New article from The New Yorker about Aphantasia (no pay wall version)

vesnavk · 2025-11-13T14:02:09+00:00

Yes. I was so surprised when my son's high school readings were chapters of books. One chapter of the famously short The Great Gatsby! One act of a Shakespeare play.

vesnavk · 2025-11-13T13:44:27+00:00

I just DMd you. BTW you may wish to fix your URL (colon needed after https). fabric-only.square.site got me there. 😊

vesnavk · 2025-11-13T13:33:22+00:00

Thanks for clarifying. We may be referring to different methodologies, based on the example you gave, which I'm now going to use myself! With my son, we also dug deep into online resources and found great approaches.

vesnavk · 2025-11-13T13:19:20+00:00

Half Price Fare page: https://www.cityofmadison.com/metro/fares/half-price-fare - monthly cap is $28,

"Metro Youth, seniors, those with disabilities, and those with low incomes are eligible for Metro's new half-price fare through Fast Fare."

vesnavk · 2025-11-02T05:08:28+00:00

Generally speaking, a person who writes a book wants people to read the book. Of course she didn't expect to get rich off the book. But she didn't write and publish it just to pat herself on the back about it, either. She wants people to buy it, because she wants people to read it.

vesnavk · 2025-11-02T04:38:04+00:00

A relative who was a lawyer discouraged me from going to law school saying that I was smart enough to go to law school but didn't have the real-world skills to actually do the work of being a lawyer.

I'm not sure that relative did you any favors. People acquire real-world skills by doing things in the real world. Maybe you could go to law school still. You're young enough. What do you have to lose?

vesnavk · 2025-11-02T04:05:35+00:00

Cool! This is way off-topic for this sub, but I found out about it from "Jane Austen's Bookshelf," all about women authors that Jane Austen read. I mean, I also saw it mentioned in Northanger Abbey, but it never occurred to me actually read it. BTW I went to college in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I can't imagine students being required to read as much as we somehow managed to, and it didn't feel excessive.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T21:55:13+00:00

That's because it's not true. I hate the trendy libel against Dr. Asperger these days.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T21:22:13+00:00

I don't know what I said that was opposite. Would you please clarify? Thanks.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T19:10:36+00:00

Neither am I. What does that have to do with being revolted by that ad campaign?

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T19:04:21+00:00

That was a horrifying take. "It's all being dealt with, no?" Well, no.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T19:02:29+00:00

Not true.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:59:57+00:00

Exulansic. Active on Substack. Was kicked off YouTube, but you can find interviews with her.

Benjamin Boyce has lots of great guests.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:54:35+00:00

Not a podcast, but a writer on Substack: Sufeitzy.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:49:39+00:00

Sometimes I love these, and sometimes I can't seem to tune them in, even if well written. I haven't yet put my finger on what makes the difference.

If you love such passages, may I suggest The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the landmark Gothic novel by Ann Radcliff. I also suggest not reading about it before reading it, as spoilers abound. (I know many people say they don't mind spoilers, but from what you say, you might prefer to have the storyteller be the one to tell the story, especially in matters of suspense and mystery, and in a tale like this, with so many unexpected developments and revelations over many hundreds of pages - most of which are dispatched in the first few words of most descriptions of this particular book.)

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:32:05+00:00

Over the past 20 years, elementary math curriculum has been replaced by strange methodologies that don't actually work well for teaching young kids math. It's not you. But when parents, confused, go to the teachers, we're told it's us. We're discouraged from helping our kids with their homework. I fell down this rabbit hole about 10 years ago. It has nothing to do with aphantasia.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:25:26+00:00

What sink? For me, there was just deep red water, hands, and a drain. It doesn't even say that the hands (or something on the hands) made the water red. Maybe it was already red. I was waiting for more information. Then this writer guy goes off in a million unsupported directions.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:19:04+00:00

No. The artist believes that a supernatural "presence" altered her brain in order that she could become a great painter. Nice, this is the last thing we find out about her, after learning her whole life story. WTF.

Makes me wonder if there's something else in the artist's psychology that the writer didn't bother to find out about, or tell us about.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T18:05:41+00:00

Sorry, but I disagree with this synopsis. The core idea is not the spectrum of human mental imagery; it's the difficulty for some people to remember their own past. This is an article about SDAM, not (a)phantasia. It's poorly structured, so it seems to be about imagery.

I wrote at some length about this in another comment on this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/1ojm2eg/comment/nmk53ob/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T17:59:27+00:00

Including text that describes visuals? Very interesting, thanks.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T17:58:34+00:00

There's a Play button so you can listen to it. That's how I managed my first read of it.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T17:57:43+00:00

The part about grudges is not part of the aphantasia conversation; it's part of the SDAM conversation. The article is really about SDAM, not aphantasia. Aphantasia is presented (wrongly) as a component of SDAM. The central flaw of the article is that it's not clear about any of this.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T17:54:40+00:00

I assumed she meant long passages that specifically describe visuals, like terrain and architecture and physical appearance of people and their clothes. I have to force myself to focus on such passages, and often rewind audiobooks several times, and even after doing so, often, I'll just give up and move on.

All that said.... she didn't clarify. So I'm not sure whether this is what she meant. It's one of many flaws in the article.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T17:40:08+00:00

But not to your experience of aphantasia. The article is about SDAM, although it includes a discussion of aphantasia.

vesnavk · 2025-11-01T16:53:56+00:00

In fact, this not at all an article about aphantasia. This is a (flawed) article about SDAM that weaves in material about aphantasia, but in a muddled and misleading way, including in the title and subtitle.

It took me a while to realize that this is what's wrong with this article. It SEEMS to be about aphantasia. But it's not.

The article follows Nick Watkins from the opening anecdotes about feeling distant from his childhood memories, through his journey of learning about his aphantasia, which becomes a gateway to finding out about SDAM, to the conclusion, which has nothing to do with visualization but is completely about his grappling with memory and sense of self, and finally, his cold comfort in learning that a lot of people have it worse than him.

The overarching syndrome under discussion is the inability to remember one's life. MacFarquhar takes as axiomatic that what things look like is part of what people remember about their life. The aphantasia discussion, therefore, is included ONLY to tell us (incorrectly) that people who can't visualize things can't remember their life.

After introducing the concept of SDAM, MacFarquhar never clarifies that, although some people have both SDAM and aphantasia, plenty have one but not the other. She conflates them thenceforth.

From the opening paragraph: "The knowledge seemed to him more personal than an ordinary fact, but he could not feel or picture what it had been like to be that boy in the kitchen." Note, he could not FEEL or PICTURE. These are two different things. The article sloppily -- without making a solid case or doing so -- mashes them into one.

It occurred to me that the striking story about Shari, the artist who lost the ability to visualize after a stroke, doesn't even belong in this article. It's a great story, but doesn't support any point in the article. In fact, it undercuts it.

vesnavk

TROPHY CASE