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183 points petalmind | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.251s | source
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happytoexplain ◴[] No.45763396[source]
I have no real basis for this, but I always suspected that the majority of differences in ability to picture things is actually just a difference in semantics about terms like "visualizing", "picturing", etc. I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination. On the other end, I don't think anybody is actually unable to "think of" what a thing looks like. But it's really difficult to objectively describe what it's like to picture something in your head - so difficult, in fact, that I can see some people calling it "literally summoning an image" and others calling it "not seeing anything at all", while both talking about the exact same thing.

Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.

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1. abetusk ◴[] No.45763617[source]
I think this is a typical response for someone with aphantasia.

To see why your take might be false, many people dreams have a fidelity of images that is comparable to reality, even for people with aphantasia. Do you dream with this fidelity? Can you recreate that fidelity while awake?

There are also testable differences that support the claim that people can actually visualize, in photographic detail, images while awake [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/