u/Tuikord

Saturday, I promoted to 5th degree blackbelt in Hapkido. It was part of an international seminar that had been announced in the works for a year. When it became clear that we would be using the presence of high-level people to do a bunch of upper-dan promotions, it was not clear to me that I would promote. Some others were obvious to me, but my promotion was not.

Afterwards, a couple of the leaders of my school told me about the decision to promote me. I was one of the first persons they knew deserved promotion. Evidently, many people had told them that my welcoming them to the school made the difference in them staying. And many commented on how important my work with them was to their progress. That same day, one of our 1st-degree blackbelts who had come for the promotions gave me a card expressing how important I had been to her.

What is the point to this? I continue to underestimate my impact on people.

Why am I posting it here? I won't say that SDAM causes this misperception, but I do think it sets it up for me. My base understanding of memory comes from personal experience which is SDAM. I don't expect people to remember the person who made them feel welcome. I am always pleasantly surprised when someone remembers me. I had met one of the event teachers at a previous seminar and done some practice with him. He is as far above me in skill (equivalent of a 9th degree blackbelt, although his system is different) as I am above a white belt. But he remembered me and warmly congratulated me on my promotion.

I figured this out 5 years ago when I learned about SDAM, but it seems I still underestimate my impact on people.

I recently had to replace some hinges on a medicine cabinet. My wife and I got it all set up. These were snap in hinges, so we didn't need to hold the heavy door while screwing it in place. Just catch a hook on each hinge on a bar mounted in the cabinet, then push part of the hinge down to clip into place. Very simple. I showed each part to my wife. She could not do it! She complained that she couldn't see the hook or the bar with the rest of the hinge in the way. And she was not strong enough to hold the door for me.

So, I had my son come over to help out. I showed him everything and held the door for him to clip them into place. He couldn't do it either! He had the same complaint that he couldn't see to get the hook on the bar.

Then I had him hold the mirror and very quickly I lined up the hinges, pushed the hooks against the bars and clipped the hinges in place. I didn't look for the hook or the bar. I lined the two parts up, pushed until it felt like the hook was set and then clipped the other part on. Easy-peasy.

So why am I posting this here? Both my wife and son are imagers. They both complained that they couldn't see the connection they had visualized. I didn't bother with seeing that connection. It was hidden. But I knew how the system worked and put parts where they needed to be. I do believe that their dependence on visuals was at least part of their failure to execute. I was not hindered by the lack of visual feedback. People are always looking for benefits, so I thought I'd post about this.

From time to time someone here will ask about the experience of blind people with visualization. I recently ran across a study from 2005 which sheds some light on this. They looked at people who could see at birth and became blind, broken into two groups, early blind (EB) and late blind (LB, teens or later). They compared with people who could see. They looked at visualizing various objects, changing the image, moving toward an object, and estimating both size of image and distance to the object.

TL;DR - visual imagery depends on seeing things or having seen things.

While there were some differences, the LB group performed about the same as people who currently could see. The EB group had significant differences. Some of the group said it made no sense to ask about the apparent size of an object at different distances because the same object always looked the same size.

(99+) The role of visual experience in mental imagery

There was another study I don't have right now which looked at the visual perception of congenitally blind people who gained their sight. They could not recognize objects without touching them and similar to the previous study, they did not associate size change with distance change. So even if they had some form of visualization, it did not map to what we see with our eyes.

I've known for a couple year that Jaymin Eve has aphantasia. She is an author I like. She just decided it was time again to mention aphantasia to her Facebook group and she added that she has no internal monologue. I thought those here might find it interesting. If you want to check her out, I'd suggest starting with the Supernatural Prison series, stating with Dragon Marked. I think all of her works are fantasy or urban fantasy with romance. The Supernatural Prison series has fairly low romance and spice, so is accessible to more. Some of her other books get quiet spicy.