wantonviolins [they/them]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
Ah, I follow, though I’m not sure I agree with your supposition there. I think we have language that can communicate varying levels of interior imagery, but I do think the people who are aphantasic are at a disadvantage in imagining what other people have going on inside their heads. Someone with robust interior imagery can just … imagine nothing, and while they might not get it exactly 1:1 with the aphantasic’s experience the general idea is still conveyed, but the aphantasic has absolutely no frame of reference for vibrant interior imagery and has to rely on approximations to understand.
Sure, maybe “neurotypical” people would all have the same visualization ability, but I think if they could discuss the concept and their experiences enough they could reach a shared understanding of what their visualization level was.
I have an inner voice, but when I’m reading, if I’m reading something that meshes well with my brain, the inner voice is silent and I have a little movie going on in my head instead. This can be inconvenient, when my linguistic processing catches up to my imagination and I realize that there was a bit of clever wordplay or delightful phrasing I want to appreciate on its linguistic merits I have to go back and re-read it in inner voice mode instead.
I don’t think anyone is saying that the ability to hallucinate at will is even on this scale, that would be some kind of 0 out of the 1-5. I can visualize in detail inside the confines of my mind, but nothing I imagine ever breaks containment and escapes into my perception of the real world. I can use my imagination to picture alterations to the real world, but this is easier if I close my eyes and imagine a scene that’s the real world I was just looking at plus the alterations. The alterations will never appear in my visual field. I consider myself a 1, full apple.
I do sometimes get very mild auditory hallucinations, like perceiving indistinct voices or the murmur of crowds in white noise, but that isn’t an active process, just my brain searching for signal in literal noise.
I’ve heard that some people with perfect recall/“photographic memory” can hallucinate at will, though, and that’s how their recall works? I dunno, could be miscommunication along these same lines.
awww you guys get apples? everything I try to imagine gets replaced with Samwise Gamgee riding the Nimbus from DBZ through an Akira Toriyama-styled Middle-earth
edit: I’m mostly joking, I can see the apple just fine in 4K HDR ULTRA HIGH DEFINITION, but I have been having vaguely intrusive visualizations of LotR in Toriyama’s art style. got a whole holodeck in here, visualizes everything, but the more complex a scene is the more it starts to lose detail at the edges. In the apple example, I can see the near-microscopic detail on the skin of the fruit in my mind as long as it’s just floating in a void, but once I have the whole orchard and golden sunset drenching the hills in yellows and oranges and the small farmhouse with a porch that wraps around and the apple pie on the windowsill with steam rising from it and the horse stamping its hoof impatiently and the small cloud of dust kicked up by said hoof, I can no longer perceive the texture of the apple skin
ok but inventing entirely novel forms of shit can rob the narrative of some of its ability to effectively critique the present day, concerns become abstracted beyond the audience’s ability to relate to them
part of the reason cyberpunk has remained relevant is precisely because the things it critiqued in its early days are still present today
Bipartisanship
Bi Parties On Ship