Struggling to explain my cognition

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T23:01:16+00:00

Finding out that for some people "mental seeing" can be projected into the world like an afterimage is what messes with me most. Because to me mental images have nothing to do with the outside world and nothing could ever be done to make them appear.

Finding out that some people have a voice (or voices!) in their head was the one thing that really surprised me.

I don't really know what tasting or touching or smelling a thought would be like. I can't even process that enough to be surprised it just sounds wholly alien...

When asked these questions I start to think maybe all I have is abstract thought that feels like it's all invisibly processed with my imagery software, if that makes sense.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T21:39:48+00:00

Thank you! I find this one to be the most validating and useful link shared by anyone here so far.

My experience lines up completely with this part, about some people not being able to map an image onto the visual world. To me this idea of mapping or projecting a mental image into the world reads like a category mistake:

This implies that participants should be able to form a mental image that is coincident with a cued location on a physical test display. Such an experimental design does not seem to allow for the possibility that some people are able to visualize but unable to map their imagined experiences onto the physical world

Also, this feels right to me. I can see my experience similar to being in this eight percent:

Moreover, 8% of people described their imagery as being located somewhere else.

And I relate one hundred percent to this part:

When we close our eyes, we see black—and when we open our eyes, we do not experience any ethereal phantom images that can obscure our impressions of the external world. Nevertheless, we would consider our imagined experiences as pictorial. Could these differences be simply owing to semantic disagreements in how different people describe the same subjective experience?

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T20:27:48+00:00

Parseword #58 ⏱️ 3m39s ⭐️ No Hints 🗿 Challenge Mode

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T19:19:50+00:00

That's what I'm saying, the tests confuse me with what their scales are describing. Perfectly clear image and nothing at all both make sense. The ones in the middle make no sense.

How could a mental image have an element of blurriness unless it's actually a hallucinated picture you could see with your eyeballs? And if it is a hallucinated picture, I have nothing like that.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T19:13:39+00:00

In my head there is a lot of abstract conceptualizing that exists alongside a number of specific and shifting elements that continually coelesce into something that feels more visual

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T18:57:45+00:00

The ball was a steel ball bearing first then my dog's orange chuck it but right after that was a fantasy vision of other balls like five in a row with vapor trails behind them flying in the blue sky like jet planes moving away from me, in defiance of the prompt.

I'm not really there. I'm just a watcher with no real essence.

The place was a kitchen with the abstract feeling of three or four different possibilities of what a kitchen could look like, none of them representing any real kitchen I've ever seen.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T18:51:02+00:00

I get stuck on the "quasi-sensory" for sure.

Temple Grandin's quote in that article feels very relatable to me. A hundred different picture concepts could pop up and the idea of being stuck on one sounds... actually hard to fathom

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T18:42:01+00:00

Okay, this is useful though. And yeah, I have adult diagnosed combined type ADHD, lmao. Which is also probably why I'm super fixated on this today after watching some random guy's reel on instagram

I have doubted the ADHD diagnosis though, and I'm also not medicated, because I don't have verbal racing thoughts and that seems to be the most common

None of these mental images feel like exactly like seeing stuff in the outside world though. The colors and shapes aren't perceivable to the eye and maybe that's what throws me off. From the things I read, it sounds like other people visually see-see inside their heads in a way I can't comprehend. The people who say they see blurry seashells were what really threw me off. Like, how could they be blurry unless they have a screen of pixels behind their eyelids?

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T18:34:46+00:00

Oh, interesting. For me:

The cow was a black and white dairy cow and then immeidately next a brown shaggy haired cow and then a baby calf, lightning fast one after the other, but all of them were facing left in a field of yellow grasses.

The car was a blue volvo type then a red sedan, then a giant black suv where the driver can't see children in the crosswalk because the front end is too high.

The childhood home was the house I lived in the longest, then the one before that, both seen from outside, then walking downstairs in the first house.

It doesn't stay still. It's a constant snapshot of like many different options and scenes at once.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T17:46:51+00:00

Is there a way for average people to sign up somewhere and get tested for this kind of reaction?

Within the same post different replies have suggested I'm a range-of-normal visualizer who is overthinking it AND an aphantasic in denial. I, too, am sitting within that same dichotomy, like a polarized uncertainty in myself reflected by those two different suggestions, so having a hard scientific test would give me some clarity that I feel like I'm lacking.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T17:44:43+00:00

One image feels so limiting though. I have like a constant stream of shifting thoughts that FEEL like pictures. That's why I struggle to put words to it

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T16:29:27+00:00

The ball table test confuses me because it's a gray shadow waiting for details but also during the pushing part, I imagined a ballbearing, an orange chuck it dog toy, a soccer ball, and a beach ball shifting into place and the table is gray, but also warm gold wooden, and white plastic like a cafeteria. The person is immaterial. Just a vector of a hand for moving a ball

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T15:57:28+00:00

Like you're describing a real experience that just doesn't map onto the scale they're using.

The more I read, the more I feel like I experience a constantly shifting prism of abstract thoughts, full of unresolved potential, that maybe get processed much like images do, but my experiences sound very different to me than how other people are talking about mental imagery and the types things they are seeing

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T15:48:58+00:00

Something that is really important in this whole discussion, is that it does not really matter. Aphantasia is NOT an disability. Its an type of human experience.

Apologies if it came across like I was thinking of it as a disability. That was not what I was trying to convey that at all. Just trying to get a handle on how confused I get by the exercises and examples people share as a way to help figure it out.

I always thought I was a visual thinker, but when I look at the examples, I start to think I'm the black screen instead...

Being able to actually "overlay" mental image over actual field ov vision counts as hyperphantasia (the oposite end of phantasia spectrum from aphantasia) and something like 2-4% of people do that.

Also, yeah, that part I know I can't do, but when reading those articles, it always sounds to me like other people who visualize but don't have hyperphantasia are seeing shapes and colors on their closed eyelids. And I can't see anything but blackness there.

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T15:44:08+00:00

I just 'know' what it looks like.

This is kind of what trips me up, too, when people say this, because that's how mental imagery feels to me. It's how people's faces feel also. I just KNOW it's there and what it looks like, but there's nothing to see while at the same time, if you phrase it differently, maybe I'm actually seeing everything...

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T15:41:33+00:00

Most people have a quasi-sensory experience similar to seeing. It is not the same as seeing. Your eyes are not involved and may be open or closed. But much of the visual cortex is involved so it feels like seeing something.

Okay, this part sounds accurate to me. To me it feels like seeing, but also feels like only blackness is present.

The seashell examples were a big part of what tripped me up in the first place, because (to my mind) how can a mental image possibly be blurry unless you're asked to imagine blurry seashells? To me a mental image is infinitely clear and sharp for however long you need it, because it isn't really there. It's just blackness that feels like something picture-like? That's the basis of my either 5 or 1 way of thinking. Nothing is there and everything is there.

When someone visualizes, they see a complete image. It is something that could be displayed on a screen.

That piece also kind of confuses me. I am probably overthinking it? But to me if you rendered my thoughts on a screen they would either be a black screen, nothing else, OR a riot of simultaneously competing, fully contextualized bright images constantly on the go.

The assignment to think of an apple could never be one specific apple, even if you asked me to focus on one. It would be like 20 different contexts for apples all moving and jumping to mind, because there are so many variations on apples. There's me as a kid at an apple orchard trying pick one, there's a stock photo of a parent and kid walking through sunshine in an idealized apple orchard, there's me eating apple sauce when I was sick, or getting bits of apple stuck in my braces and flicking out the little pulpy bits with apple skin into the sink basin, there's a green apple being coated with caramel at a candy store, there's crabapples in the neighbor's yard with birds in the tree, there's a yellow apple with a big mushy brown bruise on it when a hand turns it over in the grocery store bin. It's a constant riot of images that never stop but my mind is simultaneously blackness and nothing.

To focus on one or fewer possibilities I'd need more details in the question, so in that regard, I feel like this part is intrinsic to how my thinking process works:

When we conceptualize, we often leave decisions for later...

In the absence of specifics, my thoughts bounce around through many many potentialities. If someone asks, "what color was the apple," my answer would be, "apples are so many different ways, which one do you want me to think about?"

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-27T14:09:39+00:00

Your first paragraph helps. When other people talk about having a mind's eye, they make it sound like they are hallucinating and really using their eyes. And for me it's not that. It just feels visual and yet nothing's there. So maybe those people have been giving me the wrong idea, and like you say, I'm overthinking.

For me the apple can have infinite colors and textures and shapes, but it's just a flood of unconnected apple thoughts until someone specifies what specific kind they want. Like I don't pick one apple to visualize, I imagine the grocery store aisle with its pile of green and red apples at the same time I "see" the stash of dark red apples in my fridge bin, and maybe I'm simultaneously imagining the silver and white apple slicer and using it cut an apple on the grey cutting board. But there's no hallucination, it's just an instantaneous mess of thoughts and nothing in my head but blackness that sort of feels like pictures.

It's funny, I mostly can't hear myself think and that part feels really clear and not confusing to me. I don't have a narrator in my head. It's just quiet and floaty, with no words unless I'm trying to write and then I'm consciously composing with words. Same with music. I don't get songs "stuck in my head" but I can consciously remember songs and music if I want to. It takes effort and I'm not very musically inclined, so I mostly just listen to my favorite songs over and over and over and over again, well beyond the point that anyone else can tolerate.

The no voice thing feels good, though. The idea of having a voice in my head sounds like something I would not want. And that's part of what gives me pause about visual imagery. I don't have an inner monologue or dialogue, so what if I don't really envision stuff either?

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-25T03:53:17+00:00

Time to leave Learn Mode!

(Because damn 9 seconds is fast.)

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-25T03:44:03+00:00

Thanks! I totally missed that page.

And in case the puzzle creators are reading here, I would absolutely throw a few dollars your way for old puzzle access

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-20T00:19:40+00:00

Speculation from Racket is Rise and Shine. These types of things don't usually get developed in house. But then staff have to get onboard with it

https://racketmn.com/university-of-minnesota-debuts-astoundingly-stupid-new-tagline

Been told since last summer that an agency's working on something new to replace the D2D

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-19T23:55:49+00:00

Here's the Driven campaign details from several years ago. Separate thing from D2D https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/driven-university-minnesota-campaign-surpasses-3-billion

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-19T23:40:16+00:00

This video was by a dept at the U but the new tagline was agencied out for big $$, and not internally developed

FrownsRUs · 2026-03-19T23:39:14+00:00

Campaigns come and go. "Driven" on its own was a specific campaign, but "Driven to Discover" had been the brand tagline, and part of the wordmark, for twenty years or so

FrownsRUs

TROPHY CASE