#do i have aphantasia?????

[existencebringsonlypain]

hey can someone describe what imagining something is like? like imagining an image?

[jet-teeth]

Specifically relating to my latest post, but in general also: I feel like my attention span has gotten so bad these days in terms of actually finishing anything, to the point that the deflection/procrastination-projects get as silly as "builds a whole-ass 3D model instead of finishing the goddamn drawing because that's somehow easier than dealing with the perfectionism demon hovering over my shoulder when I draw these days"

(I think this why I'm trying to chase looser styles/play around with traditional media here and there again, since anything too precise starts to activate the Overthink Demon. I guess what I post is "oops! All sketches" anyway, but a lot of things still get overworked. Probably should start using timers again or something idk) Rarely do I actually "finish" models as well, which is generally why I don't post any (they are almost always studies/character reference models) but let's see if I can get around to making some Printable Little Guys this year, since frankly I find 3D a more comfortable medium to work in than outright painting/doing rendered-out stuff

Ramble post, but I'm always interested in the topic of "process" when it comes to art, and how struggles & limitations might actually help an individual find what their strengths really are too (or, just reveal areas that need more work. I DO want to finish a couple of the paintings in my WIP folder, but I also have accepted that it's not gonna be the natural medium for me ever) (I always try to include art in long text posts like this so they aren't as boring. Have a Banana Cat drawing I never uploaded. Also yes the printer HAS been added to my enclosure and it's great fun :> )

[spacizia]

that weird guy from archives who dumped an entire conspiracy on you (except he’s right)

[aro-culture-is]

aro culture is not realizing that everyone related or self-projected into romance in media, not just appreciating the relationship as a separate and fictional thing. (im arospec but yea, didnt know that ppl projected themselves onto the characters when they have a relationship what the heck. is that why there is so many unnecessary romance scenes?)

.

[fiveredlights]

i should stick to writing i think

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

[ID: An image with five silhouettes of heads showing different apples. Choice 1 is shown as a hyper-realistic red apple with shading and color, 2 as a slightly less realistic apple with less shading, 3 as the same apple as 2 but in black and white, 4 as the outline of the apple with no color, and 5 as no visual apple. End ID]

asking bc i found out i have aphantasia recently (no visual) and did not realize people can See the things they are visualizing in their minds. for reference i'm a 5 (completely dark/no visual and only think about the apple w/ concepts)

[appalamutte]

omg. when y’all say “this writing is so good i can see it perfectly in my head” that’s not…..that’s not a metaphor?? y’all are ACTUALLY seeing the scene play out like a movie in your head while reading?

[bombusbombus]

recoloured this old warmup to repost cause I had it on my mind.

If Clark is going to be in earth 19 (gotham by gaslight universe) (they're publishing more gbg and clark is going to be there), then listen to me listen to me, he needs to be a cowboy. Superman needs to be a cowboy in the big city. I am SOO serious about this. I am on my knees, DC, let me write for you, I would add so many themes about modern technology versus traditional knowledge and sprinkle in some anticolonialism PLEASE.

You could have a cute little Daily Planet that has to struggle against yellow journalism in a smoky little backroom & setting their own type, a la The Truth. You could have gentlemen's clubs. You could have a brutal war against unions in the streets and one lone titan of industry giving into their demands. You could have the exact same 3 batkids from the movie, there's literally nothing to improve on there. You could have Clark tear down a barbed wire fence with his bare hands, in a futile attempt to unravel colonialist ideas of private land ownership. Imagine the alien knows more about the earth, the real earth, than the knight in his city does. Imagine the American dream failing Clark, who has to go back east to the big city, failing Bruce, who lost his parents, failing everyone over and over until they decide to build something without it. In an era of rampant exploitation, what do real heroes look like?

Or you can make the justice league fight big steampunk robots ig I'm excited either way.

[sentientsliotar]

What if Light developed aphantasia?

Say when Soichiro fires the blank, Light sustains a head injury- and recovers entirely except he now cannot picture anyone’s face so he can’t use the death note.

Light could definitely get Misa to write names for him, he would still have a lot of power as Kira. But there’s something poetic about god-complex Light having to rely on others to use his divine powers.

[aphantimes]

"why is drawing so hard" says the aphant that self taught terrible practices and very rarely uses references

[running-in-the-dark]

oh, a fun* thing I'm noticing about when I'm writing something is that there's absolutely no descriptions of what anything looks like ever. not the rooms, not people's clothes, just nothing. everything happens in a blank void and no one... is wearing any clothes? no that's definitely not where I was going with that but now I've forgotten what I really wanted to say.

anyway, it's really not surprising and just mirrors how I read things written by other people too - I completely skip over any descriptions like that. can't do anything with it anyway so it's just unnecessary information to me

*not so fun

[imnothereyet]

can anyone tell me why i just thought it would be a good idea to throw myself headlong into a sequence of research & effort that summarizes as "human geography & urban planning historical revisionism" and would require learning how to do a from-the-ground-up redesign of entire metro areas based off of current understanding of the course of technological advancement, finding the oldest topographic data to use, spending hundreds of hours learning to effectively draw/paint semi-realistic architectural & landscape scenes, likely learning 3D modeling whether digital or physical, improving my understanding of building standards/options, and keeping up with emerging technologies.

[tag-if]

RAAAAH I found this cosplayer guy on tiktok and he looks EXACTLY how I picture Aleron

Just give him freckles and it sells it. Imma make a sketch later, probably. Hopefully.

OH I FOLLOW HIM OMG

okay, hear me out

if you can find his Hiccup cosplay, then make the hair a Little bit redder, you've got Aleron pretty accurately

[cosmos-collective-blog]

An odd thing about having some degree of aphantasia, and full-on synthesia simultaneously.

If you tell us to close our eyes and picture an apple, or any object really, we can't. We can tell you what it looks like from memory if we know what it is, but we can't actually see it in our head. It simply isn't there.

With our eyes open, however? Especially with our synthesia involved? That is an entirely different story.

With our eyes open, but with no music on (our synthesia processes sound as colors and/or feelings), we probably fall somewhere between 2 and 3 on the "visualize a star" chart here.

But with music on? 4, maybe 5, solely because there is now color involved and added to the vague outlines. And yes, we have tried to sustain what little imagery we DO get, but synthesia isn't exactly something that can be controlled— the entire Thing™ with synthesia is imagery or other sensations (such as taste, sound, etc) that happen as a result of processing stimuli. We've learned to just wing it and work with it as best we can and to use it to our advantage somewhat.

We still can't visualize shit with our eyes closed. But with our eyes open and music on, we've managed to visualize the headspace at least somewhat. More often than not, it's blurry colored outlines. But sometimes, we get bits of solid color and silhouettes. That's been happening a bit more often on good days, when we aren't too floaty.

I just thought this was interesting.

-Juno

[persnickety-peahen]

i saw a post talking about how wild the human brain is, and in the comments, someone mentioned aphantasia, which made me feel things and i just have to talk about it so here ya go all seven of my followers and people interested in whatever tags i end up using:

if you don't know what aphantasia is, no shame at all. although it's becoming more widely known and researched, it's still a fairly obscure neurological condition. heck, i only know about it because i read an article on it once about six years ago and realized, hey, i have that!

essentially, aphantasia is the lack of a mind's eye, an inability to voluntarily produce mental images. sometimes it's acquired after a brain injury, but it's predominantly just something folks are born with. estimates about the number of people it affects vary pretty significantly—i've seen everything from 1% or less to as much as 5% of the global population! that's wild! statistically, that means you might probably know someone with aphantasia . . . or maybe you have it yourself but, like me, didn't even know it was a thing until someone told you it was and now you've got a little mini existential crisis on your hands where you realize that the brains of at least 95% of the people you know work in a fundamentally different way from your brain and you're missing out on an experience they all have in common and aaaaah

i don't know anyone else irl who has aphantasia, so when i find someone online who does it's like that moment when a dog sees another dog and recognizes that they're a dog and just goes absolutely crazy. i am consumed by the desire to overshare infodump about all the ways aphantasia has affected my life and then compare notes like, do you also have such a bad autobiographical memory that more than half of your childhood memories are actually reconstructions based on stories other people have told you about your own life? do you also sometimes get unreasonably anxious about being a victim of a crime someday and getting a good look at the perpetrator but not being able to describe them to police later because you can't picture what they look like and even a sketch artist wouldn't help and would probably only make things worse as whatever they draw would slowly replace what little memory you do have? are you one of those aphantasiacs who never got into reading because you couldn't picture things? or are you like me and loved reading anyway, but a) got really bored and pulled out of it when authors spent time describing what something or someone looked like because it didn't do anything for you and b) got really confused when your friends would talk about how they didn't like the movie adaptation of something because it "wasn't how they pictured it when reading" and you didn't know what the hell they meant by that? and then you went on to become a creative writer obsessively concerned with imagery and if you have enough of it to satisfy those people who actually like when things are visually described? do you want to get into drawing but give up in frustration every time you try because of the lack of direction you experience from not having an image in your mind's eye to that you're trying to draw in the first place? do you need visual aids to really understand certain scientific and mathematical concepts? were you frustratingly bad at making and interpreting graphs for school projects and presentations? and now you hope you picked a career path where you won't ever have to do that ever again?

are you also terrible at estimating distance and length and height because words like "foot" or "meter" mean nothing to you, much less bigger measurements like miles and kilometers? do you also need google maps to get anywhere despite living in the same city your whole life because lacking a mind's eye also means you lack the ability to make mental maps? were your inability to navigate and difficulty with measurements something people made fun of you for the same way they made fun of me for it? and now that you know you have aphantasia you can snap back at them and be all, actually the reason i can't navigate or understand measurements is because of a neurological condition so you're basically making fun of me for being disabled, how about that? do you also sometimes get sad and think about how you don't really remember anymore what your loved ones who've passed away look like? or even what your loved ones who aren't currently in the same room as you look like? how you rarely notice if someone got a haircut or new piercing or tattoo or otherwise changed their appearance because you can't visually compare it to how they looked the last time you saw them?

when you try to picture a loved one's face, what happens? me, i run through a list of traits in my head, oftentimes more focused on personal attributes than physical ones because that's what i'm actually capable of remembering consistently. i don't just know what someone's hair or eye color is—i have to memorize it, like a fact for school. mom and dad have blue eyes. my husband has hazel-ish green eyes. my best friend is blonde, but her hair is darker now than it was when we were kids, and she got glasses while we were going to college in different cities, i should know that by now and stop being surprised when i see her wearing glasses. her mom, my second mother, has straight brown hair and a long face, but i can't remember what color her eyes are even though i've known her for twenty years. i think they're blue, but i can't picture it. i don't know for sure, and if i think about it too long it kills me. when i have kids, will i remember their eye colors? or will i have to ask my husband if he knows?

i take a lot of pictures. all the time, of everything—of people, of scenery, of my food, or myself, of pets and cools animals i see strolling around the city. boomers criticize me for not living in the moment, and it makes me feel awful, like i have to choose between experiencing something and remembering it. cause yeah, without the pictures, i would forget. i keep movie stubs and playbills and fair tickets and museum handouts and even fucking hospital bracelets, and i cherish them the same way other people cherish religious items.

it's lonely sometimes, having aphantasia.

the people close to me know about it, so they know how to accommodate me in relation to it, and they're supportive and interested in learning more. but they don't live with it themselves, so even though they know what it is, they don't know what it is, ya know? their knowledge is all second hand. as wonderful as my people are, when i'm really feeling my aphantasia and getting into those sad thought spirals, talking with them about it just isn't the same as it would be to talk with someone else who has aphantasia and has dealt with the same issues and feelings about it

i guess in the end i just want what we all do: community. when i find someone else with aphantasia, i don't wanna be like a dog seeing another dog because i'm so starved for contact with other folks like me; i wanna be like someone recognizing another member of a long distance club i regularly participate in, like hey! same hat! and then go about the rest of my day because i'm satisfied with the community i have. ya know?

anyways yes this is a free invite to message me if you have aphantasia or think you might have it and you wanna compare notes and chat about shared experiences, or alternately if you know someone who has aphantasia or are just curious about it and want to learn more about it :D

[celiaelise]

Wait people think you shouldn't use references bc you should be drawing from your IMAGINATION??? I guess I thought the argument was that you should just be drawing from life and learned knowledge of anatomy, (and I do think there's a benefit to drawing from life and it's different from looking at something already flattened, though it's obviously not always an option) but it never occurred to me that the argument was, "it's fine to draw from 2d images but they can only exist in your brain."

Some of us can't picture detailed images in our brain, or picture anything at all! People with aphantasia aren't allowed to be artists? 🤨