Timeline for Mathematicians with aphantasia (inability to visualize things in one's mind)
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:43 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @MichaelHardy I don't think anything you say here contradicts anything I said. My point is only that there is a much bigger difference between an actual visual image and "mental imagery" than most people realize, and that what you think of as "remembering a mental image" involves a lot more complex processing than the naive analogy of loading a bitmap from disk into cache. | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:24 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | Many things that happened when I was two or three or four years old I can remember only because the remembered visual images are vivid. | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:22 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | $\ldots\,$bigger as you go further north. And lots of things like that. @TimothyChow $\qquad$ | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:21 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | $\ldots\,$you are asked to recall what it said. Do you remember it verbatim? Probably not. Do you remember what it said the protagonist was doing at that point? Probably you do. Similarly with the map. The visual image doesn't necessarily have all the details, but you still remember that the boundary between Manitoba and Ontario has that angle where it turns from going north to going northeast. And so on. I certainly don't remember the convoluted details of the boundary between Vermont and New York, but my mental picture emphatically shows the east-to-west breadth of Vermont getting $\ldots\,$ | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:17 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | "I have doubts about how much the ability to conjure up 'mental imagery' helps mathematical thinking." Certainly I use is frequently. However, concerning your remarks about the boundary between China and Kyrgizstan, how about the following. On the fourth page of Chapter 2 of a novel that I have before me, it says: "He continued downhill for a couple of hours. The road was hardly more than a cart track but it was easier than the maintenance road. Somewhere below, when the hills gave way to the valley where the foreigners lived," and so on. Now suppose three days after reading that,$\,\ldots\,$ | |
| Oct 5, 2021 at 12:00 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | (continued) To solve the puzzle I mentioned, even though it would seem to be the sort of thing that could be solved directly via "mental imagery," I am not able to do so, and I expect that the same is true of many others. I have to resort to other forms of abstract reasoning. So I am not sure that even those of us who do not have aphantasia are relying on "mental imagery" to do mathematics as much as we think we are. | |
| Oct 5, 2021 at 11:57 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @JPMcCarthy Right. But even when you have your eyes open and are looking directly at the world around you, 3D space is something synthesized in the mind by some complex mental process from the 2D images that you see. (And even the 2D images are complex syntheses from the signals entering your visual system.) Your "mental image" of 3D space is even further removed from what you actually see with your eyes; it is highly abstract. So I'm not surprised that some people don't use these abstractions when reasoning mathematically about geometry. (continued) | |
| Oct 5, 2021 at 5:05 | comment | added | JP McCarthy | I would say that a lot of people can mentally visualise in three dimensional objects by visualising "moving" relative to the object. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 21:38 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @LSpice Depending on what you mean by "literally," we may not literally see any dimensions. Visual perception is a complicated process. But certainly, a bottleneck occurs at the retina, which is essentially two-dimensional. | |
| Oct 4, 2021 at 21:32 | comment | added | LSpice | Is it clear that we literally only see two spatial dimensions? I would think that, literally, we see three …. | |
| S Oct 4, 2021 at 21:24 | history | answered | Timothy Chow | CC BY-SA 4.0 | |
| S Oct 4, 2021 at 21:24 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Timothy Chow |