markers

Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.

As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.

Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...

Have you used ChatGPT lately?

What you describe is not quite what they are doing, they are adding nudges at the end of the follow-up question suggestions. For instance I was researching some IKEA furniture and it gives suggestions for followup, with nudges in parenthesis "IKEA-furniture many people use for this (very cool solution)" and at the end of another question suggestion: "(very simple, but surprisingly effective)". They are subtle cliffhangers trying to influence you to go on, not pure suggestions. I'm just waiting for the "(You wouldn't believe that this did!)". It has soured me on the service, Claude has a much better personality imo.

I've had a brain MRI to rule out other causes (tumors etc), but it was clean. I don't think they looked specifically for tiny damages to areas (if that's possible), but I'm not sure to be honest as I only got answer that there were no signs of disease.

Thanks for trying to help! I answered in another comment, so you can see a better reply there, but I've been trying (a lot) of these things and the short version is that it seemed to work when my brain had been given some time to heal, but repeated covid infections might have made it permanent in my case, or at least given the prospect of future infections. But time will tell. My smell/taste survived the last infection(s?), so there might be some hope that it gets milder.

It's so weird, as I know exactly which "muscle" to trigger to make it happen, which I guess someone having aphantasia wouldn't instinctly know, but it just doesn't do much.

-edit- Oh, forgot to mention, in the beginning when I trained on visualizing again (back when it did work), I got _so_ exhausted in my brain afterwards, it was like really trying to used some damaged "muscle". I find that really fascinating. I'm not able to invoke such exhaustion in other ways, that quickly.

I think I know which ability you refer to, as my fear when I discovered this was that I couldn't work as a software developer anymore (before I got a grasp of what had actually happened, it took a while to actually understand the extent). I used to visualize arrays/tables/graphs in my head (like images/fancy animations) and do operations on them to imagine how one could transform them etc. But I also had/have a native sense of "depth" to data structures, which I also used. That one can move around in a data structure in a sense, I'm sure you know very well what I mean. Luckily that ability is still intact, which I've been relying a lot more on lately, but I can imagine you being much better than me on those kind of tools. The mind is so extremely fascinating, and it's so weird to think of the ways we think of things.

I tried visualization exercises (there's a lot more to the story that I didn't consider space to add here) and the first time they worked rather quickly, so I regained the ability in the course of days. But as I mentioned in another comment, I contracted covid again and then it was even worse than it had ever been and training didn't feel like it worked. I regained a little bit since that infection, but got covid yet again (it's an awful disease) and then it was back to square one. It seems like something in the brain had to heal before I could train it back up, but I'm afraid that the damage will be/is so severe that it will not be possible to recover (especially since I couldn't even create images in my dreams).

I might get better over time if I just stop getting covid, but as isolating myself is out of the question, that's unlikely to happen. Unfortunately it seems much harder to recover each time. Since last time it's not really been recovering. On the bright side, my sense of taste/smell has not been damaged again, which has been great.

I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance.

Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.

I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based on playing back memories as movies in my head. Especially childhood memories suffered. Also reading books is a very different experience, as when I previously would make up movies and picture the characters visually when reading, now it's all black. That said, reading books is still an enjoyable experience, it's just very different.

I also stopped dreaming in images for a long time, which was weird. It's still very dim (not so vivid), but at least that part came back.

Has she been doing essential oil training? As far as I know it's the only scientifically validated method and it did a lot for me (although at soon 2 years my taste/smell is not fully recovered). I know it worked as I only regained the smells from the oils initially. Flowery oils were specifically good, as they likely contain thousands of different compounds that you find in many other smells.

One usually recommend four oils (of high quality preferebly): one citrus, one mint/eucalyptus, one spicy (e.g. cinnamon) and one flowery (lavendel did wonders for me, then geranium) to start out with. Smell each oil for 20 seconds every morning and evening, while thinking of/imagening the thing you're smelling. Since it's a neurological issue, the last thing supposedly helps. It usually took me 2-3 weeks from starting training until noticing any (very minor) effect at all, and much longer to regain a lot of it.

Sorry if she's already tried, hopefully it's useful for others. It can take a long time for the training to work.

I highly recommend checking out polars if you're tired of pandas' confusing API and poor ergonomics. It takes some time to make the mental switch, but polars is so much more performant and has a much more consistent API (especially if you're used to SQL). I find the code is much more readable and it takes less lines of code to do things.

Just beware that polars is not as mature, so take this into consideration if choosing it for your next project. It also currently lacks some of the more advanced data operations, but you can always convert back and forth to pandas for anything special (of course paying a price for the conversion).

Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information Google actually displays.

The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge plus. Recommended!

(No connection to it, just happy user).