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I'm suddenly curious whether comics-appreciation is even somewhat correlated with aphantasia.
(Thinking of someone from many years ago who said that they didn't like comics because they got in the way of their own imagination.)
(Thinking of someone from many years ago who said that they didn't like comics because they got in the way of their own imagination.)
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Date: 2025-03-16 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-16 07:21 pm (UTC)But then I've enjoyed lots of short stories with no images attached.
So I don't know!
(Also many people replying on Facebook who don't have aphantasia and love comics. So, short of someone doing the research, I'm going to assume no connection.)
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Date: 2025-03-16 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-16 07:28 pm (UTC)No, wait, you totally can ;-)
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Date: 2025-03-26 05:53 pm (UTC)Just to adduce more inconvenient facts, I'm not aphantasic, and I'm about as big a comics geek as you'll find.
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Date: 2025-03-28 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-16 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-16 10:01 pm (UTC)People with geometric mind can rotate a tesseract or even a higher-dimentional object, including compacts with projective spaces glued in; people with algebraic mind manipulate expressions easily, and they don't need any pictures (except maybe commutative diagrams, which are easy anyway).
I'm of a rather algebraic type; and when I read a book, I enjoy the combinations of words. E.g. a letter from Merteuil to Valmont is a treasure of style, without having to see the faces; seeing their faces would just distract me from ideas and narrow the perception of the words.
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Date: 2025-03-16 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 05:29 am (UTC)The presumption is that the ability to think abstractly about things that without needing images can be advantageous.
I am (pretty much) aphantasic and definitely good at abstraction. I was also fine with other early university maths. Interestingly, the standard RYA (Royal Yachting Association in that UK) way of teaching some parts of boat navigation use a lot of more visual methods and drawing angles and I find myself thinking "this is just working out the missing angle of a scalene triangle, just doing that would be easier" For me. But teaching others, I completely see that it works better to "see" it.
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Date: 2025-03-17 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 01:58 am (UTC)But also, don't discount early exposure, or lack of. My mother absolutely forbade comics other than Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I have great difficulty reading comics or graphic novels. (I really tried to get into Elf Quest). I'm so word-oriented that I keep forgetting to look at the pictures, so I miss non-word details.
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Date: 2025-03-17 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 07:19 pm (UTC)There followed a panel discussion and audience participation. There was a blind person in the audience who had been a reader before losing sight and their reactions were interesting. Particularly, I remember a thread about some people preferring to receive text by eye or ear and then whether by computer reader or human for differing reasons. The specific reason that I remember was that a human reader imposes too much interpretation on the author's words for some people's taste.
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Date: 2025-03-17 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 09:05 pm (UTC)* "Analysis of the results showed that participants with aphantasia showed a reduced BOLD (MRI) response during perception compared to the control group."
From.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:13 pm (UTC)In my view this is neurology but I don’t know as I’d die on that hill. To me psychology describes human behaviour, but then you also know that I don’t really believe that’s a science anyway.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:29 pm (UTC)"Human behaviour" *to me* includes "causes of human behaviour", which includes "differences in the brain". Which would make neuroscience a subdivision of psychology. (And I'd distinguish between neurology and neuroscience.)
But you could decide to slice up what belongs to what and which discipline is a subset if which discipline in a wide variety of ways. And I'd slice it up in different ways myself, depending on the context.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:36 pm (UTC)I can argue both distinctions. Neuroscience vs. psychology as a discipline yes you are right. Neurology vs. psychology as a property, both of which people have. But this is entirely semantic.
I really don't have a strong view on this. I just found myself surprised because it was so different from the filing I'd have gone for.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 09:49 pm (UTC)No, I think it's neuroscience (better than neurology, your point holds). To me, psychology doesn't describe properties of wiring. It describes behaviour. But this is all part of the massive conversation about research paradigms that you and I have scheduled for when Gideon goes to art school.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:53 pm (UTC)(I don't think I have hard lines here. I don't see a real distinction between wires and behaviour. To me that distinction is one that people draw based on what helps them think about things better/more happily/etc. From what you're saying it feels like this is fundamental to the difference between us. But I may well be entirely wrong there. We can fill Gideon in during his breaks.)
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:56 pm (UTC)We once had a very long conversation about this, involving steering wheels. I can't remember any more than that. It was one of these cases where proposition A seemed entirely self-evident to you, whereas the reverse of proposition A seemed entirely self-evident to me.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:57 pm (UTC)We can make a list and dig until we hit axiomatic bedrock. Sounds like a fun weekend!
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Date: 2025-03-17 10:01 pm (UTC)It does to me too.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:57 pm (UTC)I don't know if they give you breaks at art school, but I am pretty much 100% certain that if they do then he won't want to spend them talking about taxonomy.
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Date: 2025-03-17 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 10:02 pm (UTC)You're no fun.
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Date: 2025-03-17 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-17 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-22 09:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-22 09:30 am (UTC)I wonder how they put scenes together.
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Date: 2025-03-25 11:52 pm (UTC)I am not aphantasic, though I may be low on the ability to visualise things - I've never done a formal test: I think I can see things in my mind, but they are vague and changeable. But I remember at the age of seven burrowing through the scrapbook pile in class finding all the comics so I could read them. I think that was just wired into me, whatever else happened.