I’m convinced lots of people actually don’t think

I’m a word-er, but I think hank green explained it pretty well in a video. Language is just an I/O bus, thoughts occur as a set of abstractions with associations.

Yeah I’m calling bullshit on this one haha, op is implying some people cannot process word if not spoken or written. That would be so unbelievably disabling you probably couldn’t function in society.

Easily we just do. It’s like breathing. We just do it.

Can you explain how you breath? Or beat your heart? Or create blood?

That’s how we do.

Probably different for everyone, but I have neither and sometimes feel almost compelled to speak my thoughts out loud. If I don’t speak them they’re just kind of abstract feelings or impressions.

Vibes or visuals

My best guess: sometimes, one idea flows to the next in my head without the words. Usually I “feel” sentences falling into place at least a few words ahead of what I’m saying, at least kind of. But sometimes I just sort of talk, without the inner mo ologue, and it’s mildly confusing. Like, who the hell is building the sentences if it’s not me? And why does what’s coming out of my mouth totally agree with what I would be saying if I could build the words right now?

Basically, sometimes the place that ACTUALLY assembles the words bypasses the self-awareness layer, and the words just come out.

I imagine this is somewhat analogous to the people with no inner monologue; there are still thoughts, they just don’t take the form of words. Pictures, concepts, or even other things that make less intuitive sense to those of us with inner monologues.

I’m a 5 on this scale (maybe a 4 1 on this scale (maybe a 2 if I’m distracted, processing other stuff) and I have a big component of kinesthetic sense and some emotional tone comes into play. It actually often takes work for me to turn ideas into words. This gets harder if I’m tired or sick or something.

Edits: I forgot the actual anchors.

It has its benefits. You can talk absolute depravity, like Trump farting so much shit into Ivankas mouth that liquid diarrhea is overflowing from the side of her mouth with chunks of yesterday’s pasta bolognese dangling off her chin, and get no mental image of that filth. But you can enjoy that imagery.

Wow. I didn’t know about the term “prophantasia” until now. Probably because I think that visualizing things in our 3d world is a normally developed imagination power of the people who don’t have Aphantasia.

Prophantasia seems like biologically evolved Augmented Reality. Where instead of wearing a piece of AR glass, We’re naturally born with this trait.

I can pull out my palm in front of me and visualize a small cat jumping around. Not for too long because I cannot imagine the random movement a cat does. But, as a still object, visualizing an apple is easy.

I am more curious to wonder if someone can manually develop Spatial Intelligence without being born with it priorly.

I have to practice pretty hard to do that, it’s much easier in a journal than in my head to dialogue. Do you find it helps being mindful?

Mine don’t stop either, but it’s just constant words. Are your thoughts mostly images?

I used to want very much to be an artist, or at least, be able to draw capably, but it’s always seemed impossible. I can think of what I want to draw in a macro sense - like, if I was thinking of that famous Norman Rockwell painting with the boy with the bindle sitting at the diner next to the police officer, I can certainly imagine the scene. Just thinking of that painting from memory, the officer is looking down at the boy who’s looking up at the officer, there’s a man behind the counter in a white outfit looking at both of them with an amused expression, there’s some pastries or donuts or something on the counter…

But to draw something, it feels like you’ve got to be able to imagine the micro details, and without references to look at, I just can’t do that. The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer’s hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?

I even have a difficult time commissioning artwork as a result of this, because it’s difficult to describe what I want without having something visual to reference.

I have aphantasia as well but I do actually have something sort of like a memory palace… kinda. It should be completely useless when I’m awake, but isn’t. I have a dream town, and every place I’ve dreamed about more than three times in the last ~20 years is there in a surprisingly consistent and exceptionally vivid way, like logging into a mmorpg, but spawning in random places. If not for it being easily recognizable as “my town”, I’d struggle to tell it from waking reality because that’s the only other time I experience “sight”. It’s genuinely unsettling sometimes, when my brain makes a new place, to not know if I was dreaming. Maybe that’s why I revisit places until they feel comfortable and familiar and get incorporated into the town.

I say it isn’t completely useless because I use spacial memory to “go places” when awake. I can’t see it, but I know what’s there if I go there, the same way I can mentally count the windows, and know what’s around them, in my house without visually touring the house; I think about where I go to open windows on a nice day, and count the stops.

I can’t put things into the town purposely. Locations or objects, unfortunately. Everything has to already be there if I want to make use of it. But if I can find a useful thing on my spacial tour, I can make note of where I found it, or move it to somewhere more useful. Like the finding the windows exercise, but, to continue your example, I happen to recall that next to window 3 is a Christmas cactus with pink heart-shaped flower buds, and I choose to ”move it” it to the 7th window of my tour. (And yes, if I make note that I’ve moved something, it does stay there when I dream, so that’s really neat)

Genuinely not that useful for things people probably normally use a memory palace sort of thing for, like short-term memories, (finding useful objects is difficult, and sometimes requires a lot of in-dream exploring, which takes actual time) but somewhat useful for certain long-term things, like numbers or recipes. And as a bonus, when I forget something, I’ll often stumble across it in my town and be reminded. Like the recipe for my mom’s cheesecake is the literal ingredients just sitting on the counter in the pocket floor she lives in (she’s a nightmare I had often enough to join the town’s residents, but I shoved her in an impossible floor so I can avoid her). I put that recipe there because I like to modify it, and I often forget what the base recipe is. It’s not written down in the normal sense because I’ll lose it, but it’s simple enough for a representation like that to be easy to hold onto.

But I’ve had similar frustrating experiences with people telling me to visualize things for whatever reason. Like nope, my internal computer is GUI-free. Text output only, with a screen reader. Not even multiple voices, which I hear is a thing most people can do, just the one default reader voice.

On the subject of not being able to visualize people, if there’s someone you haven’t seen in a long time, do you falsely match other people up with the description? For example, my mom died when I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now. It’s been so long that I genuinely don’t remember what she looks like unless I’m looking at a photo. But I know her general description, and when I see other women who fit the description I -feel- that they look just like her even though they usually don’t, actually.

Good heavens! I learned about the memory palace in a Hannibal Lector book, thought it was genius, assumed everyone could do that.

I’ve been told on Reddit that people with aphantasia can actually do the ‘memory palace’ thing. But, since it was just one commenter who didn’t quite describe how it would work, while I myself can visualize but dislike the ‘palace’ technique, I have no further information as to how to do it.

If you close your eyes and focus on an apple, what do you see? My understanding is that people without aphantasia / who are “1s” can actually see an image of the apple, as though they were looking at it. If you just see black, no image at all, you might be a 5.

I have sexual fantasies, but they’re more like reading erotica than watching porn.

I imagine I describe things just like I expect others do, except that instead of having a catalogue of pictures to reference, I have a filing cabinet of documents with descriptions of those things. The concept of a ‘photographic memory’ is completely foreign to me. If I’m walking down the street and I see someone get mugged, then I get asked about it later, I can recall and recite the things I specifically took notice of in the moment, but if I want to be able to give a description of e.g. what the person was wearing or what color their hair was, I need to consciously observe those things and commit them to memory at the time. As I understand it, some folks can just recall the event and ‘replay’ it in their mind, and recall things they might not have taken direct notice of originally; I definitely can’t do that.

It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.

Can’t visualize faces at all; I think you pulled that quote from a different post. ;)

The thing to remember, though, is that… I didn’t even know this was something that I “couldn’t do” until it was pointed out to me that others can do it. I just assumed everyone else was being metaphorical when they said they “visualized something” in their head, or whatever. So whereas you hear it and think “Oh gosh, these people can’t do this very normal thing! That must be awful!”, to us, it’s more like we’ve just been living our lives as normal and then 30+ years in, we discover that most people have a superpower that we don’t have.