• HereIAm@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Pen and paper maths I’m pretty decent at, but ask me to calculate anything in my head and it’s anyone’s guess if I remembered to carry the 1 or not. Ever since learning about aphantasia I’m wondering if the lack of being able to visually store values has something to do with it.

    • futatorius@lemm.ee
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      20 hours ago

      Ever since learning about aphantasia I’m wondering if the lack of being able to visually store values has something to do with it.

      Here’s some anecdotal evidence. Until I was 12 or 13, I could do absurdly complex arithmetical calculations in my head. My memory of it was of visualizing intermediate calculations as if they were on a screen in my head. I’d close my eyes to minimize distracting external stimuli. I’d get pocket money because my dad would get his friends to bet on whether I could correctly multiply two 7-digit phone numbers, and when I won, which I always did, he’d give the money to me. He had an old-school electromechanical calculator he’d use to check the results.

      I was able to use a similar visualization technique to memorize long passages of music and text. That stayed with me post-puberty, though again at a lesser extent.

      Once puberty kicked in, my ability to visualize declined significantly, though I also learned some mental arithmetics tricks that I still use now. I was able to get an MS in mathematics without much effort, since that relied on higher-level reasoning and not all that much on powerful memory or visualization.

      So I think your comment about aphantasia is at least directionally correct, as applied to people. But there’s little reason to assume LLMs would do things the same way a human mind does, though both might operate under similar information-theoretic constraints.