Dropping by after this closed, but I have a couple descriptions of mental experience which people have called unusual when I’ve tried to explain them in the psat.
I always overthink questions about vividness of imagination due to describing the experience of imagining in terms which I rarely see used. I find that subjectively, imagining something and recalling having seen or thought of its component parts feel almost identical. In the classic aphantasia test of “imagine a red apple”, I grab some recent recollection of a red apple—maybe it’s clip-art of an apple that I saw online; maybe it’s the apple that’s sitting with some other apples on my kitchen counter. As I’m asked further questions about “the apple”, it seamlessly shifts into a recollection that happens to have the answer to the question. For instance if I’m asked how “the apple” smells or tastes, I layer on a recent or particularly vivid memory of having smelled or tasted an apple.
I have yet to figure out whether I’m unusual in seeing so many memory attributions on imagined images due to others imagining without memory, others imagining with memory without keeping track of what memory each image is from, or some other explanation. This awareness of attribution doesn’t hinder my ability to create novel things—if anything, I have an easier time being confident that something I’ve made is quite unique, because I can compare it to similar things which it distantly resembles and point out their differences. I find it relatively easy to steer a small creative project away from being an exact replica of any particular prior art which I can recall.
I also find that I retain visual and spatial information more readily than some. I often wake from a dream and have to sketch out a map of the location where the dream took place in order to recall the events which happened on that map. This is usually handy when traveling, although I’m extra disadvantaged once I do get thoroughly lost because I get relatively little practice solving that sort of problem.
Dropping by after this closed, but I have a couple descriptions of mental experience which people have called unusual when I’ve tried to explain them in the psat.
I always overthink questions about vividness of imagination due to describing the experience of imagining in terms which I rarely see used. I find that subjectively, imagining something and recalling having seen or thought of its component parts feel almost identical. In the classic aphantasia test of “imagine a red apple”, I grab some recent recollection of a red apple—maybe it’s clip-art of an apple that I saw online; maybe it’s the apple that’s sitting with some other apples on my kitchen counter. As I’m asked further questions about “the apple”, it seamlessly shifts into a recollection that happens to have the answer to the question. For instance if I’m asked how “the apple” smells or tastes, I layer on a recent or particularly vivid memory of having smelled or tasted an apple.
I have yet to figure out whether I’m unusual in seeing so many memory attributions on imagined images due to others imagining without memory, others imagining with memory without keeping track of what memory each image is from, or some other explanation. This awareness of attribution doesn’t hinder my ability to create novel things—if anything, I have an easier time being confident that something I’ve made is quite unique, because I can compare it to similar things which it distantly resembles and point out their differences. I find it relatively easy to steer a small creative project away from being an exact replica of any particular prior art which I can recall.
I also find that I retain visual and spatial information more readily than some. I often wake from a dream and have to sketch out a map of the location where the dream took place in order to recall the events which happened on that map. This is usually handy when traveling, although I’m extra disadvantaged once I do get thoroughly lost because I get relatively little practice solving that sort of problem.