Great minds!
I'm pretty bad with names AND faces, so that's one aspect of the start of the semester that I'm not looking forward to.
I have self-diagnosed with prosopagnosia in the past, but (a) that's much less interesting than in the self-diagnoses discussed yesterday, and (b) I think I've actually got better at it in the past year somehow. I almost want to say it's because of my daughter - hey, she really does look different from most kids her age, despite having exactly the same hair style as all of them. (Which isn't actually true, her hair is one of the distinctive things about her, but it's not like I've been confused by seeing her in a hat or anything.)
I'm a medium recognizer. And medium name rememberer. And medium height, weight, build, age, and appearance. But I have an out-of-this-world blog.
I can whisper to horses. They don't do what I say, but I'm pretty sure they understand me perfectly.
"You matched 0/14 faces so you're pretty bad with faces."
Starting as a small child but well into adulthood I had involuntary and intrusive, but not otherwise upsetting, visions of very specific big-eyed blond woman in a white shirt and blue skirt brushing her hair. It was pretty haunting... who was she? Anyway, like two years ago I realized it was Charlene Tilton, who was on Dallas for a bit when I was a baby. Brains are so interesting but ALSO not interesting at all.
Anyway 10/14 but I think I got all the ones right where I thought the guy looked like a twerp. 100% twerp recognition.
I also got 0/14, and I am terrible with faces, especially generic white dudes. I can't tell male Olympic swimmers apart, or actors on a TV show where there are several male leads.
I was a bit surprised it was that low. I figured I'd gotten at least 1-2 right.
I bet my sister's baby daddy would qualify. He always remembers a face and he knows where he saw it before. Rando face at a track meet? Don't you remember? Saw that face at (specific) track meet two years ago. He is also eerily good at finding creatures in underbrush. What he sees, he really sees.
I actually thought I was doing pretty well, like I'd get around 12 right. Oh well. Being delusionally overconfident is the best kind of delusional to be.
Whoa. I didn't match any of them. I didn't expect that.
So there are three (!) 0/14 folks in our sample size of whatever. Maybe too much time staring at these text boxes has literally made us unable to recognize the human face.
I also got 0 but at least now I feel like I'm in good company. (I expected to do badly, but when I started I thought I had matched some of the early ones -- but I may have just matched the picture that had the most similar lighting rather than actually matching the face).
I feel like there should be a name for us in the extraordinary 0th percentile, since being this bad is a skill too! Subparrecognizers?
But I do OK recognizing people in real life.
(and before there are 80 comments, yes I know that's not how the math actually works on this, you pedants)
I matched 0/14 faces so according to this quiz I'm pretty bad with faces. But I'm actually really good with faces. Terrible with names but good with faces. I often recognize faces of people I've met only briefly years prior. So I think there's something wrong with this quiz. For one thing, seeing e.g. only a frozen picture from the front and then being asked to select from a lineup of side-profile pictures feels very artificial.
So, what is the causal directionality of commenting on unfogged and recognizing 0 faces?
19: You can do that with looking at butts.
Huh. I am notoriously bad at recognizing faces, and I got 9/14. Maybe I'm not face blind after all, but just a jerk who doesn't care about the people I meet.
Or maybe urple's got it in 21. M is very good with faces -- can recognize someone he's met once years ago, spots people on the street who played bit roles in tv shows -- and he scored only a 6/14.
I got 6/14, which counts as bad. But while we're talking about weird brain stuff, anyone else here have aphantasia? I don't like the name, but it's useful to have one. Just means I see nothing when I close my eyes, understand the world through a haze of metaphors and adjectives. That sort of thing, classifying eyebrows and nose angles, is apparently enough to be just bad at faces and not helpless.
I'm kind of open-mouthed at all the zeros. IME at least for the first few the lone face and the face in the lineup were totally identical. It's almost as if my experience doesn't define the limits of what's possible but THAT can't be it???
Apparently, a well-trained Belgian can tell that the dowdy nurse and the hot socialite on the boat are the same person.
26 just to be clear do you not see the darkness behind your eyelids? Or is it just that you don't visualize anything.
27
Yeah, I thought so too! When I first started it I didn't read the instructions and randomly clicked a face, then exited and started over, so maybe it messed something up?
29: Right, I can see darkness (or, like, red spots if I press on my eyes) but can't create images. I do dream, though I have no way of knowing if I see things or just understand them, and I have deja vu sometimes. But none of what normal people do. (I don't think this is why I'm less likely to objectify than the average person here, but maybe it's a piece of it.)
*turns computer upside-down, shakes it confusedly*
27: That's what I thought, but it told me 0/14.
Thorn, I don't visualize anything unless I have to. I skip descriptions in books almost entirely. All I want to know is overall ambiance, and a couple nouns are good enough for that.
I never forget a face. Mister... Chekov, isn't it?
I think this is a quiz glitch and not an all-of-you glitch.
I just re-took the test, and it told me 0/14 again. I doubt that now, and would believe it better if it told me I got a least a couple right. 'Cause I think I did.
"It was."
-- the first sentence of m-A Tale of Two Cities
Pretty sure we found an inter-dimensional portal, you guys! Who's coming with?!
Another 0/14 here. Like Tigre, I was convinced I was acing the thing until seeing the score. My secret method was to imagine what the guy might look like with a different expression on his face. Yes, other half, I am now willing to admit that it is perhaps not foolproof.
I got 7 of 14, but felt sure I was getting like 9 or 10.
9/14, on a phone, while answering questions from a demanding three-year-old.
4/14. I'm agreeing with urple.
Or maybe I was just stunted, growing up in the long, dark shadow of Todd.
I got 10, which is supposed the median of everyone who took the quiz. Who are all you people?
I find aphantasia fascinating and I simply have no idea how anyone who has it can begin to understand science or math. Any answers or insight?
There's no need to be an asshole just because of your super power.
I only went through calculus and my general memory is unusually good, which probably helped. Unlike a lot of people who have it and have written about it online, all of them male, I knew from a young age that other people could visualize and didn't just use "seeing" as a figure of speech. I can do mental rotations by talking about "if this part is on the bottom it moves left" and so on, but it's really hard.
There are other things my brain can do better than other people's like processing multiple language streams at once. I think I'm an outlier in several ways but aphantasia is definitely one.
Not trying to be rude, if you're actually being serious this time. I'm a firm believer in multiple different orthogonal intelligences, so I just think this is one of many. Unfortunately, I think it's really hard to do science without it.
I don't get it. I mean, I clearly don't have aphantasia, but I don't see how recognizing numbers and recognizing faces is the same.
I was talking about aphantasia, not proposagnosia. I use my visualization skills extensively in science, whether it's picturing what a function will look like or visualizing atoms, macromolecules, and structures. If I couldn't do that, I'd struggle.
The most plausible answer is our ai doesn't yet incorporate human levels of face recognition.
50: Still, visualizing faces is a separate part of the brain from visualizing not faces. I read that somewhere.
I came up with Prominent Skeleton Theory without using a single part of my brain. How's THAT for science.
Yes, I would have bet $10,000 that I got at least 3 to 4 if not all 5 of the first five right. They seemed trivially easy.
I think we are agreeing vehemently. My two lines in 45 were not meant to be related.
50: I'm not joking! You wouldn't say an actually blind person couldn't do math, right? I got a 5 on my AP Physics exam just like probably the rest of you, just did it by thinking about waves that flow out like when you drop a pebble in a pool versus if you dragged a perpendicular stick through them or whatever. Not-visualizing is exactly as natural to me as visualizing to people who do that. I don't think there are any (many?) tasks I couldn't perform that a regular person could.
58 sounds like visualization to me.
I do dream, though I have no way of knowing if I see things or just understand them, and I have deja vu sometimes.
Have you ever tried lucid dreaming? It's learnable.
I don't know if it counts as visualization. I can't draw pictures in my mind, which I'm led to believe other people can. But the only way we can talk about this is through language, which is going to sometimes sound like the language visualizing people use to explain their thought processes. I just know that now there's a name for sonething that fits my experience.
I can sometimes do lucid dreaming and would explain it as something like taking control of the narrative. I've never tried to develop it but do know it's a skill.
I think I've made a comment similar to 59.1 to LB before, about phases of the moon. I'm so heavily visual that I can only interpret these descriptions of thought processes as image-based.
5/14. Maybe the only problem with my recognition is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I used to think I had a problem remembering names like faces, but now that I think of it that hasn't been too bad lately either. I wonder if there's any relation between memory, connecting with people, and depression.
I mean, when I draw the line like that, of course there is.
I mean, I know what Eggplant looks like. He's a tallish white guy with floppy hair, thin with an angular face and deep, dark eyes with eyebrows close above them. But none of that is anything other than my calling up the words I put to it when I met you or when you put up photos with your dog. I'd recognize you if we met again and might recognize the dogs even, but that has nothing to do with a mental picture because I have none.
Wait, it's literally impossible for you to close your eyes and visualize what another person looks like?
Or, say, close your eyes and imagine the Mona Lisa?
Right, I can't imagine in pictures or recall pictures. I could tell you about the Mona Lisa, but not from being able to pull it up mentally. There is nothing but darkness.
Whoa. What's interesting is that it's NOT a disability. I don't think of myself as a "visual" thinker but nothing like that. Seems weird that you can dream but not do that.
I'm confused now. I think I do visualize stuff, all the time, but I never see an actual image without physically looking at stuff. Like Thorn, I close my eyes, I see black. But if I think of someone's face it's not at all like recalling a list of words.
Tigre/whoever, if you think of the Mona Lisa can you see it as if looking at a physical image? (Albeit low resolution.)
I don't know if my dreams are actually visual. I don't know how you know. I remember impressions and storylines from them, but all of it in words by the time it comes back to me later. Mostly it's the emotional impact that's with me when I wake up.
I can't visualize words either, so I know what the letter M looks like but can't close my eyes and recall it visually or draw it on the inside of my eyelids or whatever. Everything happens at a deeper level.
There are other weird things about my brain, like that I can read much more quickly than normal and process what I'm reading while I go, or that I can be transcribing one text while reading a different one, or even that my sexual responses are a lot less physically constrained than the norm. I have no idea what if any connection any of this has, really, and probably never will.
https://m.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ ">This thing confuses hell out of me. Roughly what Thorn describes (?) but I don't have any of the problems he describes.
I ran across this page soon after he wrote it and found it affirming and quite close to my experience. I'm not particularly good at drawing, but the things I make are identifiable. And I can knit well and do hairstyles competently, which requires making things look like I want them to look.
69 - kinda. I can't summon a perfect scene of it into my mind but there's definitely an image and not just black+words. From dreams (to the extent I can remember them) I can certainly remember images.
But I don't get a visual image freom reading a book or whatever and tend to think in concepts, not pictures. I always figured that's what people meant by "not visual."
My three-years-younger brother posted what I think is the same article Mossy did (I'm on my phone and don't want to mess with the html) and he found it interesting because he thinks of himself as the opposite of aphantastic, that he can't NOT visualize even though it sometimes gets distracting. We are very different people in a lot of ways.
I took the super-recognizer test twice (which, yes, makes the second time even less meaningful than the first) and got 6 the first time and 8 the second. In real life, though, I'm very good at recognizing people, not quite to super-recognizer level but close enough that I experience some of the same problems they report. I'm not nearly as good at remembering names or where I know someone from; the recognizing is more like a binary yes/no thing totally disconnected from any context.
Lourdes and I are on a date and he just apologized for violating the analogy ban in conversation. I think he was just embarrassed at making a day job-related analogy.
I had never heard of aphantasia before this, though, and I don't really understand it. Especially the emphasis people are putting on closing eyes. I can visualize just fine, but I'm not literally seeing what I visualize regardless of whether my eyes are open.
Maybe that puts me in the middle of the spectrum from the link in 72?
But of course, as others have mentioned, the fundamental problem with trying to describe this sort of thing is that it's impossible to do adequately with words, but that's the only way we have to describe things at this level of abstraction.
There is this mall, maybe more a strip mall or arcade, at the closed end is a ladies clothing store, next is a luggage shop, then a jewelry store. There is a kiosk that sells newspapers, magazines paperbacks. Take a right at the end of the arcade and cross through the parking lot there is a stand alone movie theatre. Entering the theatre to the left are stairs to the balcony.
I have been remembering this very clearly, visually for a couple days. Problem is, the mall doesn't exist, or anything like it, and I am remembering a dream, maybe from years ago.
I dream very cinematically.
I got zero on the OP test, but I don't believe it.
The link in 81 is fascinating. I had no idea this was even a thing.
And I don't even imagine things visually all the time, or even particularly often. But I certainly can.
I think teo and I are the same. What surprises me is that I apparently am in the minority(2% per OP?). I had thought people who could literally visualize like Tigre were a smallish minority.
I don't know if 77 is the best or the worst thing ever.
I'm not sure I understand 85, though. I think I'm somewhere in the middle on both recognition and visualization.
There's an aphantasia test embedded here which I thought fails profoundly because it doesn't cover the ambiguity I tried to resolve by asking 69. Sample question: "Conjure up an image of a friend or relative who you frequently see; how clearly can you see the contours of their face, head, shoulders and body?" Absent this thread I would answer "moderately clear" when the right answer apparently would be "no image at all". My whole life I've been assuming most people meant 'mental image' metaphorically.
I feel like this is something that is really and truly inexpressible with words, so of course tests like that inevitably fail. I guess the people who can't even conceive of imagining something visually are obviously aphantasic, but beyond that I don't see how this could be verbally expressed in a way sufficiently rigorous to make comparisons.
I mean, I'm assuming the hyperphantasic types aren't able to literally summon visual images in front of them with their eyes open like in Pokemon Go. Maybe they are.
And to render this quite clear, I remark, in the first place, the difference that subsists between imagination and pure intellection [or conception ]. For example, when I imagine a triangle I not only conceive (intelligo) that it is a figure comprehended by three lines, but at the same time also I look upon (intueor) these three lines as present by the power and internal application of my mind (acie mentis), and this is what I call imagining. But if I desire to think of a chiliogon, I indeed rightly conceive that it is a figure composed of a thousand sides, as easily as I conceive that a triangle is a figure composed of only three sides; but I cannot imagine the thousand sides of a chiliogon as I do the three sides of a triangle, nor, so to speak, view them as present [with the eyes of my mind ]. And although, in accordance with the habit I have of always imagining something when I think of corporeal things, it may happen that, in conceiving a chiliogon, I confusedly represent some figure to myself, yet it is quite evident that this is not a chiliogon, since it in no wise differs from that which I would represent to myself, if I were to think of a myriogon, or any other figure of many sides; nor would this representation be of any use in discovering and unfolding the properties that constitute the difference between a chiliogon and other polygons.
It's had to talk about, and this is all going to be hand-wavy.
When I see a mental image, I am "picturing" something: it's something visual, if not always well-defined except for what I'm focusing on. However, it doesn't involve my eyes and has no spatial presence in my mind*. People who have mental images close their eyes to remove the distractions on visual processing to make it easier, but it's not necessary.
But it's definitely a two-dimensional image. Like, I can do geometry on a (simple) diagram in my head, in the spatial sense of geometric reasoning where the diagram provides assistance in a way that a list of predicates would not.
* I can imagine that I'm seeing something not there--e.g., I could choose to visually imagine a six-foot-tall bunny standing next to me--but I feel like in that case I'm not just simulating the bunny but the entire room I'm in (which is very easy to do if I have my eyes open, admittedly).
93 sounds like more or less my way of experiencing this sort of thing.
And I'd say I'm similar to Tigre's description of himself.
I'm curious what those who have or suspect they have aphantasia feel about the memory palace mnemonic technique. Have you tried it? If not, could you imagine getting any utility out of it?
Second 94. I'd thought of the mind's eye as something like blindsight:
patients claim to have a feeling that there has been a change within their blind area--e.g. movement--but that it was not a visual perceptI would say I feel that I have mental images, but they are not visual percepts.
This all seems to depend so much on the precise definition of terms that can't be precisely defined that I find it hard to sustain any interest.
Haven't tried a memory palace, but maybe something similar for historical dates. I imagine a table with years in the cells. For mnemonics I usually use some kind of story, all words.
97 is true, but I think we can work around definitions with detailed questions. Like, what do you see when you close your eyes, teo?
98: And I find the memory palace an intuitively obvious method for remembering things, though I don't think I've ever tried it myself since I tend to have a pretty good memory without any special techniques. But if I were to try any special techniques, that would definitely be one of them.
For my self I find indeed I have a Faculty of imagining, or representing to myself the Ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a Man with Two Heads or the upper parts of a Man joined to the Body of a Horse. I can consider the Hand, the Eye, the Nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the Body. But then whatever Hand or Eye I imagine, it must have some particular Shape and Colour. Likewise the Idea of Man that I frame to my self, must be either of a White, or a Black, or a Tawny, a Straight, or a Crooked, a Tall, or a Low, or a Middle-sized Man. I cannot by any effort of Thought conceive the abstract Idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract Idea of Motion distinct from the Body moving, and which is neither Swift nor Slow, Curvilinear nor Rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general Ideas whatsoever.
Like, what do you see when you close your eyes, teo?
Black, with some red and bluish specks and shapes that roughly correspond to relatively light areas within my visual field immediately prior.
Great! Now close your eyes and imagine an elephant. What do you see?
An elephant. But not, like, literally. Literally I still just see black.
The elephant I see on a level separate from literal vision that I think of as "imagination." But I still do have a physiological sense of seeing it, at the same time as I'm literally seeing nothing but black.
It's like the blackness is the sensation my eyes are delivering to one part of my brain, but there's another part of my brain that is also delivering the image of an elephant to the same part. And I'm "seeing" both at the same time.
And both of those signals are being subordinated to the music I'm also listening to.
But even if I take off my headphones and focus only on the visual sensations, the literal darkness predominates over the more abstract (but still entirely visual) elephant, unless I specifically focus on the latter.
Comity! Except I'm not listening to music.
I find that if I try hard to imagine an elephant, the quasi-visual sense shades into a quasi-motor sense. If I particularly focus on the trunk and tusks, say, I'll start to mentally trace the outlines of those shapes in a way that involves my sense of my right hand, as if rehearsing what it would be like to draw them.
In conclusion, brains are weird and there is a lot of variety among them.
I sort of do 110 too, though leaning to vague gestures rather than drawing (at which I suck).
Of only we all could be as enlightened and topless as teo.
Huh, I don't do that at all. My visual imagination is exclusively visual with no motor component AFAICT.
115 to 110/113. I may be intermittently enlightened but I am rarely topless.
I guess I do generally sleep without any upper garment, which would technically make me topless more than rarely. Still, less than 50%.
It's only fair to exclude your Alaskan records from the average.
I think the Alaskan factor would work the other way, actually.
Though it does get rather stuffy in these un-airconditioned buildings in the summer.
Thus it appears, that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. It is merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it, when we trace the relation of cause and effect.
81 is the one I meant that seems more believable to other people than whatever I'll say about myself, but I also judge him for not having paid enough attention to know he's an outlier.
I am able to hear music and words whether created new or remembered by me. So pi is (in rhythm!) three point one four one five nine, um pause, two six five three five eight nine, big pause because I'm pretty fuzzy after that unless I've been trying to remember.
I can remember a lot of things. I'm on page 443 in Deluge and not using a bookmark. I couldn't tell you the number in the other books I'm reading but could flip right to it. I played quizbowl last weekend and seemed maybe a little worse than my teammates at thinking of how many people are in the painting Nighthawks but not significantly so. I just don't do it by calling up a memory of the picture.
I have always thought the formal memory palace sounded a little strained and like a lot of work, but I've been tempted to try it. I think of my memory as very much like a database, where I find things by how they're connected to other things. (Maybe it feels like this to everyone! It doesn't get discussed much.) In doing trivia sorts of activities, I've always claimed a sort of intellectual purity by not memorizing lists of Nobel prize winners or quizzing myself on what city is in what country, just trying to know what I know organically. That's partly because it's the easy way out and I'm lazy and definitely partly so I have a good excuse not to have to compare myself to people in the tier above me who do that sort of thing, implication being I could be there too if I just tried, which may well be false.
All these opinionated comments make me think I should have stayed in philosophy and trolled from a subjective position of authority. Maybe I know just a little more about what it's like to be a bat than y'all do.
Visualisation can be treacherous, though. For example, I have created clear mental images of all the regular commenters here since I started reading this thing longer ago than I care to remember. Occasionally I get to see what somebody really looks like, on FB or Flikr, and I can safely say that with the partial exception of LB none of my prior images correspond even remotely to the facial or body type of the person concerned.
I got 10/14 rated average on that quiz, but it's a lie. Somebody only has to get a new hairstyle/colour or grow a beard or something and I have no idea.
So I took the test and got 9/14, average score.
I also got in touch with my Inner Racist, which kept trying to tell me that all these white dudes look pretty much alike. And that was super-awkward.
Don't worry unduly. As a white dude, all those white dudes looked pretty much alike to me too.
re: 124
Ditto. Average, although looking at the distribution on the right, a bit lower than average, I think.
My three-years-younger brother posted what I think is the same article Mossy did (I'm on my phone and don't want to mess with the html) and he found it interesting because he thinks of himself as the opposite of aphantastic, that he can't NOT visualize even though it sometimes gets distracting. We are very different people in a lot of ways.
This is me, too. And like F, I do nearly all my math visually. Then writing it down is just describing what you see.
In fact, I remember a conversation here, a long time ago, where I was stunned to learn that anyone learned Linear Algebra without visualizing everything. Like, how could you make sense of linear combinations and spanning sets and such, without seeing it?
I visualize nothing. My reaction when I found out that you could do linear algebra over an arbitrary field was "Thankfully, enough of this picture shit."
I did find thinking of determinants as volumes of parallelipipeds helpful, though. It at least explains why Stokes' theorem.
I was surprisingly average on the test (7/14) given how bad I am at faces in the real world, and how bad I've come out on other tests.
Insofar as you can compare things like this by talking about them, I'm not aphantasic, but I'm a weak visualizer. The way it feels to me is that I can imagine vague pictures, but to get any detail in them I have to specifically place that detail, and there's a fairly low limit on how much detail I can sustain at a time -- there's no such thing as imagining a detailed picture, and then 'looking' at it to find out information about the details. I do mathematical/spatial awareness tasks fine, but visualizing things doesn't help me do them. If I want to visualize something mathematical, I have to understand it really well in a non-visual way, and only then do I have enough information to build the picture.
Does anyone else use visualization as a second track for multitasking? E.g., knitting, I'm often in a position where I'm trying to count something that I'm doing really slowly, remembering if the row I'm knitting is number eight or twelve or whatever. Ordinarily, when I count, it's 'auditory' in the same sense that images are visual, I'm saying numbers to myself. But saying "okay, this is row number 8" doesn't work well when I'm going slow -- if I think about anything else other than repeating 'eight, eight' to myself, there's a good chance I'll forget in the three minutes it takes me to complete the row. If, on the other hand I visualize a numeral 8 in some specific color and font, I can hold that steady while I think about other things, much better than I can hold a non-visual thought that I'm working on the eighth row.
I visualize phone numbers as a path on the keypad to remember them.
Memorising phone numbers is fraught with danger. Always write them down. Then you can have the adventure of calling a number you don't recognise and seeing who picks up.
130: running markers. Will change your life.
Closer to LB's thing are the mental shenanigans I do to keep track of where I'm at in a workout. Actually I use members of my family. Somehow it's easier to remember that I'm on the Pokey round than the 3rd round.
130 is really interesting and something I'll try. I love the feeling of knitting but get frustrated because I basically can't count without concentrating really hard. I quit math after 10th grade--trig? because the arithmetic was exhausting and I was defiant. I'm a good visualizer though, and found out in my current career that as a result I have a knack for understanding molecular biology and circuitry beyond what my training (none) would suggest and have learned to use the skills I do have to understand mathier things I thought were impenetrable (though all applied math-accounting, stats etc.) Now maybe knitting! It would be nice if someone had suffered to teach me I could learn this way during, you know, my formal education. But whatever.
I talk to myself all the time when I'm doing stuff. Sometimes it is counting. When I'm working out it's usually along the lines of "fucking hill. I promise if I make it to the top without slacking, then I'll go to cool down." And I'm lying. Either I have to slack and then I stop or, if I didn't need to slack, I keep running.
124: I also got 9/14 and am also apparently black.Every day a school day!
Linear algebra is arguably a way to non-spatial intuition to geometric problems. Probably why I avoided learning it for far too long.
I wonder if anyone experiences or has heard of this thing my boyf had--like emotional synesthesia. He'll experience say, stress about a project as a blue cone and be like UGH I need this cone to flatten. Every affective state, including his feelings about me, has an image like this and it's not even like, just a corresponding image, his experience of the image and the emotion are inextricable. Some of them see intuitive enough--anxiety is a brown disc around his waist below which he can't see his legs but most are less so. We wrote synesthesia researchers about it and they're all like "huh, weird."
I mean I think a lot of people have vague visualizations connected to emotions but trust me this is different.
What do you see when you turn out the lights?
I can't tell you, but I know it's mine
A favorite lyric.
In terms of visualizing faces, etc I think I'm fairly average, but I'm exceptionally awful at spatial visualization. At least I think that's why I'm so bad at putting things together.
0/14.
Maybe it doesn't work on Firefox? Any of you other zeros using Firefox?
Firefox only works if you think in Russian.
I got an 8/14 (using Chrome). I think of myself as poor with faces and miserable bad with names, so I was surprised to come out as average.
Although I did just recognize an old boss of mine who I hadn't seen in 17 years or so when standing in line for beer at a cat video festival. So that was weird.
144.1: I think average is pretty bad for both of those.
In fact, I think you can make a passable definition of "human" from being bad at faces, bad a names, drinking beer, and watching cat videos.
That test was stupid. They cropped a lot of the lineup faces to obscure the shape of the face, which would otherwise be a perfectly legitimate way to differentiate people. Is the idea that you recognize them based on particular more stable characteristics? Also, people are infinitely more recognizable when you can see how they move and carry themselves, so headshots are way tougher than recognizing people in real life. This seems more like a very specific kind of pattern matching than "recognizing faces." Anyway, I got 10/14 and kind of spaced out for the second half.
147: "They cropped a lot of the lineup faces to obscure the shape of the face, which would otherwise be a perfectly legitimate way to differentiate people." I wondered about that, if maybe the cropping was just sloppy or they were trying to simulate having to recognize people from an artist's sketch or something.
147: "They cropped a lot of the lineup faces to obscure the shape of the face, which would otherwise be a perfectly legitimate way to differentiate people." I wondered about that, if maybe the cropping was just sloppy or they were trying to simulate having to recognize people from an artist's sketch or something.
I have a vague feeling that I've seen 149 before.
The post so nice it went up twice. My bad.
Not only did I know J/osh Davis, mentioned, at Royal Holloway, I was his experimental subject. He was trying to develop a face-recognition algorithm; it didn't work. It looks like he built a career on studying the failure of his original research topic.
I was using FFS with noscript.
Also interesting to read Thorn's descriptions. I think of myself as non-visual and very word-oriented. But I do have the ability to visualize -- just not very well.
4/14, which surprised me. I prepared an excuse by not taking it too seriously and therefore not spending more than a few seconds scrutinizing the arrays of candidates, though. I'm generally very good with faces, though I'm awful with names. I agree with urple and ogged that matching a front view with a cropped side view, especially if they are almost all twerps, is hard. If they were moving (as the OP linked article talks about) it would be much easier.
7/14 on retry, versus 4/14 the first time. Doesn't inspire confidence.
After the last facial recognition test linked here, I'm afraid to even run this. I'm not bad at recognizing people, or remembering detail if I remember them at all, but I can't deal with looking at lots of faces in succession.
On general visualization and memory, I could probably still describe some visual characteristic of a majority of the youth hostels I've stayed in, and it's been ten years since I stayed in one. But I also have found sometimes that I have just as detailed memories of things that have turned out to be wrong when I've tried to verify them.
10/14, which is misleading in terms of utility because my problem with social interactions is more remembering anything about the person. They might look familiar but seriously 30 seconds after I'm introduced I've forgotten their name unless I've been chanting it to myself to remember.
But the more shocking thing about all you freaks is 150+ comments and not a single TRON joke.
157- Literally 5 minutes ago my wife and I went into a hostel we were last in 18 years ago and I have the feeling they've changed the configuration, the bar's in a different place.
The thing I did forget that would have been much more useful than remembering the position of the furniture is that they stop serving drinks at 9.
I think they made it particularly hard because what they're trying to do is find super-recognizers.
I can hear Chief Wiggum changing his answer from yes to no after 3D Homer asked if anyone had seen Tron.
I got 11 which it says is average but the pages loaded slowly on my phone so I think I sometimes had more than 5 secs to see the face and anyhow I was actively trying to notice things like thin lips or big ears. By the end I had a bit of "all these fuckers look the fucking same".
In general I am moderately visual but when it comes to a page of text I am very visual, not quite remembering the whole page but having an impression of where in the book and where on the page something was. I always figured that on those "remember 10 objects on a tray" tests that I would do much better remembering 10 printed words. On the other hand if I have to remember a phone number for thirty seconds while I walk elsewhere and dial it, I remember it as an oral chant ("five-four-six-six-two-eight-three" or whatever over and over sotto voce).
|| Hey, nerds: The 2016 Hugo Awards are starting in ten minutes. |>
Dunno. I didn't vote on short stories as I was working from the longer formats down and ran out of time. My wife ranked him pretty low, alas. I can come up with stories that both Puppies and non-shitheads would be biased towards/against voting for him. So I dunno.
Alas, Tingle lost, to what my wife said was the only actual good short story. Although the winner name-checked Tingle in her speech.
Well, he can still describe himself as "Hugo-Nominated" at least.
Took the test again on my boyfriend's laptop. Got 8/14. That's better, because I do actually recognize faces in general. I'm sure many of those 0/14s are because the quiz is broken.
163- When I need to remember a number short term, I repeat half of it to myself and memorize an image of the other half.
OT haircutting bleg
My boyfriend has the thickest, coarsest hair ever. It's straightish/wavy (curlyish when wet), and grows straight out for the first inch and a half of length. He had long hair, and I cut it following a hair tutorial online, and...now he looks like Rachel Maddow. I'm not sure--should I have left the top longer? Should I cut it shorter? Is the only way to prevent poof to put product in it? (He's anti-hair product).
I don't have haircutting advice but if he stays with you after this incident he is either your true devoted soulmate or a man who is out of other options.
Well, it's not like he's going to leave her now. He won't be able to find another woman for the next six weeks at least.
Good point. "Remove your partner's options and win their heart forever."
I have the exact same hair as your boyfriend, and when I attempted a pixie cut, everyone said I looked like Rachel Maddow.
Next month he will look like Kramer/Eraserhead. Have fun!
Hmm... He's moving to Prague in about 3 weeks, so maybe this will protect him from Czech women.
So, it sounds like it's just the hair type, and there's not much to do about it? He trying to decide if he should just buzz it really short.
You cut hair following an online tutorial. Just get a Flobee and be done with the slow crawl to rock bottom.
He's anti-hair product? Are you sure he's really Italian?
I was not anti-hair product. I used a lot of the stuff to weigh it down to something less heinous looking. In fact, IIRC, the Rachel Maddow look was my weighed-down look, which was an improvement on looking electrocuted.
I'm not really Italian, though.
Buttercup should test how many people still recognize her boyfriend.
He's the rare Italian who doesn't use product - - probably why he lives in the US.
I sent his photo to two friends, one said to get a blazer and glasses, and the other said if he wants to look like a lesbian he might as well go full fauxhawk.
