People with aphantasia typically think that when someone says to “picture X in your mind”, they’re being entirely metaphorical. If you don’t have a mind’s eye, that’s a super reasonable thing to think, but it turns out that you’d be wrong!
In that spirit, I recently discovered that many expressions about “feelings in your body” are not metaphorical. Sometimes, people literally feel a lump in their throat when they feel sad, or literally feel like their head is hot (“hot-headed”) when they’re angry.
It seems pretty likely to me that there are other non-metaphors that I currently think are metaphors, and likewise for other people here. So: what are some things that you thought were metaphors, that you later discovered were not metaphors?
I believed “bear spray” was a metaphor for a gun. Eg if you were posting online about camping and concerned about the algorithm disliking your use of the word gun, were going into a state park which has guns banned, or didn’t want to mention “gun” for some other reason, then you’d say “bear spray”, since bear spray is such an absurd & silly concept that people will certainly understand what you really mean.
Turns out, bear spray is real. Its pepper spray on steroids, and is actually more effective than a gun, since its easier to aim and is optimized to blind & actually cause pain rather than just damage.
Remember: Bear spray does not work like bug spray!
these might all be relatively obvious but here are some I’ve found nice to notice
brain waves are actual waves of activation that pass through the brain
our neurons have actual literal weights, having more weight means having more stuff, physically. AI “weights” are named after that
in relativity, spacetime is actually one thing. saying “space and time” is missing the point. though of course until we get a ToE unclear if that model is physically true—but it sure seems like a hint to me
loud sounds are air smashing your ears
“I didn’t hear that” when people’s low level processing fails to parse words someone said despite being perfectly able to receive the audio. not usually playing fool, in my experience
I used to think “getting lost in your eyes” was a metaphor, until I made eye contact with particularly beautiful woman in college and found myself losing track of where I was and what I was doing.
This feels closely related to Alexithymia or emotion blindness
Extremely common in: people with ADHD / Autism (potentially over half)
Fairly common in: people who have PTSD, people with substance abuse issues (possibly causal, alexithymia → drugs to feel something), and men (male-normative alexithymia)
People with alexithymia often identify their emotions primarily through physical sensations
For me (a male with autism, ADHD and PTSD) I can tell I’m feeling scared or anxious if my legs get cold (I believe this is a common form)
Reminds me of how a few years ago I realized that I don’t feel some forms of stress but can infer I’m stressed by noticing reduction in my nonverbal communication.
This FULLY explains my experience with panic attacks. I occasionally get all the physical symptoms, think something like “Huh, my heart is racing and it feels like air doesn’t work. I wonder why?”. I monitor my breathing and pulse for a while to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to automatically-alive or something, and (since it’s never been a heart attack before) go on with my day.
Would have been nice to know in elementary school when attempting to describe my experience with emotions (I thought I didn’t have any) got me treated for depression for a year.
Sorry, I’m being very pedantic, but how are “picturing” and “mind’s eye” not metaphorical? It’s not like there’s an actual picture or an actual eye anywhere, in fact that’s the whole point
There is (for me) an actual experience of a picture. It seems only slightly metaphorical to call the faculty of experiencing such pictures “seeing” by an “eye”.
One test for the possession of such a faculty might be to count the vertexes of some regular (not necessarily Platonic) polyhedron, given only a verbal description.
I didn’t know about that test! Pretty neat, and it seems better than the “color of the apple” one
To be clear I am not pushing back on the notion of aphantasia, although I’m not necessarily a fan
And I don’t think I have aphantasia
My point was more about metaphors, and about the fact that much more of our communication relies on them than we realize
That’s not an official test, just something I thought up!
...I do not believe this test. I think I’d be >99%+ percentile at counting vertices on a polyhedron through visualization and <20% percentile at experiencing the sensation of seeing it. I do “visualizing” the polyhedra, but I don’t “see” them. (Frankly I suspect people who say they experience “seeing” images are just fooling themselves based on e.g. asking them to visualize a bicycle and having them draw it)
I think very few people have a very high-fidelity mind’s eye. I think the reason that I can’t draw a bicycle is that my mind’s eye isn’t powerful/detailed enough to be able to correctly picture a bicycle. But there’s definitely a sense in which I can “picture” a bicycle, and the picture is engaging something sort of like my ability to see things, rather than just being an abstract representation of a bicycle.
(But like, it’s not quite literally a picture, in that I’m not, like, hallucinating a bicycle. Like it’s not literally in my field of vision.)
What distinction are you making between “visualising” and “seeing”?
I’ve heard of that study about drawing bicycles. I can draw one just fine without having one before me. I have just done so, checked it, and every detail (that I included — this was just a two-minute sketch) was correct. Anyway, if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind’s eye. I expect there are people who can draw a map of Europe with all the country borders, whereas I probably wouldn’t even remember all of the countries.
Oh, that’s a good point. Here’s a freehand map of the US I drew last year (just the borders, not the outline). I feel like I must have been using my mind’s eye to draw it.
On the opposite end, when I was young I learned about the term “Stock market crash”, referring to 1929, and I thought literally a car crashed into the physical location where stocks were traded, leading to mass confusion and kickstarting the Great Depression. Though if that actually happened back then, it would have led to a temporary crash in the market.
My example is when people say “I enjoy life” they mean actually enjoying life-as-whole and not like “I’m glad my life is net-positive” or whatever.
Feeling pain after hearing a bad joke. “That’s literally painful to hear” is self-reportedly (I say in the same way I, without a mind’s eye, would say about mind’s-eye-people) actually literal for some people.
Where’s the pain?
It is the “cringe” feeling I believe. Its embarrassment on behalf of the bad joke not landing. I could also be irritation that your brain didn’t get the reward it was anticipating.
My understanding of Sarah’s comment was that the feeling is literally pain. At least for me, the cringe feeling doesn’t literally hurt.
I’m not sure I can come up with a distinguishing principle here, but I feel like some but not all unpleasant emotions feel similar to physical pain, such that I would call them a kind of pain (“emotional pain”), and cringing at a bad joke can be painful in this way.
Huh! For me, physical and emotional pain are two super different clusters of qualia.
I would strongly guess that many people could physically locate the cringe pain, particularly if asked when they’re experiencing it.
Sternum and neck for me
One’s heart skipping a beat. I thought it was just a poetic way of saying something like “time stood still,” but no, it turns out it does do that pretty literally.
I also was kind of surprised when it turned out ‘gut feeling’ actually meant a feeling in your belly-area.
Added: I wonder if the notion of ‘having a hunch’ comes from something that causes you to hunch over?
“Seeing the light” to describe having a mystical experience. Seeing bright lights while meditating or praying is an experience that many practitioners have reported, even across religious traditions that didn’t have much contact with each other.
I wrote about my own experience discovering “feelings in the body” here
For most forms of exercise (cardio, weightlifting, HIIT etc.) there’s a a spectrum of default experiences people can have from feeling a drug-like high to grindingly unpleasant. “Runner’s high” is not a metaphor, and muscle pump while weightlifting can feel similarly good. I recommend experimenting to find what’s pleasant for you, though I’d guess valence of exercise is, unfortunately, quite correlated across forms.
Another axis of variation is the felt experience of music. “Music is emotional” is something almost everyone can agree to, but, for some, emotional songs can be frequently tear-jerking and for others that never happens.
Weight lifters feeling “pumped” is similarly literal. I get this from rock climbing more often than lifting, but after a particularly strenuous climb, your arm muscles feel inflated—they’re engorged with blood. It can take a minute for it to subside.
Wow I hadn’t even considered people not taking this literally
At a party several years ago an attractive intoxicated person made a pass at me unexpectedly. As a long time married, this isn’t something that happens. At that moment it literally felt like my knees fell out from under me. It was so unlike any other sensation! Im convinced it must have been “weak in the knees”.