Aphantasia

Author : Alan Kendle
Publisher : Dark River
ISBN 13 : 9781911121428
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aphantasia written by Alan Kendle and published by Dark River. This book was released on 2017 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Close your eyes and picture a sunrise. For the majority of people, the ability to visualize images - such as a sunrise - seems straightforward, and can be accomplished 'on demand'. But, for potentially some 2% of the population, conjuring up an image in one's mind's eye is not possible; attempts to visualize images just bring up darkness. Although identified back in the 19th century, Aphantasia remained under the radar for more than a century, and it was not until recently that it has been rediscovered and re-examined. It has become clear that Aphantasia is a fascinating and often idiosyncratic condition, and typically more complex than the simple absence of an ability to visualize. People with the condition - Aphants - commonly report effects upon their abilities to recreate sounds, smells and touches as well; many also struggle with facial recognition. Paradoxically, many Aphants report that when they sleep, their dreams incorporate colour images, sound, and the other senses. Put together by lead author Alan Kendle - who discovered his Aphantasia in 2016 - this title is a collection of insights from contributors across the world detailing their lives with the condition. It offers rich, diverse, and often amusing insights and experiences into Aphantasia's effects. For anyone who wishes to understand this most intriguing condition better, the book provides a wonderful and succinct starting point. Foreword by Professor Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology, University of Exeter

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aphantasia written by and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aphantasia is derived from the Greek word "phantasia", which translates to "imagination", and the prefix "a-", which means "without.Mental Sensory Perception or MSP, is the ability to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in one's mind (Don't bother googling MSP, I coined the term 5 minutes ago).Aphantasia is a mental condition characterized by an inability to voluntarily visualize mental imagery or to recall sounds, smells, tastes, or sensations of touch; the individual simply doesn't have mental sensory perception. What!? Most people walk around with the ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch in the minds?Wait...some people can't see, hear, smell, taste and touch in their minds?Are you kidding? Whether you do or don't have mental sensory perception, most people don't even realize this is a real "thing" and "discover" Aphantasia by accident? And why isn't Mental Sensory Perception a common term? ESP is but MSP isn't? How about we put MSP in the psychology books, at least then people can ask questions, like, for instance, "what is it?". We have all heard the term Extra Sensory Perception or ESP, rejected by the science community almost entirely for lack of physical evidence. It is a condition completely based on anecdotal evidence yet is considered our sixth sense. MSP is literally a sixth sense. Mental Sensory Perception is a real ability that is as mysterious and unexplained as ESP but it is based on a factual "unacknowledged" ability unlike ESP which is a suspected "extra" ability. Having MSP absolutely is an "extra" sensory perception precisely because about 2% of the world population doesn't have this ability and just about all of them were born this way.That about sums up the general state of understanding for people that come to learn about Aphantasia. It is really quite the riddle. Some people simply do not have mental sensory perception. But why do we call people that don't have MSP a name that means without imagination? Everyone with this condition has an imagination, they just can't "see, hear, smell, taste, or touch" with their imagination. But more importantly, why is such a big deal not a big deal?Yes, it matters whether you do or do not have mental sensory perception. After all the research on Aphantasia since my moment of discovery, I'm not sure having MSP is a benefit or detriment to people unless they know the power of either gift. However, knowing this information helps to explain the way you learn, the way you communicate and the way you integrate yourself within society. It's a big deal! In fact, the first thing I did when I learned this was a "thing" was to ask my 7 year old son if he could see images in his mind. Why? Because if he couldn't, it would help to understand his behavior, his interests, and his capabilities to learn, experience, and grow.This book does not discuss the science of Aphantasia, primarily because there really is none. Even following Professor Zeman's study, 5 years ago, there still hasn't been any concrete scientific research conducted to understand this condition.Instead, this book simply serves to provide the reader, whether you are an aphant or a phant, with a clearer understanding of what aphantasia is in relation to mental sensory perception, how most people come to discover this condition and some insights, strategies and tactics to adjust their daily living in order to live with or without a condition that may or may not have hindered your forward progress.

Author : Oliver Sacks
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307594556
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mind's Eye written by Oliver Sacks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.

Author : Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262162173
Total Pages : 590 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seeing and Visualizing written by Zenon W. Pylyshyn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we see and how we visualize: why the scientific account differs from our experience.

Author : Susan Aldworth
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781527233102
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Extreme Imagination written by Susan Aldworth and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Peter Mendelsund
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0804171645
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What We See When We Read written by Peter Mendelsund and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus Best Book of the Year A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page—a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so—and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved—or reviled—literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature—he considers himself first and foremost as a reader—into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

Author : Alexandra Oliva
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1101965088
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last One written by Alexandra Oliva and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far. It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens--but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them--a young woman the show's producers call Zoo--stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Anna Abraham
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108429246
Total Pages : 865 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination written by Anna Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from leading experts. It showcases a rich and detailed analysis on how the imagination is understood across several disciplines of study, including anthropology, archaeology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. An integrated theoretical-empirical-applied picture of the field is presented, which stands to inform researchers, students, and practitioners about the issues of relevance across the board when considering the imagination. With each chapter, the nature of human imagination is examined - what it entails, how it evolved, and why it singularly defines us as a species.

Author : Patricia Stacey
Publisher : Da Capo Lifelong Books
ISBN 13 : 0786742070
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Boy Who Loved Windows written by Patricia Stacey and published by Da Capo Lifelong Books. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1997, writer Patricia Stacey and her husband Cliff learned that their six-month-old son Walker might never walk or talk, or even hear or see. Unwilling to accept this grim prediction, they embarked on a five-year odyssey that took them into alternative medicine, the newest brain research, and toward a new and innovative understanding of autism. Finally their search led them to pioneering developmental psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan who helped them save their son and bring him into full contact with the world. This enthralling memoir, at once heart wrenching and hopeful, takes the reader into the life of one remarkable family willing to do anything to give their son a rich and emotionally full life. We stand witness as they struggle to elicit the first sign that Walker is connecting with them, and share in their fears, struggles, tiny victories, and eventual triumphs. The Boy Who Loved Windows is compelling and inspiring reading for parents and professionals who care for children with autism and other special needs. The book is also a stunning literary debut, of interest to anyone who cares about the lives of children and the passion of families who, against huge odds, put these children first.

Author : Pete Etchells
Publisher : Icon Books
ISBN 13 : 1785785060
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lost in a Good Game written by Pete Etchells and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Etchells writes eloquently ... A heartfelt defence of a demonised pastime' The Times 'Once in an age, a piece of culture comes along that feels like it was specifically created for you, the beats and words and ideas are there because it is your life the creator is describing. Lost In A Good Game is exactly that. It will touch your heart and mind. And even if Bowser, Chun-li or Q-Bert weren't crucial parts of your youth, this is a flawless victory for everyone' Adam Rutherford When Pete Etchells was 14, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened. Etchells is now a researcher into the psychological effects of video games, and was co-author on a recent paper explaining why WHO plans to classify 'game addiction' as a danger to public health are based on bad science and (he thinks) are a bad idea. In this, his first book, he journeys through the history and development of video games - from Turing's chess machine to mass multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft- via scientific study, to investigate the highs and lows of playing and get to the bottom of our relationship with games - why we do it, and what they really mean to us. At the same time, Lost in a Good Game is a very unusual memoir of a writer coming to terms with his grief via virtual worlds, as he tries to work out what area of popular culture we should classify games (a relatively new technology) under.