[HN Gopher] Bicycles from Sketches
___________________________________________________________________
Bicycles from Sketches
Author : datashrimp
Score : 173 points
Date : 2020-06-11 10:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gianlucagimini.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gianlucagimini.it)
| nradov wrote:
| If you showed some people a sketch of something like a Ventum
| triathlon bike they would probably say it was wrong or fake. The
| shape of bikes has been held back for too long by tradition and
| outdated UCI race equipment rules.
|
| https://ventumracing.com/bikes/
| devb wrote:
| Or the safety bicycle design is so perfect that any attempt to
| "improve" upon it winds up coming across more as an art project
| rather than a utilitarian upgrade.
| nradov wrote:
| The point is to go _faster_ , not to be utilitarian.
| Materials and aerodynamics have improved since 1890.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| If utilitarianism optimises for local travel, the biggest
| difference I've seen is a curved top-tube on omafiets. If it
| optimises for moving rider and luggage from A-to-B, touring
| bikes are pretty standard.
| stinos wrote:
| Dunno, doesn't look _that_ special to me. But I 've had quite a
| bunch of different bikes (trials/mtb/bmx/cruiser/race/'normal'
| day to day) and am from a cylcing-heavy country so I'm used to
| seeing many different shapes.
| nradov wrote:
| I didn't claim it's special. Just that it differs
| significantly from what the majority of people think of as a
| "bicycle". If you ask them to sketch a bike it won't look
| like that.
| murican22 wrote:
| Designer: "I updated the mocks to match your requirements."
|
| Product Manager: "Close enough."
|
| Engineer: "..."
| anm89 wrote:
| I love these more than words can describe. I would love to have
| them reproduced and put them on my wall.
| mcv wrote:
| Some of these are gorgeous! Hilariously impractical, but
| gorgeous. Nice job. Shame it's rendered; I was kinda hoping they
| actually made these bikes. Although I suspect they'd be too
| dangerous to try them out.
| brudgers wrote:
| earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17699017
|
| and, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478061
| bewuethr wrote:
| Some of them have now been built in real life!
|
| https://www.behance.net/gallery/77793195/Velocipedia-IRL
| glaberficken wrote:
| Wow thanks. This one should be "rideable" at least
| theoretically:
|
| https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/c...
| mactrey wrote:
| I don't know much about bikes but why wouldn't the blue one
| with the solid wheels be rideable?
| kevmo314 wrote:
| The rear wheel would likely shear upwards along the seat
| tube when the rider sits on it. I suppose with enough
| strength it could work, would be quite a heavy bicycle.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| the blue one looks "rideable" for definitions of rideable
| that do not include steering.
| amwelles wrote:
| My friends and I did this, but with horses, during a camping trip
| once. The results were hilarious and still something we joke and
| laugh about.
| rgovostes wrote:
| I didn't know what part was missing from the first bike and it
| was a little frustrating the author didn't explain! I have an
| idea now from comparing to real bikes, but I am not confident
| that this bike would "immediately break." From forces on the rear
| wheel?
| mkl wrote:
| It's missing the horizontal struts between the pedals and the
| back axle. Those make strong triangle shapes, and without them
| the back fork is going to be quite flimsy and unstable. The
| person's weight on the seat would put a lot of torque on the
| welds connecting the back fork struts to the frame below the
| seat.
| cpsempek wrote:
| correct, this is known as the chainstay in case you want the
| jargon
| mlillie wrote:
| Thank you. The author really missed the big reveal at the
| end, I was also wondering this same thing.
| praptak wrote:
| I wonder what else seems simple but is actually hard to draw from
| memory. My example is the simplest knot, although the difficulty
| seems a bit different from that of the bike.
| tobr wrote:
| I would guess the tricky thing with bikes are all the similar
| looking metal bars at different angles. It's hard to perceive
| the overall shape of the bike and remember how the pieces are
| connected.
|
| So maybe other similar things that are assembled from several
| parts would be hard: a folding chair, a pair of scissors, a
| suspension bridge, the Eiffel Tower, a catapult, etc.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| - Try drawing the steering wheel of your car
|
| - Try drawing the face of your wristwatch / clock
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| Tell them to only use 2 triangles - they might nail it but most
| people do even worse!
| leafmeal wrote:
| If you're drawing of a bicycle doesn't look like a bicycle, then
| you've never drawn a bicycle before.
| loeg wrote:
| It's kind of hard to draw a chain and chainstays clearly. That
| seems to be one of the common missing pieces. They're in a
| similar region of the bicycle.
| martin-adams wrote:
| What really surprised me is that the bicycles weren't made using
| 3D modelling, it looks like he used something like Photoshop to
| compose the images.
| notatoad wrote:
| it's easy to assume that these are people who don't have a lot of
| familiarity with bikes, but pro cyclists don't do much better:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU
| tomcam wrote:
| Obviously a pitch for yourbike.io, YC's Winter 2021 batch. It's
| one of the better BAAS ploys (Bicycles As A Service)!
| TrueGeek wrote:
| I am very disappointed this isn't a real service :(
| esperent wrote:
| Are you sure that's the right url? All I get is a page full of
| random ads on yourbike.io.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sorry, I just made that up as a joke. I thought the clue
| would be the 2021 date!
| tantalor wrote:
| Mods: add [2016] to title
| vvpan wrote:
| What blew me away is that the author is using 2d vector graphics
| to draw all that. I think there might've been a follow up post
| where he shows the process.
| informatimago wrote:
| What's frightening, are the ages noted on the sketches. THEY ARE
| FROM ADULTS !!! Clearly, this demonstrate information overload on
| their brains. They definitely should not be allowed to vote. I
| wonder how/if they can have functional lives. Aren't they all
| from an asylum?
| reitanqild wrote:
| You are heavily punished for this comment but instead of giving
| you another flag or downvote I hope there is a learning
| opportunity here:
|
| Think if you met someone who said any of these things while you
| were listening:
|
| - There are adults who cannot fish!
|
| - There are adults who cannot swim!
|
| - There are adults who cannot milk a cow if their life depends
| on it!
|
| - There are adults who cannot tell you 6 teams from premier
| league
|
| - There are adults who cannot tell you the rules of baseball,
| basketball, football
|
| - There are adults who cannot say even half of the American
| states or capitals
|
| - There are adults who cannot tell you which countries are
| members of the European Union
|
| - There are adults who cannot drive a car
|
| - etc
|
| It is frightening!
|
| Or not. We are just different. And for the record, more than
| two of the bullet points above covers me, a highly successful
| software engineer :-)
|
| Not everyone has the same skillset, the same background etc.
|
| Once we learn to respect others for what they are not for what
| they are not, we can make progress.
|
| I recommend you edit it and I'll try to delete or empty my
| comment afterwards :-)
|
| Edit: I see two hours have passed now so it is too late anyway.
| My advice still stands for another time: People can be
| excellent in most areas of live and still struggle mightily in
| others, at least that is my understanding.
| joejoint wrote:
| Next to the name and age it's the profession. Here are some you
| think should not be allowed to vote.
|
| Anna, 24 - Student. Alessandro, 30 - Doctor. Federico, 32 -
| Professor. Martino, 27 - Doctor.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am a professional artist; drawing stuff from out of my head
| and making it look plausible, if not actually correct, is
| literally my day job.
|
| I have spent multiple decades practicing to be able to do this.
| Everything that I _can_ draw out of my head and make look
| plausible rests on top of a solid foundation of spending time
| looking at real-world examples of the thing, or photos of the
| thing, and working from them.
|
| There is a huge hump that artists almost inevitably have to get
| over somewhere in the transition from "amateur" to "pro":
| amateurs almost inevitably convince themselves that they need
| to be able to draw _anything_ with zero reference, and if they
| can 't somehow magically do it they are a failure; pros will
| happily draw a lot of stuff with no reference, but the instant
| they realize they don't know what a thing looks like, they will
| put down their pencil and go find something to work from.
|
| Part of being a pro artist used to be maintaining a "morgue" -
| you would be constantly on the lookout for photos of things you
| thought you'd have to draw someday, and you'd clip and file
| them. The advent of image search has made this less necessary,
| but I certainly still have a few shelves full of coffee table
| books full of _really nice_ photos of distinctive stuff - I
| have an entire book that is nothing but photographs of
| _staircases_.
|
| How does the human body work? How do all its muscles sheath the
| bones and organs, how do you break it down into basic shapes
| that you can quickly put on the canvas and then flesh out into
| a realistic drawing? Which parts should you exaggerate when you
| want to caricature a particular pose? Which parts should you
| not bother with more than a basic rendering of to best serve
| the needs of the drawing at hand? That _alone_ is a body of
| knowledge that artists have to spend _years_ cramming into
| their head before they can be a pro. We regularly circulate
| little tip sheets[1] that talk about the ways we have found to
| simplify these things.
|
| How much of _your_ day-to-day work as a programmer comes out of
| your head? How much of it is looking through documentation and
| searching Stack Overflow?
|
| 1: https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/p/every-how-
| to-t...
| jrockway wrote:
| A bicycle is a complicated object that has many forgettable
| parts. Everyone knows that there are two wheels (bi-cycle) and
| that there's a triangle formed from the down tube, top tube,
| and seat tube. Except, the triangle has a 4th side to hold the
| steerer and fork (the head tube). Then there are the other
| details. The handlebars attach to a stem, which attaches to a
| steerer tube, which goes through the head tube with bearings on
| each side, and finally tapers at a "rake angle" to actually
| hold the hub of the front wheel. There is also the rear
| triangle that consists of the seat stays and chainstays (and
| the seat tube). You have to put the saddle somewhere, that's
| attached to a seatpost that goes inside the seat tube and is
| secured by clamping it in there. With all those in place, the
| rest is easy -- where the wheels, pedals / bottom bracket, and
| chain end up are all very natural.
|
| The problem is how often the bicycle is extolled as a simple
| triangle with some handwaving and two wheels. Turns out all
| that handwaving is quite complicated. The triangle becomes a
| shape with 4 edges. There are actually two triangles. And there
| are complicated details in joining the seat and fork to the
| bike.
|
| So... I don't think these people are dumb. They have been
| mislead by "it's just a triangle" when it's actually nothing
| like a triangle. The devil is in the details.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| >Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to
| demonstrate how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we
| know something even though we don't.
|
| They probably don't pose the question like this, though. I
| suspect you'd get different results if you asked a person, "Can
| you draw an accurate representation of a bicycle?" vs pestering
| them to draw a bicycle so you can make fun of them later. I know
| for myself, if someone handed me a sheet of paper and said draw a
| bike, I'd do it for fun, but it would not be correct.
| rohansingh wrote:
| I don't think "how to draw a bicycle" is the thing that your
| brain tricks into thinking that you know. Instead, it's "what
| does a bicycle look like?"
|
| If you ask most people if they know what a bicycle looks like,
| I think they'd tell you, yes, definitely. But really they
| don't. They know that it has a couple wheels and some sort of
| metal tubes, and that's a workable mental model to convince
| yourself that you know what a bicycle looks like.
| watwut wrote:
| People can recognize bicycle from non-bicycle perfectly well.
| If you would make bicycle with unusually large wheels, people
| would recognize that perfectly. In particular, telling bike
| from random wheels and tubes is easy.
|
| So yeah, people do know how bicycle looks like.
|
| What people do not know is how to draw bicycle or any other
| thing. Unless artists, they don't know to abstract important
| details from unimportant and they are complete crap at
| proportions.
|
| For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong
| place with wrong size, but I still would not say people don't
| know how human face looks like.
| anonred wrote:
| >For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at
| wrong place with wrong size
|
| That's kind of an odd counter example to use. Most people
| will certainly draw an anatomically correct face (for all
| intents and purposes) with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
| And you're unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the
| nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose.
|
| In contrast, this is _exactly_ what people are doing to
| bikes, as illustrated by the ridiculously funny renders in
| the article.
| watwut wrote:
| > two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you're unlikely to
| see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or
| move the mouth above the nose.
|
| That is not enough for realistic face. In the first
| place, people wont draw these on the right places and
| with the right relative size. While the eyes will be
| higher then mouth, they still wont be on the right place
| and it will be extremely visible. The nose can be
| sideways, it sticks out and thus is harder to draw.
|
| Also, the beginners nose wont look like actual nose, eyes
| wont look like actual eyes and so on.
|
| It will be kinda like those bikes. Note that none of
| those bikes have three wheels, two seats or four handles.
| All of them have seat around where back wheel is, all of
| them have handles. There is one bike that have back seat
| small and one that have pedals under seat. These are the
| worst proportions and relative position wise, but some
| people will do stuff like that with human face too.
|
| When they teach you to draw faces, they teach you literal
| guidelines to get thing at the right places and sizes.
| You are then supposed to erase the guidelines. It takes
| effort to learn for most of us.
| Someone wrote:
| In experiments measuring perceptual thresholds (say of
| motion, color, or size), it is common that subjects say they
| can't see a difference anymore between movement
| speeds/colors/object sizes, but, when pressed to answer the
| question, 'guess' right way above chance level.
|
| I think it's likely this is similar: they know, but not
| consciously. To test that, one could ask them whether the
| drawing they made represents a bicycle. I would guess many of
| them could say there was something funny with their own
| drawing, even though they can't make a better one.
|
| (One can have a philosophical discussion about whether that
| means that they know what a bicycle looks like, but they sure
| can act as if they know)
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, if simply asked to draw a bicycle most people are
| probably happy to just sketch something that represents the
| _concept_ well enough to, say, work as a Pictionary clue. Would
| be interesting to see the results of being asked to draw as
| accurate a picture as possible. And not just the results, but
| the drawing process itself--I 'd wager that having to think
| about it would elicit more "wait a minute, this doesn't go here
| after all" type realizations.
| reitanqild wrote:
| This has been discussed at least a couple of times before but
| maybe I have a new angle:
|
| Somewhere during the last three years or so I realized I'm one of
| those people who can hardly see mental images. Even my dreams
| seems to often be just feelings og having been somewhere and done
| something.
|
| However I can draw bikes my house and everything else that I know
| well (and I often have too draw things since I cannot keep mental
| models in my head.)
|
| Why is this, how can I draw something I cannot project in my
| head? Is it just because I understand it so well that if I try to
| draw it wrong my mind hurts?
|
| PS: My drawings are not nice, but they are somewhat correct, the
| frame makes sense, the chain is in the correct place etc etc.
|
| PPS: I keep wondering if I always was like this or if I lost it
| at some time (if I lost it my best guess is there's a mild form
| of something like PTSD because of a bunch of stuff that happened
| from I was 15 to 25).
| SamBam wrote:
| This is very interesting, but I do think that there's a big
| distinction between drawing and imagining, so I don't think
| it's too surprising that a person may be better at one than the
| other.
|
| Indeed, I suspect I am like you and am better at drawing a
| bicycle than imagining one. With drawing it, I simply know how
| to do it. There's a sequence of steps (draw a diamond shape,
| add the seat post, add the wheels and the front fork). I don't
| even need to keep the whole thing in my head while I'm drawing
| it -- the paper acts as the repository.
|
| On the flip side, though, there are plenty of things I can
| imagine that I cannot for the life of me draw. Faces of family
| members. Animals.
|
| But again, I think that artists who can draw life-like
| representations are ones who do _not_ use their imagination,
| and, in fact, learning to draw from life is a process of
| learning not to use your imagination. When we draw from our
| imagination, we tend to use our mental models, which are
| abstract and functional. We put eyes at the top of the heads,
| because that 's how we imagine them, because we focus on the
| face and all that wide-open forehead space is useless. It's a
| skill to not use those models when trying to draw accurately.
| reitanqild wrote:
| > On the flip side, though, there are plenty of things I can
| imagine that I cannot for the life of me draw. Faces of
| family members. Animals.
|
| Lucky you :-)
|
| Seems I can only recall photographs of my mom and dad when I
| try now (passport style photo og my mom and a photo of my dad
| making a funny face while carrying an oversize chocolate).
|
| Same kind of goes for my wife: I immediately recognize her
| now but the first few months I was dating her I was afraid I
| would not recognize her :-D
|
| Edit: and when I try to view my wife in my head I only see a
| 15 year old passport style photo :-D
| cmehdy wrote:
| There's a youtube channel called Psych of Play (by Daryl Talks
| Games) which has a video[0] about an ad for a Tetris game
| released in 2017, and the video goes on to explain some
| hypotheses about the ability to have stored knowledge being
| separate from the ability to recall it. Some links are made
| with sleep, too. There's also an example of a person with both
| retrograde and anterograde amnesia who has no idea who you are
| after a few seconds, and no idea how he knows the piano, but
| can play it anytime he wants.
|
| There's a lot about how memories are formed and recalled that
| is still the subject of much research.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq5UWSwV2Os
| lancesells wrote:
| > However I can draw bikes my house and everything else that I
| know well (and I often have too draw things since I cannot keep
| mental models in my head.)
|
| This is quite similar to watching a movie and how you can
| instantly tell a CG human is fake. Because you know how humans
| look, walk, move, etc. Whereas if it's a CG plant or animal
| most of us might not notice it's fake because we don't live our
| whole lives observing them. An expert at elephants can probably
| see a CG elephant and notice the wrong things much faster
| because they know it well.
|
| For myself, I can draw from my imagination but it's not that I
| see the image in my head. It's quite often being a little less
| present or concerned with the actual drawing while still having
| the muscle memory of drawing the common shapes that make up
| mass and form.
|
| I would recommend starting off making marks on paper and seeing
| what comes out of it. A lot of cartoonists practice drawing an
| odd-shaped oval and then using that as the basis for the shape
| of the head.
| rodw wrote:
| Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but a bicycle has a more
| complicated (or specific) structure than most people realize
| that they find hard to reproduce when sketching it.
|
| I think "mental modeling" is actually the problem in that case.
| Our mental model of a bicycle is "wheels; pedals; handlebar;
| (sometimes) chain". To a casual observer, "fork" and "frame" is
| background information that they don't think about or notice
| but those are obviously pretty fundamental.
|
| So when you sit down to sketch it from memory you suddenly
| realize that you're not exactly sure how those parts fit
| together. Think about how often people attach the pedals
| directly to a wheel in a sketch, for example. That's 100%
| reflecting our mental model ("to turn the wheel I turn the
| pedals").
|
| "Sketch a bike" is almost like a test of "can you invent the
| diamond-shaped frame off the top your head?" Because of our
| mental model we don't even notice that part.
| JNRowe wrote:
| > "Sketch a bike" is almost like a test of "can you invent
| the diamond-shaped frame off the top your head?" Because of
| our mental model we don't even notice that part.
|
| Distracting from your point, but there some awesome
| reconstructed diamonds floating around today. The two below
| are the first examples that sprang to mind because of how
| they invert the "missing" structure.
|
| 1. https://www.slowtwitch.com/Tech/Cody_Beals_Winning_Ride_70
| 32...
|
| 2. https://www.slowtwitch.com/Products/Tri_Bike_by_brand/Cerv
| el...
|
| Perhaps, some of the artists in the original piece are
| reporting from a future of tri-frames, lefty forks and shaft
| drives3.
|
| 3. https://www.bikeradar.com/news/faster-than-any-chain-
| ceramic...
| rodw wrote:
| Oof. The cantilevered rear wheel in the first link in
| particular makes me really uncomfortable for some reason.
|
| I don't mind the "n-shaped" frame overall but something
| about the chunky frame combined with the rear wheel
| sticking off the back makes me think it's going to snap off
| - painfully for the rider - on the first pothole or hop.
|
| I didn't realize that that the upper bar between the rear
| wheel and the saddle was so important to my psychological
| comfort, but I now I know. Even one of those skinny bars
| like the ones on old-school Schwinn road bikes would make
| me feel so much better about that bike.
|
| Wait. Is there a bar between the bottom-bracket and the
| rear wheel on the non-drive-train side of the bike, or is
| it actually cantilevered in _two_ dimensions?
| watwut wrote:
| Read up materials for beginner artists. The thing they emphasis
| is that people by default dont know how things look like and
| dont remember that. When you are drawing from observation, you
| are supposed to look a lot and draw a little, because it is
| normal that your brain will throw away that information. The
| set of things you actually know how it looks like is called
| visual library and you are supposed to consciously working on
| that and making it larger. The general assumption seems to be
| that beginner has small to empty visual library.
|
| The "seeing through artist eye" is basically about that -
| training to see things and tricks to remember how things look
| like. It can get better with practice.
|
| By default, untrained people tend to draw symbols of things
| they see - how the thing is "supposed" to look like.
|
| Quite likely, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, you
| just don't have the particular training, just like most people,
| which is actually perfectly fine for most of us.
| amenghra wrote:
| Do you think you have some form of Aphantasia? This post by
| Blake Ross might be helpful?
| https://m.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-fe...
| lqet wrote:
| I always wondered whether a good way to describe Aphantasia
| to people who don't have it is to ask them to "imagine" an
| odor. Most people can recognize specific oders effortlessly
| and remember them for decades (example: you smell some brand
| of aftershave, and you immediately know that this is how your
| great-grandfather always smelled, who has been dead for 20
| years), but you cannot "think" of an odor and actually smell
| it the same way you can think of an apple and see and inspect
| its image inside your head. Yet you "know" what gasoline
| smells like, or fresh bread.
|
| This leads to another interesting question: are there people
| who cannot imagine music and other sounds, like speech? Is
| this related to Aphantasia?
|
| A question even more interesting: _are_ there people who can
| imagine odors, or combinations of them? I would expect this
| to be very handy if you are designing perfume, for example.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I can definitely think of odors and smell them, certainly
| more vividly than I can see mental images.
|
| Thinking of fresh bread nearly makes me wonder whether
| someone is baking it nearby. Sounds are similar for me. I
| can play most songs in my head with full orchestration, and
| pick out different instruments. After hearing my alarm and
| turning it off, I will sometimes think of it later and have
| to check to make sure it isn't playing again.
|
| Images though, require sustained effort for me to maintain.
| I would never ever mistake a mental image for a real image
| - they are completely on completely different "screens" if
| you will.
| kaybe wrote:
| Wait, you cannot imagine odors? They are more vivid than
| images in my head.
| lqet wrote:
| Oh my god :(
| function_seven wrote:
| I love unintentional epiphanies :)
|
| I can imagine odors decently. I didn't know this until I
| just tried it after reading your comment. But yeah, I
| just imagined what a jasmine bush smells like, my dog's
| poop, strawberry scent car freshener, baby powder, and
| distant brush fire.
|
| My best guess is that I'm imagining them at something
| like 30% fidelity, and some are harder than others to
| synthesize in "my mind's nose"
|
| It's not nearly as good as what I can visualize in my
| mind's eye, so your analogy is still helpful.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| Yeah, I think I have a relatively poor visual
| imagination, but when I try to picture a specific object
| it's probably ~10% as vivid as actually glancing at it.
| When I try to recall a smell, it's probably more like 20%
| as vivid as smelling it.
| [deleted]
| stephen_g wrote:
| Wow, I never thought about that, didn't realise that was
| a thing. I can only so very vaguely imagine what things
| would smell like that I wonder if I really am at all.
|
| Music, sounds and voices have always been the most clear
| for me (I can think through some of my favourite
| orchestral pieces with multiple instruments at once), but
| I've never been as good at visual.
| reitanqild wrote:
| > Do you think you have some form of Aphantasia?
|
| Yes, I think so, it is so strong the first time I tried to
| take the test I was somewhat surprised that you were supposed
| to be able to do all these things.
|
| I'll add the article to my reading list immediately :-)
|
| Edit: yep, read a few lines, very similar and interesting.
| Haven't seen this article before, thanks.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Plus the artist for the Little Mermaid had it so it would fit
| in with being able to draw things but not visualise them.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2019/apr/.
| ..
| etrevino wrote:
| I only recently (last few years) discovered that aphantasia is
| a thing. Before that I thought that when people were talking
| about "mind's eye" they were using a figure of speech that was
| totally unrelated to being able to create images in your head.
| I am a decent artist. I can sketch out the layout of a building
| after having been in it a short time, including identifying
| exits, etc. (maybe I should thank my CIA dad for that one) But
| I still can't recall images on demand. It's very strange. I
| always wondered if it was related to whatever brain
| malformation that caused my epilepsy. I also wondered if the
| genetics that caused my (admittedly self diagnosed) aphantasia
| was related to my brother's ability synesthesia. The brain is
| remarkable.
| markkat wrote:
| IMO it's underappreciated how these mistakes are not a bug of
| human intelligence, but a feature. They reveal a default non-
| literal interpretation of the world, which can be made less
| abstract when needed. However, it's the default abstractness that
| prevents us from making gross contextual errors based upon a
| literal interpretation.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Having fixed my bike so many times over the years, I can easily
| sketch a correct bike - if not in terms of proportions (at
| least without any corrections), but in how the frame is
| constructed and how all the moving parts come together. I guess
| someone who doesn't need this knowledge will just use a more
| abstract model.
| thangalin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
| moreoutput wrote:
| I've always wondered -- is there something I can read/see
| that compares the drawings from savants like Stephen to
| actual photographs? I'd like to dig into the specifics.
| thdrdt wrote:
| When I tried drawing portraits I really had to relearn how to
| look. In my mind eyes were positioned at the top of the head
| while in reality they are in the middle.
|
| But when you draw cartoons it looks a kind if silly when eyes
| are drawn at the accurate location. And maybe this is the
| feature you mentioned. It's fun to play with it.
| glcheetham wrote:
| This feature really is a bug for Chinese speakers. The same
| phenomenon as people being unable to accurately draw a bicycle,
| an object you're pretty familiar with, is called "character
| amnesia" when you're unable to write a Chinese character that
| you probably see every day and can read and understand with no
| problems. The meaning of the character is definitely abstracted
| away somewhere in your brain, but there might be hundreds or
| thousands of characters you're simply unable to reproduce on
| paper.
|
| The Chinese characters are composed of a specific order of
| strokes, and sometimes it's like you can't bring a clear enough
| picture of it into your mind's eye to be able to reverse
| engineer it with a pen on paper. I probably experience this a
| lot more as a learner of Chinese as a foreign language, so I'm
| pretty familiar with the feeling of "Character amnesia". It
| happened to me the other day with Ya (tooth) a pretty simple
| character that you'd think would be easy to remember. Once you
| get the first two to or so strokes down though muscle memory
| seems to take over and you finish it almost subconsciously.
|
| From anecdotal examples, this is actually pretty common, and in
| mainland Chinese sources I've read they seem to put it down to
| people using pinyin (romanised pronunciation) input on phone
| and PC keyboards instead which gets people out of the habit of
| remembering stroke orders.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
| watersb wrote:
| Neat!
|
| Is your experience similar to spelling errors in written
| English?
|
| I choose English because it's the primary (only?) language
| for this site, and while there are definite rules for the
| correct sequence of letters for a word, the rules for the
| language overall are not especially consistent. And it seems
| to me that English has a bazillion words in common use.
|
| I have from time to time experienced that very weird
| sensation, as I look at an English word I've used in written
| language for fifty years, and it suddenly for a time it seems
| totally wrong and incomprehensible. I recall staring at the
| word "Our", thinking it could not possibly mean anything in
| English. This is rare, and doesn't last long. So far.
|
| But it gives me some insight into aphasia, perhaps.
|
| And we need spell-checkers for our writing, because in a
| stream of words we have written by pushing buttons, the brain
| elides the misplaced letters, it's almost impossible to spot
| them all, much less work to simply hand to someone else to
| read it fresh, then the errors seem obvious to them.
|
| But it's the temporary, isolated dyslexia I find bizarre.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I love these sketches!
|
| Having worked in a bike shop for a bunch of years I'm really good
| at drawing a bike, but recently I tried to draw the outside of my
| house. The front of the house that I see nearly every day. My
| house that I've been living in for over a decade. I couldn't do
| it!
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I'm the same.I can draw shoes,houses, spaceship and etc.,
| however I can't draw familiar objects. I think this is
| partially because I wouldn't be able to describe familiar faces
| either,even though I see them on daily basis. It's weird how
| the brain works: I remember the email with some API specs that
| was sent to me 4 years ago but I struggle to remember what we
| spoke about over the dinner just a day before.. Would be
| interesting to see if anyone knows why it's like this.
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