10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
What’s the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
Hyperphantasia is the opposite.
Hyperphantasia. A subset of that is prophantasia, where you can physically conjure a mental image in your field of vision, but that case is extremely rare.
Sounds like schizoaffective disorder to me.
Prophantasia is voluntary, and people not only control it, but as other comments point out, it feels like ‘self’. My brother, a PhD psychologist, has developed an interest in aphantasia. Aphantasics rarely hallucinate. So, from talking with him, we have a pretty good working hypothesis that schizoaffective disorder affects the same brain pathways as prophantasia, i.e. hallucinations that are not under voluntary or conscious control. (As an interesting side note, in highly-individualistic cultures, the voices and images more often feel malevolent and ‘other’ to sufferers, in contrast to people in collectivist cultures, who experience them more often as friendly and familial. It’s not necessarily maladaptive.)
Interesting stuff. My response was a half-joke, but I appreciate the additional information!
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Sounds like you have it yeah, I explain it like a blind person can tell the shape of something by feeling it, I can kinda feel the shape of an imagined object in my head but can’t see it visually. If you’ve never thought about it, most people can close their eyes and see vivid or somewhat vivid pictures like you would a photograph
I can’t see things in my head, but i love Tetris and I’m excellent at fitting a lot of suitcases in the trunk of a car.
One of the reasons I smoke marijuana is so that my dreams chill out. When I’m not smoking I can wake up still feeling tired because my dreams were too intense.