NSA reform panel: Foreigners actually have privacy rights, too - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/spying-reform-panel-the-world-is-not-the-nsas-playground/ <comment><USER3> Some of the other commenters seem to underestimate the extreme shift, caused by the NSA scandal, in how the US is perceived in some parts of Europe (and I guess Brasil).

NSA surveillance (and hacking!) is pevasive of all that is digital. They even directly attack private individuals in Europe, considering them as worthless pawns. (Don't believe me? Google "Belgacom Hack")

To those of us living in countries that had to struggle to rid themselves of the surveillance state, this _feels_ like enemy action.

So why should people over here perceive a country that has declared them fair game to its large security apparatus be anything other than an enemy?

Do not underestimate the consequences of the NSA actions. The mistrust that is growing right now could undo important parts of the digital globalization.

<comment><USER4> I was talking to someone who works for a company that does cloud hosting of _very_ high end business applications (i.e. specialized finance systems) and he said they were seeing a lot of European companies starting to look at moving their hosting from the US to the EU - largely due to the recent NSA revelations.

I must admit that this rather surprised me - but I have no reason to doubt him.

<comment><USER5> > _I must admit that this rather surprised me_

Why does it surprise you? It's come to light the American government is sifting through everything it can get it's hands on. Any rational person would take steps to try and prevent their important data being looked at.

<comment><USER6> The NSA's job has been to spy on foreigners since the Cold War. I don't understand how the new revelations are some how a big surprise?

Also moving your cloud hosting to an EU country is probably going to buy you exactly zero safety. The majority of the internet traffic in the world routes through the USA regardless or origin / destination.

<comment><USER7> I recall times when we in Europe perceived NSA to be working on behalf of us to protect against our common threats in China/Russia/Mideast/whatever - <USER2> know, being allies, NATO, common military operations, so on.

Seeing them as the most powerful force hostile against us in the digital world is some shift in mindset, when coming from that history.

<comment><USER6> They aren't spying on you (if in fact you aren't plotting to kill Americans)...

<comment><USER8> How would they find that out without first spying on you?

<comment><USER6> As general Alexander mentioned in the 60 Minutes interview, they may collect lots of data but don't examine it or bother to look until they have a warrant or need. Kind if like what you do with your logging collection service....

<comment><USER7> NSA is known to abuse their intel for USA commercial interests (the largest published example probably is Airbus vs Boeing).

You don't have to fear them unless you're a terrorist. Or you're a member of a social organization with a somewhat similar name to a religious organization (Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim case, for example) in which case US authorities will treat your info as terrorist info. Or your partner criticizes US government (e.g. David Miranda case), in which case your communications apparently can be intercepted as well. Or your company competes with US companies. Or something else that I hadn't noticed...

I mean "may collect lots of data until they have some need to use it" is evil enough to be perceived as a hostile enemy act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been looking/waiting for an article like this ever since news of the NSA spying was released (but haven't been looking particularly hard). All of what I've seen previously discussed whether the spying has been legal/appropriate to do to US Citizens, while I've always felt it has been a bad idea regardless of citizenship.

I haven't really thought it through, but I sometimes wish that the international blowback _does_ happen, and happens in a big way. I think the US government has betrayed the world's trust, and I would like to see repercussions. As a software engineer working in Silicon Valley for a company that sells software internationally, it would not be good for my industry. However, my country's morality compass seems to be broken, and I'd appreciate if the rest of the world helped us to get back on track.

<comment><USER10> As a foreigner, I appreciate your sensibility. I'm constantly under the impression that most americans would be fine with the NSA surveillance programs if they didn't target americans. That viewpoint is exactly what earned America so many enemies along the years. America doesn't need better intel or military, it needs better international policies. What good is it to be the richest country on Earth if you have a sick/stressed society that is constantly under threat, and with increasingly fewer civil liberties?

Today, I don't think I would want to live in the US... and if you'd asked me 15 years ago I would have jumped at the opportunity.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. I myself have this secret fantasy that one day we'll realize that we'd buy 10x the security, by taking the 33 cents of every tax dollar we spend on defense and using it to help all the countries in the world that we want to like us. We can build a lot more goodwill by building nations than destroying them. If we're seen as the people that show up at your countries doorstep and improve your human condition until it's on par with most developed countries, then that would earn us a lot more security because we'd have popular global support.

Which is going to be more impactful?

1) Don't mess with us or we will mess with you? or 2) If you mess with us, we'll show up and improve life for your own population, where they will clearly support kicking you out to let us in to help out.

The former is the conclusion you come to if you view all the best possible outcome as the result of Pareto optimalities or the result of a Nash equilibrium.

It's like "how to make friends and influence people" for nation states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a foreigner. And I'll be honest: I expect and assume the NSA (and any other country) will be spying on my traffic if they have access to it. If we assume (even though I disagree) that an NSA with capabilities like this is needed, then targeting me as a foreigner is... Well, sort of the point.

Where the issue arises is that so much traffic goes through the US, a choice to use non US companies etc to avoid this becomes moot... So whenever I think about this, I end up back at square one and see the need for end to end encryption on everything. :(

Edit: I'm in a Five Eyes country too, just FYI. Also, anyone ever get the feeling that the entire point of the internet is kind of... Incongruent with national borders and laws that live within them? I'm not arguing for anarchy or a new global order, truly I don't see a good way of reconciling the feeling of "square peg round hole" I get when I think about this stuff.

<comment><USER13> My gmail signature says "Privacy Notice: the NSA likely has a copy of this email". My own little bit of civil disobedience.

Some people ask about it - and I explain that as Canadian living in the US - all my emails seem to fall under the umbrella of "ok to collect".

I'm hoping this makes people think "hmmm, is there anything in this email I don't want to send?" And realize the true impact of surveillance state - changing what we think and communicate to others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'll echo Eric Posner's article on this issue: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_ch...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/11/the_nsa_should_keep_spying_on_foreign_leaders_and_citizens.html).

There's a big difference between not spying on foreigners because the government is _legally constrained_ from doing so, and not spying on foreigners because _it 's bad foreign policy._ The former idea is ridiculous: we do not live under world government where sovereign nations are subject to international legal restrictions. The latter idea is eminently sensible.

<comment><USER15> > we do not live under world government where sovereign nations are subject to > international legal restrictions

We ought to. The notion that nation-states are allowed to run rampage and be as anarchic as they please, internationally, is _stupid_.

<comment><USER14> The problem with world government, and international frameworks in general, is that people who don't think like you can nonetheless legally bind you. At least to the extent that you mix international frameworks with democracy.

My family emigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh. It's a place where you see women covered up in the name of Islam, etc, and its getting worse over the last 20 years, not better. I have absolutely zero desire to be part of a democratic community with people who believe these things, and I bet if you're honest with yourself neither do you. But that's what happens when you mix international legal norms with democracy. You oblige yourself to follow the votes of people who have totally different cultural values to yourself.

And this isn't a one-way street either. I imagine most Europeans would prefer not to be part of a democratic community that included Americans and their notably more conservative approach to many issues.

<comment><USER16> The variation of opinion across the U.S. is at least as big as the variation across the planet. Just watch Louis Theroux's documentaries to see the evidence of this. You have extremist thinkers in any country. That is why we have democracy and political parties, to find compromise through negotiation, and why we have constitutions and courts of law to uphold them, to ensure basic rights cannot be trampled with the shifting of the political winds. The scale at which you apply democracy and constitutional rights doesn't really matter, except that it is unfair to apply it unequally.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Can you take iran and israel and make one country out of them? What a ridiculous idea, it would only end in bloodshed. Here's the thing that's ridiculous to me: that we tolerate it when countries deny people their human rights because it happens inside their borders. Team America, World Police, right? Well, despite being a European I'm all for that if it means we finally get rid of human rights violations. It's not ok to deny women their human rights, so Iranians must eventually comply with that or face consequences before a court of law. Similarly it's not ok for Israelis and Palestinians to deny each other their human rights, so eventually they must comply with that or face consequences before a court of law.

The way I see it, the discussion is not about what needs to be done, only on when it will come about. Economically, we've already formed frameworks that span the globe, like the WTO and IMF, and we have somehow managed to bring everyone into a single unified economic theory, even the communists. Now we just need to do the same thing for the other half of what governments do and unify the social theory.

<comment><USER14> > The variation of opinion across the U.S. is at least as big as the variation > across the planet. Just watch Louis Theroux's documentaries to see the > evidence of this. You have extremist thinkers in any country.

I'm sure the range of viewpoints within the U.S. is bigger than the difference between the average viewpoint in the U.S. and the average viewpoint in Bangladesh. But what's the really relevant measure is the average viewpoint in the U.S., weighted by 300 million people, and the average viewpoint in Bangladesh, weighted by 150 million people, and the gap between those two huge masses of beliefs.

Moreover, we have internal boundaries in the U.S. to ease certain internal disparities in belief systems. E.g. right to work versus right to unionize? That's decided at the state level. "Rights" that are recognized at the national level tend to be supported by national consensus, and when they're not

> and why we have constitutions and courts of law to uphold them

Who decides what's in the constitutions? Unelected Philosopher-Kings? If, instead, people get input into the constitutions by which they're governed, then you're back to square one. Bangladesh, originally created as a secular republic, amended its constitution in the late 1980's to make Islam the state religion. The new Egyptian constitution makes "the principles of Islamic law the main source of legislation..." Which courts of law are going to tell them they can't do that? What of the real danger that they tell us that we have to do that?

<comment><USER17> I believe the Awami League government just undid this? In any case, they don't have anything as bad as the Objectives Resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is really scary that some people need a 300 page report to realize that foreigners have privacy rights, too.

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't worry about the "inequality", they've always been spying on US citizens too, and still are!

In fact, US citizens are their priority, because they're the ones the US government needs to control and keep in check to maintain their power.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's been my opinion that we need to put our policies where our mouth so often is here (we're still calling ourselves a beacon of personal liberty and freedom, right?) and stop acting like the rest of the world is made up of nothing but potential enemy combatants. The tone of our relationship with the rest of the world is significantly marred when we don't show basic respect even for our allies (not that I think our enemies should necessarily be fair game for these kinds of tactics either - not going to "win hearts and minds" that way).

</comment><comment><USER21> Privacy, in general, to me, seems to only go as far as an individuals/groups ability/will to assert it "technically".

In physical space, as you may have seen in the ACLU parody video of the NSA, people threw/swatted at the cameras and "santas" that were snooping (a "technical" solution, not an "theory" one [they did not try to reason with the santas to stop doing what they were doing before they resorted to the "technical" solution, from what we were led to believe]).

Most people are not doing that in the realm of the internet, so to me the video was interesting because at the end, it's a call to action in basis of a "theory" that made no mention to the "technical" that could be at ones disposal.

How can one use only reason with someone/organization/government who asserts their power over another through technicalities ignored by those who lack the ability/will to assert their privacy through the technicalities available and discussed many times over on places like HN from information accessible online?

</comment><comment><USER22> It's kindof funny, the presumption is that there's exactly one government in the world who is not allowed to spy on any given person, every other government is fair game.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also, peace on earth, pls.</comment>


Did Adobe copy my idea? - <AUTHOR>

Adobe's new product "Photoshop Nav" looks identical to one I talked about on the 21st August 2010 on HackerNews, I would love to know where they got the idea from?
My Product: http://hotkeys.gameweaver.com/
Adobe's Product: http://www.photoshop.com/products/mobile/nav
HackerNews Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622890 <comment><USER2> Clickers:

My Product: <http://hotkeys.gameweaver.com/>

Adobe's Product: <http://www.photoshop.com/products/mobile/nav>

HackerNews Post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622890>

</comment><comment><USER3> Did Apple steal Delicious library idea... yeah probably. Just deal with it and move forward with your idea.

clickable links: <http://www.delicious-monster.com/>

<http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/ibooks.html>

<comment><USER4> Apple hired the guy who came up with that UI in the first place, so I wouldn't go as far as saying they "stole" it.

<comment><USER3> yeah but still the design doesn't belong to the designer but the company. Any code you write, isn't yours, its the property of the company that is paying you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking at the adobe site - there is a young designer guy credited for creating this.

Check and see if he has an HN account. Check and see if he commented in your thread.</comment>


Arc-ish web programming in Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pipinghot.info/?p=7

<comment><USER2> is this all pseudo code or is pyflow actually built?

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, it's built (not released though)

<comment><USER3> Why not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you released every line of code you've ever written?

Since people seem to be interested, I'll try setting up a repo and writing a little doc early this week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since the python interpreter interprets tabs and newlines and commas as tokens, you have to count them as well (in arc you have to count spaces that aren't part of strings).</comment>


Judge Rules That NSA Collection Of Phone Data Is Lawful - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/27/257635799/judge-rules-that-nsa-collection-of-phone-data-is-lawful

<comment><USER2> Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971454)

        N.S.A. Phone Surveillance Is Lawful, Federal Judge Rules
        (nytimes.com)

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971827)

        Federal Judge in New York rules NSA activities constitutional
        (uscourts.gov)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971787)

        U.S. judge upholds NSA phone surveillance program
        (reuters.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971666)

        N.Y. judge rules NSA phone surveillance legal
        (politico.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971626)

        NSA gets win in court over bulk data collection
        (cnn.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971622)

        NSA surveillance lawful, judge rules
        (bbc.co.uk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971526)

        NY Judge Rules NSA Phone Surveillance Is Legal
        (usatoday.com)</comment>


What it takes when writing a novel is your day job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/f351215421f

<comment><USER2> I could never be an author

<comment><USER3> I would never be an author like here. Looks at the cover of her books: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/186-3227527-8974765?u...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/186-3227527-8974765?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Maya%20Rodale)</comment></comment>


Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/21/facebook-stealing-googlers-at-an-alarming-rate/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this has anything to do with the engineering challenges they have to solve at Facebook or the fun working environment. As that code-leak incident hinted some time ago, Facebook probably isn't more than a huge pile of spaghetti php-code. The only motivation of people for switching is greed. Facebook is pre-IPO, so stock options can potentially make some employees millionaires in case of a good IPO.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article: "Entrepreneurs want to work at the hottest place on earth and right now that's Facebook."

I see at least two false statements in that sentence.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I don't know about the rest of you but I'd rather be working on what will be the hottest thing around in a year's time. Catch the wave _before_ it breaks.

<comment><USER5> Google's big wave came and facebook's hasn't. What's your point?

<comment><USER6> If an entrepreneur goes to work for an established company, he ceases to be an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER5> yeah I read that comment as the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some days, Tech Crunch seems more like a gossip tabloid than a serious news source. I once heard someone describe TV news as an ounce of fact poured into a sea of speculation, and this isn't the first TC article I've read that's gotten really creative with the speculation part.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not alarmed. Are you alarmed? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the Microsoft VPs. When asked about Google free lunch and recruiting tactics, he replied: "That's the culture in Silicon Valley. What's frightening is that people come and go within 2-3 years"

These googlers came to my school and advertising how proud they are working at Google. Now we know the truth (^_^).

</comment><comment><USER9> "They are going back to Microsoft!" -- facebook has a lot of ex-microsofties already. Anyways, I hope it doesn't get polluted too much with the ms mentality. The facebook experience and the newsfeed are loosing their simplicity and looking more and more like windows live.

<comment><USER8> For a side note: Google products start to look boring. No new features. No wonder they're losing their employees; nothing more to do.

<comment><USER10> Does Facebook make anything interesting (from a programmers perspective)? I know a lot of cool stuff coming out of the google sweatshops, but I couldn't name anything interesting from Facebook. Am I missing out on something?

<comment><USER8> Search, GMail and Maps are the only 3 things I used. I don't even use Calendar, My Maps or their Cinema search whatnot. That's pretty much their products that I know of (and most of my friends outside Valley)

<comment><USER10> That's already three more applications than I could name from Facebook :-) That wasn't a rhetorical question, but I've really no idea what would make Facebook interesting for a programmer.

Google on the other hand is teasing me regularly with brandnew interesting API's (for which I never find the time to really check em out).

<comment><USER11> A lot of programmers seem to think the Facebook API is pretty interesting... and they've found the time to check it out, too.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, that's the stuff I was searching for. Facebook ain't that common here in germany and I'm no webdeveloper, so I didn't know until now about this API. I only had found the Facebook website which completely failed to impress me and if the name wouldn't drop so often I would probably not even have taken a second look.

Well, time for new API's... maybe next year. If facebook is still the hype in 2008 ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How much freedom does Facebook provide for its software engineers? Do they get something like 20% freedom?

<comment><USER13> FYI that 20 percent thing is a trick for keeping potential entrepeneurs from quiting and starting their own companies.

<comment><USER14> From what I understand, it's not even that real. That is, if you can get all your work done in 80% of your time, then you are free to work 20% on whatever, but most people don't end up doing it because they have to spend 100% of their time (or close to it) on official work.

<comment><USER15> but, afaik, you can club all the personal time you don't use and take it as a continuous block of time, perhaps between projects. Anyone working for Google, please clarify!

<comment><USER16> I don't work there any more, but you are correct. Many successful products started with banked 20% time.

However, most individual 20% projects are not standalone projects. They are often tools or components or features or mini-sabbaticals with other teams.

It is more possible to entrepreneurial at Google than any other company I know of. The workload _is_ really high, but even so, the main barrier to effective 20% time is still oneself. Even at Google, most people talk about their brilliant ideas and don't do anything about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They are going back to Microsoft!</comment>


Microsoft Apologises After Bing Translates 'Daesh' into 'Saudi Arabia' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/30/microsoft-bing-translates-daesh-saudi-arabia <comment><USER2> Don't cave to these idiots and apologize for an automated system that made a mistake. An apology implies fault.

By all means recognize an error and fix it, just don't apologize for everything that someone gets overly upset over.

<comment><USER3> It's usual better PR to write a generic apology with weasel words than say "Ops. System error. Not my fault." Both have almost the same meaning and information, but the latter will bring many embassy complains, boycotts and angry journal articles.</comment></comment>


Who profits from innovation? Startups or incumbents? - <AUTHOR> http://reactionwheel.net/2014/09/whoprofits.html

<comment><USER2> See also "Profiting from technological innovation: Implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy" by David Teece @ [https://bdpems.wiwi.hu- berlin.de/portal/sites/default/files/...](https://bdpems.wiwi.hu- berlin.de/portal/sites/default/files/Teece%20-%201986%20-%20Profiting%20from%20technological%20innovation%20Implications%20for%20integration,%20collaboration,%20licensing%20and%20public%20policy%20%28upload%29%20_0.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are Twitter and Farmville hard to replicate, while Uber and AirBnB are not?

<comment><USER4> Network effects, user lock-in.</comment></comment>


Advice on generating buzz for JackTheDonkey.com? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jackthedonkey.com My name is David Katz, and I have recently launched a new online community (also known as a social networking site) called JackTheDonkey.com.
http://www.JackTheDonkey.com is the community where your time online supports the charity of your choice as we donate 55% of all ad revenue generated by users' time on Jack to their choice of 21 charities from across the US and Canada.
The more you visit and interact with others, the more money JackTheDonkey.com donates to the charity of your choice....it's free and easy and works out to 1.1 cents every impression....EVERY IMPRESSION.
There are currently 21 charities from across Canada and the US (with the UK coming onboard shortly) that you can choose to support with your time online including:
- Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation
- Best Friends Animal Society
- The ALS Society of Canada
- Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
- Canadian Tire Jumpstart®
- Card Therapy
- The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada
- Eating Disorders of York Region
- Lilah's Fund
- The Malibu Foundation for Environmental Education
- The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada
- New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity
- Ontario Special Olympics
- Pencils For Kids
- Plug In America (featured in Who Killed The Electric Car?)
- Ronald McDonald House Charities of Canada
- The Reena Foundation
- The Scouts Canada Foundation
- Sustainable Laos Education Initiatives Inc.
- The Toronto Wildlife Centre
- Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (helping protect the endangered Mountain Gorillas)
Please join us today. It's free....it's easy...and could be lots of fun for you....all the while your time online is benefitting the charity of your choice.
http://www.jackthedonkey.com/register1.html
Attached is a copy of my first/only piece of press for your perusal:
http://www.cjnews.com/images/stories/Heebonics/June_25_09.pdf
Attached is also a copy of a review on killerstartups.com:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/jackthedonkey-com-support-a-charity-the-social-way
And on startupmeme:
http://startupmeme.com/jackthedonkey-jacks-every-visit-of-yours-to-support-your-favorite-charity/
Thanks in advance,
David
twitter.com/inyourfacebook <comment><USER2> "The Donkey Show"? SRSLY?

You could promote it by putting flyers up all over Tijuana and by hiring underage hype people that shout "Come see the amazing donkey show! Senorita loves the donkey...and the donkey loves Senorita!" [Just kidding.]

WHY, oh why, have you branded the site this way? I wanted to know, but the site felt so creepy I had to leave before I could figure anything out. Which probably isn't your desired response, right?

</comment><comment><USER3> That donkey slash man, man slash donkey is freaking me the hell out.</comment>


Hospital in Naples, Italy, avoids coronavirus infection by staff - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/video/hospital-in-naples-italy-avoids-coronavirus-infection-by-staff-81480773935 <comment><AUTHOR> I had to see this video to understand what it means to walk about and to interact with those handling infected people. The scene where the nurse places the medicine in an isolation compartment closes the door and then has to dispose the glove made me realise how a virus can be an invisible enemy or attacker. It's in the air, it's on surfaces, it's exhaled and inhaled, the ventilation can move it around.</comment>


Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504 <comment><USER2> I'm... halfway. When I try, I can generate images, but I only do so occasionally. Most of the time, my thinking is exactly like the author describes. Facts, ideas, connections, hunches, intuitions, etc. The images are kinda like a serialization of this, no more: they have exactly the data I put into them, and not really any more "detail".

But what really blew my mind was when I realized that people think with words. Its always "have an idea, then attempt to serialize it into some approximation in the form of linear sentence or words". I mean, I can chose to speak a sentence in my head, but it is strange and artificial. But from what I hear from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?

<comment><USER3> I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't _not_ think in words. It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head. Brains are weird.

<comment><USER2> Do you know more then one language? I grew up bilingual from a young age, and I suspect that has something to do with the disconnect between ideas and words.

The simplest proof I have for the fact that I don't think in words is that I quite often forget a word, and can't complete a sentence. I know exactly what I want to express and have thought it through in my mind, but I can't tell it to someone else because I don't remember the serialization of that idea, and am forced to try to work around it by describing the word and hoping someone fills it in for me.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I also grew up to be bilingual from a young age, and I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with the words you already know from your first language, but in a way a toddler would, just by listening to it and maybe some reading.

After I began to think in English (my second language), I found that I wasn't speaking my first language anymore, I was just translating to it from my second one. And because the two weren't connected in my brain, I started frequently forgeting words and having trouble with phrasing.

<comment><USER5> > I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting > foreign words with the words you already know from your first language

Mildly off-topic, but I never realised until recently how much of a difference this can make. I've used French numbers far more, and for far longer, than I have Japanese numbers [0], but learning that way still results in me going "8 - that's eight, so its huit". Because I learnt the Japanese numbers through usage and without the deliberate English comparison, I go straight to "8 - hachi" without the intermediate step.

It's also weird to me that I can count backwards (say 10 to 1) far easier in Japanese than in French, probably for similar reasons.

[0] Note I'm a long way from fluent in either. I studied French at school, and have picked up a very small amount of Japanese through usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and > turquoise waves.

Yes, with great detail.

> If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing.

Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!)

> And mom's face? Of course.

Not at all!

I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind.

My experience with imagining faces: I get the overall head shape, hair... everything, but the features are blurry, wobbly, and kind of switch nonstop, like my imagined faces were made of constantly changing cutouts of a multitude of faces. It's disorienting.

I (think I) don't have any trouble recognizing people's faces. Sometimes I even remember strangers who I come across occasionally on my city... But I still struggle remembering/imagining the most familiar people around me.

Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER7> Try this:

Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face.

Does that make it easier? It does for me.

<comment><USER8> How did you stumble upon that trick?! That's amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions.

About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.

<comment><USER10> The question that kept coming to mind as I read this was how you compare different things?

For example, something as simple as: What is more blue? The sky or a lake?

Or, on a practical note, if you are designing software, do you have a good sense of color theory, to be able to select colors that will look good together, or do you have to put it on screen and do some trial and error?

Also, your concept of the "milk voice" was very alien to me. I don't think like that. My inner voice is my own voice, with full emotion and inflection.

<comment><USER9> I think I've stored basic information as to color degree, like "X is very dark blue" and "Y is light blue." I'd have to actually see the objects to settle a close contest.

Trial and error for matching colors.

Thanks for the insight on the "milk voice." You'd think by now I'd learn not to assume anything. I thought the "neutral inner voice" was universal.

<comment><USER11> > I thought the "neutral inner voice" was universal.

For me, most of the time, I don't have any kind of inner voice. I don't usually think in words; thinking is more like combining abstract symbols/feelings/concepts in a way that's more immediate and less linear than language.

<comment><USER9> Really?! That is fascinating to me. I am 100% language on the inside.

<comment><USER10> That begs another question - if you are doing something althletic (or even soemthing simple like driving a car), do you develop "muscle memory" the same as other people, or do you need to actually think through each motion you perform?

<comment><USER12> There was a study done a while back that looked at whether people could improve at video games by imagining themselves playing. IIRC the participants who imagined practicing showed a comparable amount of improvement in contrast to those who actually played. Can't find the link unfortunately.

<comment><USER13> Similarly I read once that during recovery from a trauma that prevents to do a particular physical activity if one imagines doing that activity, then it shorten the recovery time and leads to less muscle dystrophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a vulnerability, one I didn't know about until it happened.

Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban- bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.

And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed- out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce, single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and _I couldn 't code_, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.

Anybody else gone through this?

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry to hear you went through that. Did your abilities return once the course of antibiotics was completed?

<comment><USER14> Yep, it was just the fever that knocked it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody.

My wife, for example, _can 't process "left" and "right"_ without great effort.

She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take.

Even more confusingly, _she 's a very good navigator,_ much better than I! I process "left" and "right" like a "normal" person and yet I'm legendarily bad at finding my way while driving.

I've tried to get her to explain the left/right difficulty and it's hard for her to put into words, because of course how can you explain how your brain _doesn 't_ work? The most she's been able to say about it is that she understands what her "left arm" or "left foot" is but can't translate that to what my "left" is, or vice-versa.

Anybody else ever heard of or experienced anything like this?

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out relative left-right to other people.

Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".

<comment><USER18> I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy.

I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both _moves_ it and _turns it to face_ the same direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this "model" whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I'd picture myself in the third person, give myself an "origin point", and then visualize where I'd be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the origin.

(All this was without actually 'picturing' anything, in the traditional sense. Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it'll feel different when you're trying to add yaw if the "south" side of the cube is the one facing you, vs. the "east" side or the "bottom" side. Now imagine that the cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands. Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.)

One interesting effect of this is that I've found that I now get "acclimated" to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where _north_ is in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot while navigating, and so my "origin point" becomes fixed to North, such that I begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city, with streets running "up-down" instead of north-south and "left-right" instead of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of "I'm facing up" when I'm facing north.

On the other hand, when I'm in a city I _haven 't_ acclimated to, _man_ do I miss that sensation; I get _completely_ lost.

<comment><USER16> Very interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia survey embedded in the BBC article: [http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054). Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you take it and report your score?

The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none of the questions make sense to me (no image on any of them).

<comment><USER19> 8/40

I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in further research.

I'm a computer engineer.

Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?

<comment><USER20> So far I've found [https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/) but it's not very large (yet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery.

I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible.

And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually _see_ sheep when they did it. Do people really see sheep?

Notwithstanding my apparently poorly functioning mind's eye, I've never had any problem with spatial reasoning, and have scored +2sd in tests with a spatial ability component. I find myself able to "feel" the forms in a way that seems to have nothing to do with vision.

Does anybody else recognize this experience?

<comment><USER22> Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross' discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic. It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop and think of a sunset. The first sunset image I get is almost involuntary. For me it will be cliché, like a stock photo, but I can alter it, or add detail. (Other people may get fantasy landscapes or particular sunset memories).

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people they shared the space with.

<comment><USER21> There is a language problem here where it is impossible to be sure that when people describe subjective experiences in the same words they are actually having the same qualitative experience.

I don't take it too seriously. It's just a jumping off point for a conversation about an interesting perceptual quirk.

<comment><USER23> He says second monitor. My wife just said she sees as though her glasses are off at first. Very visual words from neilk and her both.

Unlike glasses or monitor, my "collections of attributes" when asked to actively generate a sense of things ("Picture X") seems more non-visual attributes.

Picture a chair: wood, cool to touch, weighs this much in the hand, makes a scraping noise when slid, fairly clean design with straight high back, no arms but indents for buttocks, sturdy, can be stood on to reach things. I just don't see an imaginary visual of one.

// I _can_ mentally/visually flip through an endless card deck of them, like nielk's Google Image Search example. I don't feel like I can visually put an imaginary one in an imaginary room in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surprised no one's linked this yet: SSC's "what universal human experiences are you missing out on without realizing it", which describes this phenomenon in particular:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human- ex...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences- are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/)

Basically, there are a lot of cases where people assume something is part of everyone's internal experience but which can be refuted with detailed, literal comparisons of your first person accounts.

For me, it was alcohol. I have never actually liked it, in the sense of "enjoying the sensation of drinking it". The best drinks to me are merely "bearable". I always assumed everyone was pretending as some excuse to get drunk.

</comment><comment><USER25> My wife has multiple sclerosis. Aphantasia is one of the complications she's experiencing. Without being able to visualize she's had to resort to using a notepad and paper to write everything down. She's always been creative and it's been very hard on her to come down with this.

<comment><USER26> Is it aphantasia or is it the general severe cognitive changes across many domains that usually accompanies MS?

<comment><USER25> We aren't sure. It took a long time before we associated a term to her issues. The tl;dr is she says she lost the picture in her mind. She cannot visualize anymore, which sounds like aphantasia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is very interesting!

I just realized that when I imagine things they are rather sketchy. For example, when I imaging a beach, it is very abstract. When I try to describe what present on it, I do not use an object from the picture, I first remember what could present on the beach like a left towel and then sort-of add it to the mental image.

In school I also had troubles with drawing. I could draw regular shapes like cubes, spheres or beams, but drawing an animal was a nightmare.

A probably related thing is that I do not get why people drink. I do it occasionally for a social aspect, but I do not remember that I ever experienced being more relaxed from it or having any special fun. I just feel more and more intoxicated :(

</comment><comment><USER27> As a child, my dad had the "Mega Memory" tapes around the house and I remember listening to them. Very early on in the lessons, the instructor talks about using basic association because we "think in pictures." As an example, he noted that if he said the word elephant, people picture an elephant, not the word "e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t." I must have been eight or nine at the time and remember being terribly confused because I couldn't really picture of an elephant in my head. I suspect I do have aphantasia to a certain degree.

Unlike the author, I do dream visually (in fact, I tend to have very vivid dreams; the most vivid ones are difficult to separate from reality, even if the subject matter is something fantastic like being part of an interstellar military or something). If I'm in a state between waking and sleeping I actually do have much more of a mind's eye, but when I'm fully awake I don't have pictures in my head...but I remember what it's like to visualize things mentally because of my dreams.

I have at least something of a "mind's ear" in that I can hear music in my head (the detail is usually not as rich; it's often just the melody with lyrics). Additionally, I have a very good memory for song lyrics and when I listen to music the concept of tuning out or not being extremely aware of the lyrics is something that friends I have described but that I rarely experience. I can usually only tune out lyrics in music if it's a song that I'm already very familiar with.

One aspect that I find interesting is that although I can't really picture places I still have spatial awareness in my mental concept of them. For example, if I remember one of the houses we lived in as a child I can "place" various objects in and around the house in their correct spatial relationships without picturing the objects themselves. Do other people with aphantasia also have this experience?

<comment><USER28> My experience is closer to yours than to the author of the original post.

1) I have a phonological loop and can easily imagine music.

2) My visuospatial sketchpad (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_memory)) is almost entirely spatial. I don't know the color of the floor in my kitchen, unless I paid attention to it specifically and verbally in the past. But I can use memory palace successfully.

3) I wonder if for me it's just an undeveloped habit which could be improved: I have dreams with pictures and colors once a few months, and sometimes I see pictures when I'm half asleep, but it's really hard to put myself into that state intentionally.

<comment><USER27> Interesting. I hadn't read about that model of working memory before but going through the article it does sound like we have similar experiences.

1) I also have a phonological loop - and would consider this the strongest part of my memory. I have a relatively easy time memorizing large volumes of text and my verbal aptitude on tests has always been extremely high. I also have an aptitude for foreign languages and enjoy studying them as a hobby.

2) I would agree. I could probably tell you the color of the floor of the kitchen where I'm currently living, but any past place would be difficult. I've experimented with a memory palace before so I believe it would work in theory but I haven't practiced enough to know for sure.

3) Sometimes I wonder this as well. I frequently have very vivid dreams and occasionally have flashes of things that I think are mental imagery but they're fuzzy and not something I can really do on demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There was a digression in another thread about this a little over a year ago, which was where I first learned of people-without-mental-imagery:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280134)

Notably, ~gwillen there pointed out Francis Galton's 1880 study of the matter – where he started with the idea that mental imagery was a hoax, as he himself did not experience it. His surveys convinced him that it was instead common, and that only ~3% of people lack it entirely – very close to the 2% estimate Ross passes along from a 2009 study.

So: still surprising people, but known for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER30> Lots of discussion last year about one of the sources:

      Aphantasia: A life without mental images (bbc.com)
      91 points by adamcarson 235 days ago | 75 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792)

</comment><comment><USER31> As someone without a mind's eye it's hard to imagine how much this "visualization" resembles normal vision. I remember from reading up on this earlier that some people can even superimpose things on an empty sheet of paper, or in the air. That would almost seem like a hallucination to me.

Key quote from the article IMO: " _I thought "counting sheep" was a metaphor._ " I've always thought the same way about daydreaming, only a few years ago did I realize it's actually something more precise than just 'not paying attention'.

<comment><USER32> Normal vision is your display, "mind's eye" is offscreen rendering/renderbuffer(s). Length, resolution, color depth, scene complexity varies by person. Not a part of your normal vision, just a readable/writable visual information in your brain. Can be overlaid into real world with some effort sometimes.

This topic is fascinating, what else some people have that others don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> And now I wonder what someone with aphantasia would see using psychedelic drugs, or while meditating... Still nothing ? Could that help ?

<comment><USER9> Meditating has never done anything for me visually. I thought the idea of "visualizing" while you meditate was just a figure of speech.

I haven't tried psychedelic drugs. Maybe I should start.

<comment><USER33> So you cannot visualize things while trying to but do you dream at night ?

About psychedelic drugs, it's not something I would advocate lightly as it has the potential to mess you up pretty badly. From my limited experience it was more like having my imagination on steroids so I wouldn't know what happens if there's nothing to enhance in the first place... That said I've never taken hardcore stuff like lsd or dmt where some people report having full visual hallucinations.

<comment><USER9> That's one of the FAQ's in the piece:

8\. Do you dream? No, or I don't recall them. I've had a couple dreams but there was no visual or sensory component to them. When I woke up, I just knew a list of "plot points" about things that happened. This is also how I digest fiction.

<comment><USER33> Ah thanks, I missed this one when reading the article. Some other commenter talks about having a coworker with aphantasia but still being able to dream so they may well be a whole spectrum of what people can / cannot visualize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > I do have the 'milk voice'—that flat, inner monologue that has no texture or > sound

Sorry to tell you this, but my inner monologue _does_ have texture and sound :P It sounds pretty close to my voice (or how I imagine my voice, I guess) and my inflections when speaking (even across languages). Even when I read other people's writings, I kinda hear myself in my mind.

> However, most of my friends and family describe what they "hear" as > music—not as vivid as the real thing, to be sure, and not as many > instruments—but "music" nonetheless.

That reminds me of an anecdote with my older brother: I was very young and I remember telling him I could hear music in my mind when I wanted to, just like if I pressed PLAY on a cassette player. He looked at me like I was crazy (note to self: test if he's aphantasic).

I still can, and (I think) I can reproduce it in high polyphonic detail (even details I don't consciously remember!) I perceive my aural imagination (aurination? audination?) as vivid as the real thing (though real sound kind of "overpowers" my imagination, like my imagination was playing through earphones close to my ears, not quite plugged in, but _inside_ my head!) It's much clearer than my visual imagination, which is more blurry and fleeting.

Maybe that's why I became an amateur musician :)

<comment><USER34> I think my visual imagination is quite detailed (I am a graphic designer) but I assume my aural imagination is pretty average. I can usually only imagine very basic melodies. However on many occasions, in the half sleep before waking, I have been able to aurally imagine multi layered music at a very detailed level, and it somewhat carries over for a few minutes after fully waking. I wish there was a way to tap into this during the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The last chapter in Oliver Sacks' book "The Mind's Eye" discusses this phenomenon and how people who became blind adapted and compensated. Highly recommend it. He suggests a phenomenon like this is primarily biologically predetermined.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow .. I am able to visualize things, but the part of this where he describes the work that it takes to 'chit-chat' is _exactly_ my experience. Right after we were married I had nearly that exact conversation with my wife. She would ask 'how was your day?' and I would be unable to answer. When she pressed, thinking that I was just grumpy or worse that I was withholding something, I would become frustrated, without really knowing why, and attempt to come up with something to tell her - but it was very much just a list of bullet points from the day. I was finally able to realize for myself and then communicate to her how incredibly difficult it is for me to both remember and then come up with an explanation for what I did (or even worse - 'how I'm feeling') today. It's gotten a little bit easier through practice, and she is much more understanding now. It's comforting to hear that experience from someone else. Chat-chat is absolutely abhorrent to me - I feel entirely incapable of participating in it. He quips about the social oddness of leaving a party for two hours to think up an answer to a simple friendly question - yup, I've done that.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thanks for sharing.

I'm also aphantasic and the fun part of reading this was the differences between our internal experiences. I have a great sense of direction and I love navigating and exploring new places.

I don't really have a mind's ear, either, just the "milk voice" as he calls it, although when I started studying Chinese and learning the tones, I had this crazy experience where I heard a melody in my head for the first time. Now I'd say I have something like a speaker that sometimes plays music, but I can't really control it. (Great, now I can get music stuck in my head.)

I have a similar experience with episodic memory, which is strange, because generally I have a great memory. In high school, I could read a chapter of a book and remember it word for word the next day (but my memory was not photographic!) I've always been deeply unsentimental and, instead of being sad about it, my attitude has always been "destroy the past to create the future."

</comment><comment><USER38> Not only can I imagine the beach, but sometimes I don't snap out of it until an hour (or more) later. At this point I have imagined an entire plot with myself as the main character and multiple other characters. The "movie" starts off at the imagined beach, including the bright sun making me squint, the feel of the sand under my feet, the smell of the salt water, etc. Next thing I know an hour (or more) has passed by. In this time I have befriended my fellow imaginary beach goers and joined them in defending the beach from a zombie invasion.

I had a similar experience to the author. Except that it was when I learned that not everyone experiences these intense fantasies. I experience a psychological concept known as Maladaptive Daydreaming. I find it difficult, and at times impossible, to stop visualizing through my minds eye.

</comment><comment><USER39> The test seems nearly useless. What's the difference between "moderately clear" and "reasonably clear"? Seems like a test subject would need to be prepared quite thoroughly with image and video examples to define the available options.

<comment><USER40> I believe the test is an attenuated version of one use in real psychological research, the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1], and has proved to have predictive power. E.g. the scores people give correspond with the level of activity seen in their brains when they undergo MRI scans, so although vague, it isn't "useless" in that sense.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I used to have a lot of trouble with this. It didn't help having the terminology 'visualisation' which makes it feel like you're not doing it right if you don't 'see' something.

It's something you can work on by using your other senses for instance rather than trying to see something, concentrate on what it feels like, or the sounds or the smells. e.g. To picture a beach feel the sand in your toes, the breeze on your face, the noise of the waves or the smell of the salt air.

If you can concentrate with that in your mind instead I find a picture will then quite often form. Especially true if you take the time to quieten your mind first (e.g yoga, breathing techniques, meditation etc).

</comment><comment><USER42> Wait, so people can actually _see_ things in their head? Like the author, I was convinced this was a metaphor/figure of speech... Actually, I'm still a bit skeptical about whether any of this is true.

I have a sense of how things are located spatially and can recall features of things I have verbally described to myself, but there is no way I can _see_ anything that's not before my eyes.

Not sure if that's related, but I have a very bad sense of direction, especially when driving. I'll need to take the same route a dozen of times before I can stop relying on my GPS.

<comment><USER40> Skepticism is healthy, but there is an overwhelming body of evidence that visual imagination is real. Even if you don't take people's testimony as proof, MRI scans demonstrate that areas of the brain associated with visual processing engage when people imagine visually. Disbelieving all of this simply because it doesn't match with your own personal experience of mind is bordering on arrogance.

I do think visual imagination varies greatly, even amongst those who have it. Mine is not particularly strong — everything I imagine is very "shadowy" and ill-defined, but nonetheless it is there. It is hard to describe such an intangible phenomenon, but imagining/remembering visually feels qualitatively different from imagining/remembering facts, sounds, words, etc.

For example, I can imagine the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, and when I do, I "see" the painting in my mind. This imagined image is far from clear or sharp, more like a fuzzy ghost of the original. Also, the imagined image is separate from the sensory input I'm receiving from my eyes. I don't see the van Gogh painting plastered over whatever I'm looking at. Instead, it's as if the two images coexist in my conscious awareness, although it takes a deliberate effort to maintain the imagined one, and the image from my eyes is much stronger and clearer. Closing my eyes can help me focus more easily on the imagined image.

My dreams are similarly lo-fi, visually speaking. The best way I can describe is that everything in my dreams is very poorly lit. It's like being in a darkened room, where you can see objects, but can't make out their details. This tends to frustrate me, and I often spend a lot of my time in dreams trying to address the problem by reaching some more brightly lit environment, and then getting confused as to why I still cannot see properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think either most people are exaggerating about their ability to visualize or I have this impediment to a degree. My mental "images" are extremely faint, distant, wavering, ghost-like. Any parts I'm not focused on immediately poof away. Definitely can't conjure up a whole scene and explore it. But at least it's something.

The reason I think people may be exaggerating is because there are very few people with the artistic or mechanical aptitude that I would have if I could produce stable and detailed mental images at will. Also, police sketches.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have a problem that sounds similar to this. But instead of visualizing, I have problems remembering events. I usually remember events "out of order", perhaps like recording 30-second videos and storing them randomly ordered. For example, if someone asks me if I have breakfast this morning, I might recall a certain breakfast, and then struggle trying to figure out whether that was today's breakfast or yesterday's. This becomes very frustrating when people ask me "What did you do today?"

</comment><comment><USER45> Einstein and Feynman claimed to think in vivid mental images. Are there examples of people who have _exceptional_ mathematical ability with aphantasia?

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through practice? My own mental images tend to be dim and fuzzy, far from the photorealistic scenes some people seem to be able to conjure up. But I wonder if there's a feedback effect here, where people whose visual imagination is stronger to begin with tend to use it more, thus further strengthening it, while people whose visual imagination starts off weaker use it less, and so it remains weak, or gets worse.

It would seem like learning to draw or paint might be a good way to train visual imagination. As I understand it, many artists begin by mastering representative art based purely on reference models, then later develop to produce works partly or wholly inspired by mental imagery.

I'm curious if anyone here who learnt to draw or paint during adulthood experienced a corresponding increase in the vividness of their mental images, particularly in areas not directly related to drawing? E.g. did your dreams become more vivid? Are you more able to imagine the specific details of your house, or your friends and family? Do your mental images feel "clearer" or more defined?

<comment><USER21> > I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through > practice?

There are various meditative and esoteric practices based on exactly that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Weird. This explains a lot of my abilities much better than hightened IQ or something like that. The test, which basically asks you multiple versions of "how clear can you picture X", told me I'm in the top 20% of people with Hyperphantasia, although I might misjudge my experience greatly.

Being able to quickly and accurately create mental models is essential to most of my workflows.

Now I really regret not having learned drawing.

<comment><USER47> Just learn now. But be aware that observational drawing is a different skill than illustrating your "phantasy" mental images.

In the second category, the engineer Elmer Sperry apparently had a serious facility for visualizing machinery, and would hold out a pen and paper to "just draw a line around it". It's mentioned in Eugene Ferguson's book Engineering and the Mind's Eye: [https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onep...](https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment> Smircio- This is fascinating. I have to test every single person in my life. I know my wife already has synesthesia so I'd assume she also can conjure up images at will, but who knows. I've heard of people who have no inner monologue, but never people who have no mind's eye! I wonder how common it really is? Thanks for this article.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm exactly the opposite. Everything in my head is an image. When I do math, I'm manipulating shapes, connections, colors. The space seems to be higher dimensionally, as things can be close and far depending on how I'm "gazing" through the space. While I can visualize systems as I might see them, I can also visualize them topologically. That's basically how I write code. I can "see" the path of operation through a ghostlike view. But only a few paths are in focus at any one time. Focus is not a great way to describe it, as it's not like the optical effect of focus. It's more like being able to feel a tension on a path. The path's I'm "seeing" are tight and the one's I'm not seeing, are still there but I have no "purchase" on them until I follow them.

The way I do calculations used to drive my teachers nuts in grade school. But my systems always worked. I do addition and subtraction as complements, which is how I see them. I do multiplication and division by what I can only describe as folding number lines. Individual numerals have colors and sounds, and what I can only describe as personalities. That is, in base 10. In other bases numbers seem boring and flat. I'm not sure what to make of that. What if I'd been raised using octal or hex? Binary makes me nervous.

I make my living as an illustrator and animator, I've been doing CGI since the late 1970s. I've tried to draw some of these things, but when I try and project them into 2D, I can only get what to most people seems nonsensical. But if I close my eyes or concentrate they are visible inside my head. I don't try and do this very much anymore, because I've found that sometimes this "breaks" the system and I can't see it anymore.

My dreams are very visual. Often my dreams are multi-threaded, with several plots and sets of characters. I'm often more than one person in the dream, or sometimes not present at all. I generally remember the dreams as a linear thing, but they are often connected and "inside" the dreams they seem simultaneous. I've no idea how to describe the experience better than that. When I was very young I used to have terrifying dreams that I can only describe as geometric. Things seemed connected in dangerous or threatening ways.

As I've gotten older, I've found that I have to work on problems with more consecutive steps. When I was younger I could "fold" several operations at once.

</comment><comment><USER49> I experience something similar but different in my ability to recognise Chinese characters.

When I see a Chinese character I immediately know what it means.

But beyond the most simple characters I cannot summon them into my mind.

As an example, I cannot hope to handwrite them.

I guess this is the difference between recognition and recollection.

</comment><comment><USER50> the unmangled link to Penn's podcast is here and actually starts at about the 75 minute mark:

[http://cdn46.castfire.com/audio/522/3454/25338/2512630/penn-...](http://cdn46.castfire.com/audio/522/3454/25338/2512630/penn-15-06-28-ss- mp3_2015-06-28-180830-7770-0-6421-2.64k.mp3?cdn_id=46&uuid=e7c85533317f374b699565f40c175f4c&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fpennsundayschool.com%2Fepisodes%2F)

</comment><comment><USER51> Is it strange for me to wish I had aphantasia? This sounds like a blissful condition.

<comment><USER4> What exactly makes this condition appeling to you. I, personally, think it would be a big downside to life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hmm I wonder if this will drastically affect his spatial reasoning abilities.

</comment><comment><USER26> The conclusion is a little confusing. If his mother Dorianne is also a member of 'Aphantasiacs Anonymous', why does he quote a chat log where she claims to see stuff all the time?

<comment><USER9> Hm I guess I didn't make that clear. Doriane is just another friend of mine, not my mother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I take it from the article that this would solve one of my biggest internal issues: songs getting stuck in my head. It's gotten so bad in recent years that I don't listen to music _at all_ , because it may stimulate a "earwig" that will not stop.

<comment><USER18> AFAIK, we've long solved this one: a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure"—trying to complete a pattern. You likely heard the beginning of the song, and that set off your mind trying to remember the rest, but you can't remember the ending, so it just keeps spinning on it.

The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as you've _given_ your mind closure on the pattern, get your mind out of the rut of analyzing the pattern by listening to something else (also to completion.)

More precisely, the experience of having a song stuck in your head is strongly analogous to the experience of having been half-told a joke. You've sort of allocated a mental context buffer and it's waiting around to receive the rest of the context, so that it can then evaluate the 'punchline'. The simplest way to discard the buffer ("ruin the joke") is to just get the punchline early, without the rest of the context. If you go through a bit of music theory, you can recognize a song as a pattern of building and releasing tension. You could actually _just_ listen to the part of a song that finally releases the tension—closes the matching parenthesis to the opening one your mind is stuck on—and that would do the trick. Listening to the _whole_ song is just easier.

<comment><USER54> > a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure".

I usually turn off my car's stereo only at the end of musical phrases for just this reason. This phenomenon happens _a lot_ to me.

There is a song, stuck in my head since a little over a decade ago, which ends with a fade out, not providing any closure at all.

It still pops up occasionally, but fortunately I can usually override it by recalling any of a number of favorite other song loops I have collected through the years and haven't gotten tired of yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Noteleaf Now Shows Full LinkedIn Info for 2nd & 3rd Degree Connections - <AUTHOR> http://noteleaf.posterous.com/noteleaf-now-shows-full-linkedin-info-for-2nd

<comment><USER2> Sadly, I can see recruiters abusing the hell out of this. I hope they have an opt out.

<comment><USER3> The control still lies within your linkedin account. Information about 2nd and 3rd degree contacts through the API is more limited than what you can see by visiting someone's linkedin profile page. We were able to have our API access come to the same level as web access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jake, Wil, you're crushing it.

I still want you to fix my email problems, though... :)

<comment><USER3> I think email will be an eternal well of problems to solve, and hence, startup ideas. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would I need to know someone before I meet them?

Also, what if I don't want 2nd or 3rd degree connections to know my extended profile information. Is there anyway to tell LinkedIn to not provide this data to 3rd parties?

<comment><USER6> Clearly you don't do much business development. Since the goal is to build a relationship, this information can come in handy. Maybe you both worked with the same person, attended the same school, enjoy the same activities, or perhaps you learn of a few pieces of information that it makes sense to steer clear of.

It's incredibly useful.

<comment><USER7> "Also, what if I don't want 2nd or 3rd degree connections to know my extended profile information. Is there anyway to tell LinkedIn to not provide this data to 3rd parties?"

Not everyone uses linkedin because they want to do business development. If anything, I find that the service is counterproductive. My info is there merely so that business acquaintances can contact me without having to give my real email address.

<comment><USER7> To the person who downvoted this and the grand-parent reply: why?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Empathic Futures – Exploring human-machine relationship - monika-bansal http://www.empathicfutures.com <comment><AUTHOR> "The rapid emergence of intelligent systems is fundamentally changing our society.

Empathic Futures is a research experiment by FELD studio for digital crafts and Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe that explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and human behaviour to develop 'Empathic Intelligence'."

This really is a load of nonsense.

Until machines developed self awareness there can be no 'intelligence' and humans cannot develop a relationship with a machine, as any relationship would be a fantasy in the mind of the human until a machine develops self awareness.</comment>