Yeah, fun fact: doing acid as a teenager made me find out I'm suffering from a condition called aphantasia which is a neuronal malfunction that doesn't let you see anything with your inner eye. I don't dream, I don't ever imagine anything and I have no optical hallucinations when doing hallucinogenic drugs. I enjoy the effects, I just don't see things with my eyes closed, like ever. I remember things and see thy have changed eventually, but that's it, no picture. The only good thing about I found out so far is that I can in fact unsee things. Nothing gross or gore I ever saw can haunt me.
This condition has only been given a name a couple years ago, so I have just recently found out I'm not the only one, an estimated 2-3% of the population has it, but most never talk about it as they're afraid people will, think they're freaks. Which we are ;)
Just one thing: can you people imagine what porn means to us? LIke not to have a personal wank bank in your head?
I've always loved reading but descriptions of landscapes ie. don't work for me. I'm not even trying to paint a picture, it's as if there is no canvas to paint anything on. I can vividly imagine emotions and human interaction though, so I love Dostoevsky for example. There's a lot of literature not describing sights. I'm never dissapointed by casting decisions when books are made into a movie cause I literally haven't pictured the protagonists like apparently most people do.
I'm the same, didn't know it was a condition. I can't see mental images but I can hear mental sounds, which means I have trouble with guided meditations when the person is saying "picture yourself blah blah" I stop listening at that point. When I read, I can hear the waves on the beach, or the footsteps of someone walking, or the sound of the voices speaking (that's always a shock if the book I read gets turned into a movie). The only real problem is I can't do high level math. My math genius brother told me that's because mathematicians need to be able to visualize relationships between shapes and angles. Once that was explained to me I felt much better for being the only person in my family who is crap at math.
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· 5 years ago
Hi, above guest here.
Funny you should mention meditation, I had a super awkward experience. My then girlfriend and I went to an event held by tibetan buddhists informing about their "diamond way" of buddhism which they claimed was not ilke the others, they said it was relatable without superstition, which sounded great. We were just half an hour into the "show" when the front guy (actually a "Lama" from Denmark who lived in Nepal since the 1960s) started a guided meditation, telling us what we were to see with our inner eye. I never heard of it before so I actually tried to see what he described but it sounded all so ridiculous (and we were pretty smoked up) I totally zoned out and started making "funny" remarks to my gf who had totally dived into that meditation and shushed me and really started to hate me for being such an insensitive dick. Well, rightly so, I sort of asked her how she could be so naive and suggestible, I could just not quite understand how that meditation thing...
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· 5 years ago
... could work at all. From my acid experience I knew some people had "more phantasy" than me, but we just smoked a little hash and she had hallucinations? I couldn't believe it. We split that evening.
I'm not good at math, too, but nobody in my family is, so I guess I'm just not that smart. I can't imagine any other sensual perception as well, so I pretty much live in the moment and I don't filter any input there is from outside, which can be quite exhausting. I did a 10 day trip to China once, and was so overwhelmed from what I saw that I spent the last day in Beijing on my hotel bed watching TV rather that visiting thew forbidden city cause I was afraid I might totally freak out there and get a seizure or something. ...
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Edited 5 years ago
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· 5 years ago
... Oh my, sorry for rambling and whining *lol* - Anyway, how old were you when you realized it? How do you think that may have affected you? Do you see advantages in it, how does it make you feel to learn there's a name for it and people are studying it? For me it was sort of a great relief and even though I'm still the same freak as I ever was, it's different, better. You?
There's not yet much science in on the matter yet, as Adam Zeman of Exeter University in Great Britain just recently started striding it. Maybe you're as interested as I am in learning more of it. There's a questionnaire on the universities pages.
I realised other people have videos running in their mind and I don't, about 30 years ago when I was in my 20s. I actually felt good to know there was a reason why I couldn't do math the way my brother and sister could. I didn't know it was an actual condition until just now, I thought I had brain damage and I was the only one, I would love to participate in a study.
This condition has only been given a name a couple years ago, so I have just recently found out I'm not the only one, an estimated 2-3% of the population has it, but most never talk about it as they're afraid people will, think they're freaks. Which we are ;)
Just one thing: can you people imagine what porn means to us? LIke not to have a personal wank bank in your head?
Funny you should mention meditation, I had a super awkward experience. My then girlfriend and I went to an event held by tibetan buddhists informing about their "diamond way" of buddhism which they claimed was not ilke the others, they said it was relatable without superstition, which sounded great. We were just half an hour into the "show" when the front guy (actually a "Lama" from Denmark who lived in Nepal since the 1960s) started a guided meditation, telling us what we were to see with our inner eye. I never heard of it before so I actually tried to see what he described but it sounded all so ridiculous (and we were pretty smoked up) I totally zoned out and started making "funny" remarks to my gf who had totally dived into that meditation and shushed me and really started to hate me for being such an insensitive dick. Well, rightly so, I sort of asked her how she could be so naive and suggestible, I could just not quite understand how that meditation thing...
I'm not good at math, too, but nobody in my family is, so I guess I'm just not that smart. I can't imagine any other sensual perception as well, so I pretty much live in the moment and I don't filter any input there is from outside, which can be quite exhausting. I did a 10 day trip to China once, and was so overwhelmed from what I saw that I spent the last day in Beijing on my hotel bed watching TV rather that visiting thew forbidden city cause I was afraid I might totally freak out there and get a seizure or something. ...
There's not yet much science in on the matter yet, as Adam Zeman of Exeter University in Great Britain just recently started striding it. Maybe you're as interested as I am in learning more of it. There's a questionnaire on the universities pages.