Maybe people aren’t saying “I can personally hallucinate at will”, but many people saying “I can’t visualize images” think that other people can hallucinate at will. The twitter poster even says “the way your eyes see?” which is pretty clearly asking if people can hallucinate.
Depending on how someone comes into this discussion, their prior experience, and the particular language they come across, it’s easy to interpret these images as representing… well… images. People who say “I’m a 1, I’m a 2, 3, 4” are probably just saying they can think about and recall the shape, texture, color, etc of things, and can’t actually see shit. Having a scale of “good image, bad image, outline” was probably meant to be very abstractly tied to this ability to think about those details.
I think if you took a group of completely neurotypical people, whatever that means, who all have EXACTLY the same sensory experience, they would start labeling themselves on every part of this chart and completely misunderstand what everyone else is saying about their perception. You’d have 1’s and 5’s despite no actual difference.
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.
Maybe people aren’t saying “I can personally hallucinate at will”, but many people saying “I can’t visualize images” think that other people can hallucinate at will. The twitter poster even says “the way your eyes see?” which is pretty clearly asking if people can hallucinate.
Depending on how someone comes into this discussion, their prior experience, and the particular language they come across, it’s easy to interpret these images as representing… well… images. People who say “I’m a 1, I’m a 2, 3, 4” are probably just saying they can think about and recall the shape, texture, color, etc of things, and can’t actually see shit. Having a scale of “good image, bad image, outline” was probably meant to be very abstractly tied to this ability to think about those details.
I think if you took a group of completely neurotypical people, whatever that means, who all have EXACTLY the same sensory experience, they would start labeling themselves on every part of this chart and completely misunderstand what everyone else is saying about their perception. You’d have 1’s and 5’s despite no actual difference.
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.