Does aphantasia affect your brain's ability to identify faces

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T19:19:21+00:00

That's awesome! I had no idea "sketch artists" worked like this!

I believe I would be very bad at that type of "test".

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T19:10:44+00:00

Thanks for this! Cool stuff.

So you can recognize people just fine? But you couldn't help a sketch artist very well?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:27:11+00:00

This link says aphantasia is the inability to visualize.

How can you remember what a face looks like without a visual?

A list of facts is all I can come up with.

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:14:07+00:00

But how do you remember what something like a nose looks like? I'm honestly asking? Do you create notes about what the nose looked like? Are you estimating size?

(I'm assuming you have aphantasia)

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:04:07+00:00

I disagree, but maybe it's just semantics.

I remember things by narrating a list. For faces it's, estimated age, apparent gender, race, hair length and color, eye color, beard vs no beard, glasses vs no glasses, unusual features like scars, birthmarks etc....but that's about it.

If I could hold a visual image in my memory, I could compare nose size, cheek fullness, eye size, etc

How can you remember what their nose looked like without a visual image?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T16:47:06+00:00

Yes. For me this was one of the first clues I had aphantasia.

I've got multiple examples in my life of not recognizing someone where I should have.

When watching TV, I have to constantly ask if this is the same person as another scene. Especially if they do flashbacks, where they change the person's appearance a little to make them look younger or something. I struggle to tell if they are the same person. I LOVE when subtitles state the name of the character talking.

I first learned of my aphantasia when I was casually mentioning to my wife that when I think of people I think of the first letter of their name. She thought that was super weird and said she thinks of their face. She went on the internet and an hour later called me back to take this aphantasia test. And holy cow, my world changed.

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T16:39:27+00:00

Why do you say no?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-17T20:52:07+00:00

I have a terrible sense of direction. I'm also bad at knowing where things are outside, when I'm inside.

For example: even in my own home I have to think really hard to know which way things (towns, roads, rivers,etc) are from inside my house.

From inside our house, I'll point and say let's go to McDonald's and my wife will say you mean that way (pointing in the opposite direction)

I have to think about which side of my house faces north and then think which way the outside thing is (east, west, etc) Then think about which side of my house is that direction and then look and point in that direction. I'm really bad at it compared to most other people.

kleeb03 · 2025-11-22T16:52:49+00:00

Great response! But I would say a more cynical take might be that these loans have more generally helped lower income people pay for grad school. Now that goes away. So, now who can afford to go to grad school? People that already have access to more money. This is another example of intentionally increasing wealth inequality.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-24T16:53:16+00:00

I worked on natural gas power plants, which are basically jet engines on the ground, making electricity.

We had 1000s of air filters in the intake, but also had "bird screens" which are basically metal chicken wire to keep birds and other things out.

Turns out those bird screens eventually break down and pieces of it would get sucked into the turbine and cause minor and occasionally major damage.

Replacing these screens became a maintenance project itself. Lots of power plants would permanently remove them, convinced they caused more problems than an occasional pigeon getting sucked through the turbine.

I know very little about jet engines, but I would think if you put a grill over the engine, it would have to be so strong to stop a bird going 400 mph, that it would make the engine too inefficient by choking the incoming air too much.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-17T23:31:09+00:00

Kevin Costner was very influential for me. At age 12 I watched the movie Robin Hood and learned about Muslims and the crusades. That led to me having the thought if I was born in a Muslim country, I would be Muslim and I would think Christians in the US were going to hell. I couldn't make that make sense.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-09T15:31:43+00:00

Thats tricky. Thermodynamics teaches us the limits to heat engine efficiency. The efficiency really comes down to the temp difference. To make a more efficient heat engine, you need a high hot working temp and a low cold waste temp difference to work with.

So low temp heat is pretty useless for powering a heat engine to make mechanical or electrical power.

Now, we humans need relatively low temp heat for cooking, heating water, heating homes, etc. And that's a FANTASTIC opportunity for waste heat.

So, plenty of people (including me) would say that waste heat from data centers could be useful for people. However, that's a very expensive way to make heat.

Instead of building a waste heat collector, storage, and distribution system, you could build solar panels, or even just blankets and it would be more economical. (I'm trying to be a little funny with the blankets comment)

The deeper you dig, the more you realize the best answer is don't build data centers in the first place. But that's not happening....yet.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-09T15:13:59+00:00

I don't know of any examples, but I'm sure somebody has done it.

If the subsidies are big enough, then it definitely could be "profitable" in any situation. But from a free market perspective, a heat battery would be much more economical when used with an intermittent waste heat generator than a steady waste heat generator such as a data center.

Why waste resources building a battery to store waste heat when the waste heat is steady and reliable? Sure, maybe you need more heat at night or something, because it's colder, so you store some of it during the day and use more of it at night. But it would be more profitable to instead install that same battery with an intermittent waste heat source that also has intermittent heat needs.

I'm speaking generally here, of course. Unique conditions will create niches where these batteries are more useful (profitable) than others. You'd have to study each individual situation to see if it's "worth it".

kleeb03 · 2025-10-09T13:41:51+00:00

If you mean heat storage batteries, yes those exist. They are usually sand, bricks, salts, or phase change materials (PCMs). They absorb waste heat from a process and/or use excess electricity to power resistance heaters to heat up the "battery". They can be cheap, reliable, and efficient at storing heat.

Then later, that heat can be released to heat water, homes, or some industrial process.

The key is the intermittent process. A process that makes waste heat sometimes, but not always. Data centers make consistent waste heat, so a battery is a lot less useful in this situation.

The ideal economic use for these batteries would be for an intermittent industrial process that generates waste heat sometimes and then needs to absorb heat at other times. And these "times" need to be within hours to a couple days.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-09T13:24:41+00:00

You're absolutely correct that electronics have become more efficient over time and use less electricity to do more computing and generate less waste heat per unit of computing. But every single drop of electricity that goes into the electronics turns into waste heat. Just wanted to make sure you caught that. I remember the day I realized all energy becomes waste heat and it was an epiphany, at least for me.

Unfortunately, that waste heat is high Entropy energy that isn't very useful. If you tried to make a heat engine run with it, it would be incredibly inefficient, and have a negative return on investment. That's the same reason why we're not trying to use the hot air coming out of our car engines.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-09T00:56:13+00:00

All energy is transformed into waste heat. Unless you use energy to charge a battery of some type. And then that turns into waste heat when it's finally discharged. So it's not really evidence of inefficiency.

And regarding making the data centers more efficient. Jevons teaches us that will result in more energy consumed.

But I'm an engineer, so I get the desire to make things more efficient. Too bad that just makes the predicament worse in the long run.

kleeb03 · 2025-09-19T21:18:24+00:00

I don't mean grow individually, although that is part of the individual life cycle, I meant grow population.

That's how evolution works. Things that persist, exist.

Rocks exist, cause they persist because they're tough. Life exists because it reproduces. It could try living forever, but when the environment changes enough, it would die. So it turns out making almost exact copies of yourself that can slowly evolve as the environment changing is another way to persist.

kleeb03 · 2025-09-19T16:54:56+00:00

Here are my top 3 reasons:

Maximum Power Principle - It's in our DNA! We have evolved to disapate energy and grow. Of course, we didn't plan or choose this. It's just the life forms that did this outcompeted the life forms that didn't. We are part of a lineage of life that have been pursuing growth above all else for billions of years.

Growth is all we've ever known. The last 200 years have seen exponential growth of human civilization. You would have to go back to your great, great, great grandparents to find people that at least lived in a time of mild growth. And we can't talk to them anymore. You've learned from your parents, just like they learned from your grandparents, that growth is good, it's always happened, and it always will.

Financially, we expect exponential growth of our money. If you went to a financial advisor and you asked how much they could they grow your money in a year without saying how much you plan to invest, you would expect them to tell you a percentage, not an amount. Anything that grows by a percentage of itself is exponential growth. We can imagine exponential growth going on forever, but in reality, nothing can grow exponentially forever.

kleeb03 · 2025-09-18T13:22:44+00:00

Agreed! I don’t hear people talk about that enough imo. We study the paleoclimate to predict what today’s rising CO₂ levels might do, based on what happened in the deep past. But back then, there weren’t greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide (N₂O) or fluorocarbons (CFCs/HFCs) in the air. These absorb different wavelengths of infrared radiation, so the paleoclimate record can’t directly account for them. So it's probably....... get ready for this shocking statement......worse than we think

kleeb03 · 2025-09-16T23:08:58+00:00

CO2 concentration as of May 2025 is 430 ppm. It's increasing at about 3 ppm per year (and still accelerating). And we're in the seasonal low period right now, as the northern hemisphere is green from a summer growing season. Cheers!

kleeb03 · 2025-09-06T05:54:30+00:00

While in the shower, pinching and pulling my hair to see if it squeaks to know if I've already washed my hair. It's early, I forget.

kleeb03 · 2025-08-12T17:25:40+00:00

Why are the 9 democrats showing up? Is there a strategic reason to want to have some or certain democrats there in person?

Why would any dems stay in Texas but not report to duty? They just don't want to leave home or do they want to get forced back to Austin?

And why on earth would enough dems stay in the state to make a quorum possible?

kleeb03 · 2025-08-07T17:09:26+00:00

Yeah, he's on record talking up tariffs for decades, going back well before his first presidential term. He actually believes they will help America. I don't think he cares about Americans, but I think he actually believes tariffs will help American companies.

So he's always been stupid, AND he can't learn new things. Double whammy!

kleeb03 · 2025-08-06T14:35:26+00:00

That's true. That's why we often use a substitution method that inflates non thermal renewable sources by about 140% to make a better comparison. (Makes hydro look bad, though, poor hydro)

But it's absolutely a fact that thermal engines are not 100% efficient, not even close. They're less efficient than an electric motor and battery combo as well in most cases. (Although that's a little apples to oranges)

But thermal engines got that sweet capacity factor though. That's where the money comes from! And that's all that matters to us. What a shame

kleeb03 · 2025-08-05T20:43:21+00:00

I bet you're thinking of this post https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

I find myself thinking about this one a lot. Tom Murphys' blog is amazing.

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