I have aphantasia. Like many others, I am able to see images when I dream and very rarely in a hypnagogic state.
My partner is on the opposite side of the spectrum; she can conjure mental images with ease. Our differences in that respect have led to a lot of interesting conversations.
I think aphantasia is quite misunderstood by people able to visualize. I can remember how things look, have no issues identifying faces, have a strong spatial understanding of places I've been, etc. It's hard to describe precisely; we just remember things differently.
After coming down from the shock of learning there are people like you I was even more amazed that one of the founding engineers of Pixar, and a giant in computer graphics, also has this condition. He even did a survey that found his artists where more likely to be on the aphantasia spectrum than managers. Dunno, maybe some people are so driven to create what they cannot think or see.
I’ve heard about that! My partner and I have both been learning to draw this year. I’m pretty decent at drawing observationally / from reference, but I haven’t tried much from memory. I imagine she’d be much better at that side of things. I’ve also noticed I’m not great at coming up with initial ideas or visual concepts, but once I have a topic or direction, I can absolutely run with it.
I also think it makes sense why a lot of software engineers (myself included) have aphantasia. Being “rational” is arguably easier when you’re not influenced by the emotional weight of images. Maybe we’re even less predisposed to PTSD, since we can’t visually relive things in the same way. My mind still races at night like anyone else’s, but it’s all non-visual. Just endless inner monologue instead of a reel of images. Couldn't count sheep if I tried!
Your metaphor isn't bad, actually. I just don't visualize anything. It's more like a feeling of abstract relationships. It often feels like most of my brain is in RAM; I can usually recall things almost instantly. And if I can’t, I can do the trick where you think of something else and let your mind crunch in the background until it pops up.
I should clarify that I can still imagine what a room looks like and what’s in it. I just don’t see it. It’s more like I feel the layout or know where things are, almost like navigating a mental map without any visuals. Specific details like colors, patterns, etc. are much harder to recall unless I am intimately familiar with the object or whatever.
This. If you ask me to imagine a triangle I'll start thinking about having three sides and three angles and the area is half of the base times the height and it's a rigid body and the angles add up to 180 degrees... but there's no visual aspect to it.
Sometimes I wonder if aphantasia gave me an advantage in mathematics, because I had no trouble whatsoever with the concept of "abstract symbols".
I think you have some abstract symbol capability that is not the opposite of imagery.
I lack imagery but also am nonverbal and hit limits in math. I am terrible at rote memorization or application of formulae.
I did well in math up to a point, which may have hurt me. I simply felt answers to quite a bit of algebra and some calculus, but it doesn't scale. I also got accused of cheating a couple times in primary school, when I could not explain my work when arriving at an answer very quickly.
My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?
I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptomps and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.
Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.
For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.
From a previous comment of mine[0] on this subject:
> When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
> I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
I turned down an interview with Rabbit. While I was looking into the company, I watched a product demo of theirs featuring the CEO who didn’t use the scroll wheel on the device (instead used the touch screen) and it seemed as if multiple features shown were not actually in a functional state. Kind of a weird tech stack, too, based on the job description.
What makes a song sound “good” is another question - there seem to be countless factors. Most people can easily tell you if they subjectively like or dislike a song, but typically have a hard time explaining exactly why.
Did you put this together? It looks great. The site our village uses to host its village code is an atrocity so I’ve been considering rolling my own unofficial version.
Our official code is hosted by American Legal Publishing [1], but it's so bad that I decided to download a copy and try hosting my own.
After I was elected to our village council I started to notice the similarities between legal code and computer code – large amounts of plain text, formatting, and change management.
I ended up using Markdown with some special CSS styling, and the site is generated by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. BBEdit and regex was a huge help to whip it into shape.
You are welcome to use anything I've done [2]. I would love to see more people doing the same.
It is mentioned by its old name in older blog posts, but there seems to have been a rebrand to just "MDN". For example, there's no explanation of what MDN stands for on the About page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the article's theory that the main (technical) problem is thermals:
> "Cooler Screens does refer to them as vivid and engaging, and they must have thought that they needed to compete with store lighting to catch attention... the wattage of the backlighting (and attendant heat dissipated) must be considerable.
> "...I suspect they have a thermal problem. The whole system probably worked fine on a bench, but once manufactured and mounted with one face against an insulated cooler door, heat accumulates to the point that the SoC goes into thermal throttling and gives up on real-time playback of 4K video. The punishing temperature of the display and computer equipment leads to premature failure, and the screens go dark."
I wasn't involved with the hardware side of things. The SoCs are from Nvidia, iirc. The widely-publicized issues with Walgreens are 'electrical,' but I'm unsure of what that actually boils down to in practice.
Was there any awareness that the premise was kind of goofy from the jump? Was there any concern about the optics of the failing units described by the author?
Unlike the starting point, a regular glass door, which effectively always accurately displays its inventory, a screen layer, by nature, introduces the possibility of inaccurate data, an entirely dark door, etc. Hardware maintenance is no doubt important: having a bunch of inoperative doors, especially in a single location, can lead to customers having negative experiences. The advertising premise is more straightforward - show contextual ads to customers seconds before they make a purchase.
It seems like you just used a lot of words to explain the obvious thing everyone who encountered them experienced. It's on obvious step backwards from a glass door. The engineers had their work cut out for them to fix the ridiculous problem that the product created in the first place. Only for potential benefit of advertisers, and at the guaranteed detriment of consumers.
I was on the Retail Value Add (RVA) team, which primarily handles the backend providing the content to the doors, as well as an interface for clients to update said content.
My partner is on the opposite side of the spectrum; she can conjure mental images with ease. Our differences in that respect have led to a lot of interesting conversations.
I think aphantasia is quite misunderstood by people able to visualize. I can remember how things look, have no issues identifying faces, have a strong spatial understanding of places I've been, etc. It's hard to describe precisely; we just remember things differently.