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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2133 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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From what I can find the term aphantasia was first coined as recently as 2015 in a paper titled Lives without imagery.. This despite the existence of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or VVIQ which predated the 2015 study by 40+ years.

The Guardian article you've linked makes the point at the end:

Keane’s work was proof that you do not have to be able to picture something to be able to draw it. “People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination, and one of the messages is: ‘They’re not the same thing.’”

I wouldn't suggest that creativity and visualization are "the same thing" but I think to suggest that there is no correlation between the two is counterintuitive, and bears investigation.

In a 2020 study Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing Zeman et al found evidence that aphantasics have deficits im object memory (what something looks like, its color, shape, size, etc.) but not spatial memory (location, relative distance from other objects, directions, layouts) and in fact in some cases aphantasics outperformed non aphantasics in this regard.

Also there seems to be no real difference in an aphantasic's ability to draw what they see (eg a still life) rather than what they imagine (Medusa, a leprechaun, etc )

Train is arriving, have to cut this short. Thanks for engaging.

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