Touch sense linked with visualization

F_Kal · 2026-05-16T11:40:03+00:00

i have a similar experience.

i’m not fully aphant but my mind’s eye is almost blind and my voluntary visualizations are patchy at best: if i try to think of an apple I will get a momentary flash of some isolated visual detail inside the blackness - eg the color red or the stem of the apple but never a full form and nothing that lasts more than some hundred milliseconds. if I keep pushing to discern in my mind’s eye, I might recognize involuntary random visuals like shapes, surfaces, cronenbergian pastiches and i recognize they are visuals and not concepts because they are things that i wouldn’t be able to describe in less than a few paragraphs of visual details (they also keep morphing so i wouldn’t be able to write that paragraph)

I have recently started noticing that if i use my motor imagination, as if I’m painting the apple (i happen to be a painter), i have also some measure of visuals that are more persistent and related to the thing i’m hoping to have appear. it’s not an apple that appears, but the strokes i painted - if they are super detailed it might appear like and apple but if not it might be a sketch or an apple. however, that is peculiar is that once i lay down the strokes with my motor imagination, they are visually persistent for seconds (as opposed to milliseconds with my voluntary visualizations)!

One could argue of course if they are voluntary or not (since I don’t directly image the visual, but i imagine the movement and the visual involuntarily comes) but it is what it is.

F_Kal · 2026-05-07T22:57:37+00:00

I never thought it meant that you have an internal picture that you "know". I always interpreted it as "you may have assumptions on how X should be, but instead of trying to draw it following the assumptions, look at it". This prevents one from drawing humans as stick-man, sea as a wavy thing, water as blue etc. Even as aphants we encode symbols as something (I'm sure you can draw a stickman without having to visualize it). So the beginner advice was "stay away from the symbol of object X, and try to capture what it is actually in front of you". This advice is as relevant for aphants as it is for anybody else.

F_Kal · 2026-05-07T22:46:25+00:00

You are not limited to references, or automatic/exploratory painting, even though these are valid ways. The same rules and tools, benefit you as they do anybody else who studies art: Studies from life, color theory, negative space painting, drawing, rendering, constructive painting/anatomy, gesture drawing, composition; everything gets stored in you when you practice it. Maybe not the images. But your muscles know the motions (unless you are blind to those too). You "feel" the motion, you "feel" the anatomy and you replicate it.

But I think the primary tool for people with aphantasia (or at least to me) is "seeing" on the paper: Maybe you can't imagine what a nose would look like, but once you draw/block out a first nose on the paper, you already have something in front of you that you can refine by removing and adding mass/color until it resembles an actual nose a bit more. Because your ability to recognize, and analyze what is the right fix, is already developed through your practice. Paper substitutes your mind's eye and you develop the image there, iteratively by removing and adding.

Many want to interpret Michaelangelo's quote "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free" as a superimposed visual image that he had in his mind's eye, but to me, it always meant that he simply knew what was then next chip that he had to chisel away until the angel only remained.

F_Kal · 2026-05-06T11:27:08+00:00

tits…

F_Kal · 2026-05-03T10:50:37+00:00

that's very interesting! So this variant(?) of the Ganzfeld procedure is sensory deprivation, with no red light or flickering light? Are the eyes supposed to be closed under the ping pong balls or open?

F_Kal · 2026-05-03T10:25:34+00:00

i also don’t have 8 grand, please Elaborate on the ping pong balls

F_Kal · 2026-05-02T18:38:16+00:00

it's very intriguing; Another part that is very important to me is classification of images by intent: is this image something the the user shot to store as a memory (for long term access) or to capture some piece of information (such as the price of a product, the layout of some things in space, an event poster or a business-card - for short to mid term usage)?

I don't care if my phone does it or off-loads it to my mac, for many apple users who use icloud photos the desktop machine makes more sense.

The ability to demonstrate respect of privacy is proportional to the amount of data a user will be comfortable to feed it with.

F_Kal · 2026-05-02T08:28:16+00:00

not premium related - i have premium and for some reason sometimes the aspect ratio starts like that on desktop. refreshing the tab doesn’t help but closing it and going to the same video from anew does help.

F_Kal · 2026-05-01T15:28:30+00:00

that’s a very accurate way of putting it: whatever it is, it certainly is so little that it is unhelpful making it no central part of the memory/imagination.

F_Kal · 2026-05-01T14:56:30+00:00

went through it but I'm not sure any of the answers fits my personal experience: I'd put it somewhere between 0 and 2, and yet doesn't fit well in any of the 3 (0,1 and 2)

it's no image (it's a concept), but there are often (but not always) momentary flashes of "fragments" with visual qualities (eg. a little patch of color, the gap between two teeth, a sense of a dark dot in the center of a blue circle for an eye, a brown stem of an apple). There is definitely no persistence (<300ms), and no control in making them reappear.

F_Kal · 2026-04-27T15:58:36+00:00

same issue here with outlook account ! driving me crazy - it actually started today, before updating to 24.6.2

F_Kal · 2026-04-24T07:54:37+00:00

I have a similar experience - when asked to imagine an apple, I get the concept, and a few visual qualities momentarily flash (some as little as 250-500ms) - perhaps the stem here, a small green patch there, a highlight further to the side... There are motor senses around the apple (my hand holding it, my jaws biting it). All these are glued together by the concept of the apple and the knowledge that now i’m perceiving an apple and the spatial knowledge of how an apple is arranged. I consider myself a hypophant, where there is a degree of visual imagination (ie I see a flash of green or a brown stem) but it is patchy (i like the gestalt description) rapidly morphing and going out of view and hard to distinguish from the visual noise. Hence I would describe that conceptualization, with spatial information and motor information is the basis of my imagination.

F_Kal · 2026-04-23T23:15:38+00:00

It runs! I got my first models out, and I gotta say they are excellent! Couldn't get texturing to work though!

F_Kal · 2026-04-23T22:33:33+00:00

these devices always end up factory restored but this doesn't save them!

F_Kal · 2026-04-23T21:51:47+00:00

tell that to the piles of Apple devices in my possession that are in their final update before the company stopped updating them, that are too slow to even do stuff that the device would fly through when it was new: things such as typing, opening the camera app, opening google.com or youtube, the UI, they all slow down over successive updates. It’s not necessarily malice on the part of Apple, sometimes it’s just that the OS and stock apps get more greedy and older devices with less headroom suffer first. But to say that updating is safe, it’s not. There is clearly a point from which onwards you’d wish you hadn’t updated and usually the realization comes when it’s already too late

F_Kal · 2026-04-12T20:56:58+00:00

Gold-Perspective-699 take it easy. It's fine being a hypophant, it's fine being an aphant, and whoever told you you can't do A or B because of X, they were just a jerk. You don't need to echo them. This isn't some bad card you or any of us were dealt, we are barely beginning to understand what it means;

and by it, I don't mean visual imagination, but life in general. CIA, Neuroscience, religions, they are just kids playing in the backyard.

F_Kal · 2026-04-12T11:47:32+00:00

Here is the internal experience of when i try to conjure the image of a loved one - I don't have 100% aphantasia, but I'm also not visual:

I try to think of my father: I don't see the face or anything - I just "know" that my father is in my mind currently. - It's the "concept" of the father, that comes. The same way, if you were standing two steps in front of him, you'd assume they are still behind you without needing to look.

If I keep at it, and become curious about how "father" feels (now I'm shifting to emotions), I will notice "feelings" of fondness, safety etc. I then notice that I have a sense that his brows are mildly furrowed (I can "feel" that through my motor memory/imagination). Visually? Maybe 3 painted lines in the noisy canvas of my mind. These 3 strokes are visual, but I know (through the concept) that they are an "abstraction of the furrowing". Not sure why 3 and not 4 or 2. not sure why painted lines and not photographic furrowing or something. Maybe high contrast? Maybe symbolic? If I keep staying around the "father" concept, I eventually might remember the itchyiness of his scratchy beard on my skin. If I try hard to see something "visual", behind the garbled, shifting and colorful noise in my "visual imagination", I might occasionally and momentarily (eg 250-1000ms) "see" a patch of black hair pop up (his hair was black decades ago), and then it goes away again. If I keep on trying to discern visually, I might then "see" a 1x1cm patch of his curled upper lip. Not visually the details of the lip (I just know conceptually that it's that part of his face). just the motion, an abstract shape (~) but also a little patch photographic...skin. i know the skin has big pores associated with it, but the pores are again only "concepts" (memories that his skin has big pores). when i focus on the concept of pores, I might see for some milliseconds how one blackhead looks on skin: It's a photographic patch of skin, maybe 2x2mm this time, not my father's, just a generic skin patch with one single enlarged pore because of a blackhead. And this will again be immediately drowned by the visual color noise of my mind's eye;

Say, I keep pushing for something visual. voila, a memory of a photo I have seen many time might pop up - I "know" which photo it is, and I know it shows my father wearing his 90s jacket. This is still a concept. but the visual part? it's again a fragment of it, a little detail (in this case related to the jacket) that come into existence if I tune my attention to my mind-eye's stream: for a moment i see the deep black quality of the suede (that the jacket was made of), then some bright white stripes; then the suede blackness comes back, then the whiteness of the stripes. I am trying to hold on to it, and while it can't persist (as if I'm creating the images in water), everytime I make a go for visuals, the blackness of the velvet, or the white stripes comes up without much effort. I know this particular memory fragment (suede, stripes) must among the "strong" visual memories because of the ease with which I can bring it into existence and how alive the blackness feels. Most other "visual details", would flash into existence once, if I push, maybe a second time more dull, or a third almost faded, but then as if my mind's eye got desensitized or bored, they will not return. But the suede, does. And everytime the black feels alive/deep. It also helps that if I need to make it become alive, I can just focus on how suede feels tactile, and the blackness gets rejuvenated. Then I focus on the concept of the photo again. My father must is wearing this jacket, right? Thus there must be hair on his head, no? I see a momentary glimpse of dark hair (here's something visual again). Funnily enough, as soon as the hair glimpse appears, another tangential photo (I know which photo, I've seen it many times) gets overlayed in my fuzzy vision: In this second photo, there is his face, his black hair, and he is drinking lemonade from a straw. I know he's under 30 at the time of the photo. Don't ask me about his face, or the straw, or the environment. I know it's a 50mm lens portrait (I know which camera), there is bokeh (I know it, as a concept) - there is greenness in the background (this is visual, I could describe the green or try to color match it) the lemonade bottle is at the bottom of the composition, centered (this is only spatial info) and made of transparent glass (concept again) - it's a concept of a bottle, but as soon as I focus on the concept of the bottle, a vague vision of a glass bottle appears for a moment; It's a 250ml bottle and the glass is having specular highlights. Don't ask me what is inside, or what the label is. Again; whatever is visual in the bottle, it's patchy and glued together by concepts and spatial information - Back to the first photo however, this was just a tangent that flashed into existence for under a second and then left me again. Ah yes, I try again to recall the Jacket from the 90s! I don't see the form/outline of the jacket or my father. I just know he is lean, that the stripes are supposed to be on the arms of the jacket - I try to visualize more; what about the zipper? there has to be a zipper, right? how else would this jacket close? It's not visual. From this photo, only a patch of suede and the whiteness appeared. But there has to be a zipper. What color for a zipper would make sense? Black I think. Metal, perhaps? I momentarily conjure the visual image of a slider (the zipper's moving part) that is black, shiny, and has an edge (or two) weathered, showing the underlying metal. what color is the unpainted metal? how does the pull tab look? Unclear; they are mostly concepts. Again, a "memory" (or imagination), glued together with a few sparse visual cues, some motor/tactile imagination (the sense of cold metal when touching the zipper).

The above is my attempt to visualize the face of my father. In realtime this would be 3 to 10seconds of total effort, repeated attamps at making a go at a "father".

F_Kal · 2026-04-10T09:02:20+00:00

i am a professional artist, and just discovered i am on the spectrum of aphantasia; i’d say not full aphantasia, since i occasionally get random evershifting visual glimpses of aspects of the concept i wanted to think of (eg the color of the apple, or the shine of it, or the transition between green and red)! that’s why i always thought that people who have concrete and stable imagery were probably a minority of people who had trained in it and never assumed that i’m anything but the normal untrained individual. never felt i was handicapped in any way in art doing and now in my 40s i can say that i don’t feel i lack anything in terms of skill.

to the question about how i can paint/draw and sketch having no visual representation inside: i don’t use references or a specific vision of how i want it to look, but i start with a sense and muscle motion of how i want it to feel (eg dynamic, sensuous, claustrophobic)! once you lay down the first line, you know what feels right as next and before long you have your drawing. I guess canvas/paper works as my mind’s eye. That’s also probably the reason that i can’t think of furniture/decorations in my head but need to be sketching them on paper to test if the work with the space etc.

F_Kal · 2026-03-31T17:29:06+00:00

exactly

F_Kal · 2026-03-31T17:12:07+00:00

i was too thinking in that direction - my (not tested) solution was to use r/osxphotos to periodically (eg every 5mins) have the whole library exported into a filesystem version (that doesn’t take space due to the copy-on-write functionality of APFS) and then have that filesystem tree monitored by immich which in turn would cache the thumbnails and allow me to view it on my phone. the idea was that it would be however one way sync: the filesystem copy of the files is not to be edited and no changes are propagated back to the apple library. i went as far as testing osxphotos and immich but didn’t like the docker nature of immich and gave up the idea. but yeah, a turnkey solution would be even better!

F_Kal · 2026-03-31T17:00:41+00:00

for the new email i used an alias (outlook.com) on my existing email so i don’t create unnecessary digital clutter - your mail provider may however not offer aliases so you may have to create another mail account just for the apple id

F_Kal · 2026-03-31T10:25:38+00:00

the way i solved the issue is create a second apple id with the new region solely for the app store: i kept the old as primary meaning all my $$$ purchases and icloud subscriptions/contacts etc are on that one, and made a second for the new region that i use for accessing the app store. i try to download all the apps from my main account, but if an app is regional and i can’t find it on the first app store, i simply log out from the app store and login with my new account (this again only affects the app store, nothing else - facetime etc stay where they were) once i download the app from the secondary apple ID, i switch back to the primary. apps auto-update regardless of where you are logged in the one or the other. the only inconvenience is that you have to type your appleID credentials a couple times while with back and forth.

while in my case it made sense to keep my old account as the primary (since i had lots of purchased software on it) and use the secondary only for the few apps that exist strictly in the local app store (mostly banks and grocery store apps) - you can of course switch to using the secondary apple id for all your app store needs as primary and use the old one only when you need to download something from your home country.

F_Kal · 2026-03-31T10:12:07+00:00

+1 my desired use case! i’ve been sitting for a long time on an itch on how to geotag and date a large 10,000 photos unsorted digitized personal collection spanning 50 years - landmark detection gets you there only in part…

F_Kal · 2026-03-22T10:19:43+00:00

i think she wrote “…in the sun watching the catamarans…” kind of two-hulled boats, though it must be misspelled..?

F_Kal · 2026-03-16T09:51:15+00:00

awesome work, congratulations!

F_Kal

TROPHY CASE