tilthat: TIL a philosophy riddle from 1688 was recently solved. If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability, distinguish those objects by sight alone? In 2003 five people had their sight restored though surgery, and, no they could not.
nentuaby: I love when apparently Deep questions turn out to have clear empirical answers.
So fascinating.
I really wished I could write like that. Probably because of poor working memory (thanks ADHD) I can’t hold that much stuff in my head prior to writing. Certainly not a bunch of raw wordless concept blobs (or whatever?) plus flow an form and all that. Jeez. I invariably write things as I go. I might have a vague sense of what I want to write. Certainly nothing “done” before writing.
I can “see” a rough approximation of The Scream in my head. Enough to draw an inaccurate copy. I can draw other stuff (cars, bicycles, cats whatever) by visualizing them to greater or lesser degrees.
My kid has aphantasia and described it like you did. Remembering facts about it but not so much the actual image itself. Interestingly she is quite good at drawing.
I’ve heard that it’s much easier to learn how to draw when you can make an image in your head and trace it down on paper. It’s still possible to become good at drawing with aphantasia but in my case, I can’t make up new imagery from my thoughts so I have never had that as a reason to draw, if that makes sense. I just don’t know what to draw, so I don’t.
Art does nothing for me anyways, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I have never looked at a painting, sculpture, dance, theater or other physical forms of expression and felt anything about it. I can only objectively observe it, like ”this painting of a boat is blueish and painted with oil on canvas” or ”this person moves their legs and arms in this fashion while singing about loneliness”. This might be more due to autism than aphantasia though. Still it probably contributes to why I can’t draw.
Interesting. I hadn’t considered art might have no effect on some. Interesting that autism could play a role there.
My kid usually draws from a picture or something. I do that sometimes too. (Well I don’t draw much anymore).
My wife can’t draw. She has tried numerous times. I infer there’s some capability of looking at a pic and abstracting it into lines or shades or whatever and then putting that on paper. Well, she doesn’t have that.
She does not have aphantasia. So she can see a cat, say, in her mind’s eye but can’t translate that onto paper I guess?
I suppose the more detailed you can picture something the easier it would be to draw it if you have the ability to translate pic to paper.
I read once an exercise where you have people draw a bicycle without using a picture. The results are often laughably inaccurate. I guess because some folks think they know how the thing works but don’t. Or haven’t paid enough attention. But presumably if, like me, you have had bikes for years, worked on them, know how they work, and paid attention to all the details you can make a very accurate drawing.
That is interesting. There is undoubtedly some learned skill involved regardless of mind’s eye.
I can draw a bicycle correctly, for the same reasons as you, but it will not be pretty. The frame will be 2 parallel lines all over and it will be drawn from a perfect side angle. I could draw a derailleur the same way, or the insides of several types of steering column.