Yes! I have hypophantasia, and I've been reading Living With Intensity, which is largely based on the work of Dabrowski (overexcitabilities and positive disintegration, etc) and written for folks working with gifted individuals. And one of the assumptions that the authors keep making is that gifted folks will have highly developed visualization abilities. While I have some OEs, and I think the overlap between gifted and autistic is huge, I do not have the visualization ability. It's annoying that the authors make this assumption.
Yeah, that seems like a really ridiculous assumption, the sort one would make from seeing themselves as the standard and not bothering to try to understand how other people's minds might work differently from their own. It seems like they could stand to be a bit more "gifted."
Global aphantasia here (and I am autistic). That is, I do not experience any mental senses. Although, I can imagine or recall a visual image and have it in my mind, but I do not actually see it, like a computer that has an image file in its memory, but does not display it. My dreams, though, are pretty much like reality, at least in terms of sight and sound (I can't really be sure about other senses, as I tend not to remember my dreams well). So, when someone says their visualizations are "dreamlike," that does not help me at all, since there's not much difference for me. In short, I have no sensory experiences unless there's something real to be sensed or I'm asleep and dreaming.
This is really interesting. How does this impact your emotions? I find Autistic people often have differences in their interoceptive sense that make them quite alexithymic
I'm pretty sure I'm alexithymic, and my interoception is a bit wonky. I wouldn't have thought until recently that the two would have much of a connection until learning not too long ago that many people actually experience emotions as physical feelings, while I usually experience emotions as mental unless, perhaps, they're particularly extreme. I had thought that the emotional sense of "feeling" was mostly metaphorical in comparison to physical feeling, like I used to think that terms like "mind's eye" and "visualization" were figurative language until I learned that most people do literally see something.
Back in 2nd grade (in the U.S. system), we were once asked to close our eyes and imagine some animal (I can't remember which animal), and we were asked if we could see it. For a moment, I wondered if, maybe, others could actually see it, and that wasn't just figurative language. I didn't say anything about it, though, since it seemed like fairy tale sort of stuff to me, and I thought I'd probably be mocked and bullied for asking, and that people would say things like, "No, it's just figurative language, not literal, you idiot!" It wasn't until decades later that I learned I was actually onto something.
I figured out I had Aphantasia long before I figured out I was Autistic. Maybe partly because I read Thinking in Pictures and thought, “Whelp, that’s not me!” I also thought people were using figurative language until a conversation in a college classroom where I realized most people do actually see something with their mind’s eye. I immediately started asking everyone I knew and it turns out my mother has Aphantasia also. So that might also be partly why I thought it was normal.
Yes! I have hypophantasia, and I've been reading Living With Intensity, which is largely based on the work of Dabrowski (overexcitabilities and positive disintegration, etc) and written for folks working with gifted individuals. And one of the assumptions that the authors keep making is that gifted folks will have highly developed visualization abilities. While I have some OEs, and I think the overlap between gifted and autistic is huge, I do not have the visualization ability. It's annoying that the authors make this assumption.
Yes our experiences are far more diverse than that
Yeah, that seems like a really ridiculous assumption, the sort one would make from seeing themselves as the standard and not bothering to try to understand how other people's minds might work differently from their own. It seems like they could stand to be a bit more "gifted."
BTW, I was always "gifted," and I was always aphantasic. How did that happen? :-p
Global aphantasia here (and I am autistic). That is, I do not experience any mental senses. Although, I can imagine or recall a visual image and have it in my mind, but I do not actually see it, like a computer that has an image file in its memory, but does not display it. My dreams, though, are pretty much like reality, at least in terms of sight and sound (I can't really be sure about other senses, as I tend not to remember my dreams well). So, when someone says their visualizations are "dreamlike," that does not help me at all, since there's not much difference for me. In short, I have no sensory experiences unless there's something real to be sensed or I'm asleep and dreaming.
This is really interesting. How does this impact your emotions? I find Autistic people often have differences in their interoceptive sense that make them quite alexithymic
I'm pretty sure I'm alexithymic, and my interoception is a bit wonky. I wouldn't have thought until recently that the two would have much of a connection until learning not too long ago that many people actually experience emotions as physical feelings, while I usually experience emotions as mental unless, perhaps, they're particularly extreme. I had thought that the emotional sense of "feeling" was mostly metaphorical in comparison to physical feeling, like I used to think that terms like "mind's eye" and "visualization" were figurative language until I learned that most people do literally see something.
Back in 2nd grade (in the U.S. system), we were once asked to close our eyes and imagine some animal (I can't remember which animal), and we were asked if we could see it. For a moment, I wondered if, maybe, others could actually see it, and that wasn't just figurative language. I didn't say anything about it, though, since it seemed like fairy tale sort of stuff to me, and I thought I'd probably be mocked and bullied for asking, and that people would say things like, "No, it's just figurative language, not literal, you idiot!" It wasn't until decades later that I learned I was actually onto something.
I figured out I had Aphantasia long before I figured out I was Autistic. Maybe partly because I read Thinking in Pictures and thought, “Whelp, that’s not me!” I also thought people were using figurative language until a conversation in a college classroom where I realized most people do actually see something with their mind’s eye. I immediately started asking everyone I knew and it turns out my mother has Aphantasia also. So that might also be partly why I thought it was normal.