I request everyone to take this Test and vote what they got. This is supposed to be a test for Aphantasia. Please vote honestly and correctly.
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voters
Well, my option isnāt even on thereā¦ first of all, Iām not a big fan of saying you have aphantasia just because you donāt see an HD picture of what youāre thinking of when closing your eyes. This has mostly to do with the fact that you donāt have time to close your eyes during competition every time you want to āseeā something.
Not sure if this has anything to do with your Hyperphantasia post but I see a red star entirely differentlyā¦ so you got the little red book and so things start going Chinese quickly there and star becomes ę (xing). Letās build that character:
äø, äŗ, å·„, äø, ē, ē, ę¶, ę (roughly: one, two, work, three, king, life, crystal, star)
ā¦and I guess that is where we go from square to cube to hypercubeā¦ the image, which is really just the feeling of the essence, is a composite of all of the above. Doesnāt make sense to youā¦ well, I said āhypercubeāā¦
okay, wellā¦ if Torus - Wikipedia still makes sense to you weāre good. Hope that makes some sort of senseā¦ itās really too hard to explain. The image sounds like this by the way: https://youtu.be/UtL1bv0DWNo?t=163
By the way , no problem with theta or delta waves or visualizing in dreamsā¦ so if I feel it beneficial for long term memory palaces I might āvisualizeā things for 5-10 minutes before falling asleep and then going over it the next morningā¦ BUT, in the middle of the day: close your eyes, imagine a red starā¦ no, not like any of the aboveā¦ visually it a zero.
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Well rather it is quite strange.
I never had Aphantasia, so I expected to see something like 6, however when I visualize it even though the shape of star
is distinct but the colour does not comes out that much. So what I got is 5.
I think with that pinkish colour, my brain feels like convinced and doesnāt create any more vivid red shade.
However If I see a vivid red colour first and then do it, I get 6. But I think it is because my brain memorises the colour instantly but cannot create such a vivid colour of its own randomly and naturally.
It is surprising that there is this range of visualization. I expected it to be more like on the extremes like a user would either see 1 or 6.
@bjoern.gumboldt have you any other such instances where you cannot visualize something directly ?
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Itās not really that I cannotā¦ my brain just doesnāt see the need for it. Imagine a crossword puzzle where some of the letters in the puzzle are numbered to give you a single answer phrase at the end. My brain is really just interested in solving the words that give you these lettersā¦ solving the overall crossword is not needed for that.
Ultimately, and this is where I have a problem with the word aphantasia, because it suggests that you have no imagination; when really why should you limited yourself to looking at photographs? I mean Impressionists, Expressionists, Dali, and Picasso (just to name a few) didnāt bother with seeing the red star above as it is originally depicted. Maybe this best gets across what Iām trying to say:
So why limit your āimaginationā (yes, it has the word image in it) to just 3 dimensions and the wavelength your eye can pick up?
Is this like the ālook at a candle and then close your eyes and imagine itā-thing? Iām sure that works for everyoneā¦ but thatās more your physical eye rather than your mental eye. I donāt think that helps much with this ātraditionalā visualizing thing weāre talking about.
Anyways, I can do the star up to 2-3 before falling asleep and usually dream at 5-6 but really not something Iād choose to do when it comes to memorizing information, etc. There too much other stuff going on at any given moment when awake to bother with forming mental images in hi-def.
@Vertexion can you visualize with your eyes open? If so, where in the room do you project the image? Is it as real as a hallucination?
By the way, I have no problems with names and faces or the P in a PAO or traversing memory palaces.
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Well I just tried to visualise a blue circle in a wall of my room with my eyes open. Strangely I cannot visualize it. It feels like a sense of something being there but I honestly cannot Imagine or see the circle.
However if I close my eyes or look anywhere else and then imagine that blue circle in that same wall (without seeing that wall directly), I am achieving quite good visual image.
No, it isnāt hallucination. It just like a sense of something should be there or something is missing but you cannot remember what it was. Its rather very hard to explain.
@bjoern.gumboldt, what is your experience with something like that?
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I have to make a conscious effort to colour the star or itās black and white. Do most people imagine in colour by default?
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user_7e, yep, itās the easiest way.
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I see a vivid red star in front of me. Perhaps itās the Macyās red star, or the communist red star, or astronomically, a red supergiant star about to explode. Itās so big that the entire orbits of several planets could comfortably fit inside of it.
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Iām surprised a lot of people responded with a 6. Are your visualizations really that vivid? And is that how normal people visualize things? Mine is somewhere between a 4-5. Maybe thatās why I didnāt do so well in school. I literally canāt conceptualize certain things.
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I just saw a great thing. impossible to expain
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Although i did vote for 6,Iād still say my visualization ability is not the best.
But itās certainly trainable.I have made quite a progress over the last 10 months just by actively observing things around me.
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I voted 1. I canāt really see anything when I try to imagine a red star. I definitely donāt have aphantasia though - I have had vivid dreams where I could see things with perfect clarity.
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Hi,
Iāve put a 5 in my answer as I did not really get the āredā rightā¦ I saw a very vivid star (as in the graphic representation, not as in āSunā), but the color was more yellow/orange ā Very bright indeed, but I thought I should emphasize that the command āsee it REDā did not quite stick.
In fact, even if I try again, even right now, I have a hard time giving this thing any other colour than that I originally āfeltā for the object.
To change its colour, I need to change the nature of the object: I have no issue in visualizing a red star, of the type you find in Christmas decorations. I get a vivid image for that, too, but in the āheat of the testā it seems to me - in retrospective - as the word āstarā kinda overrode its qualities. It came up very quick and very vividly, but with its own colour, on which I have relative power.
I can imagine it white, orange but not really RED!
Thatās so bizarre!
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I didnāt realise that - I had only read about aphantasiacs like Blake Ross and Penn Jillette who donāt have visual dreams.
I can visualise other things vaguely, not clearly. For some reason I get nothing for the red star.
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Star? What star? I see a pinkish blob. Or more accurately the feeling that there is a red star that is hidden behind frosted glass. That if I could just rid of the barrier I would see the star.
I also have the feeling that the star is just at the edge of my peripheral vision. As if I turned my head fast enough I might see it.
Same thing goes for remembering faces. Heaven forbid anyone ask me to describe what my husband looks like.
Iāve often wondered if my visual imagination & memory has been co-opted or trained for more abstract thinking.
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The first few seconds the colour was not so intense, and the contour not so sharp. I had to put a bit of effort for the star to become intense red, and the lines distinct.
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I wonder how this capacity or incapacity to imagine objects clearly, affects the way people use images or loci in their brains to memorize things.
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Sounds, notes.
I suppose it is more difficult to ask if someone can imagine a melody or a tune in his head, because it is not easy to check if the notes are the same notes of the original song. In my case, if I cannot imagine a melody in my head I cannot sing it correctly. And very often I cannot sing the right notes.
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It is just mind blowing that 50%+ voters didnāt correctly visualize the Red Star which is number 6 in the image(check out the color with Photoshopās color picker)!!
How can this be! I donāt get itā¦ 
May be,we didnāt learn to choose the correct color when we were a kid!?!?!
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I canāt find āmy starā in these. If I split this up in three axes (keeping the scale from 1 to 6) then I can find it:
- For the color: 6
- For the contours (1: high myopia, 4: impressionism, 6: sharp pencil): 3
- For the shape (1: cubism, 6: whole image with right proportions): 4
A few years ago all these scores would have been a few points lower. And even now, scores will decrease with the complexity of the object Iām trying to see (the ones here are for seeing a red star)
Doesnāt anybody else feel the need to distinguish between these (or other) different features of visual imagination?
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