I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven’t seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.
As far as chess, this means I’m logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don’t play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.
I just wanted to say I’m almost exactly the same way, and it’s kinda cool to see someone else stuck in this halfway point, lol. The way I describe it is that I can picture the concept of something in my head, but the moment I try to focus on any details, it gets warped or corrupted or simply won’t manifest any more detail. Same on struggling with faces/remembering people, not so much on spatial orientation.
While I haven’t played chess in a long while, I can kinda draw off my experience with similar games and logic problems I’ve worked on. I can kinda hold the concepts in my head, but not really visualize it. So I’ll not be envisioning the chess board, but I can still easily puzzle out “if I take this pawn, that one will take my rook, then I can take it with my knight”, etc.
Yeah, pretty much the exact same thing for me. I describe things as, I can get a single detail to pop, but then I lose the overall composition, and when I scale back to the whole image, it’s a different image.
I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven’t seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.
As far as chess, this means I’m logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don’t play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.
I just wanted to say I’m almost exactly the same way, and it’s kinda cool to see someone else stuck in this halfway point, lol. The way I describe it is that I can picture the concept of something in my head, but the moment I try to focus on any details, it gets warped or corrupted or simply won’t manifest any more detail. Same on struggling with faces/remembering people, not so much on spatial orientation.
While I haven’t played chess in a long while, I can kinda draw off my experience with similar games and logic problems I’ve worked on. I can kinda hold the concepts in my head, but not really visualize it. So I’ll not be envisioning the chess board, but I can still easily puzzle out “if I take this pawn, that one will take my rook, then I can take it with my knight”, etc.
Yeah, pretty much the exact same thing for me. I describe things as, I can get a single detail to pop, but then I lose the overall composition, and when I scale back to the whole image, it’s a different image.