Interesting Links for 13-06-2021

[andrewducker]

How to Mute Twitter's Suggested Tweets on Your Timeline

(tags:twitter )

Can't See Pictures in Your Mind? You're Not Alone. And Now We Know There Are People That See Particularly Vivid Ones.

(tags:vision imagination memory brain neuroscience psychology )

How the Web Became Unreadable

(tags:accessibility web fail )

Comments

[nancylebov]

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabifbgmdmgdllomnfinbmaellmclnh?hl=en

There's an app called reader view for making text easier to read (black on light yellow/brown background). I hope there are comparable aps for phones and other browsers.

[andrewducker]

Built in on Firefox and really really handy.

(Also good for getting past many paywalls)

[dewline]

Yes?

[andrewducker]

Open a page that's cut off for a paywall. Switch to reader mode (which doesn't process JavaScript). Hit refresh.

About half the time you'll see the full page - because their security system is to load the page and then use JavaScript to hide half of it!

[cmcmck]

Pictures in the mind?

Oh yes!

I'm colour/music synaesthetic!

[calimac]

I have my browser (and also my MS programs) set up so that I get white print on a black background, which to my mind is the only way to read a light-emitting screen, just as black print on white background is the only way to read light-reflective print.

[naath]

nope, green on black, the one true way (on screens)

[ckd]

I'm enough of a neophile to prefer amber on black. :-D

[alithea]

I sometimes picture landscapes or scenes in books but I rarely imagine what characters look like. I mean, I can play the fantasy casting game with some thought but if you just ask me out of the blue what the protagonist of the book I'm currently reading looks like, I couldn't tell you.

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, me either.

[conuly]

Can't See Pictures in Your Mind? You're Not Alone. And Now We Know There Are People That See Particularly Vivid Ones.

I remember, a long time ago now, browsing an internet thread where somebody professed himself totally baffled that people could find questions like "How many points on the maple leaf on the Canadian flag" difficult. After all, if you've seen it once, can't you just picture it and count the points?

He was getting a lot of downvotes, but I was the only one to stop and explain that most people, in fact, cannot do that. That I believed he could do that, and that he thought his experience was typical, but that he was probably at the far extreme.

[andrewducker]

I had a discussion with someone when aphantasia first entered public discussion who was sure that people who said they could see things in their minds eye were just speaking metaphorically. And no matter how much they claimed to *really* see it, was sure they still meant *really* in a metaphorical sense.

[conuly]

It's so hard to get out of your own headspace!

This guy was much more reasonable once I was able to spell out for him that his experience is just that - HIS experience. I'm not sure he totally believed it on an emotional level, but he definitely understood it on a cognitive one, which is more than good enough.

[azurelunatic]

My dad basically bludgeoned his mind into aphantasia. He used to be able to visualize the rotation of an object, but he was at an age/in a time where Being Crazy was the worst thing you could be, and he didn't want to have to answer yes if someone ever asked him Do You See Things. So he made himself lose the ability, and he never managed to get it back.

Brains are a hell of a thing.

[andrewducker]

Wow, that's awful! Particularly as it's by far the more common way to be!

[channelpenguin]

My visualisation skills are very poor (except colour matching when one thing isn't there - THAT I can do!). My abilities to play back music sound, melody, lyrics etc. in my head is incredibly good. You win some you lose some.

[channelpenguin]

addendum - I had amazingly acute eyesight, especially at distance - but dont have proper stereoscopic vision. It is only with the need for varifocal glasses for anything closer than 5m that I have had that corrected. Wow - that IS weird. Odd to think that is how most of you have always seen the world! 3D is TRIPPY!!!

[andrewducker]

That must be really weird!

My eyesight is terrible - but corrects extremely well. With my glasses on I've apparently got good enough eyesight to be a sniper.

But... I've finally started to lose close vision, so once I've had my second injection I'll be off to get some kind of multiple focus glasses. *Sigh*

Mind's Eye

[agoodwinsmith]

Behind paywall, so handwavium here.

I have a mind picture of physical things, but it is not the same as a photograph or painting. Colour may or may not be there. There is a type of 3D-ness, but static. Glancing isn't enough - if I haven't noticed it on viewing, it is probably absent in my representation. I can sometimes read my class notes in my head. To create a grocery shopping list, I walk around the grocery store (okay: I float spookily around the empty grocery store).

However, since I have moved so many times in my life, I often know where I kept a thing three moves ago, but not now. Perfect internal image of the old location, but quite useless. By far the worst, though, is that if I have decided that I want a thing to be put away in a particular spot in the new place, that is where I expect it to be. It doesn't matter whether or not I have discovered the thing won't fit there. I have very firm mind pictures of the thing being in the perfect place, and no amount of it not being there will budge the image or provoke the memory of where I eventually actually put the thing.

I have always assumed that I can rotate shapes in my head because I learned to sew young. When cutting out pattern pieces, getting the best fit on the rectangle may involve laying pieces upside down and backwards and flipped. One has to keep track or nothing it going to work.

I often wonder how people who don't have internal representations cope. I suppose it's like google - now that we've got it, I would hate to do without it, but we did manage okay before we had it.

Re: Mind's Eye

[andrewducker]

I don't have one (or barely have one, if I really concentrate). I seem to manage okay!