Yes, I rarely experience hypnagogia just before I fall asleep, and it seems like I can force it to happen if I focus on my eyelids. Though, paradoxically, as soon as I realize it's happening, it's gone.
After speaking with enough people about this topic, I can assure you it's not just a difference of language.
It's incredible what friends, family and coworkers have told me they're able to do with visual imagery. A large portion of them could overlay imaginary objects over the real world. My wife, who may be hyperphantasic, can spend hours watching TV shows/cartoons she's created in her head. She has no idea what it's like to think without visualization.
I'm extremely jealous of their abilities to replay memories, old or contemporary, as films in their head. I can tell you basic facts about what happened in my life, I can't re-see those experiences.
Sorry I'm not sure of the relation to antibiotics, but Hypnagogia is something even aphantasics experience. It's typically more involuntary than not, so it's grouped with dreams rather than visual imagery/thinking.
I don't mean to take away something so small from your great posts, but...
> repetitive PTSD-like school dreams
I'd really like to know how common this is. I'm now almost ten years removed from my school years, but the vast majority (90%+) of my dreams are based there.
I suspect you do, as well. Your realizations are very similar to mine when I first found out.
> I couldn't describe a person's face to you at all, but if you asked 'do they have a big or small nose'
The day I told my wife about this, she had me try to describe a woman who'd just sold us food a few minutes prior. I've seen this woman many times, but the only thing I could really conjure is that she was old. I don't have face blindness, no problem recognizing people, unless, like you mentioned, I very barely know them.
> This even applies to people close to me such as my own immediate family, partner, etc.
After that, my wife had me try to look at her face, then look to a piece of paper and immediately draw. Of course, artistic ability and aphantasia are totally different things, but it really cemented how little visual information gets retained. As soon as I looked away, all I knew was factual information like "curly hair", "mole next to nose".
> where I would expect it to break down would be recollection of colors...
Could that not be explained by simply storing that information as "textual" data? As in: using spatial imagery to recall the layout of a room, and basic knowledge to recall the color of the walls.
> ...touch, sounds, tastes, or smells.
These other senses are considered separate from the topic of Aphantasia. It seems there are many people with good visual imagery, but none of the other senses... as well as people with zero visual imagery, but some or all of the other senses.
I have zero across the board, unfortunately.
Could you explain your taste or smell imagery? My recollection only goes as far as "I remember liking this dish more than most things".
> Whenever I read about this phenomenon, there doesn't seem to be a good quasi-objective metric of this subjective capability to visualize -- there's no test or questionnaire I can use to see how my abilities rate against others'.
There certainly is. The Vividness of Visual Imagery questionnaire, or VVIQ [1]. It's been referenced in most of the recent aphantasia research I've looked at.
While I understand the desire to use less vague terminology, to hallucinate usually implies that it is done involuntarily.
Based on your description of your abilities, have you considered that what you're describing is spatial thinking, rather than visual imagery? It is common for people with aphantasia to retain strong spatial cognition.
I have aphantasia, an absolute 0 on the visualization scale. Not sure about LSD, but I've had vivid open and closed-eye visuals on quite large doses of psilocybin. Even though those visuals tend to lean more to the involuntary side, it feels like there's at least some level of control, so it's pretty exciting to experience that for the first time in my life. I very rarely had lucid dreams as a child, but I couldn't control the narrative, I just knew I was dreaming.
Memory tends to be poor among folks with aphantasia, but supposedly whatever details we do actually remember may have less of a chance to have been morphed over time through re-visualization. So we'd make for better eye witnesses.
This past weekend, I attended the conference he was interviewed at for this article. During his talk, he mentioned he had them complete the VVIQ from University of Exeter (which the other replies linked to), the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/psychology/imagery), plus several more questions, maybe a dozen or so.
> We have been smeared by the mainstream media [...] for working with law enforcement to ensure that justice is served for the horrible atrocity committed in Pittsburgh
Would someone close to this project be able to explain why the node operator wouldn't have direct access to user's keys in the event of an SGX exploit? The whitepaper only briefly delves into transaction privacy protections, but not key management.
If any government wanted to take down a CPU or GPU based cryptocurrency, they could accomplish a 51% attack in no time. Gathering or manufacturing ASICs would be a longer, harder, more obvious process.