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Some people can't see mental images

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183 points petalmind | 11 comments | 30 Oct 25 17:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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andy99 ◴[30 Oct 25 18:12 UTC] No.45763166[source]▶
I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
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Sharlin ◴[30 Oct 25 18:26 UTC] No.45763386[source]▶
Yep. Problem is that there's actually a spectrum of vividity of mental imagery, but in popular discussion it's always seen as a binary on/off thing.

An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...

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1. pavel_lishin ◴[30 Oct 25 18:55 UTC] No.45763838[source]▶
In Russia, color-blindness is referred to as Daltonism, and I figured Francis must have been the one to be the source of that (given this topic), but apparently it was John Dalton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalton
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2. jdadj ◴[30 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45763908[source]▶
I haven’t heard of Galtonism. From my experience as the colorblind child of native Russian speakers, it’s Daltonism (дальтони́зм).

https://en.openrussian.org/en/colour-blind

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3. pavel_lishin ◴[30 Oct 25 19:25 UTC] No.45764197[source]▶
Good lord, I had both of their wiki pages open, and STILL somehow D and G were the same letter in my mind.

I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a monument to my goof.

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4. at_last ◴[30 Oct 25 20:12 UTC] No.45764780{3}[source]▶
shrugged
5. khazhoux ◴[30 Oct 25 20:34 UTC] No.45764998{3}[source]▶
We all doof from time to time
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6. CommieBobDole ◴[30 Oct 25 21:21 UTC] No.45765525{3}[source]▶
Perhaps you suffer from D-G letterblindness.
7. olalonde ◴[30 Oct 25 22:18 UTC] No.45766083[source]▶
Quite a lot of languages use daltonism actually: French (daltonisme), Spanish (daltonismo), Italian (daltonismo), Portuguese (daltonismo), Catalan (daltonisme), Romanian (daltonism), Polish (daltonizm), Russian (дальтонизм), Greek (δαλτωνισμός), and Turkish (daltonizm).
8. bqmjjx0kac ◴[30 Oct 25 23:45 UTC] No.45766801{4}[source]▶
He gone doofed.
9. ◴[31 Oct 25 00:48 UTC] No.45767191{3}[source]▶
10. tomjakubowski ◴[31 Oct 25 00:53 UTC] No.45767215{3}[source]▶
It would be totally understandable for someone who reads handwritten Russian to confuse D and g in their mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_(Cyrillic)#Form

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11. pavel_lishin ◴[31 Oct 25 13:34 UTC] No.45771819{4}[source]▶
Oh man, I don't think I've written cursive Russian in something like a decade. I honestly have no idea how Russian historians parse old documents; old hand-written English is hard enough, but cursive Russian is a whole other thing.

My last name just looks like a child drawing a wavy ocean!