Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
What you describe is not quite what they are doing, they are adding nudges at the end of the follow-up question suggestions. For instance I was researching some IKEA furniture and it gives suggestions for followup, with nudges in parenthesis "IKEA-furniture many people use for this (very cool solution)" and at the end of another question suggestion: "(very simple, but surprisingly effective)". They are subtle cliffhangers trying to influence you to go on, not pure suggestions. I'm just waiting for the "(You wouldn't believe that this did!)". It has soured me on the service, Claude has a much better personality imo.
No, I don't use OpenAI products. Sam Altman is a weird creep and the company is headed into the abyss, so it isn't my cup.
However the original complaint was about continuation suggestions, which are a good feature and I suspect most users appreciate them. If ChatGPT uses bait or leading teases, then sure that's bad.
I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based on playing back memories as movies in my head. Especially childhood memories suffered. Also reading books is a very different experience, as when I previously would make up movies and picture the characters visually when reading, now it's all black. That said, reading books is still an enjoyable experience, it's just very different.
I also stopped dreaming in images for a long time, which was weird. It's still very dim (not so vivid), but at least that part came back.
That sounds incredibly sad and frustrating. I can't imagine what it's like to suddenly lose that ability, being so dependent on it.
Indeed many of my childhood memories are mostly sequences of pictures, the emotional content kind of "floats" on the imagery. It must be very frustrating, being forced to reinvent how you experience your inner life and memories.
Edit, after reading some more comments: are you musically inclined? Did your ability to hear melodies in your "inner ear" suffer similarly?
It sucks, but that's life - there are worse things and life is still plenty enjoyable. In addition, I lost my sense of smell/taste completely and that was much worse to be honest (but still, you learn to live without and focus on what's good). If I had to choose between the two, I'd choose being able to smell/taste any day. Funnily enough not because of food, but actually because of the added experience you get when walking in nature or other places - smell has so much to do with experiencing things, but you never consider it until it's gone. Luckily it came back, even though it's been 2.5 years now and it's still only 80% normal (but 80% is quite good!).
As you mention, the most sad part about it is actually the childhood memories, but I still have the memories of course, they're just a bit more "facts based" than re-living experiences.
Luckily, I didn't lose my inner ear or even inner monologue like in another reported case [0]. I do play instruments, so I guess I was/is musically inclined to some degree. I still have ability to imagine music exactly like I would hear it, unlike a friend with aphantasia who can't.
Another interesting detail is that I regained the ability before losing it again (Covid re-infection), and during this time of recovery I could gradually see grey, blurry images that got better and better. It's like the image generator in my head didn't have capacity to create full blown images, but only low res ones. Which makes me believe that in my case the "image generator" was damaged as I couldn't even dream in pictures, while for most people with aphantasia that's not the case, as they can dream normally.
On the bright side, I don't get horrible, lifelike images popping up in my head anytime I hear about something disturbing. Not that that was a big problem, but it's something you notice. It makes me believe that people with aphantasia might be better at coping with disturbing events, as they don't have to re-live the experience visually. But that's just a theory.
Smell is super tied to memory so that could be the cause of your imagery issues. I almost completely lose my sense of smell due to concussions in early adulthood but occasionally it randomly comes back (briefly) in full force. Anything I smell at that time triggers very visual memories in my head from childhood.
Neurology is still such a black box medically. Did you by any chance have a brain MRI at any point? If yes, and your willing to share, what portion of the brain was impacted? If more than one, has there been diagnostically visible change between them? Did you get any treatment? I can be reached at first at full tod moc if you prefer.
I've had a brain MRI to rule out other causes (tumors etc), but it was clean. I don't think they looked specifically for tiny damages to areas (if that's possible), but I'm not sure to be honest as I only got answer that there were no signs of disease.
Well maybe it's a good thing. You live in the present instead of an imaginary past. The past is gone no matter how much your mind tries to come up with images. The memories no longer have any existential significance apart from causing you trauma, generating false sense of pride, etc. Helps you to do and try new things instead of relying on a past you once lived and no longer exists.
I do tend to think I live a bit more in the present because of aphantasia. However, I also do have an experiential memory. It's not great, and largely not visual, and to the degree there are any visual elements they're pretty useless, like burnt fragments of a Polaroid. I think you're kinda having a hard time imagining this condition.
> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize
True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.
I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.
You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.
I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance.
Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.
Not sure why I was downvoted (I know it wasn't you), but it sounds like we are on the same page.
It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.
I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).
If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.
Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?
I think I know which ability you refer to, as my fear when I discovered this was that I couldn't work as a software developer anymore (before I got a grasp of what had actually happened, it took a while to actually understand the extent). I used to visualize arrays/tables/graphs in my head (like images/fancy animations) and do operations on them to imagine how one could transform them etc. But I also had/have a native sense of "depth" to data structures, which I also used. That one can move around in a data structure in a sense, I'm sure you know very well what I mean. Luckily that ability is still intact, which I've been relying a lot more on lately, but I can imagine you being much better than me on those kind of tools. The mind is so extremely fascinating, and it's so weird to think of the ways we think of things.
I tried visualization exercises (there's a lot more to the story that I didn't consider space to add here) and the first time they worked rather quickly, so I regained the ability in the course of days. But as I mentioned in another comment, I contracted covid again and then it was even worse than it had ever been and training didn't feel like it worked. I regained a little bit since that infection, but got covid yet again (it's an awful disease) and then it was back to square one. It seems like something in the brain had to heal before I could train it back up, but I'm afraid that the damage will be/is so severe that it will not be possible to recover (especially since I couldn't even create images in my dreams).
I might get better over time if I just stop getting covid, but as isolating myself is out of the question, that's unlikely to happen. Unfortunately it seems much harder to recover each time. Since last time it's not really been recovering. On the bright side, my sense of taste/smell has not been damaged again, which has been great.
I'm aphantasic, but I also have a very good visual/geometric intuition. The brain's a funny thing that way. Give me a shape rotating problem and I'll get the answer pretty rapidly compared with a baseline, but it's by a process that doesn't involve explicit visualization.
Hopefully you'll be able to access similar mental pathways with practice.
I'm pretty sure you can regain the ability. Covid damages the brain, and the brain "forgets" how to do certain things (like smell or visualise or focus), but brains are incredibly powerful and flexible, and can re-learn these things. I myself have long covid and lost a lot of sensing ability, but have been able to improve my senses of smell and touch by training with promising results. Here are some techniques people have used to help learn/relearn how to visualise: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/
Thanks for trying to help! I answered in another comment, so you can see a better reply there, but I've been trying (a lot) of these things and the short version is that it seemed to work when my brain had been given some time to heal, but repeated covid infections might have made it permanent in my case, or at least given the prospect of future infections. But time will tell. My smell/taste survived the last infection(s?), so there might be some hope that it gets milder.
It's so weird, as I know exactly which "muscle" to trigger to make it happen, which I guess someone having aphantasia wouldn't instinctly know, but it just doesn't do much.
-edit-
Oh, forgot to mention, in the beginning when I trained on visualizing again (back when it did work), I got _so_ exhausted in my brain afterwards, it was like really trying to used some damaged "muscle". I find that really fascinating. I'm not able to invoke such exhaustion in other ways, that quickly.
I was aphantasiac(?) most of my life and I self discovered similar techniques to what they discussed in the Reddit while learning multivariate calculus. I was trying so hard to visualize the integrations and using the “fuzz” I see when I close my eyes to infer the shapes then one day I could actually see them in my minds eye. I never applied the technique to other things because I didn’t have the same motivation to practice that induced my first breakthrough but I am pretty confident the technique works. The plasticity of the brain is remarkable and it’ll adapt to what you need it to do if you work at it.
As someone outside the spectrum completely, I can sympathise with your lack. I find you experiencing both sides fascinating. But the reason I replied is that my wife is a Chinese medicine practitioner, and also treats using a not so common method of scalp/brain acupuncture. After contracting COVID myself and losing all sense of smell and taste, she cured me in one session of that technique. Minutes after the needles went in my scalp I got back about 5% of my senses and by the evening it was all back. I don't know where you are geographically but it might be something worth exploring.
Thanks for your tip/reply. My sense of taste/smell is much better now and seems to be on a good trajectory as well, I won't seek more treatment at the moment. What you describe kind of sounds related to a stellate ganglion block[0] which can have these instant (and for some permanent) effects on covid-induced anosmia.
I was referring to scalp acupuncture as a maybe-potential-who-knows remedy to the Aphantasia, but it's a projection of it curing my smell/taste in minutes, not a "scientific assertion".
It's not the same as described in the link. I'm referring to acu needles at the top of the scalp in specific locations, triggering whatever nerves are there.
Covid was/is a weird one. Hope you get your visuals back. I've never had them but if I did I wouldn't want to miss them.
I just realised that I had similar experience. I can still picture things in my mind but dreams only came back a few weeks ago after being absent for a long, long time. Thinking about it it's not been months but a year or two.
I know it’s basically cliche at this point to recommend psychedelics for anything, but one effect I’ve certainly noticed is a strengthened mind’s eye in the comedown and following days. More so with acid and more so for legitimately visual trips than smaller-dosed, heady trips.
Im not sure if my total aphantasia comes from a burnout or whether I was born with it. After a severe work related burnout, when things came to, some things did not return to normal. I have learned about aphantasia recently and did not test before the burnout.
Has she been doing essential oil training? As far as I know it's the only scientifically validated method and it did a lot for me (although at soon 2 years my taste/smell is not fully recovered). I know it worked as I only regained the smells from the oils initially. Flowery oils were specifically good, as they likely contain thousands of different compounds that you find in many other smells.
One usually recommend four oils (of high quality preferebly): one citrus, one mint/eucalyptus, one spicy (e.g. cinnamon) and one flowery (lavendel did wonders for me, then geranium) to start out with. Smell each oil for 20 seconds every morning and evening, while thinking of/imagening the thing you're smelling. Since it's a neurological issue, the last thing supposedly helps. It usually took me 2-3 weeks from starting training until noticing any (very minor) effect at all, and much longer to regain a lot of it.
Sorry if she's already tried, hopefully it's useful for others. It can take a long time for the training to work.
I highly recommend checking out polars if you're tired of pandas' confusing API and poor ergonomics. It takes some time to make the mental switch, but polars is so much more performant and has a much more consistent API (especially if you're used to SQL). I find the code is much more readable and it takes less lines of code to do things.
Just beware that polars is not as mature, so take this into consideration if choosing it for your next project. It also currently lacks some of the more advanced data operations, but you can always convert back and forth to pandas for anything special (of course paying a price for the conversion).
As the blog mentions, once Pandas 2.0 is released, if you use Arrows types, converting between Pandas and Polars will thankfully be almost immediate (requiring only metadata adjustments).
In one of those games, Nieman was losing by 1.3 points in the first 10 moves despite being 100% according to this analysis so I'll take it with a grain of salt. This only looks at having moves within the top 3 engine moves done by one of the engines tested, and sometimes there's just 1-2 good moves so doing 1 out of 10 (or whatever) possible moves doesn't mean you did anything good. Further, it's unclear how cherry-picked it is. If it was that obvious I'd think the other analysis would've caught it which they didn't.
You can find more discussion of it on reddit, but the threads are generally all over the place.
A 1.3 difference out of an opening sideline is neither rare nor lost, and mostly simply comes down to the fact that the engine doesn't understand the opening. Even the mod pin in the link you posted clearly outlines that this is a misleading way to frame this. It would be better to read more into the discussion before helping misinformation spread.
I didn't describe it as lost like the poster did, I said 'losing by 1.3' which is accurate. At any rate, if you actually did read deeper you'd see that losing by 1.3 is plenty relevant, when claiming 100% engine play correlation, and that the mod is somewhat cherry-picking. Further, playing openings where you are -1.3 in 2000 blitz is fine, but in super GM games 1.3 points down is more often than not pretty bad.
"The engine doesn't understand the opening" might have applied 10 years ago but you'll have a very hard time finding a single opening in all of chess where it would be the case now.
While interesting, this does not seem very convincing to me. They successfully show that Niemann was playing many games with a high percentage of "engine perfect" moves, but they do not do enough to show that this is inconsistent with what top players usually do. A whole distribution of scores is shown for Niemann but only limited summary statistics are shown for other top players. A proper comparison would involve showing the same type of data for both.
> They successfully show that Niemann was playing many games with a high percentage of "engine perfect" moves, but they do not do enough to show that this is inconsistent with what top players usually do.
I thought the video very much did make that case. A single known cheating game had a 98% correlation (Sebastien Feller Paris 2010), other GMs have generally at most 75% average correlation. The analysis had more than half a dozen games with Niemann at 100% correlation. If that's cherry picking, it seems like there are a lot of cherries to pick.
Yes, that's the question that I wish she had tried to answer. What are the chances? Without checking for that pattern by other 2600+ GMs, we don't know the answer.
Yeah, because Carlsen's is only a sample of 426 games
The first 4 are the most interesting, having same sample size of 4000. But across the board players tend to have little distinction between choosing moves between 0.0 & 0.1, except one player
Me, as a 1600 player, have played some 0-0-0 games on Lichess. I didn't cheat. I just play a lot of chess games and during those games, my opponent was really bad, so I had a perfect game (according to the engine).
You're conflating accuracy with engine correlation. Having a perfectly accurate game means you didn't make any moves that caused a centipawn loss. Having 100% engine correlation means you're making the exact moves the engine would make.
I think I have on 3-4 occasions played a game where, after evaluating on chess.com, got a 100% accuracy (which is engine correlation). A couple times were all theory and then blundering a mate in 1, but...
I did have one game where I didn't know the theory except a very vague recollection in the beginning. I actually thought I had blundered in that game and was trying to figure out what I'd do if my opponent made a certain move — they didn't find it, I ended up winning material in a tactic and they resigned — I was in complete shock when it came back 100% accuracy (and I definitely did not see the engine response to the move I was worried about, which was the best move).
I'm only around 1600-1700 on chess.com.
Not taking a position either way on Hans, but I have no doubt he knows far more theory than I do (and I do know some lines 20+ moves deep), and correlating with an engine is not impossible even outside of book.
To repeat what was said above, accuracy is not the same as engine correlation.
Engines often play moves that are counterintuitive and weird, but nonetheless good. This is because they can evaluate large trees of tactics in a way that humans cannot.
If a human finds a natural move that is just as good as the engine move (in terms of evaluation), they are still playing accurately, but they are uncorrelated with the engine. Playing accurately is not a sign of cheating. Playing many engine moves is a sign of cheating.
The engine scores centipawn loss against the perfect move (according to the engine). The engine plays the move with the lowest centipawn loss itself. How are those two different?
So there are "really bad" opponents at the 1600 level, but is it reasonable to think there are "really bad" opponents at the 2600 level? It's a different world up there.
Right, op is making a mistake in thinking that a perfect game against a 1600 is the same as a perfect game against a GM. GMs will intentionally play less perfect moves to head towards complications where they will come out ahead. When I start to bang out 15 moves of theory against a IM/GM they will recognize it and play something I’m not familiar with and just win more quickly.
This is complete garbage. Real statistical analysis has been done, and has been inconclusive so far. Cherry picking games is ridiculous - at the 2800 level, a GM will only deviate from the engine's top moves 0-3 times. It would be expected that an exceptional performance would remain within top engine moves if someone was able to play at that level.
Hans isn't at the 2800 level, but Magnus is almost 2900, and probably has good reason to be suspicious of someone playing way above their rating in tough matches.
Yeah this is interesting … she shows that Hans had many tournaments where he shows record setting move accuracy as measured by correlation to Stockfish 15, and that 6 of these tournaments occurred in a row. She also shows that for those tournaments even by Reagans model, Hans results would be like a 1/70000 chance if legit.
The key point (in the end) seems to be that the odds for a streak like Niemann had are about 1 in 80k. Statistically speaking, I'd say that's a long shot from a smoking gun. Here's a good rundown of a case where a cheater is considered to have been exposed by statistical evidence, but those odds were on a completely different scale, 10^22:
Basically the mistake that is easy to make is that we shouldn't ask: "what is the probability that Hans plays five tournaments like that in a row?", but "what is the probability that someone will play five tournaments like that in a row?". Even if we correct for the fact that there are probably more Minecraft speedruns happening than GM tournaments, odds of 80k just seem a bit too low to call it evidence.
Using an ultra-high ELO chess engine to score each possible move, then reversing through the players moves and seeing how often it would have been a positive move (one that shifts the balance of the game in your favor) - or perfect move (not sure which). It is extremely rare to make 100% perfect moves in a game, let alone a series of games. Typical gameplay for high level chess player doesn't peak over 72-75% for a given series of N games. Niemann has several tournaments over this and several games with 100% perfect moves. The inconsistency is also a concern since he goes from mid-60's to 78/79 in a span of one tournament.
It's also worth pointing out that a player's odds of making the perfect move are inverse to their opponent's ELO: as the level of play rises, finding the right play becomes exponentially harder. The data suggests he's sometimes playing other grandmasters as good as those grandmasters would play a rando on Lichess.
yeah - if I pulled a random willing powerball ticket out of my massive pile of powerball tickets, that would be a really, really rare event. It would make me believe that it isn't such a rare thing, for sure.
FM Yosha puts forward a fairly convincing argument about odds and engine correlation, but another commenter rightly pointed out that these statistics are not seen as incriminating in and of themselves. Unfortunately, even when the preponderance of evidence seems to be against a player - best example is Sebastian Feller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Feller) playing with superhuman accuracy at crucial moments, and whose team captain later admitted to helping him cheat - they can still cast enough doubt to be allowed to continue playing at the highest level.
Here is a blunder that Feller played on move 13 just over a month ago (https://new.chess24.com/wall/news/grandmaster-blunders-mate-...) - this same guy managed to draw against Magnus Carlsen in 2008, in a game where Carlsen also found the moves/mannerisms of his opponent highly unusual.
Perfect when compared to the moves the top chess engines would make? Hikaru says he only scored 100% one time, and 70% is more typical for a GM, yet everyone does it?
the gist seems to be that he has unrealistically high correlation with game-engine recommendations, often all the way up to 100%, but only when playing "tough" opponents, and far lower / realistic correlation scores (around 50%) in other games.
for reference, magnus carlsen's correlation score at his peak averages around 70% (according to the video)
This is super cool! I tried it on a video I recorded a while ago that I completely forgot about and was like wait wow the summary came away with points that I'd be glad a viewer got.
One thing is it was a very long and rambling video and probably didn't do a great job of motivating examples rather than just getting bogged down in them for a while, so the summary doesn't really say how the examples support the central claim, but that may be the fault of the video honestly lol...
Also a few basic errors like writing "medium" where I'm pretty sure I said or at least meant "median" and in one case, I'd have to go back and watch this to be sure, but it seems like the summary says something is better in B than in A when I was saying it's better in A than B. The summary definitely touches the right content but I'm not sure it's correct.
Also funnily I have a tendency to sprinkle the word "like" liberally(for better or worse) and the summary copies some of the sentences verbatim, starting with "Like..."
(completely off the topic of cheating in chess, sorry...)
He played several games with 100% correlation with what chess engines considered to be the best move, and also played in 5 consecutive tournaments with such a high fraction of engine-preferred moves that his performance rivals the best players in history at the pinnacle of their careers.
It would be nice to get an ELI5 on this too. I used to play chess and have an understanding of the significance... but I don't think I can fully appreciate it as well as someone with a solid background in both.
It's actually fairly easy to cheat statistics. It happens literally all the time in Academia. There's a thousand ways to make a statistical analysis believably say what you want in a way where even other professionals don't realize is the case unless an expert does a thorough analysis.
It's easy to cheat a statistic you create. It's quite hard to cheat a statistic where you don't know who will look when at which particular data points.
I did not intend to attack or defend Hans with that statement, I just wanted to point out that both you and the original comment could be right at the same time. That being said, it's quite funny that this case showed both sides.
Since younger players are growing up and developing with these incredibly powerful chess engines, I wonder if that plays a role in their ability to play at such a level.
If this were the case, I think we'd see younger players more likely to get these 100s more often as they're learning from chess engines.
Does anyone familiarized with the topic know if this makes sense?
Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information Google actually displays.
The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge plus. Recommended!
Been using Cerebral for two projects (one large and one small) so far and it's simply been an amazing experience.
It's incredible how such a simple framework/concepts can cover everything you need, even for large apps. It doesn't only handle state well, but also provides a good solution for handling side effects.
Also, the way routing is handled is really something other frameworks should learn from. It's slightly unusual in the beginning, but when you "get it" you suddenly realize everyone else has got it all wrong.
Just a shame it's not more well known, as it compares very favorably to other state/side effects management frameworks like redux and mobx.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...