Just curious, have you had any patents that had aphantasia and are you able to get them under? Anything that seems to rely on guided imagery just fails outright for me since I can’t visualize anything. It took me years to understand that the way I think isn’t normal and to get a word for it. I tried for years to get hypnotherapy for issues and it never quite worked.
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I am regularly amazed by how much woo police enthusiastically endorse. Then I remember they are all Grade XII graduates with C- averages and a strong aversion to critical thinking.
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Hey LG,
Is aphantasia a self-diagnosis? I ask because the ability to visualize is a spectrum, not a binary, and while I have encountered people across much of the spectrum, none of them would have qualified as truly aphantasic IMO. If you can recognize and remember faces, then I would guess that you do not have true aphantasia. (I say “guess” because hypnotherapists, not being MDs, are not legally able to diagnose.)
Among those who identify as “not visual”, I believe that some rate themselves that way because they imagine that other people have holographic IMAX theaters inside their heads. Comparing ourselves to others rarely yields good results. But that would not account for everyone who considers themselves non-visual. As I said, there’s a whole spectrum To help less-visual folks feel more relaxed and receptive, I tell clients and students that in their hypnotic work, they may have experiences that correspond to their physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Or… they may interpret what they hear in a personal way. So if I suggest that they “see” or “hear” something, etc., their experience may be like their daily sense of sight, hearing, etc., but if not, they should feel free to experience what I describe in whatever manner of knowing that is appropriate for them.
If I say to someone who tells me they are not good at visualizing, “Imagine a flamingo wearing a top hat”, and they don’t say “I have no idea what you’re talking about”, then I think they would still be candidates for hypnotherapy.
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But I bet they still pull in the occasional “psychic” to determine where a victim’s body is.
(Hint: say, shallow grave)
My understanding is that they are basically not admissible in any court in the US. However, the DOD does extensively use them for security clearance. Not all security clearances require polygraph but some do. The DOD claims it is effective for their purpose, although of course they can’t explain why to anyone because “that’s classified.” At least people who fail (which is quite common) don’t go to jail or get accused of a crime, they just don’t get the level of clearance requested.
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It’s a self diagnosis but only I latched on to a description of how I seem to think and it bothered me for decades but couldn’t ever get confirmation that other people actually saw shit in their heads.
I can recognize faces but I couldn’t see the face in my head or remember what they look like until I see them again. Show me a picture and I can recognize the person but If I had to describe it after the fact I couldn’t.
If you tell me to visualize an apple I don’t see an apple in my head but get the concept of an apple. I can get the concept of a flamingo wearing a top hat but I don’t see it at all I think more the words and the idea.
It’s more like my minds eye is blank and dark but I have a decent sense of space and where things are but more deal with other senses.
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The DoD, DoJ, DoS, DoE (Q ya know) and any other part of the government requiring a security clearance, all use polygraph for security clearances called either Counter Intelligence Poly or Full Lifestyle Poly. The Counterintelligence polygraph just asks questions like “Do you hate the United States?” The Full Lifestyle Poly regularly fails people who have any lifestyle that “they” the government feels could potentially let someone be blackmailed, which might arbitrarily include being non-binary or a furry or advocating for legalizing marijuana despite never having smoked it, or whatever.
People are also reportedly failed for being “too honest” in the sense that for a lifestyle polygraph to work they have to catch you in a “probable lie”. So they will ask you “Have you ever looked at porn?” and “Do you ever break the law while driving?”, “Have you ever in your life found someone under 18 sexually attractive?” and similar questions expecting you to lie, and if you refuse to lie in those situations they will also fail you.
I believe that other jobs such as police sometimes also use polygraphs as conditions of employment.
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Weird. When you close your eyes, do you know where your hands are, how your body is positioned, or does it just become blank? Do you feel like this “disability” significantly impacts your life? Your experience of reality seems like it is almost incommensurable with how most people experience it. Have you found any advantages to it?
And most importantly: an accomplice is just a witness waiting to happen.
A living accomplice.
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Texas police stop using hypnosis because it doesn’t work and leads to false convictions
WTF did they start using it for if not precisely that?
I’m sure Texas police are fine fellows and exactly like all other police: they know who did it, always, it’s just that the odds of a conviction are stacked against them. Securing a conviction where there is no actual evidence is therefore their speciality. Confessions should be ruled out without actual physical evidence of crime.
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Did anyone see The Investigation on HBO? It was amazing the lengths the Danish justice system went to, to prevent the suspect from self-incrimination. The criminal repeated lied and then changed his story after he was caught in the lie, but this was not allowed to be considered evidence of the the criminal’s guilt. I have no idea how realistic the series was, but it was very different from the US where the interrogation seems like it is the primary investigation technique.
In many jurisdictions confessions are not acceptable proofs of guilt. They are so easy to obtain from anyone not a career sociopathic criminal (or rich person, i.e. career sociopathic criminal).
There’s an urban legend about how the police once strapped a suspect to a copy machine set with a piece of paper that said, “He’s lying.” They just kept pressing the copy button when he said something they knew to be untrue until he was convinced that the “lie detector” was foolproof and he confessed.
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Look! It’s Enrico Palazzo!
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Something, something, urban legend/tv script / chicken/egg, something…
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I have a good sense of space but there is no image but now that I think about it and close my eyes It’s because I can feel the rest of my body and the desk where my wrists are laying and I assume the rest of the desk from the physical feeling of the desk. It doesn’t impact me much except in some really niche ways. I’ve been a furry for a long time and always had a hard time defining my fursona and it’s because I had a hard time describing work working it out so ended up very generic. (The current trend the fandom has been diving head first into VR has been liberating as working on things like that is easier now that you can just step into a furry artist made avatar and then mod it)
Oddly enough I found a word for this in Virtual Reality at a party one night where a furry was putting people though a thought experiment to explain his aphantasia and the crowd was trying to grok it and I stood there pointing mouth dropped as he was putting words to something I never had a way of confirming, That my brain didn’t work like everybody else. Turns out there was 3 of us at that party who was the same way. We came to the conclusions there may be some selection bias with furries, aphantasia and VR. If you can’t visualize yourself as your fursiona VR is going to be catnip.
If anything it is just more frustrating that I don’t have the ability to close my eyes and see shit. I can remember events in vague way and remember how events unfolded but I don’t really “See” it. I can remember where things are and have a good sense of space and place but not what the stuff looks like if I had to describe it.
Dammit.
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Thanks for your reply, LG.
Unfortunately, we are culturally/evolutionarily conditioned to be primarily oriented to value sight over our other senses. This shows up in language as well, such as using “I see” to mean “I understand”, or “I went to see The Beatles” instead of “I went to hear The Beatles”. You say you “get the concept of an apple”, “think more the words and the idea”, and “more deal with other senses”. That seems quite functional to me. I would encourage you to think of your way of knowing as a difference rather than a disability. A hypnotherapist who is aware of your sensory balance should be able to work with you, although the process might require patience on your part as the therapist gains fluency in using language that is more suitable for your frame of reference.
Best wishes and don’t underestimate yourself.
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Note that I wrote my reply beginning with “Thanks for your reply, LG” before I read your “I have a good sense of space”. That’s really interesting, but doesn’t really change what I said already. Your sensory balance may be somewhat unusual, but it works and doesn’t have to hold you back. Cheers.
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You say that like it’s a bizarre thing to not recognize faces. I have prosopagnosia, meaning that I can’t recognize faces at all. I can tell people apart by body language, voice, size, and other context cues, but facial recognition doesn’t really enter into it. Going by face alone I don’t think I can even reliably identify gender.
I wouldn’t classify myself as aphantasic though, although I need either a lot of descriptive detail or some kind of memory cue to see something in my mind. I’m not sure if that’s related or not. Probably have the same kind of cause, but I don’t think one causes the other.
You are describing proprioception, which is something else entirely.
By the way, there are a lot more than five senses, many of which (such as proprioception) you don’t even notice until they’re gone.
As a longtime federal employee, that’s what frustrates me the most. They screen out stuff that’s really none of anyone’s concern, like being gay or being from another country or having smoked pot in college (thanks Biden) but they apparently don’t give a damn if someone’s an active member of a white supremacist organization. Membership in terrorist/anti-American organizations is at least one section of the SF-86 but the events of recent months have shown me that nobody really gives a rat’s ass.
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