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Aphantasia is weird

A few years ago I realized that people actually see objects in their head when they think of stuff and I thought that was insane. I shortly realized that I have aphantasia (the inability to visualize anything) and I thought it was so weird, that it must be a really large difference in the experience of my life compared to someone else. Anyways, I always thought that maybe I didn't really have aphantasia though because I could kind of visualize space itself like when doing physics problems or something. However, I recently learned about a study regarding aphantasia that showed that people take longer amounts of time to figure out if two rotated objects are the same, regardless of whether they have aphantasia or not. Since people without aphantasia solve the problem by visualizing the object rotating in their head, it should take them longer to solve if they must rotate more. You would expect that people with aphantasia would be faster at this problem, regardless of how much it was rotated, since they use more of a logical approach to the problem. However, the study showed that the results of the two groups were the same. This means that the way that people solve dimensional problems is not as simple as we think it is, especially for people with aphantasia. I think this is pretty neat because it reveals a little more about our consciousness and how we think in a way that can't really be put in words.

- 5/11/25 -