I am someone who has aphantasia and I have a theory that most good engineers can visualize- based on just talking to my colleagues. I am particularly interested in this because I am working on an initiative to teach CS concepts in a way that relies less on visual memorization.
Ofcourse
It still blows my mind that people can visualize! And that it is such an obvious thing for them haha.
I think its common occurrence man.. I mean for me that's easier way to remember / understand things .. What I use get amazed when I was kid is the way How I use to differentiate people faces..
Depends, that's not the easiest thing for everyone and that's why we have a lot of tools for presentation.
that's not fair, because people have different styles of problem solving. some are visual thinkers, some need to talk it out with other people, and some do combinations.. all depends
Yes but I am wondering specifically if when coding visualization has any benefits. Do people remember syntax and structure in their head? Can people see an architecture flow while writing it without making a diagram?
And hey I'm all for it not being fair, I can't visualize anything haha ^.^
I'm with you fellow aphantasia sufferer. "Close your eyes and tell me what you see" ... "Black. It's black. Because you made me closer my eyes."
Omg someone else in tech with aphantasia! It's cool :D And yes it still blows my mind that people can actually see stuff.... it sounds distracting but maybe also helpful. I do all of my visual thinking on "paper" if you will..
Yup same here. Anytime I need to do anything remotely visual, like architecture diagrams, I struggle getting started because I can't imagine the end product. If I habe a starting point to edit then its cake
I have synesthesia, which is not quite the opposite of what you have, but entails manifestations across senses (hearing colors, seeing sounds are the most common as far as I know). I generally see all my senses, in addition to also having those senses intact. By which I mean that even though I visualize everything I perceive through all 5 senses, I also hear and smell and feel/touch and taste. It's quite strange, but as a result, I visualize everything very well in my head. I never use a whiteboard and I've never understand why people do because it does nothing to help me and, as such, I actually feel disadvantaged in most meetings. I wouldn't be able to project what I can see in my mind if I tried to and that is the drawback because even though I can visualize everything (which seems to allow more intuitive understanding), I have not become effective at expressing what I see to any degree whatsoever. I'm not trying to derail this thread, I just thought it was incredibly interesting to hear about aphantasia for the first time and never knew there was something nearly opposite of what I experience. I can't imagine how difficult that must be. OP, you must be very skilled in many complementary things to be able to function so well and know your stuff so well that you will be teaching it. Props to you!
I love reading this! That is so insane to me :D Like I understand how it can be helpful, but I still don't understand what it must actually feel like to see stuff in your head. And with synesthesia it just seems magical! So, I got an IQ test done professionally with a neuropsychologist and I do have very high-level verbal IQ and math IQ. Veeeeeeery low spatial haha. I guess I just compensate a bit with the other 2. What's fun is that I tend to have mental verbal life narration instead of visualization.
I guess in terms of opposite, I first need to verbalize something mentally or out loud before drawing it on a paper. My mind usually goes "Websites are rectangles. Draw a rectangle, and then let's add some shit" when planning UI.
I have to visualize for anything to make sense. Mad props to those that can do engineering without that capability.
Thank you for asking this. I've never heard of aphantasia. You just broke my mind...well you showed me how broken my mind is. All of these people just actually see the same thing when they close their eyes!? They don't construct a set of information that represents what they know something looks like!? WTF!? Anyway... Let me share how it works for me. Maybe it works the same for you. I don't see anything. When I visualize. The _front_ of my eyes is just black. However, if I try to "visualize" or if I'm thinking about a set of concepts there are faint cubes along the back side of my head. There's one for each concept or data set I thinking of. That's how I keep track of what I know about whatever I'm "visualizing." Sort of like placeholders. So if I'm asked to visualize a beach (just read an article using this example). I know there's sand, bam a little box. A palm tree, another box, water, another box. It feels like it's an inch or 2 behind my head. It's not fixed, but depends on what attributes I'm thinking about. It's incredibly hard for me to spell out loud, maybe this is why. Let's take "apple." I know there are 5 letters. So 5 boxes. Or if I'm thinking about the look. Red, a box; round, a box etc. Does that make any sense? Do you relate? Or do I sound completely nuts.
Wow. It's fascinating how differently brains can work. I can see how spelling out loud would be hard. Never even considered that.
I understand the knowing part. I find that I can only keep track of one item at a time. So I can sort of know an apple and think about what its characteristics might be, but asking me to think about a beach at a time is difficult although I could probably draw it just fine. I think my verbal side likes to take over and instead of thinking about boxes, I get elaborate prose descriptions that I have read somewhere at some point in my life. Such as "an apple that shined like a fire truck" or "the water was so clear it was almost green" and they give me a certain feeling and somewhere inside my brain knows what I'm talking about, I just can't recreate it in my head.
I've always wondered how much of it is that you can't visualize, out that you're not aware that you're doing it. Like, if I ask you, "what's the color of your door", do you not picture your door ever so subtly, to get at the answer? If you draw a line on a piece of paper, and then I ask you to draw it again, slightly rotated, do you not mentally rotate it to know what to draw? And if your answer is no, I'd love to know your specific mental processes for handling these kinds of things. This is really fascinating
I definitely can't mentally rotate anything in my head. I've been failing those questions on the standardized tests since I was a kid! I know my door is white but only because I made a conscious thought one time and thought "My door is the color of fresh snow" which my mind knows what it is. However, if you ask me the color of my kitchen counter despite living here for 8 months I have no idea haha.
Same. I know my house door is green. I've noted it, talked about it etc. I have absolutely no idea what color my door at work is. For that matter I don't know what color my office walls are. As for the line, I guess I don't even understand. I rotate it on the paper. I have a weird notion of spatial orientation, but there's nothing to see.
A great example when my wife and I found out about this is she asked how many windows we have in our house. I processed that by thinking about each room on each floor and remembering where the windows were. She simply pictured each side of the house from outside and counted the windows she saw.
Wow. So she just sees it and counts? She doesn't have to construct what it would look like based on the facts she knows. Mind blown on this thread tonight.
Glad I could be of service! My moment of awakening was when I took Calculus 3. The book instructed me to imagine the 3D shape drawn, rotate it, and crush it, then sketch the approximation. I was like daheck. I asked the prof to explain how to do that and he was like just do it and I was like uhhhh. I then got diagnosed and then got the class replaced with something else because the rest of the curriculum was based on that skill and I literally couldn't do it. It set a precedent at my school because apparently no one with this situation or a situation such as being born blind had ever taken that class before.
What do you mean by visualize?
Can you see images, concepts, etc. in your head. I only have a theoretical understanding of it, but my friends say they can visualize their code architecture and everything in their head. I can only do it on paper.
Like, you can't visualize anything? If I tell you to picture a house you can't?