One of the most important details of Sacks's life which dogged him nearly to the end (and which is important to this NY piece), was a minimization by Sacks of his own sexuality. He was not "openly gay" at all.
If it's something I'm capable of figuring out, then I'll just know the answer (and I guess I'm pretty good at this sort of thing). I recognize that that's a terrible non-explanation but I can't explain what's happening outside of my awareness. I'm just good with spatial problems. I can't /visualize/ a damn thing but that doesn't appear to be necessary.
I don't know why I'm surprised every time to see so many people astounded in the comments every time another of these articles come out. I guess I thought by now this phenomenon would be more common knowledge... I'm a non-seer and a non-self speaker. That is, I do not have any clear monologue whatsoever, nor can I visualize anything at all. However, I have a pretty great memory, just not for the experience of things, but instead only the circumstances, the trivia, the conclusions, and all of those can be very granular.
Words exist for me in the space beyond my lips, or my fingertips; what that feels like, in the moment, is that it is the act of externalization of words which makes them come into being, but not for a moment are they ever out of my control.
I can't remember the sound of my mother's voice. Not really. Of course if I heard it in a recording it would be as recognizable as any voice, and in fact when I watch animated shows, like classic King of the Hill for example, I'm extremely good at picking out all the celebrity voices and I'm often surprised that I can identify a voice I didn't know that I knew.
I used to have an internal monologue. I used to be able to picture things. That all went away in my teens. Not only can I somewhat remember what that was like, I'm able to experience vivid internal pictures and internal sounds sometimes in the moments just before I'm fully asleep. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it's enjoyable when it does.
And that's it. If you have any questions for thisaphantasic non-self-speaker, have at it.
Well, I have another question further down to another guy about how he imagines sex, I guess you can answer that as well.
But also, how do you solve math problems? Often the you need to draw a graph and look at some crossing points. For me, I can conjure up a video in my mind similar to 3B1B, and I use that to think about the problem. It can even get complicated enough that it would take me a while to draw on paper. How do you solve such problems?
Not the person you asked, but as someone who also cannot see mental images at all I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "imagines sex". I don't really imagine sex and self-gratification is usually not worth it without visual aids. The times I pull from memory, it's more about the overall experience rather than visualizing anything specific.
As far as math goes, I've always been pretty good at it. I generally don't think about graphs at all in mathematics. That's something I associate with learning math more than I associate it with "doing math". The only time I'm reaching for more complicated math is in a computer science context so I'm rarely trying to solve anything other than arithmetic or rough approximations in my head.
What does memory even mean though, if you cannot recall the video of what happened? I find it hard to fathom you can recall an experience without replaying the sensory impressions you got. It's almost definitional, isn't it? To remember something that happened to you is to be able to re-experience it.
What is it like to read fiction? Tolkien’s writing comes to mind as a good example: many passages of Lord of the Rings are detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Are these types of works just not enjoyable?
Not the GP, but I find it hard to even respond to your question. The whole framing seems unrelatable, but I can try to read between the lines to understand your intention. Normally, my mental experience does not include anything that feels like questions nor answers, nor other words really. Being verbal is almost like climbing into my verbal mecha-suit and piloting it for a while, which I am doing right now to type this post.
In summary, there is no sense for me in posing a question and casting an answer. I either know or don't know. I can't communicate with myself to expose things. To do so feels like trying to act out (while rolling my eyes) some classroom exercise on the Socratic method, which feels as artificial as one of those team-building corporate retreat games.
When I am actually trying to choose something, there is just the fleeting feeling of doing a little "path search" or simulation into my future. This is not likely to involve any awareness of words, unless I take an extra effort to meta-think and verbalize. If I wanted to explain to my wife what I am thinking about, I could deliberately force myself to articulate it. I could stop short of speaking that, and have a sense of the intended words without a sense of speaking, hearing, nor communicating.
Me naturally trying to "ask myself" what to do is more like directly simulating a future and which way I will go at the fork. I don't think words "left or right". Instead, I can feel the branch and whether I am going to innately go one way or the other. I could even feel myself hesitate there with indecision or ambivalence. I mean this metaphorically.
If I literally think about travel, it is less like a first-person simulation and more like flipping through a set of routes or destinations. It's not a visual map nor a first-person vista, but an innate understanding of place and/or manner of movement. For a walk or day hike, I don't see options, but I feel a sense of topology, topography, relative effort, and even accompanying qualia. Whether it is an out-and-back or loop, whether it feels like closed-in canyons or open hillside or steep cliffs...
For driving, I would similarly feel the shape of the route and the important bits like congestion, bridges or tunnels, mountain passes, or a tricky freeway interchange.
For airplane travel, I might have a fleeting sense of the geographic distance, but mostly I would think about logistical elements like ground transport, airport terminals, and duration of the air phase. Or I might think more on the people and social contexts.
For something abstract, like how I should set my retirement investment allocation, I'm not going to think words like "SP500 vs REIT vs i-bonds". I feel the different buckets and also feel a sort of weighted distribution like a branching river. Or more likely, a hazy maelstrom of risks and uncertainties in this case.
For something very concrete and near-term, like am I getting a snack from the cupboard or bypassing it and getting tea, it almost feels pre-motor. Which way am I moving through the kitchen as premonition. Similarly, if I'm pondering how to dress for an errand, I am almost feeling the particular pants, shoes, or jacket in the expected environment. Or I'm stuck in front of the closet, not knowing what to grab...
You pretty well describe my experience as well. So much of recall for me is "just knowing" and already having the mental "thing" at hand in the moment (rather than starting with any perceptible intention) and I do wonder if our kind of thinker might end up more devastatingly affected by age/illness-related memory issues because we simply take for granted /just knowing/.
No idea. I'm still in the middle of shepherding parents through dementia, and I can only hope that it can be delayed and then come all at once if it must come at all.
I think I'd be ok with shifting into a catatonia of non-knowing and non-intention, the basic metastability and paralysis I have always known at times.
I think it would beat the paranoia, confusion, and recriminations I saw in one parent. Or the apparently chaotic internal dialogue/chorus of the other who seems to fluidly conflate imagination with conversation and visitation.
I don't want to ever feel like facts are being beamed into my head, that people I remember are "behind me" and doing my actions for me, or inverting cause and effect and thinking that my fears are putting my loved ones in danger.
I am also aphantasic and have no internal monologue. I never had them as far as I know. When I heard that kids could have "imaginary friends" I thought it sounded totally absurd. I equated it with my schizophrenic relative who hallucinates and suffers delusions.
Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except for some spatial or topological feeling.
I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel a subset of recognition features are present or there is something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct triggering on the recognizable features.
I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective. I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger was a very disturbing perspective shift.
I didn't know Nissans were known for being unreliable; my first car was a hand-me-down Sentra that ran smoothly till I sold it at ~220k. I've owned three cars since, I think the worst was a used Elantra that I just put out to pasture at 198k. Persistent electronic issues and terribly uncomfortable on the passenger side. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was an asking price of 10k to repair a faulty airbag sensor. Hoping the RAV4 that replaced it will live up to its reputation.
Car reliability can vary so much. Some vendors have a deserved reputation for overall quality (Toyota) where issues are usually the exception (accepting the fact that issues can always happen). Others used to have terrible reputations, but are much better now (most of the Korean brands). Some have varying QA issues, depending on model, shifting suppliers, factory, etc (GM, Stellantis). Some can mostly be reliable, but when they do break it’s expensive (VW). Sometimes the car vendor is good, but the dealer you’re at can make all the difference.
That being said, you’ll always meet somebody burned by a particular vendor (or their dealer), then swear off them forever. We’re also going through a huge shift in the market with the rise of electrification and China. In some ways electric cars can me even more reliable with fewer moving parts. In other ways the software matters more and batteries replacements can be even more expensive than a new engine in a traditional car.
Sometimes you can link the bad years of a generally reliable vendor to a new part e.g. the first year they might have introduced a 10-speed transmission.
These first years are scary.
Some vendors don’t seem to change major parts as often, which helps their reliability.
/Up to 1000 charge cycles/ is a big damper on the excitement, for me. Does anyone know if a limitation like that is inherent to the chemistry here or is this something that they could potentially (hopefully, vastly) surpass?
That's a comparable rating to the NMC Lithium cells used in an electric car, yet an EV can typically get > 200,000 miles from their cells. A charge cycle is defined as 0% -> 100% -> 0%. If you never do that, you get a lot more effective charge cycles.
Edit:
That's not the full explanation. 300 miles of range for a typical EV * 1000 cycle rating gives 300,000 mile rating.
You likely charge a lot more than 1000 times over those 300,000 miles, but a partial charge counts as a partial cycle.
It should be said that at that point you don’t have very many charge cycles left after the capacity drops below 80%, and the capacity will drop a lot faster for every charge cycle after that point.
I don’t have exact numbers.. based on graphs I’ve seen I would guess that if the original cycle life was 1000 cycles you may have another 500 cycles until the battery is actually unusable. But it probably depends a lot on the specific chemistry and how the car is used.
A study[1] was recently posted[2] which found that for lithium-ion batteries, dynamic use lead to much better battery life compared to fixed-current discharges which is typically used in labs to determine battery life.
From the paper: Specifically, for the same average current and voltage window, varying the dynamic discharge profile led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of life.
This tracks well with actual real-world data on BEV battery performance in cars with decent battery management.
