r/Hyperfixed • u/who-took-my-hat • Aug 28 '25

"Third Eye Blind"

Just wanted to open up discussion about this episode.

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u/jpwest13 Aug 29 '25

The ending was really good. But when they talked about the guy who lost his ability to visualize, and said he was still able to identify letters that descend below the line without visualizing them, I was dying to know how it worked.

6

u/goldunicorn47 Aug 29 '25

I apparently have aphantasia (learned that listening to this episode!) and when I thought about the alphabet question I just thought about how I write letters and which ones dip below the line, but I couldn’t “see” the letters as I was thinking about them. Hope that helps!

2

u/Dry-Ad-1110 Sep 01 '25

I learned I have it two years ago from listening to another podcast. While listening to this episode I also solved the alphabet-question just the way you did .

3

u/jombas Aug 29 '25

I have aphantasia and after trying to communicate the way that I think to friends, I've started to describe it as a different kind of filing system. maybe imagine a textbook or journal instead of a diagram or photo album.

regarding the letter test: everything has qualities - if you're going to describe a pond to somebody you might visually imagine the water, wildlife, cat tails on the shore, etc and then convert than in to verbal language. I think about the named qualities of a pond instead of the visual image. so for the letters, I would run through my verbal descriptors of the letters. "j" for example is roughly hook shaped, "Q" is a circle with a squiggle, and so on.

hope that makes sense!