Heh. I can clearly not visualise this thread.  

Hm I have this but I can read fantasy fiction - you don't need to visualise it!

What a really interesting article. 

I’ve read about the way some people see numbers and music in colour at one extreme but not consideration of the other end of this spectrum. 

Mrs P can draw very well and dreams very vividly. She reads slowly because she’s so distracted by the image that builds in her mind of what she’s reading. 
I am hopeless at drawing, read very quickly and never remember my dreams. I am very poor at facial recognition. She never forgets a face. 

Indeed if she needs to visualise a book how can she ever read fiction? Sounds like a genre discrimination situation to me.

I don’t even dream visually. 

Which according to that article makes me odd even for a standard wrong un 

Interesting piece.

I do not suffer this.

My dreams are not really visual either. Occasional lunging senses of movement.

I can’t remember my dreams at all. Never have done. Sometimes a vague memory just as I wake up. 

Stru do you conform to any of the aphantasic traits?

I am definitely further towards hyperphantasia. I have very vivid dreams (can still remember last night’s) and sometimes carry the emotions with me for ages after I wake up. I can get lost in very vivid day dreams, too. It means I remember whole swathes of film dialogue, particularly the intonation of things. 

My dreams are not really visual either. Occasional lunging senses of movement.

……

Same.

I always get the one where I am thrown into the sky and feel like I am flying and I reach the apogee.. there is a pause … during which my heart starts racing and my adrenaline kicks in.., and then I start falling back.

then..

BANG. Wide awake. Everytime. 
 

But the whole dream is the physical sensation of being thrown, the pause and then the start of the fall. 
 

“unless you can see something with your eyes, it's not there." 

So much for the enlightenment 

I guess the one really good thing about this condition is that you literally can’t have this one… imagine having permanent closed captions for everything in your brain.

Is it weird that the first question I had about this was … in what font? 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-synesthesia-transforms-sp…

this must be really frustrating when you are alone and don't have any "adult" material to visualise to take up that alone time.

Fascinating condition.

Wow! I have this, @scylla. Thank you for posting that link.  I had a vague sense that it was a childhood habit I had somehow not shaken off.  I used to have it always.  Now I can suppress it except when stressed.

To answer your font question.  Varies a bit. Something like Garamond when small.  When large, sans serif, but certainly not comic sans.  I have been spared the worst.

I hope this comes with some undiscovered superpower/ lucrative support system / bragging rights. I have never been able to articulate the issue so never made anything of it. Vaguely blamed children's BBCs 'Magic Pen'

I'll tell you what is worst though.  When you are poised to say a word and realise you can't spell it.  Incoherent gabble ensues. Also, can't use PowerPoint for fear of mixed signals but that is a blessing.

 But - the more confident I became with speaking up in groups, then public speaking, the less this happened.

It worked less as closed captions, more autocue. The written word had to appear first.

Perhaps because I'm a very visual person, I find this really hard to understand. Reading any sort of fiction must be very challenging for them. 

I think I'm like Dusty. 

One of the NSTAAF podcast team James Harkin has this and it gets mentioned quite often on the show.  It is indeed QI.

I am very bad at visualising images when I read, but I have never experienced  that as a problem.  I have a colleague who sees the entire architecture/ landscape as he reads, and I always think it would be a terrible distraction.

Back when that stuff about learning styles was popular, I could never get past the "visual learner" paradox. Images did very little for me. But I consumed text 

My sense is that text is about encoding, in this context, not just seeing.

Wow Tilnet. 

I didn’t expect for anyone on here to have that. 

Thanks for answering my questions about font.  Does the font and size of it change due to … emotion?  Volume? Subject? Source of noice? 

Brains are so weird. 

One thing I have always wondered about from my own condition..

Is whether or not this is related to my absolute non response to punctuation. 

When I read I don’t even see the punctuation.  It conveys absolutely no meaning to me. There is no stop inside my head. 

Does your auto cue come with punctuation? And does incoming words also get text treatment in your brain? 

Thanks @Scylla

Larger when more stressed / conscious of it.

When it happens with my thoughts in the dark it is huge and deep purple or fiery orange on black. It does not happen with daytime thoughts unless I switch it on.  Then it looks like a cheap paperback.

It is always printed or painted. Never handwritten.

I went through a few weeks once of dreaming in text (though in the dreams I was reading the text). That was handwritten and written in the language I was studying (probably too intensively) at the time.

It is both an advantage and an enormous disadvantage in language learning.  I must know how to write it.  So I am useless until I'm quite good.

I have different fonts for different languages but they work with the conventions for those languages, and I suspect are influenced by the way I first saw the words.  

Source of noise is nearly always me.  I can switch it on for other people if I care to, but my own spoken words and thoughts are where it happens involuntarily.  Emotions - it has a calming effect on my so I think it is also a reaction to stress.  No connection with big emotions that I can recall.

@scylla

Normally no punctuation, you are quite right. Well things like the apostrophe in it's and don't. Nothing else. I think no capitalisation except where it's invariable, as in names. But then we speak far less in sentences than we think, so punctuating speech would be weird in many ways.

The words appear one at a time or in small clusters.  My mind doesn't have the widescreen capacity for sentences, I suppose, so punctuation stops mattering.

So do you hear words when you read them? I do and that is where punctuation makes a difference to me.

So do you hear words when you read them?

….

They are like a silent internal narrative in the complete black/grey void of ny mind.

Exactly the same way all my thoughts happen.   

They are like a silent internal narrative in the complete black/grey void of ny mind.

Exactly the same way all my thoughts happen.   

..

That sounds restful and probably more efficient than some sort of shadow of your other senses constantly muscling in.

Does it stop you from enjoying a novel? I see the disadvantages of "face blindness", and of a lack of visual memory.  Mine is also very poor, apart from text. But I don't understand the problem the woman in the article is referring to with reading.

It does make me think how little we know about minds and education.  So easy to assume what works for us works for everyone.