Aphantasia network

Intriguing topic and one I've talked on here about before, I think.

One slightly frustrating aspect for me is that I've found no resonance online with my experience, especially in the way the rating scales and quizzes are constructed. The latter seem to imply that the impact of aphantasia is simply to blur, or remove detail from, images in our "mind's eye", the implication being that some people can see almost photographic sharpness whilst others see blurry shapes and tones of colour as if through fog. My experience is that I see various *aspects* of an image, sometimes disjoint from each-other, but critically the image is *unstable* - so if I try to examine a particular part of it, it is apt to change or even disappear.

For example, if I try to imagine the Houses of Parliament seen from the bridge over the Thames, I can become "aware of" Big Ben and the building stretching away from me on my right, but I perceive this only as a "sense of" straight lines and yellowness of brick and dark water under sky. If I try to "look" at anything, the details disappear, or other parts of the "image" (such as it is) move around or disappear.

If anything, the fleeting glimpses that I get are only of details, as if my visual memory has all of the component geometry but can't fit them into a single coherent image, and no particular sensation lasts more than a fraction of a second. It's sometimes rather similar to having a word on the tip of one's tongue; an anticipatory feeling that something might be about to coalesce, but which never does.

That's the closest thing that I've ever read anyone else say to what I experience :-). 

It's really difficult to describe:

• I like your analogy about "tip of the tongue" - a feeling that the image is almost there, but won't quite behave and stay stable
• Yes to the fleeting sensation - for me it's maybe a second or two rather than a fraction of a second
• Yes to sensations being involved - this isn't just visual; almost as if feelings are trying to make up for the lack of image
• There's a sense of "otherness" for me, like the image exists in another dimension or I'm seeing 2D shadows of something that exists in higher dimensions

If anyone on here is an engineer and knows what happens to signals when you remove phase information and just leave amplitude (e.g. demodulating a single sideband signal through an AM detector) - that's a close analogy; my brain shows me "elements" of the image (glimpses and feelings of edges, colours, feelings of the whole image) but getting them coherent and stable is almost impossible. So in that sense, I too only see the details (the elements) & struggle with the whole picture.

It strikes me too that there's a correspondence of sorts with this description and "weak central coherence" i.e. a tendency to not see the wood for the trees, that is supposedly a feature of ASD - I wonder if these two things arise from a common underlying "wiring difference" in our brains? Probably a very long shot as one is to do with visual memory and the other to do with cognition much more generally, but still.......

Trogluddite said:

It makes sense to me that memories would be encoded somehow from the resulting impression rather than from the "raw data"

I think that's actually what does happen - I remember reading decades ago about experiments on cats where it was determined that specific sets of neurones fire when, for e.g., the cat's eyes are presented with a vertical line. Different neurones fire for horizontal lines, diagonal lines, moving lines etc.

So your theory is that, whilst we see "real" things normally (as far as we know) that visual memories are missing something, and hence the palette that we have for constructing visual memories or imagined visual scenes is missing those somethings too?

Having said that we see things normally, I'm reminded of a discussion on another thread about a video showing an ASD view of walking down the street, getting distracted by drain covers and pipes etc - so I wonder if our sensitivity to edges and shapes is higher (or at least higher relative to sensitivity to the more homogeneous background) than a typical person's?

Trogluddite said:

On a slightly more whimsical note, early cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque often look to me as if they might have been trying to capture a 'freeze frame' of a very similar kind of imagery.

Wow! - Yes! I Googled "cubism" just after I posted my reply above, hoping that Google would throw me an image that I could post here saying "it looks like this". How amazing!

Trogluddite said:

On a slightly more whimsical note, early cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque often look to me as if they might have been trying to capture a 'freeze frame' of a very similar kind of imagery.

Wow! - Yes! I Googled "cubism" just after I posted my reply above, hoping that Google would throw me an image that I could post here saying "it looks like this". How amazing!