Any known conditions similar to Aphantasia?

Here you go.

Often times if a brain needs to be split due to seizures or any other reason, the communication part and the imagery part cannot relay info properly with each other, and the subject can't identify a picture of an object that know. Like, if I said apple, they could tell me it's a fruit and that it has sweet properties, but they wouldn't be able to identify the shape out of a line up

its just an extreme version of not being able to rotate 3d objects in the mind and thats not uncommon

This is the first time I'd heard the term, but I had a friend who apparently dreams in abstract (i.e. no imagery) as in just words in his mind. Ironically I cannot understand how can someone not dream in images.

I might have this. I can only visualize something for a second

What does it mean when someone is very good at involuntary imagination but average in voluntary one?

It just means you're caring too much about making it work and getting stuck in a vicious cycle of noticing a lack of results, feeling frustrated about the lack of results, and continuing not to get results because feelings of frustration get in the way of letting it happen. You'd probably start to make progress if you just recognized there's no literal picture in anyone's head in the first place and then let all the attributes of a simple moving object like a bouncing ball come to mind without trying to confirm you can actually "see it." e.g. you might notice a memory of how the motion of bouncing up and down feels, or the sound a bouncing ball makes on certain floor surfaces. Instead of trying to force an image and instead of trying to pin down whether or not it's working, you can just let all the different things that do work happen and build on each other and eventually you'll probably have some sense of visuals come up.

Sounds like you don't have a (good) visual memory, if those are your experiences.
I'm not frustrated or anything, it's just that I noticed that my imagination is almost always working automatically
But if you legitimately can't "see" images then you might have visual aphantasia. Do you think only in words/sounds?

I never said I don't "see" images. I said nobody has literal pictures in their head. You can have *the impression* of being in the presence of very vivid imagery. It's just an impression though, your brain isn't really manufacturing ink. It says "I'm seeing a really vivid landscape!" or some shit like that and so you believe that's what's happening.

get on my level retard. I can visualise an entire fucking world in my mind. I am fantacising fucking a hydritic naga while cat-spiders watch. Get on my level virgin.

>get on my level twice
>not capitalizing first get
>spelling fantasizing as "fantacising"
This lends support to my armchair science theory that verbal thought and visual thought antagonize each other. I think when you're excessively involved in one it suppresses the other.

>It's just an impression though, your brain isn't really manufacturing ink. It says "I'm seeing a really vivid landscape!" or some shit like that and so you believe that's what's happening.

You sound like a colorblind who's very sure that red and green are both brown and that there's nothing wrong with his inability to tell them apart

Maybe read the experiences of some aphantasiacs, yours seem pretty close

Nah, you should maybe read some psychology experiments on perception.
>Most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.
>So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.
>I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.
>Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out.

Or perhaps it was that i was shit-posting, and therefore did not put in the effort to correct my spelling or grammar?

I do have a poor concept of spelling, but that is because I come from South Africa so i often spell things phonetically. I am, in actuality, very skilled in tasks requiring verbal thought, as i tend to be well-worded and have a tendency to perform well in speeches, and writing. Most anything i write, i write well; So long as i put in the effort, of course.

I have a question for you: what would you define as verbal though and visual thought? Is there any crossover or do you think of them as mutually exclusive to one another?

Memory is not imagination though. Just because you mostly remember facts does not mean that you must be unable to reconstruct an image out of them.

It's the same idea in both cases. There are experiments where subjects are asked to visualize something like an elephant and then afterwards they get probed on all the details an actual elephant would have that they thought they were imagining but weren't. And again, I'm not saying you and I don't *believe* we're really seeing things when we visualize. I'm just saying this belief is ultimately a false one. You can do mental rotation tasks of shapes and believe you're really seeing shapes spin around, but what's really happening is you're coming up with answers to these questions and getting the impression there's an image guiding these answers when no such image is really there. It's similar to if you programmed a machine to do stuff in response to a data representation of a map. The machine wouldn't really have a literal image in its robot mind, but it'd behave as though it has some sense of an image being there.

Words are technically visual things, but only in the sense of words as the written symbols for language, which is the sense that almost has no importance at all when it comes to how we process language. The sense that has importance is not "words" the symbols but rather "words" the abstraction that the symbols represent. And that abstraction is basically the complete antithesis of visual thinking. We see words and immediately pivot towards the meanings they stand for rather than seeing the symbols as pictures in themselves. If you look at the words of a language you don't have any knowledge of then you'll see the pictures of these symbols, but in a language you do understand you mostly don't get the impression of looking at pictures anymore when looking at its words because you're thinking of the meanings instead. So in this way the two modes of thinking are naturally going to be opposed. The more you're thinking visually the less you're thinking abstractly about the meanings of symbols, and the more you're thinking verbally the less you're thinking visually about the direct appearances of things.

What are your dreams like?
Why are you convinced that everyone else has the same imagination abilities as you?

>What are your dreams like?
My dreams seem like they're vivid experiences of going different places and doing things like I would in real life, except with series of events that aren't logically consistent.
>Why are you convinced that everyone else has the same imagination abilities as you?
You're not understanding that I never once said I have poor imagination skills. I'm saying no matter how vivid any of us believe our imagination is, there aren't ever literal pictures in anyone's heads. You can believe you're seeing extremely vivid imagery and you can even be adept at doing mental rotation tasks or otherwise thinking about intricate anatomical details because you went to art school or it just comes naturally to you or whatever, but none of that means you're having literal pictures appear in your head. Go back to the machine example I mentioned a post ago. A robot can do all sorts of useful shit with a data representation of an image and can behave in response to it even when the image that data is based on isn't actually right there in front of their ocular analogues of a camera or whatever. That doesn't mean the machine has a literal image inside of it, just like it doesn't mean we have literal images inside us.

How does visual thinking work, especially in people who don't think in words at all?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking

I am pretty sure every single thing I visualize is something I remember seeing
Does that count?

If by visualizing you don't just mean "being able to tell facts about things", then yes

>And that abstraction is basically the complete antithesis of visual thinking.
I can think in the abstract too (or at least i think i can). Here, test my abstract thinking and let's see how i do?

>So in this way the two modes of thinking are naturally going to be opposed.
I would think that it has more to do with the visual thinking being the sub-concious fall-back when the concept cannot be abstracted.
For example, If i know Hebrew then i know what this means:

But if i do not know Hebrew, then my mind naturally fall back on simpler methods of understanding (visual concepts). Some languages (such as Chinese) use visual learning to derive abstract verbal thinking. The symbol for moon and month on their own mean moon and month, but together mean season.

tl;dr - i think it is not that visual and verbal thinking are necessarily exclusive of one another, in many instances one is thinking of both. But when one does not understand the abstract meaning of a word, they fall back on visuals in an attempt to derive the same abstract meaning.

this is completely irrelevant to this thread. visualising doesnt mean you're retrieving something stored exactly and by your first post, you seem a little naive to make statements like this when peoples experiences clearly are very diverse. e.g. some aphantasic people were/arent even aware people can visualise stuff.

just like their aphantasic people with no images, some people can extremely vivid images in their head

again, youre being irrelevent. your confusing visualisation as the ability to replicate an actual image. thats not necessarily the case. how comes visual imaging tasks show activity changes in the visual cortex? what does your "believe" even mean. its vague.

the snake is so big someone could fit in it.

The snake is sexy and i would like to fit myself into her (if you catch my drift).
┬┴┬┴┤ ͜ʖ ͡°) ├┬┴┬┴

you can argue that our sensory experience of the outside world arent literal images. look at illusions, look at hallucinations. i dont get what you're getting at. youre getting dangerously close to the philosophical problem of someone implanting your memories etc in your head. plus, mental rotation isnt the same as visualising necessarily. what do you mean by literal pictures? if literal pictures are from neural firing in visual areas and so do visualisations what is the nature of the difference? your robot argument is sollipsistic, its irrelevant to psychology. i have no proof you have experience.

The visual cortex is stimulated because you are remembering the sensation of visualisation; it is very different to having a tangible picture appear in your head.

>visualising doesnt mean you're retrieving something stored exactly
Already addressed this here:
>peoples experiences clearly are very diverse
I specifically made a point of saying there are differences between people in things like mental rotation ability or knowledge of anatomical details.
>irrelevent
The topic came up and we've been discussing it. I don't care if you personally find it irrelevant, you're free to not discuss it.
>how comes visual imaging tasks show activity changes in the visual cortex
Because when you visualize you're doing something similar to what you do when your eyes are actually in the presence of real world objects. Neither case means you have literal pictures in your head.
>what does your "believe" even mean
It means you're compelled to behave around the fictional reference point of visuals even though dualism isn't real and all there actually is in the world are physical phenomena including your physically explicable behavior of treating these fictional reference points as though they were real.

>you can argue that our sensory experience of the outside world arent literal images
They aren't and I did argue that.
>youre getting dangerously close to the philosophical problem of someone implanting your memories etc in your head
?
>what do you mean by literal pictures?
I mean qualia like visuals aren't literally real in contrast with physical objects.
>i have no proof you have experience.
Nobody actually has "experience." Experience is a word for the fictional abstractions of behavior we tend not to think about and just accept as "real" because of how deeply ingrained these behaviors are e.g. pain behavior is a pretty fundamental and primitive part of our neurology so even if you understand on a conscious level that non-physical things aren't really it won't help much in keeping you from still behaving around that pain abstraction.

>the orange one is a communist

Visualizing with images (aka not having aphantasia) is like a computer GPU. You feed it data and it produces images, they might not be very detailed or precise, but they are still images produced by the visual cortex
Aphantasiacs are unable to do this, they remember things as facts only and can't reconstruct/'see' images

yea well I want that too but I'm into vore.

I mean put my dick in her vagina.
What did you mean?

wait. I'm so confused. Since you're not actually rotating anything, how can anyone have a condition where they can't imagine a 3d object being rotated?
Worst case scenario for ANYBODY who thinks it through would be to lose track of the shape/arrangement of whatever they're rotating.
I mean, you can even crudely language reason your way through it. "I have a paper with a dot on the *top* of it. I flip it over and the dot is now on the *opposite* side. The *opposite* of *top* is botto. I have a paper with a dot on the *bottom* of it.
But more realistically a person can simply be familiar with a large number of real world experiences of objects being manipulated that they can recall and rearrange to form the pattern described to them.

your arguments are overly convoluted dude. its difficult to understand them. you are using too many philosophical ideas and overcomplicating the whole thing. not-picking ddefinitions. im convinced you might agree with me if i actually understood you properly and you didnt have to resort to philosophical pedantry. one thing i will say though is that your earlier citing of research about how we don't directly remember things really isn't relevant to this area of research.

what if i told you that abstraction is experience and you're philosophical pedantry isnt useful to anyone because if nobody really actually has experience in your eyes, then what im telling you and what you're telling me is exactly the same thing, you just insist on using different words.

Some people don't usually think in words, but I don't think that's a disability unless they're completely unable to, and I don't think that ever happens.

yea that ehhh I guess