No Visual Memory / Can't Visualize / "Blind Inside"

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Drawing from memory is hard for everyone - that's a skill that needs a lot of practice and training to get more than the "House is a box with a triangle on top and a rectangle with a cross in it for a window" kind of artwork. Ask a bunch of people to draw a bicycle and everyone can handle the "two circles with a thing to sit on and things to hold" parts and can put pedals approximately in the right place, but the frame can be really cryptic - I think it's around half of random people get confused. They don't manipulate the frame, so they don't really know what it looks like.

Weird. Right now I'm visualizing the frame of the bicycle I had, but have more of a difficulty with the chainbox.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Image/object recognition and visualization/visual memory are different things, involving different pathways in the brain. That's why a person who has never seen anything (blind from birth) can still visualize objects and draw pictures of them, although a person who is blind from birth has a grasp grasp of perspective quite different from a person who has been sighted for at least part of their life (their "perspective" is from touching with two hands that can move all around an object, not from looking with two fixed eyes).

The process of recalling for the purposes of recognition and for the purposes of visualization differs; I'm not sure what the two processes are called in English, but they are indeed distinct, with confirmation of a match being easier than visualization without external stimuli. But both depend on having information about prior exposure to objects being stored in (visual) memory. If you don't have such information stored in the brain, then you can only rely on verbally stored info for recognition, and that's different. The title mentions lacking visual memory, not merely being unable to visualize things.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Weird. Right now I'm visualizing the frame of the bicycle I had, but have more of a difficulty with the chainbox.

I can picture the chainguards and gearbox in detail. As in I can call up not only past bicycles, but schematics I remember seeing in owner's manuals.

Weird. Never thought about that before.


But faces? Nope.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I can picture the chainguards and gearbox in detail. As in I can call up not only past bicycles, but schematics I remember seeing in owner's manuals.

Weird. Never thought about that before.


But faces? Nope.

I have built bicycles, but I have never built a person.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I can picture the chainguards and gearbox in detail. As in I can call up not only past bicycles, but schematics I remember seeing in owner's manuals.

Weird. Never thought about that before.


But faces? Nope.

Different parts of the brain :)

Specialists like bird watchers can actually train their brain to leverage some of that specialized face-recognizing circuitry to help them with the subtle differences within their specialty - whether it be different bird species or different makes and models of car. I have yet to see a study on whether this impacts their ability to recognize faces - something I'm quite curious about.

[simply Nathan]

I am always awed at the ability of other people to recognize human faces. Like when I get recognized by someone from (weeks) (months) (years) before while I barely recognize my own family before they speak.

I can't intuit the cardinal directions, though navigating my way through a game where these always remain fixed relative directions on a screen is easy.

I can draw several animals from memory, but not even "simple" inanimate objects like tables or coffee mugs. Most of these objects give me trouble even when I have one sitting right in front of me to use as a reference.

[sir_pudding]

I just "recognize" people all the time and they are always false positives. Like every third stranger I see is familiar but unplaceable.

[William]

Aphantasia sounds something like what you have.

I suggested earlier that this is quite similar to Innumerate or Non-Iconographic; there is a conceptual realm you just don't have access to.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by William

Aphantasia sounds something like what you have.

I suggested earlier that this is quite similar to Innumerate or Non-Iconographic; there is a conceptual realm you just don't have access to.

Thank you! I finally have a name for it!!! I am also contacting the doctor referenced in the study.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I just "recognize" people all the time and they are always false positives. Like every third stranger I see is familiar but unplaceable.

The older I get, the more strangers resemble someone I once knew. It's been many years since I thought, "hmm, I've never seen that combination of facial features before."
Even our super specialized brain tissue can only do so much when there isn't really that much variability in healthy "undeformed" human faces.

Though I've noticed I've gotten significantly better at recognizing people in the past couple decades. I don't know if it's a natural part of aging and experience or an offshoot of how I've worked hard to lessen my social interaction issues.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by William

Aphantasia sounds something like what you have.

I suggested earlier that this is quite similar to Innumerate or Non-Iconographic; there is a conceptual realm you just don't have access to.

Except that those disadvantages cause obvious insurmountable problems that aphantasia does not always cause. There's a reason why it's only been discovered recently. You can't "coping mechanism" your way out of inability to perform basic math or read a map.

I kind of realize that my idea of a data space conscious A.I. would store memories linguistically not visually in effect having a lesser form of this feature.