hard to describe it, but I could tell you that it’s the color of grass and leaves. I recognize it when I open my eyes. It’s not really a memory problem for me; it’s that I can’t picture it in my head when my eyes are closed. | |
| Feb 28, 2022 at 21:36 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | Are you also unable to remember what colors look like when you cannot see them? | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 8:09 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Asaf Karagila♦ | ||
| Apr 26, 2016 at 23:11 | comment | added | MurphyKate Montee | @trent: yes. I have pretty solid spatial awareness/proprioception. | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 19:09 | comment | added | Trent | Maybe this is a better way of phrasing it. Say you're riding a bike with your eyes closed. Can you imagine what that would feel like, and (not via vision, via propriocreption/kinaesthesia) imagine how even when riding a bike with your eyes closed you know how your legs are moving and where they are? | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 17:01 | comment | added | MurphyKate Montee | @Trent: Wow, I really don't know. I've never thought about walking, for example, in that way. I guess I would say that I know how to ride a bike, and what it feels like, and I know what riding a bike looks like (I could draw a picture of me on a bike), but no, I don't really know what I see when I'm riding a bike. But if you showed me some videos, I could identify which one was a person riding a bike. I'm not sure I'm answering your question at all. | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 5:56 | comment | added | Trent | but - even now that I've done a 360 front flip who knows how many times - I'm not capable of visually replaying in my mind's eye what I see when I do a 360 front flip. It is however easy for me to replay in my minds eye what it kinaestheticly feels like to do a 360 front flip. Does this type of kinaesthatic spatial perception at all correlate with the perception you are using here: "I know I don't have a picture in my head, but I sort of know the schematics, how things relate to each other."? Can you kinaesthatically (not visually) replay in your mind's eye eg what it feels like to walk? | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 5:55 | comment | added | Trent | This is closely related to Todd's question, but I don't know if it is asking about exactly the same sense: When I was learning how to do a 360 front flip, I learned via manipulating my body in certain ways, then mentally simulating how I predicted changes in motion would change how my body moved, executing the changes to the best of my ability, then repeating the cycle until I learned the move. I didn't use visual perception or visual perception in my mind's eye to figure out how my body was moving, I used a kinaesthetic sense of bodily/spatial awareness. I definitely don't have aphantasia, | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 2:03 | comment | added | MurphyKate Montee | Todd - yes, I think that exactly what I'm using. | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 1:54 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | It will be a sense of the room that doesn't have much to do with perspective. It's hard -- that is, it takes a lot of training -- to go from a spatial image to a picture on paper. So these things are not necessarily stored in our minds in a visual sort of way. We translate what we see into a sense of space. If you think of it, you realize that if you imagine a table with four chairs around it, it doesn't matter whether you can see the seats of the chairs. You just know that they are there. It's kinesthetic as well as visual." MurphyKate, does this at all correlate with your experience? | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 1:53 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | Here is Bill Thurston on the example of the blind mathematician Morin and his work on sphere eversion (More Mathematical People, pp. 337-338): "It's something most people have a great deal of trouble visualizing. In fact, I think that vision is somehow distracting to the spatial sense, because we have a spatial sense that is more than just vision. People associate it with vision, but it's not the same. If I close my eyes and imagine what this room is like, I will have a sense in my mind that there's a table here and something here and there. (cont.) | |
| Apr 26, 2016 at 1:51 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 26, 2016 at 2:02 | |||||
| Apr 26, 2016 at 1:45 | history | answered | MurphyKate Montee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |