I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based on playing back memories as movies in my head. Especially childhood memories suffered. Also reading books is a very different experience, as when I previously would make up movies and picture the characters visually when reading, now it's all black. That said, reading books is still an enjoyable experience, it's just very different.
I also stopped dreaming in images for a long time, which was weird. It's still very dim (not so vivid), but at least that part came back.
That sounds incredibly sad and frustrating. I can't imagine what it's like to suddenly lose that ability, being so dependent on it.
Indeed many of my childhood memories are mostly sequences of pictures, the emotional content kind of "floats" on the imagery. It must be very frustrating, being forced to reinvent how you experience your inner life and memories.
Edit, after reading some more comments: are you musically inclined? Did your ability to hear melodies in your "inner ear" suffer similarly?
It sucks, but that's life - there are worse things and life is still plenty enjoyable. In addition, I lost my sense of smell/taste completely and that was much worse to be honest (but still, you learn to live without and focus on what's good). If I had to choose between the two, I'd choose being able to smell/taste any day. Funnily enough not because of food, but actually because of the added experience you get when walking in nature or other places - smell has so much to do with experiencing things, but you never consider it until it's gone. Luckily it came back, even though it's been 2.5 years now and it's still only 80% normal (but 80% is quite good!).
As you mention, the most sad part about it is actually the childhood memories, but I still have the memories of course, they're just a bit more "facts based" than re-living experiences.
Luckily, I didn't lose my inner ear or even inner monologue like in another reported case [0]. I do play instruments, so I guess I was/is musically inclined to some degree. I still have ability to imagine music exactly like I would hear it, unlike a friend with aphantasia who can't.
Another interesting detail is that I regained the ability before losing it again (Covid re-infection), and during this time of recovery I could gradually see grey, blurry images that got better and better. It's like the image generator in my head didn't have capacity to create full blown images, but only low res ones. Which makes me believe that in my case the "image generator" was damaged as I couldn't even dream in pictures, while for most people with aphantasia that's not the case, as they can dream normally.
On the bright side, I don't get horrible, lifelike images popping up in my head anytime I hear about something disturbing. Not that that was a big problem, but it's something you notice. It makes me believe that people with aphantasia might be better at coping with disturbing events, as they don't have to re-live the experience visually. But that's just a theory.
Smell is super tied to memory so that could be the cause of your imagery issues. I almost completely lose my sense of smell due to concussions in early adulthood but occasionally it randomly comes back (briefly) in full force. Anything I smell at that time triggers very visual memories in my head from childhood.
Neurology is still such a black box medically. Did you by any chance have a brain MRI at any point? If yes, and your willing to share, what portion of the brain was impacted? If more than one, has there been diagnostically visible change between them? Did you get any treatment? I can be reached at first at full tod moc if you prefer.
I've had a brain MRI to rule out other causes (tumors etc), but it was clean. I don't think they looked specifically for tiny damages to areas (if that's possible), but I'm not sure to be honest as I only got answer that there were no signs of disease.
Well maybe it's a good thing. You live in the present instead of an imaginary past. The past is gone no matter how much your mind tries to come up with images. The memories no longer have any existential significance apart from causing you trauma, generating false sense of pride, etc. Helps you to do and try new things instead of relying on a past you once lived and no longer exists.
I do tend to think I live a bit more in the present because of aphantasia. However, I also do have an experiential memory. It's not great, and largely not visual, and to the degree there are any visual elements they're pretty useless, like burnt fragments of a Polaroid. I think you're kinda having a hard time imagining this condition.
> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize
True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.
I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.
You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.
I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance.
Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.
Not sure why I was downvoted (I know it wasn't you), but it sounds like we are on the same page.
It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.
I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).
If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.
Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?
I think I know which ability you refer to, as my fear when I discovered this was that I couldn't work as a software developer anymore (before I got a grasp of what had actually happened, it took a while to actually understand the extent). I used to visualize arrays/tables/graphs in my head (like images/fancy animations) and do operations on them to imagine how one could transform them etc. But I also had/have a native sense of "depth" to data structures, which I also used. That one can move around in a data structure in a sense, I'm sure you know very well what I mean. Luckily that ability is still intact, which I've been relying a lot more on lately, but I can imagine you being much better than me on those kind of tools. The mind is so extremely fascinating, and it's so weird to think of the ways we think of things.
I tried visualization exercises (there's a lot more to the story that I didn't consider space to add here) and the first time they worked rather quickly, so I regained the ability in the course of days. But as I mentioned in another comment, I contracted covid again and then it was even worse than it had ever been and training didn't feel like it worked. I regained a little bit since that infection, but got covid yet again (it's an awful disease) and then it was back to square one. It seems like something in the brain had to heal before I could train it back up, but I'm afraid that the damage will be/is so severe that it will not be possible to recover (especially since I couldn't even create images in my dreams).
I might get better over time if I just stop getting covid, but as isolating myself is out of the question, that's unlikely to happen. Unfortunately it seems much harder to recover each time. Since last time it's not really been recovering. On the bright side, my sense of taste/smell has not been damaged again, which has been great.
I'm aphantasic, but I also have a very good visual/geometric intuition. The brain's a funny thing that way. Give me a shape rotating problem and I'll get the answer pretty rapidly compared with a baseline, but it's by a process that doesn't involve explicit visualization.
Hopefully you'll be able to access similar mental pathways with practice.
I'm pretty sure you can regain the ability. Covid damages the brain, and the brain "forgets" how to do certain things (like smell or visualise or focus), but brains are incredibly powerful and flexible, and can re-learn these things. I myself have long covid and lost a lot of sensing ability, but have been able to improve my senses of smell and touch by training with promising results. Here are some techniques people have used to help learn/relearn how to visualise: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/
Thanks for trying to help! I answered in another comment, so you can see a better reply there, but I've been trying (a lot) of these things and the short version is that it seemed to work when my brain had been given some time to heal, but repeated covid infections might have made it permanent in my case, or at least given the prospect of future infections. But time will tell. My smell/taste survived the last infection(s?), so there might be some hope that it gets milder.
It's so weird, as I know exactly which "muscle" to trigger to make it happen, which I guess someone having aphantasia wouldn't instinctly know, but it just doesn't do much.
-edit-
Oh, forgot to mention, in the beginning when I trained on visualizing again (back when it did work), I got _so_ exhausted in my brain afterwards, it was like really trying to used some damaged "muscle". I find that really fascinating. I'm not able to invoke such exhaustion in other ways, that quickly.
I was aphantasiac(?) most of my life and I self discovered similar techniques to what they discussed in the Reddit while learning multivariate calculus. I was trying so hard to visualize the integrations and using the “fuzz” I see when I close my eyes to infer the shapes then one day I could actually see them in my minds eye. I never applied the technique to other things because I didn’t have the same motivation to practice that induced my first breakthrough but I am pretty confident the technique works. The plasticity of the brain is remarkable and it’ll adapt to what you need it to do if you work at it.
As someone outside the spectrum completely, I can sympathise with your lack. I find you experiencing both sides fascinating. But the reason I replied is that my wife is a Chinese medicine practitioner, and also treats using a not so common method of scalp/brain acupuncture. After contracting COVID myself and losing all sense of smell and taste, she cured me in one session of that technique. Minutes after the needles went in my scalp I got back about 5% of my senses and by the evening it was all back. I don't know where you are geographically but it might be something worth exploring.
Thanks for your tip/reply. My sense of taste/smell is much better now and seems to be on a good trajectory as well, I won't seek more treatment at the moment. What you describe kind of sounds related to a stellate ganglion block[0] which can have these instant (and for some permanent) effects on covid-induced anosmia.
I was referring to scalp acupuncture as a maybe-potential-who-knows remedy to the Aphantasia, but it's a projection of it curing my smell/taste in minutes, not a "scientific assertion".
It's not the same as described in the link. I'm referring to acu needles at the top of the scalp in specific locations, triggering whatever nerves are there.
Covid was/is a weird one. Hope you get your visuals back. I've never had them but if I did I wouldn't want to miss them.
I just realised that I had similar experience. I can still picture things in my mind but dreams only came back a few weeks ago after being absent for a long, long time. Thinking about it it's not been months but a year or two.
I know it’s basically cliche at this point to recommend psychedelics for anything, but one effect I’ve certainly noticed is a strengthened mind’s eye in the comedown and following days. More so with acid and more so for legitimately visual trips than smaller-dosed, heady trips.
Im not sure if my total aphantasia comes from a burnout or whether I was born with it. After a severe work related burnout, when things came to, some things did not return to normal. I have learned about aphantasia recently and did not test before the burnout.
Alert: if you were happy to learn about aphantasia, you might also be happy to learn about SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), which I think is correlated with aphantasia.
SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes.
Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ
No! You can fight back! The thing I have realised about SDAM is that although you don’t get that emotional/movie/visual experience, you also remember what you remember.
My wife (and particularly my daughter), have vivid imaginations that can make memories up at times. If I’ve “fact-committed” a memory, it’s not wrong.
Granted, this only helps in the 0.1% of cases when you have done the fact memory committal and can thus have any argument at all. For the rest it’s “I don’t remember that, and your memory is unreliable, so…”. Ahh the comforting couch, I should just take my pillow there now ;-)
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I always feel like a complete tool when people talk about events in their adolescent years or even if we talk about the movie we watched at the theater yesterday. I remember what the movie was about and I'm probably able to recall one or two scenes that had the most impact on me, but then someone roles up and starts a discussion on "all the scenes where Rebecca and Lydia felt lost and how they were set in similar places" and I'm just lost myself. I'd be able to recall they were lost but not what scenes there were to transport that idea to me.
Memory is a funny thing, you can in fact remember things that didn't actually happen or just completely misremember things that did happen. See, for example, the 'Lost in the mall technique': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
Interesting, combined with the article below I also start to wonder about more connections/correlations.
I have many vivid dreams a night, and often wake feeling exhausted. I have been thinking this might be my brain overcompensating for aphantasia. First time I have heard of SDAM, and that certainly applies to me, along with face/name memory, especially people out of context.
I speculated the other day that it could be 40 years programming has rewired my brain. Great at making logical connections, mapping/route memory is amazing, along with logical analysis.
Probably SDAM is related to depression too. If we are not able to recall the happy times/memories in the same way as other people do, not counting those technical solution wins!
Also as bad as my memory is, SDAM or old age ;) it actually feels worse since Covid and plenty of fuzzy/foggy brain days.
I started a small meditation where I attempt to walk back through the whole day as best I can, while trying to drift to sleep. It has made me appreciate my life more and I remember more mundane details because I have at least recalled it once, if that makes sense.
Unless it is a day to forget... If you have too many of those, you know something needs to change.
Huh, when reading the parent comment I didn't think it applied to me because I felt like I remember stuff that happened in enough detail to walk through the sequences of events that happened, but reading this makes me think that maybe I don't actually have it because it's nothing I'd describe as being able to "watch" it as much as just recall the details. I could potentially imagine a visualization of the vents I remember, but I certainly don't remember what enough of the details actually look like to replay the real thing.
idk. I can watch my memories but I often see myself slightly in the third person in them, as if from over my own shoulder, which imples they're not really what I experienced but more like a reconstruction from place and dialog.
I am also like this. Why would I remember that? I don't remember almost anything I don't work to remember or is unusual. It's amazing to me that people do.
(I also have aphantasia and find it extremely difficult to believe that the entire thing isn't just a misunderstanding of language.)
Because it's useless information. Some people (like my wife) remember literally everything, at least until their brain fills up. I, on the other hand, have to explicitly commit to memory things I want to recall later. If I don't, it's gone. And why go through the effort of committing something as useless as what I ate for breakfast?
You have to realize that it's you who is the oddball, not the rest of us.
It's not useless information - I get to track what I ate when, I get to figure out the recipe if I like something etc etc. Imagine going "What you had for breakfast is useful information" as if your brain isn't already full of useless information.
> at least until their brain fills up.
(X) That's not how it works.
>If I don't, it's gone.
As I said, for the rest of us, it isn't an issue. We just remember. You don't - so you just go "it's useless information." It's not for us.
As you are discovering in this thread, everyone's brain works differently. You are exhibiting the mind projection fallacy--assuming that everyone else's mind works the way yours does. In fact, neurodiversity is a thing and pretty much every person out there has a unique mental experience.
Ha. That describes me perfectly. I have heard the distinction between “episodic memory” and “semantic memory” made before, and so I just thought that my semantic memory was a lot stronger than my episodic memory. I hadn’t realised it had a specific name. Thanks for sharing.
FWIW, I’m also very much aphantasic (I’d be a 4.5/5.0 on the test in Guardian article).
I've sometimes wondered if I could have aphantasia or perhaps be low enough on the visual imagery spectrum to have some of the practical effects of aphantasia.
When I try to visualize an object, I can in some sense visualize it but it feels very indistinct. It's like I can't see the object as a whole only the specific details I focus on. For example, I have a friend who wears circular glasses and has a handlebar mustache. I can bring up a general image of "circular glasses" or "handlebar mustache" in my mind. However, I cannot imaging his face with glasses and a mustache. It almost feels like the way that you "see" things when you are only half watching a TV show or are partially zoned out while driving. In some sense you are seeing them but it's difficult to pull up details.
When I visualize a scene, I'm not sure I "see" it so much as I form a spatial map of the scene.
I also find that the "images" that do get stored in my memory are more like impressions. Maybe in some sense I can "visualize" them, but they are really more like impressions of how they make me feel or the "vibe" that I get from them.
It's a spectrum and I think your experience is probably typical. A minority of people see nothing and another minority of people see vivid images. Most people get varying degrees of fuzziness.
I see vivid images of pretty much everything except faces. Faces are blurry (but then I can't recognize people's faces in the street and instead rely heavily on contextual clues, what they were, etc...)
I consider myself aphantasic and would describe my process similarly. I can kind of "draw" shapes in my head with sort of strokes of light like a kid writing their name in the air with a sparkler. While doing it, I can in fact feel my eyes physically moving around under their lids. Anything that isn't a rudimentary shape is out. This comes in handy while thinking about software because I can pretty easily create and trace connections between things in a sort of imaginary network.
I experience basically the same thing with sounds, which I've never heard anyone talk about. If you ask me to imagine the guitar solo from "sweet child of mine", I'm not going to hear the actual song in my head, I'm going to hear essentially the same thing as if you asked me to describe it (with lots of beedly dee type sounds). I can recognize a person's voice, but I can't will it into existence without hearing it, instead I would hear my own imitation of them, however bad that is. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but media tells me it's not.
This sounds very similar to my experience as well. Memory and mental visualization are very fuzzy. Like a camera with a dirty lens and very narrow focus. I can't even imagine my wife or children's faces clearly. I can picture an environment, but it's like a low res image or impressionistic painting.
I can think very clearly in text however, so I can imagine vivid descriptions of a physical environment and with descriptions of fine detail. But it's stored as text, and only blurrily rendered to images.
Recently, I've gradually realized that I struggle to recognize faces and some significant chunk of my social anxiety comes from this. If I see a face often enough or in large enough doses I can recognize it, but if I see it only occasionally and for brief encounters, I really struggle. I think it may be related to my inability visualize.
A key thing here is that you can train the ability to visualise. You probably don't spend very long per day trying to picture your friend's face with the glasses and mustache, but if you did, you'd find that over time, your ability would increase.
This is just normal. I wouldn't overthink it. If you were truly "aphantasic", you'd know; if you truly had preternatural visualization abilities, you'd know.
But all the comments in this thread show how different the experiences are. Personally, I can’t tell after reading all of them (and previous HN discussions too) which is common and which is uncommon: clear, fuzzy, abstract, or zero visualization.
that's basically what I experience. When I learned that many artists picture their entire drawing in detail, and then put it down on page roughly as they imagine it, I couldn't even imagine that.
i heard this from my art class teachers when I was growing up, and from a few friends who went on to be comic strip artists. However, going back and reading a few interviews of my friend, it seems like he actually imagines fairly simplified storyboards before drawing them, not a wholly formed final image.
This is not how artists work at all. I don't think any school of art has done that, other than for very rough composition (where objects go in space). Most schools of art from deep history all the way to today train with copying/sketching from life (training the eye to go where you want it), while also teaching general truths about light, color, proportion and anatomy.
People who draw out of thin air usually have these trained references in mind, so when they draw a pose they're not so much simply copying from their imagination, but from facts and past experience, about knowing about anatomy, light, and proportion. You draw as you go and see what's on the page, and you can build out a world that didn't exist, but not so much from mind's eye, but somewhere in-between the page and prior experience.
None of the above training or sketching would be needed by someone with a photographic memory or an imagination that can hold that level of mass detail (they'd only need to know practical techniques their medium depends on). There have been people like that such as Austin Osman Spare, but in the main the vast development in art has to do with learning about anatomy, proportion, light, color, and technique as taught by all the great masters.
Cartoons are a good example how a style comes not so much from the imagination, but how one very naively and simply draws characters and then builds off that natural style into something refined. This comes from playing on the page, not imagining what one wants. If you copy other people's cartoons you can also learn different lessons, and that has to do with training the eye and technique.
I really hate these aphantasia questions. It feels too subjective.
I can visualize in a sense, but I would never talk of an image. In fact closing my eyes makes it harder for me to imagine anything.
I can recall my dream from last night for example, I can describe it quite well. If you now would ask me to in my mind modify for example the color of the floor, I couldn’t. Because in “dream reality” I very much remember it wasn’t.
I can daydream, I can imagine vividly. But the moment anyone tells me, “modify what you’re imagining like this”, it all falls apart.
Also what is interesting is the quality of detail between me describing the imaginary situation and reconstructing it in real life. A lot of aspects are lost under a haze when describing it, but when reconstructing it I can tell you if an aspect is right or wrong, not what it should be.
That’s of course my personal experience. Just I feel like Aphantasia is this buzzfeed like diagnosis illness, where you really have a lot of interpretation.
I can picture things in my mind's eye, can remember what people look like, walk through the recent past, etc., but I don't see them painted as images on my closed eyelids as though I was seeing them with my actual eyes. When I remember I "see" them but not in a literal visual sense.
Like if you asked me, "When you came to my house yesterday, did you see a green apple on the table?" I would scan back through my memory "visually" and if I encountered a memory of a green apple I would say yes, but I would only see that apple in my "mind's eye". Does that qualify as an image? Because I wouldn't really call it that, it's just a flash of mental objects and sure some imagery.
What I've learned is that there are people heavily focused on their senses and then there are others who take in information in other ways (possibly intuition, etc) because they are always in their head.
I have an incredibly poor short term memory, my wife an amazing sensor. She notices everything.... object placement, where things were weeks ago. I didn't notice an elephant walking by me years ago in Thailand; nor last week in a western state town I didn't the open carry long gun that a guy had whom I spoke to for 5 seconds. [he was protesting through engagement]
These are running jokes. I also can't relate to a majority of the world (sensors) - however, I can solve complex multi-chain problems in my head that they drop out at step 1.
Oh, thanks for this. This is the idea I had in my head about this as well. Especially in dreams, it just feels like the brain gives you "what you need" for the dream and -- because of how brains work -- "ignores" the rest, which is why you can't recall it, you never "needed" to.
This feels way more like "people not really grasping how brains work" than some condition.
Seconded. It is unfortunate that social media polarises the two camps. I'm happy that people start considering this subject as a "spectrum", which allows for some more interesting discussions.
What I find strange is that so many people actually believe that their brains have a built-in raytracer. Why did, say, Boris Vallejo need real-life models and photography if there are so many people out there who can simply visualize everything in an instant?
Agree 100%. I pretty much discount everything everyone says until we start running hard science experiments.
One way to measure scientifically is to ask somebody to picture a room. The the experimenter keeps describing adding items to the room until the experimentee can no longer recall. By defining positions for all these items one could verify it is indeed visual memory by asking location questions.
I don't know if other people have thought of this and started doing it yet, but they should.
I have a pretty strong geometric imagination, but it's shape alone. When I try to convert it to a colored raster image, I get a transparent silhouette. How would you differentiate that? Also constructing an image by description isn't the same as making an image by myself from nothing.
If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that is already pushing it.
These kind of "mind-travels" are sometimes done at end of yoga classes. For me, they are complete pointless, and I usually fall asleep.
I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.
On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk alongside a wood, but every time I try to picture it, my mind balks. Also, combining a wood with a mountain I find tough, other that a mountain covered by trees. I think it is because of their genealogical dissimilarity.
I live in urban Vietnam. However, my visual imagination is derived heavily from paintings, particularly those of the romantic era (eg the Hudson river school). The promt suggest something very asymmetrical, which is anathema to the romantic schema (they avoid asymmetry but also too much symmetry). Not saying it's impossible for me to get there, just very difficult.
I guess the larger point is that vusualisation is as much fiction as it is recal.
By the way, I love the gmap link image, but I don't see it as an effective responce to the hint. I see it instead as a classic vista (I.e framed window-form).
Put yourself on the side of a mountain, with a steep drop off on the left.
Far to the left, you can see more mountains, but trees and hill block your view on the right. It's really common to see while hiking, though usually you turn to the downhill side to take a picture
Yeh... I can now see that. Thanks. Context is everything. Though I paint landscapes, I rarely stray outside the city. hence my knowledge of landscapes is mostly from paintings, not real life. The scene you describe is difficult to find in the painting lexicon (for it's asymmetry), though doubtless common in nature.
Huh. I have a lot of trouble visualizing things in general, I suppose I would be a "4" on the scale from the article, but this prompt is actually easier than most for me. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time hiking in mountains?
For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.
I also can vividly "hear" music, not really voices, but I can put a track on in my head almost as if listening to the radio. For people that can't do this, it might sound great - and it is quite cool except for waking up many mornings with a random track stuck in your head or hearing a particular riff over and over again.
I don't tend to remember faces of people I've recently met - there are times when someone says hi, starts chatting and I think "who the hell is that?"
> For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.
I can imagine this, but if someone just says "you're walking down a winding path", I visualize something much more like the original parent. It takes nonzero effort to bother to mentally render a scene like that, so it doesn't just happen when someone says something; I have to actively want to be imagining it. I don't have some scene ready-to-go that I can drop myself into.
The above changes if a specific place is named, somewhere I've been. Then I'll generate some scene based on my memory.
Your second two paragraphs could have been written by me.
>>If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
>>The image I see in my mind...
I see no image. No empty paper with an arrow, nothing. Same with sounds.
I don't have a problem identifying faces. I'm not great at putting names with faces, but that may be separate.
I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think
I don’t have aphantasia, but I do think in an audible stream of words.
This has led to an odd quirk in my experience as a software developer: I hate keywords or variable names that don’t have an obvious pronunciation, like “fn”. They interrupt the stream and make me stumble in a way that doesn’t seem to afflict people who appear to experience written words as grouped glyphs without hearing them.
(I’ve chosen to read “fn” as “effin” as a puerile expression of resentment.)
"think of" is far too ambiguous here to really meaningfully drill into the differences of _how_ people think about things. I know that a stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue. Thinking about it just involves no imagery.
Information you might rely on visualization for, I don't (because I can't). I couldn't tell you with any confidence what my family that just visited this afternoon was wearing (something I assume is easier for people who would remember it visually), but I can recall what happened - in what order, where, who said what, etc. - throughout their visit.
I have a vivid imagination. My stop sign visualized as looking up to your right at a stop sign a few feet above your head, so a proportionally distorted octagon. The coating is metallic red and near-white and has a mild flaky look to it as some colored metal has, with a hint of rainbow from the sun that lights it from my back. There is a standard metal post with holes in it. There is a mostly blue sky as background framed with small leaved, large trees. I know that if I paned down, I'd see grass with small, yellow flowers.
When I lose my wife at the store, I often realize I would be useless in describing what she was wearing if I had to. If friends were over, I wont recall their attire unless it specifically came up, then I might remember it for years.
I know what they look like. Could describe them to you. Draw them on a piece of paper. Can't visualise one in my head.
Heck, I can't even visualise what my wife and kids look like, something that my wife finds astonishing (and sad).
I'm useless at art, for the most part, with no visual imagination to work with.
Yesterday we were at a clothes store, and I could tell my youngest that I didn't think a particular set of clothes she was trying suited her, and was able to make specific suggestions. I can look at clothes and decide if they'd suit. Not because I could see them together in my head, or picture her wearing them, but because I've learned the rules, for want of a better way to put it.
> I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.
> On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
I'm the same way. I can almost replay entire songs in my head, and if I hear a repeated sound I can replay it slowed down in my head to count it, but in college I discovered that I had trouble recognizing faces of people when I'd meet them a second time. This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.
> This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.
We are very good at remembering and recognizing small details. You may have a trouble with faces yet you may have no trouble with a minor details what makes you recognize the person even if you actually struggle to recognize their face.
Anecdata: I always had not such a good eyesight, which, of course, only got worse with the age. Recently I stood at the bar entrance and recognized a friend from ~30 meters, despite what:
- he was in an unfamiliar to me clothing
- he wasn't with a cane like our previous couple of meetings (broken leg)
- I can't see shit at ~2 meters
Just a combination of his height, walking pattern and ~hair colour (and what he definitely headed to that bar and was not passing by) made me recognize him despite what I, quite literally, barely could see him.
I feel my memory/imagination is abstract, spatial, relational and factional. With that prompt I "see"/experience looking at the dark with a torch. I go over all the details one by one, but I don't see them it's just abstract concepts, like colour, shape and location.
I don't "see" a whole picture when zooming out. It's just the aggregate concept.
This might also be related to my dyslexia, why I'm good at abstract stuff like maths/programming and why I'm very good at direction and path finding. I have a good memory (but more of an indexing problem as I grow older ;)
I consider myself quite creative (I love DIY stuff and creating things), but especially at improving, tweaking. Less so at starting from scratch. I have an eye for details. That's why I'm great at pairing on tasks.
I have never experienced these things as a disability, but more so as talents.
I think my auditory visualisation is on the outlier side, I will literally sit in the car with nothing on the stereo just humming along to what I’m imagining in my mind.
It’s almost like I’m actually hearing music (or I can imagine people speaking in basically any accent) - even full orchestral. But it’s subtly different in a way I can’t really describe.
My image visualisation is much weaker, I can imagine moving images, in colour and everything but it’s much more vague.
I have to picture somewhere else I've been before that is like that. I can't make up new realistic landscape images in my head. That said, I'm not an artist
There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.
Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogramming our visual hardware to form abstract concepts in the minds eye rather than visualizing concrete objects.
Since we are going with anecdotes and gut feelings, I’d say these things aren’t related at all. I can imagine pictures, sounds and also have always been good at abstract thinking. Also chess and tetris are a matter of practice mostly, imo.
It’s funny though you can learn to visualize in chess through solving puzzles. I couldn’t do it at all at first but after awhile it clicked and I could just move pieces in my head.
I'm not convinced. I have aphantasia, yet I know I have vivid visual dreams, and I have at least once experienced even more vivid imagery in a waking state while meditating. I don't think - at least not for everyone - that the ability isn't there. It seems like something is inhibiting it when I'm awake. That, if anything, makes it a lot more frustrating. E.g. I've chased that meditation experience for a long time
In my case, I seem to have enhanced spatial reasoning when thinking about objects, rather than something visual.
For example, if I’m asked to think of an apple, I don’t see an apple (with no color etc.), but I can “feel” an apple in the sense that I can abstractly reason about the 3D space of an apple.
Again, there’s nothing visual about it. It’s almost as if I’m blind, and can form and reason about an apple as if I had only ever been able to hold one.
I have the same experience. Often times I find myself skipping steps when explaining things to other because I'm referencing a very obvious (to me) spatial disconnect between two concepts. I've also noticed that I'll gesture to where in my mind those concepts are located spatially.
Other quirks:
- I am also always aware of which direction "home" is. I can't remember ever being lost.
- I have an automatic annoyingly good memory for songs and sounds
- "Remembering" feels more like a bundle of sense impressions being re-expressed than it does recall. This is nice because I get much more "complete" impression of what my mind remembers happening. Not sure when this changed for me but it was after definitely after a few years of meditating.
Now that you mention this, removing color from the exercise and focusing on the spatial features made the exercise incredibly easy. Trying to visualize color seems to be more difficult.
I think that would be hard to gauge. From what I recall supposedly ~4% of people have aphantasia (iirc this includes minor forms, not just complete). If there are hundreds of thousands of people on this forum, there are likely thousands with aphantasia.
And whenever some niche topic comes up that relates to some group, they all come out of the woodwork to congregate. I certainly do whenever this topic comes up.
I'd say it's the other way around, people with Aphantasia trend towards tech. Especially software is very abstract, you can visualize parts of it in your head but it's often not enough precise or just too complex. Even a small imprecision makes it pointless, which is very frustrating. Compare that to something like (UI) design, architecture, animation, visual effects etc. Where even rough visualizations help a lot.
Do people without aphantasia actually visualize for loops, class hierarchies, design patterns, etc…?
If not it would be easy to explain the result of the “visualize an apple” test. It’s just like visualizing a “for loop”. You’ve got a good idea of what’s it like and yet visualize absolutely nothing.
I do visualize images I have seen in the past that represent class hierarchies, I can visualize UML representing design patterns, and also can visually compose these UMLs, I can even write code in my head as I see it on the screen, for example I can change background color or font. I can only do it for small snippets, but I do see them they are not just text. Whenever I want to solve a high level design problem I actually see the systems stylized, a cache, a database, client, server, arrows between them, the same way they appear on the screen. I can easily imagine all kinds of dashboards charts and whatnot. All these to some degree of complexity, I need to make some effort to actually take a mental picture of the screen remember and visualize it after a period, unless is something I see every day. So yes people can use images to do their work every day as programmers.
I think there is also a phenomenon where bits of the human condition are given a label and then suddenly sprouting a subculture on the internet where people get excited to be part of something special. Some kind of disease fetish.
I can’t even imagine approaching a problem without some visual representation.
I see functions I wrote hours ago, maybe not every line of code but pseudocode at least. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve solved bugs just visualizing code before falling asleep.
I asked a non-tech loved one right now and she doesn’t see anything either. I almost suspect people are claiming they “see” things when they don’t and it’s just a deep understanding of what something looks like.
While certainly some of that does happen. The language around visualization is complicated. But we know that there are people who have no ability to think in language and have no internal monologue, whereas others can do so strongly. Given how much variability there is in everything else with the brain, it would be rather strange that it isn't also true of visualization.
After all, everything we experience is our brains' interpretation of our sensory inputs. And if we can visually experience things that don't exist, whether through dreams or hallucinations (drug induced or otherwise), it stands to reason that if your mind knows how to control those same pathways you could create images in your mind.
What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.
I feel similarly, though less about the lack of objective testing and more about the inability to even be sure we're talking about the same thing. Like I can visualize stuff fine, but not literally see it like some Hololens overlay -- it's in a sort of abstract internal space separate from what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I wonder whether some self-diagnosed aphantasiacs only think they are because they overestimate how potent "normal" visualization should be. (Or maybe these visual hallucinations are normal and I'm underdiagnosing myself!)
One method to possibly tell the difference is visual analogizing. Like, "picture" the Sydney Opera House, and then (without thinking in words) name some other objects it resembles. Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
I disagree. Asking someone to name shapes that resemble for example the Sydney Opera house seems to me just a test of creativity, not ability to “visualize” something in your head.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our version of this “visualization” or “image” or … looks or even feels.
It is a creativity test, but doesn't how you get there matter? From what I understand, aphantasiacs think in words, verbalized concepts, remembered facts, relationships, etc. So I'd expect that to make a visual analogy they'd have to first think through the properties of the thing -- "OK, I know this building is white, triangular, curved, near the water..." -- and then come up with other things those attributes describe. But I can just "see" the shape and color of the building in my mind's eye, and mentally make it be something similar, without any internal monologue at all. Actually, if you just gave me a written description of these traits, I'd have a harder time coming up with examples because they're just abstract properties without any specific image to anchor them to -- I could do it, but I'd have to think about it some. But doing the same exercise with a mental image feels much easier.
How can someone judge if two things look similar that are not before your eyes without visualizing them in their mind? Surely some visual comparison and matching must be going on in their head?
But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is.
For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no color because it’s just an abstract concept. For me it is a white outline on a black background, very vividly.
For the test to be meaningful, it should still produce accurate results when the subject is pretending to have the condition (the SAT wouldn’t be helpful if you could ace it by acting as if you know the all answers!)
Consider a turing test of sorts: I want to convince you I am phantastic, you are tasked with determining whether I am faking it. Could such a test be realized?
Consider, for example, the “draw a bicycle” phenomenon. Many alleged phantists are wholly unable to correctly render a bicycle onto paper, and furthermore they are often unable to self-evaluate that their renders are bogus. Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
Of course this test does not have perfect recall/accuracy, it’s just an example of how the results can be counterintuitive.
> Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
As one, I don't draw, I construct. A set of rules make a bicycle a bicycle, so pick a part, draw it, then sequentially continue attaching parts per the rules, and at the end, it's a valid bicycle that functions. The resultant drawing is considered good, though I couldn't "see" any part of the bicycle before or while drawing.
This isn't from an image, but it is arguably a mapping.
Similarly, I've observed those who can mentally organize concepts but can't visualize pictures are often better able to render frameworks onto whiteboards than those who picture scenes.
It's made me wonder if the same parts of the mind are used for the one or the other, as if remembering everything visually uses up circuitry that could support semantic-space-time.
A anecdote along the same lines as your drawing vs constructing observation:
I happen to be fairly adept at wood working. And I often think up novel constructions that people quite fancy and indeed are willing to pay their hard earned bucks for.
Once I have thought these things up, I am able to render them to paper/CAD very easily for concrete plan creation. I am never surprised at the appearance of the thing when it is rendered to CAD, I always knew that’s what it would look like. I never saw it in any visual sense, but I knew exactly how it would appear, and I could answer in great detail any question someone might have about it (barring, perhaps, the sorts of questions that require trigonometry/excessive number crunching – the reason I’m putting it to CAD/paper).
To me, this means there isn’t a binary “has ‘imagination’/does not have ‘imagination’” divide. Rather, folks perhaps have different methods of “visualization”. Some folks have a “bitmap” approach (≈Photoshop). From the comments here, it seems some a “vector” approach (≈Illustrator). I would perhaps describe mine as a “CSG” approach (≈OpenSCAD/Grasshopper/etc.).
What’s nice with this phrasing is that nobody is missing anything. Nobody is a-trait. Everyone just has a different method of doing the same sorta thing, perhaps with some relative strengths and weaknesses accordingly, but no fundamental lack of ability to answer any particular question.
The article uses the VVIQ test (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), taken on the Internet, to select aphantasiac participants. I cannot take research like that seriously.
> For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless.
If you are not an aphantasiac, how do you know what meaning this question has for one? I am pretty sure aphantasiacs can "imagine" a triangle with some color in it. It is just that this imagine manifests differently than it does for you, but how can we measure that objectively?
To elaborate, even for an aphantasiac, a triangle or a color is not something abstract. You can draw it on a paper, and it is right there. If you close your eyes, you can remember what you have drawn on the paper, aphantasiac or not. So how exactly do you distinguish the quality of memories here? Certainly not with vague internet questionnaires. Research like that makes me really angry.
If I say "imagine a triangle" and ask you what color it is, why would it have a color if there is no image there? I didn't ask you to imagine a red triangle. Only a triangle. The only way it logically gets a color is if you are visualizing it.
In my mind there is an infinite void. No color per say, think of the void of space, without a single spec of dust.
This void is a 3D space. There is a general sense of up, down, left, right, front and back.
In this void I materialize a triangle. It is a wireframe. 3 lines, all the same length. No color, they are just lines.
By default the triangle is resting on one side, pointing up, and facing me. I can then rotate and move my mind "camera" around it while simultaneously rotating and moving the triangle as well.
The more complex the shapes, the more shapes, the harder it is to maintain coherency. I can close my eyes and concentrate to help.
I can assign colors if I wish to, but they are not really there visually. More like an extra information attached to the shape.
I understand your reasoning, but it is not very logical. It depends on what you mean by "imagine a triangle". A triangle doesn't have to be filled with a color to be a triangle. Why would you imagine it with any color in it in the first place, not just a wireframe, being transparent inside? So if your triangle doesn't have a color, it might be because you are more accurate in your imagination, not because you have no triangle imagination.
So without a proper way of defining things like "imagine" or "mental picture" first, tests like yours or like VVIQ are not well-defined. Now, maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I have aphantasia. Or maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I am a logician and mathematician, and I am very peculiar about "meaning". Maybe even both. Without a doubt though, VVIQ is not an objective test, because its elements are not properly defined.
The point isn’t to rigorously define “visualize” or “imagine”—we will probably never be able to do this. The point is to use a verbal prompt to elicit a mental experience and then to try to probe that experience.
> A triangle doesn't have to be filled with a color to be a triangle. Why would you imagine it with any color in it in the first place, not just a wireframe, being transparent inside?
That’s just it: when I imagine a triangle, it is a definite image with a definite color. The visual details like color come automatically for me. I cannot imagine it in the more abstract way you are describing. If it’s a wireframe, the wireframe is gray. It’s always a full, colorful, 3d scene, perhaps vague but definitely with visual detail.
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless
I confirm.
I would have probably picked up a color at random to play along with the whole “mind’s eye metaphor” before I realized people can actually “see” for real and it’s not a metaphor.
I don't consider myself having aphantasia (I can visualize stuff in my head), but if I imagine a triangle it doesn't by default have a color. It would if the instructions were something like "imagine a red and a blue triangle", but when I only imagine shapes they don't necessarily have a color.
The second paragraph of this Guardian article mentions, and links to, but doesn't expound on the biophysical pupillary response to mental visual imagery.
If someone with normal mental visualization ability pictures a "bright" scene, the pupils contract just as they would in response to a bright visual stimulation. Aphants' pupils show no physical response to this test.
Speaking from experience as an aphantasic person, I think it is definitely possible to test objectively. For instance certain IQ tests will test the subject's ability to identify what a pictured object would look like if it were rotated in a certain way.
I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section except that one... where I scored 1st percentile. If that's not a strong sign of aphantasia I don't know what is!
This is actually one of the things about aphantasia that has already had a (small) study[0], and the results are actually the opposite! The participants with aphantasia were more likely to both (a) take longer to answer and (b) be _correct_.
I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning are mostly (but not entirely) orthogonal spectra, and it's completely possible for people to fall anywhere on either, just based on how their brain developed its internal strategies throughout normal life.
Yes, objective tests must somehow take into account the multitude of coping mechanisms that people with the condition have developed. "Spatial reasoning" for example is very close to logical reasoning, and I don't see why people with Aphantasia shouldn't be very good at that, albeit slower in "spatial" mode.
fMRI can probably spot it for people like myself who are fully aphantasic.
But:
1. "Imagine a table. There is a ball on the table. The ball rolls off the table onto the floor."
2. "From memory, what color was the ball? The table? The floor? What did you see under the table?"
Neither I nor any other, uh, aphants, that I have known have answers to those questions. Imagination still works, and answers to those questions can be produced interactively if handled appropriately, but, ex: we weren't imagining colors and we didn't see anything at all much less "under the table".
Alternative:
1. "What do you think people do, specifically, when they "count sheep" to go to sleep?"
Our answers to that should just be hilarious for you. Hi-larious.
Understand that we thought you folks "visualizing in your minds eye" were speaking metaphorically. Entirely metaphorically.
Just to understand the baseline you're working form, what data are you drawing on when stating what's "normal"? It has appeared to me throughout this conversation that you are starting from the assumption that your internal experience (at least, with regard to mental imagery) is consistent with the majority and making assertions about the majority based on that.
If you are actually drawing on a larger amount of data, specifically pertaining to the mechanisms of people's internal experiences, that'd be useful to know. If you are not, I'd gently suggest that you're working from a flawed statistical assumption, and that looking at the numerous interactions in this thread where people describe materially different internal experiences ("I can only recall tastes in terms of descriptors" - "I can experience a taste by imagining it"[0]) may be more informative without presuming universal consistency.
I'm not sure what you think you've gained or stated with this remark.
"Mind's eye" and "visualization" refer to actual experiences. Those of us with aphantasia (no exceptions that I've encountered so far) did not realize these words referred to actual experiences.
Define "actual experiences". Normal people can not imagine an object like a red apple and actually see it, same as if one existed right in front of them. They can "visualize" it (just like you, it sounds), as in they can think of what it looks like, they would recognize one, they can even imagine broader scenes involving this apple (like an entire grocery aisle) but there is no "actual experience." You couldn't walk straight otherwise, you'd constantly be dodging imaginary objects that you'd be seeing.
The generous interpretation of everything you've written so far is that you have aphantasia and don't realize it, and when it finally registers you'll feel like a real ass about these comments.
There’s a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast about aphantasia. They specifically talk about a test for the condition. It’s worth the 30 minute listen.
Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head.
I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA.
I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate?
That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia.
For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.
> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details.
> Do you think that's accurate?
I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap.
With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it.
[0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
Thanks, those are great points. After more thought, I somewhat agree I was overweighing the value of visualizing things in my mind. I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc. So maybe that's analogous to aphantasia. It's just that we're talking about the sense of sight versus taste. From a practical standpoint, there isn't much value even if I could taste something as part of a memory. It would make the memory even stronger and more vivid though.
> I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc.
For what it's worth, I can't conjure anything other than a few fleeting details for something visual. When I manage to surface a distinct image, it vanishes pretty fast. But (if I can remember it) I can "imagine" the taste of a specific chocolate bar, a sound (particularly voices) or how something feels to touch very distinctly. I'd say "accurately" as well, but that's hard to gauge.
Interestingly, I think my tendency to visualize makes me a slow reader. I can suppress it with effort, but typically my pace slows down to let me imagine observing the story.
I don't think that's part of "visualization" itself. I don't visualize a scene, but I still can take a long time if it's interesting or has a lot of detail.
I remember reading the Lord of the Rings books and it has really long descriptions of the scenery and sometime it took me a very long time to read it, just so I can get all the details. In other parts I read over it as fast as I could to get on with the story.
Movies and TV shows are a really exciting topic. But first to your questions:
You are totally right, I can't recall a scene from a movie with all the details. I couldn't paint it, as I'm not seeing it like when it's right in front of me (in the movie). But I could definitely describe it and it will sound indistinguishable from what you would describe, the difference is that I'm remembering the description and you are remembering the scene itself.
Rewatching a movie is the same, I remember seeing the movie and I also remember all the scenes (the ones I remember); you might remember a scene by color and "images", I remember it by description or concept. But the result is the same: I remember having seen it.
A really nice perk (for me) is that I don't remember the individual actors. I remember the role played, but not who has played it. It's not like I cannot distinguish actors from another, but I just don't remember actor X played this and that role. I really don't understand the problems with changing actors in sequels, it's the same role; maybe played a little bit different, but still the same role.
I know a total of maybe 5 to 10 actors which I recognize among different movies.
A good way to think about what it is like to be color blind in a world where others see more colors is to consider tetrachromats. From Google:
> "People with tetrachromacy have a fourth cone in their retinas, called a tetrachromat, that allows them to see up to 100 million colors, compared to the average person's 1 million. This extra cone gives them access to new color ranges within the yellow and green spectrum, which can create millions of new color variations. "
I can only imagine how much more vibrant the world looks to them in terms of sunrise and sunset, walking in a forest, etc.
I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.
I learned about Aphantasia about eight months ago, and it really sent me for a trip. I have no problems visualizing in my mind and sometimes can get lost in it, to me that’s what daydreaming is.
I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
We have these common concepts which are actually very personal everywhere.
Even with good eyes the color perception differs a lot between different people. For most it's obvious that this is red and this is blue, but in between the colors it gets very fuzzy.
The same goes for sounds and smell and touch, so for every sense.
Totally, the gold/blue dress picture is a perfect example of that[0].
I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue.
When awake I imagine things but they're fleeting, hazy etc. and I have to really concentrate.
But something happened to me a few years ago, I can't really say what. Basically my dreamscape when I was asleep changed. I went from sort of greyscale dreams with 1-2 people at a time, very little audio to basically full-blown movie quality with up to thousands of people in the scene. Long ago I achieved a lucid dreaming state but it was always a bit boring somehow, there wasn't much happening. Now I can do the same and there's a whole storyline going on for me to experience.
Also when waking up I could now just turn around and immediately go back to sleep and resume the dream.
My point in all of that is that somehow when my full conscious mind isn't present it's as if in computer terms I just have a lot more CPU power available for creating the scenery, up to the point where it's as real as real life. I'm sure it's not a "CPU" issue, the brain should easily be powerful enough to do it while conscious, but maybe it's more of a survival thing.
How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation? I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation, as if it’s some kind of minority report style interface that appears before you and is perceived by the eye. It’s simply being able to reconstruct physical entities as mental models. Again, without being able to do that it just seems impossible that you could navigate from memory, unless every destination is recorded in your mind as a series of “left, right, left, left, right at church” instructions that you’ve managed to memorise, but surely you’re not doing that? You must be about to walk through the steps of a journey in your mind? I struggle to believe people are getting through life without this ability, it seems so essential to me in all sorts of scenarios.
Maybe, but what other people write about their visualization experiences is completely alien to me. It's not a matter of degree.
Is there any analogy between reasoning about relationships and paths through complicated source code code vs paths through a street map? I don't think I visualize either, I just kind of absorb knowledge and piece together plans.
I don't have an inner monologue either, and I find that I've not infrequently found myself having to pronounce a word I've only ever read before. Ihhave to invent a spoken pronunciation for the first time ever and get self-conscious. It's not the same as aphantasia, but kind of similar. Well, maybe: when I see a movie about a book I've read, I never say, "oh, that actor looks different than what I thought the character looked like".
I don't mean to argue that aphantasia is "real", but I do feel there is evidence for it.
The difference is the recognition. If you tell me "to go right at the wall with the lion on it and left after the blue door" you're giving me an immense difficult task. If you want to totally screw me just show me pictures of the wall and the blue door, I probably be really lost.
It's not only about what is visualizable, but also what form of representation is comparable. I can read a map in a matter of seconds and find my way. I can find a car plate within my line of sight instantly. The way to the parking lot behind the <insert picture of something> and finding the blue <insert car brand> there is basically impossible for me. Of course I'm able to concentrate, but it doesn't come naturally.
> How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation?
How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
> I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation
I find the utter disbelief expressed by people who don't have aphantasia exhausting. It would be similar to encountering someone who has been deaf from birth and trying to convince them that they're not really deaf, they just don't understand what it means when other people say that they hear things. They could also hear things if they just try harder.
> How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
I assume they create a mental model of space. To me, this is basically what I’m describing as visualisation. In ones mind one can arbitrarily place themselves in space and move around it. I guess this is slightly different to conjuring up an image, but to me it feels very similar. If you can “see” space in your minds eye, it seems like you could see other arbitrary things.
I’m not saying I don’t think this is a real phenomena, just that it’s hard to empathise and understand it.
If you could describe your experience of navigation from memory I would appreciate it. When someone asks you for directions somewhere, what goes through your mind?
because the average person relies so heavily on visualization in their day to day life, people that claim they dont have this ability but also seem to have no discernable difference in the way they interact with the world is what is confusing. everyone understands that deaf people exist because its really fucking obvious when someone is deaf. they interact with the world differently.
its really weird to me, and most everyone that you could be looking at a cup and trying to commit its visual properties to memory, and then close your eyes and be complete incapable of re-constructing even a vague visual representation of it.
I can visualize nothing, but have excellent navigation skills. I can accurately remember the geospatial arrangement of cities and locations and routes I visited only once decades ago. That part of my brain has nothing to do with “seeing things”
do you have any experience of feeling like youve been at a particular place before. if you dont remember seeing it, do you just remember the arangement of landmarks like dots on a grid?
It’s an innate sense which most closely resembles proprioception (knowing where you arms/legs/etc are), or remembering where you put your keys. I suppose maybe it’s similar to “seeing” landmarks on a map (not necessarily a grid) but it’s simultaneously abstract while being very well defined in some intuitive sense: I know the Vatican is this way and the Colosseum is that way and the Spanish Steps are that way (and every other spot I cared to notice on the map), and no matter where in the city I walk and so long as I know which way I’m facing, I’ll 100% know the relative direction and distance of every other spot (as well as the pathing! Not just locations but also streets, etc). It’s actually hard for me to get lost.
I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words.
Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery).
So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.
I'm almost aphantasiac, so for me it's actually easy to believe—visualizing things is hard enough that I can imagine not being able to do it at all, but also possible enough that I can imagine it being easier to do.
Similar questions throughout this thread make it clear that people assume recognition and/or knowledge of what something looks like is tightly coupled to internal visualization, but (writing as someone with aphantasia) they're not. I can draw both of the examples you gave, thinking about them (including thinking about how I would go about drawing them) just doesn't include an image in my head.
Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry.
Back before GPS, people used to give each other driving directions based on landmarks... go straight 2 miles, turn left at the red brick schoolhouse. Now, that sounds like the condition you describe - you know red, you know brick, you know what schoolhouses generally look like, but since you've never been to this specific place there is zero mental picture. When you finally get there, it's a surprise, you've found the thing that combines all the elements. But the next trip, there is a mental picture. It's probably extremely vague and lacking any detail, but it's still something, the next time it won't be a complete surprise.
Someone with the condition you describe (zero mental imagery) would, constantly, feel like they are seeing basic objects for the very first time, you wouldn't recognize anything at all, this would be a highly debilitating condition just like severe amnesia.
I can only tell you that I do not have mental imagery and am not constantly surprised by my surroundings. Object permanence has absolutely no dependency on visualization; it is completely unsurprising to me that the stop sign near my house looks the same each time I encounter it.
I totally get that you, having lived a life where mental imagery is such an integral part of your baseline experience, assume that many of the things you rely on it for require it. However, the human brain is impressively adaptable, and it turns out many, many aspects that people assume are linked (and may well be for them as individuals) are not globally so.
This thread is full of such realizations - people assuming ability at chess, art, tetris, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, architectural design, conceptualizing of DB schemas, etc. must be correlated with facets of thought like strength of mental imagery, presence of an inner monologue, ability to dream, etc. In all of those cases, people have chimed in with (anecdotal, to be sure) counterexamples. It turns out brains are generally capable of doing a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.
In another comment you wrote "stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue". The fact that you knew all of that without having to actually find a stop sign and look at it, that's mental imagery. It may be a skill some people are very good at (i.e. they can remember lots of small details) and others are not, but it's not that you don't have this skill at all.
What I know is that people describe not having aphantasia like
“I’m sitting in a room with a dog and a TV. Then someone says ‘visualize a stop sign.’ And, so then I’m sitting in a room with a dog, a TV and a stop sign. I’m know the stop sign isn’t real. It might be fuzzy or even black & white. But, I can see it between the dog and the TV.”
Well… I know exactly what a stop sign looks like. But, there’s no stop sign in the room with me and my dog. It’s not there at all.
No, that is more like hyperphantasia, where the visualized object is superimposed on top of one's visual reality. Seeing something in one's mind's eye is more like there is a a buffer right above my visual reality where I can imagine something inside that buffer. It is not superimposed over reality but I can focus on both the visual buffer and the imagination buffer simultaneously.
The woman in the article describes that she has no problem identifying faces she has seen before, in fact, she is better at that than average. It is just that she doesn't see these faces as a picture in her head.
So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the hash of a picture, and performing comparisons using the hash, not the picture itself.
It sounds like people simply have different definitions of "a picture in her head." Her mental processing sounds entirely normal on all counts.
I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes are closed, my guess is everyone would fail.
I suspect the 3.9% estimation is wildly inaccurate but that the condition / spectrum is true.
In the 1-5 guide, I'd probabably rate myself a 99 or something silly. I feel like the equipment is capable of visualising, but I just don't know how to operate it.
However, I do have involuntary visualizations. My dreams are images, very unlike thought. And in the last 5 or so years I can recall 2 occasions where I was in a relaxed state and pictured things without really trying, so I know it's possible to have dream like images when awake.
My wife says she can just perfect recall stuff. I entirly believe she can visualise, but I believe she confuses what happened with what she can see. She also states she can visualise the apple, or pretty much anything else she wants.
For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown".
All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture".
OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".
How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quickly. I've heard that people like you make great scholars for that reason.
I read about three times as fast as other people. I'm still not better in absorbing the information, I also make errors and miss key points.
The difference is that a book is already in a format I don't need to convert (to images) anymore.
About the 3x: if I need to show someone something to read on a screen and need to wait to scroll to the next page, I just read it 3 times and scroll then, it normally fits a "normal" reading speed.
I read very fast (English and code, and my native language), and I have a very vivid visual (as well as auditory) imagination. Wonder what I traded off in this setup.
Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.
Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised.
Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head.
Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
Not OP. I don’t recall any dreams since childhood. If I had not experienced a few myself, I would have a hard time understanding what a dream even is. And my 10 or so dreams only had abstract images. Defo not like a movie or reality where you can “see” things, people, objects. I don’t recall much about them anyway except being slightly mildly freaked out at the time for experiencing something which was not “real”.
Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description.
It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.
This makes so many moments of my life make so much more sense.
I don't have full blown aphantasia I think but mental images are always very hazy and dark to me and calling them up takes immense effort. Seems like I'm a 4 on the VVIQ scale.
On the other hand, imaginations in psychotherapy, be it for exposure it for revisiting childhood places and moments, still work for me. They are just not very visual. They contain emotions and haptic aspects, sometimes sounds and smells, but the visual is kind of like really old polaroid pictures. They frizzle out at the edges really quickly, they never move, the colors are muted and sometimes off.
At least now I know that people who claim that books evoke vibrant mental images in them are not bullshitting me. And I can stop sitting there with Lord of the Rings in hand, staring at a wall for 10 minutes and wondering why I still don't manage to "see" what Moria looks like.
I'm (apparently) aphantasic, having learned about the concept on a couple of months ago. However unscientific the [VVIQ](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) is, I couldn't answer a single question with anything other than "No image at all."
What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.
I don't see anything. I feel like we're talking past each other. I am skeptical that "visualize an apple" to some people gets them the mental equivalent of a Blender model where they get a 360 degree view of the image and from there they are able to apply arbitrary transformations. I can "replay" songs in my head with pretty good fidelity to the original if I remember enough of it, but I think that's fairly common.
I can confirm it's basically a blender model in my head I can ~arbitrarily transform at will. Worth noting it's not just visual, I can 'touch' the surface of the imagined object(s) or whack two together and 'hear' what that sounds like.
Strangely, I can easily do this in my dreams, or when I’m on the verge of sleep, but not at all when I’m awake. It’s like a different brain takes over. Really want to “unlock” this ability, would help a lot with art.
Ask these people to actually draw or paint the apples, and it quickly shows that they do not do lighting and shading correctly. Even with a lot of training.
Just look at art history. Only very few people managed to render things somewhat accurately before the invention of photography. And the consensus is that these exceptions (such as Holbein or Vermeer) used technological tricks to aid them.
My hypothesis is that people have an internal imagery that is extremely realistic and detailed, because they perceive the actual world in exactly the same way, using the same processes. One does not "see" the image on the retina in their mind's eye, one "sees", if I'm allowed to use the metaphor, the vector embedding somewhat further down the line.
Now, if people train their mind to actually see more detail, they find out that the brain is actually rather limited in comparison to a camera.
Yeah I am in this camp as well. I can also do things like, after the apples are smashed together I can see heir bruises, rotate them, make 2 more bruises, etc. while keeping the bruises in their same spots.
It’s actually really annoying because when I’m stuck on a problem I essentially solve the whole thing in my head. I just see all the issues with possible solutions and back them out.
I wonder if it drives my boss nuts because I can go a whole day basically committing nothing, and then bang out the solution very quickly.
I actually have been actively trying to “just start writing, see what pops out” and it isn’t coming very naturally, which is kind of obnoxious.
Do you generally expect anyone to be able to create a drawing/painting of anything in their visual field? Just because I'm staring at the grand canyon doesn't mean I can put it to paper. That takes extensive practice and skill.
I‘m saying you should be able to do it as well as if it were in your actual visual field. Which might be very badly, depending on talent and experience, but not worse. And I was asking a question, if this is your actual experience. Because while I can visualize and rotate and transform objects in my mind, it’s not comparable to actually seeing them, and it doesn’t translate to being able to draw/paint them as well as if they were in front of me, by far.
I have come to believe there are different type of intelligences, we all have a few, just different.
I do believe a subset of humans can rotate a mental image in their head. I know an accomplished UI / UX artist who would do just this. He'd create an image in his head, observe and critique it from angles and then create in "reality"
I can listen to a song 100 times, and not tell you more than 5 words in a song, nor the beat. My early teen son (a sensor) can sing the entire song after a few listens.
I used to think the only intelligence sign was being highly logical or able to solve complex problems. Because that is what I know. However, I've come to learn there are large swath of intelligences I don't have, and have not personally valued in the past, but others have them and can do great things with them.
This awareness has even allowed me to believe in a wider growth of intelligences at the spectrums, even to a type of supernatural gifts.
I am exactly the opposite, I can very easy imagine an object in my mind and apply a texture, color skew it, rotate it. I can easily visualize a chessboard with pieces that I can change colors and even move. I can visualize moments from past, faces, places, I can even draw them to some degree however without much talent. But for the life of me I can't remember my favorite music unless I start hearing it and then it comes to me, just to fade away seconds after I finish listening to it I can remember lyrics but without the music. I think that I kind of remember (chorus) national anthem and some children songs 1-2 of them, but I can sing along once the music starts. I have a very good memory otherwise, never had to use a todo list for my daily routine.
Can you change the songs you replay in your head? I think there is a spectrum of audio imagination as well. For example, I can speed up/slow down, add reverb, change pitch, remix, change lyrics, etc.
For those of you who do not suffer from dead-on aphantasia but simply have bad visualization/memory recall: you may find great industry in learning to draw, paint, sculpt and immersing yourself in perceptory recall to essentially, in an analogous manner of speaking, strengthen weak muscles. You may go so far as to find the book “ The training of the memory in art and the education of the artist” by B., L. Horace to be of interest. Do not skip on music and try to find ways to engage physically as best as possible. Perception works best in totality, and people who have strong visual recall often have other strong recall functions as well, disabilities notwithstanding.
For me, visualisation is related to memory recall. If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation. For aural imagination, such as music composition, I imagine snippets of music I've heard, then combine them. There is a visual component to that, but it's symbolic, not vivid. If I need to imagine something I haven't experienced, it's like a combination of line drawings, animation and written and spoken language. It would look like a mess if I could project it. Colours are there, but they're not vivid. They're more like bad watercolours. If I take my time, I can clear up the image, and over time it becomes more vivid. This is actually how I write. It's a slow process, but it's the only way I can think clearly. I find social conversation difficult because it tends to move faster than my ability to visualise so I find it dull and uninspiring. I prefer to spend my time slow-reading literature.
Contextual conversations are ok, such as business or academic conversations, because the language is generally a closed set and visualisations are well practiced. But social situations can be without context, and difficult to navigate.
> If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation.
When someone asks me to imagine a scene, I don't really do that. That scene with mountains, trees and a lake? It's like three labels just kinda being there... waiting to be updated based on what comes next.
But if I make a focused effort, I can sorta do it. I can recall seeing something which might look like that, and recall some visual aspects. Not super vividly, but something I could at least use as a basis to draw a sketch for example.
But just by default, those images from my memory seldom come up just reading something. I have to focus and spend time recollecting. But they never ever become vivid as in real life, not remotely close.
I‘m also a self diagnosed aphant. I was so relived when I found out, school was very frustrating since there are so many learning methods that are built for people with a mind that’s able to picture stuff also hard to remember faces, I usually only know some facts about people, like they have red hair, brown eyes… even family members
but I can at least hear sounds in my mind :) I read that this is a similar spectrum thing where some people hear nothing and others can replay everything
What about sexual fantasies? Can people with aphantasia imagine the other person in any manner? In the article, the writer claims she can’t even imagine her ex-boyfriend.
I can imagine anyone, anywhere, without even closing my eyes. In many situations, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had this ability since early childhood. It has not made me a sex-craving maniac, though; I’m quite stable.
I cannot. It's easier to imagine the sensations of being with the person than it is to visualize the person themselves.
I can't visualize the faces of any of my exes but I can vividly "feel" the memory how we felt being next to each other, sometimes if I focus this starts to include smells and sounds as well but no visuals.
Of course they can picture things in their mind, that's how they see.
To explain the not-joke: the things you see are not "out there" they are in your mind. Now of course the things you see through your eyes are there, but the images are imaginary, the eye and brain do all kinds of things between the retina and the mind to make the imagery you see. Your visual perception is constructive.
Metaphorically speaking, the camera works, these folks just don't know how to hit "play" on the tape. They have the neural "circuitry" to visualize in their minds (or they would be blind!) they just aren't using it.
> Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
Learn to use your brain folks. It's the most sophisticated computer in the known Universe and you can learn to operate it.
I'm very interested in this topic, so I'll go ahead and describe my experience.
I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures into your mind and superimpose an apple onto them, like adding a layer in Photoshop, perhaps with 90% opacity or a bit of inconsistent flickering. That's probably the best way I could describe the experience. Those edits I create are on another visual layer, inside my mind, which requires an active effort to have a consistent visual experience, but of course sometimes it can passively activate and you're just daydreaming without any effort. Personally, I have a hard time imagining faces. They change, they melt, sometimes they become inhuman. I only have consistent faces in my dreams.
The places I know well, I can fully navigate inside my mind, just flying around a town, going down streets and such. I, of course, don't believe neither the scaling or the distance is accurate, but it's convincing and consistent enough for me at the level of abstract thought.
I fully get immersed in the books I'm reading or listening to. It's the best part of reading a book.
I can imagine smell, taste, sound, touch, sight and even other senses like balance and whatever else. Sound would be the most vivid part of my imagination. High consistency and fidelity. I also have an inner monologue which I use in second person communication, addressing myself from the perspective of another entity.
I have anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and problems with rumination. I experience memories with a lot of emotion. Whenever I look at art or listen to music, I also tend to have a deep and powerful emotional reaction.
I am exactly the same as you and I also have the same exact anxiety intrusive thought flashback rumination memory issues. It's totally a trade-off but it's not a trade-off that we willingly made when we were being wired up by our genetics lol.
It is such an essential part of my life that suddenly losing these abilities would be devastating. Aphantasia should be considered a disability. I feel as if you're losing an essential part of human experience.
In second year university I took a difficult 3d calculus class. I struggled for weeks until I suddenly developed the capability to visualize and manipulate 3D objects with axes, rulers and protractors in my mind. It like instantly leveled me up. Before that I had only done 2D math.
I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition.
At least I couldn't imagine doing any job I ever head without the ability to manipulate visual information in my head.
I have aphantasia, and I don't feel handicapped at all. The only thing where I really notice differences is when trying to describe people. Since I can't visualize them in my head, I can only describe "known facts", like "they have brown hair". I would make a lousy crime witness...
When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame.
It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.
Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.
If I think of basically anything technical I get an image in my head. Any algorithm I write first exists in my head as a visualization of what I want to do. If I can't visualize what is going on I can't understand it and am in a state of confusion.
I might not have complete aphantasia, when trying to imagine an apple I struggle to imagine it beyond a circular form with a rod pertruding from an indent at the top. No color, no texture. As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
But I don't feel like I am impacted in imagining simple algorithms. I also construct them of very simple forms and rearrange them in my mind. I also feel like it is a lot easier for me to imagine things „automatically“ due to it being memories or being a byproduct of thinking about something. But my mind struggles constructing these images at will.
Also taking a pen and drawing these things up can replace some of the missing imaginary power :)
> As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
This matches my experience - I think of it a bit like a really slow CRT, the phosphorescence fading before the image can be composed.
It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
Interesting. My wife swears she has no visual mind, but she has remarkable spatial awareness when it comes to “this object will fit in that space, and must go through this sequence of manoeuvres to reach it” - she’d have Dirk Gently’s sofa up the stairs in a whistle.
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
There is a lot of evidence that aphants score higher on spatial reasoning tests than those with vivid visual recall and are over represented in fields like math and science.
These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.
Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.
Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.
> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.
You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?
(not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen before"). I don't see how any of these wouldn't still be considered visual mental imagery and I'm starting to think that the people saying there's a semantics issue here might have a point.
When I 'visualize' it's not an image at all. It's the concept of what the image would be showing, which the above posters have called a graph or schematic. But that's an analogy, and not to be taken too literally. I don't visualize a schematic. I instead feel the connections and relationships between concepts. It's entirely non-visual.
I see, it sounded like you were saying you were visualizing a schema[1] (not schematic) of a house but thought it didn't qualify as visualization for some reason.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
I think this is where I go by default, and I've described it before as a low-resolution wireframe. Only the particular part I'm paying attention to is there but I know what's around it and can shift focus as needed.
Almost like rendering a 3D image, but stopping early. I can also go full color with effort but it's generally unnecessary.
This is spatial reasoning, no visualization required. I have always had exceptional spatial reasoning, and while I can visualize it quite well, it is entirely unnecessary for function. My brain contains a detailed model of the topology of space that is quite separate from what the space actually looks like and can reason about it intuitively without visualizing it. This makes things like navigation easy even in places I have never seen before and therefore can’t visualize — I don’t need to know where I am to not be lost.
You're still describing it as an image. I think it would be more accurate to say that you feel the connections between the represented concepts as might be illustrated on a blueprint. But it's a non-visual experience.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker.
When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
Wait, do people see images of a clock in their mind? Like you, I know spatially where the hands should point so I assume this is what “seeing” is. Do people see a clock… like a legit visual when they close their eyes?
There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that.
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
Both my wife and one of my co-workers experience hi-res images superimposed over their actual vision when prompted (and occasionally involuntarily). This opposite end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia[0]. There are accounts in this thread of people having trouble reading books because they're too caught up in the visuals the story creates in their head (something that same co-worker has also mentioned happening).
I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know.
Indeed, I just wrote a sibling comment before I saw yours about the same phenomenon, hyperphantasia. I don't think that the parent is right that it's just "memories and concepts," it actually is vivid imagery for most people who don't have aphantasia. It does seem like the parent has some sort of aphantasia, just not as severe as seeing nothing, it seems to be more of a spectrum rather than a binary.
> I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts.
Some people do, hyperphantasia. I can do this, perfectly visualize the details of the Mona Lisa and examine it from any angle in my mind's eye. If I am in a semi-lucid state while nearing sleep, I can do it even more intensely, as the other day I was visualizing waves bouncing around in a maze and I could see every single bounce.
However, you're right that most people cannot do it so vividly, but it is not the case to say that it's simply memories and concepts, it actually is images and video inside their heads.
> How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details?
Can you describe the difference to me based on your experience? I don't quite understand what it would be, because in my mind's eye, I can literally see the entirety of the Mona Lisa. It does not feel like a "feeling," like happiness or angriness, those are what I'd classify as feelings.
> Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
I don't draw so it would be limited by my drawing ability, but I can reproduce it pretty well if I tried hard enough, as I can visualize it completely in my mind.
It's probably impossible to tell the difference (which would explain the lack of understanding of opposing groups in this thread), unless one tests their ability to actually see the details instead of merely believing that one sees the details.
If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
Note that I'm not interested in memory aspects here. If one can't differentiate minute details, yet still see them highly realistically, then what exactly is it one sees? Probably not the same as the real thing or a photographic image.
A follow-up question would be whether the envisioned details are stable enough to draw or reason from, or whether the image keeps changing in one's head. In the latter case, the process of phantasising may be more akin to what diffusion models do.
> If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
I see what you mean, yes, it's not eidetic or photographic memory when I see it in my mind, I can't see all the small details like that, but I can see it as if I took a picture, not an extremely high resolution one that shows every brush stroke, but more akin to something like this photo's level of detail (I can visualize the people in the crowd as well) [0]. I might even say that I cannot see the details because I actually have no knowledge of them (exactly how many folds or creases there are), than being unable to visualize them entirely. For example, I can see the Mona Lisa with 4, 5, 6, folds in her sleeves, all different images in my mind. Some people however can see every crease exactly as it is but that's much rarer, it's photographic memory, and it's not really what I'd call a normal person's (without aphantasia) experience. It is likely even trainable with more exposure to the actual underlying artifact such as observing the painting in-depth and remembering via visual snapshots what it looks like.
There are others with aphantasia, perhaps milder forms of it, who cannot "see" the Mona Lisa as a photograph, they just see a blur or something more akin to curves and lines that they must focus on, sometimes without color. These people would have less stable images in my mind, but generally my images are pretty stable. I'm curious to hear about what you can see in your mind's eye. Based on what you were saying, it seems to me like you're more on the belief or feeling side, or is it that you can completely see an image in your mind that's stable?
Most certainly. In the first case one can actually use data to base decisions on. In the latter, one is merely hallucinating something which has less information value.
Allow me to try again: in the first case you actually see the details in your mind, and you can reason with them, by separating out single details, focus on them, and reproduce them in a meaningful way. This would allow an artist to form a highly detailed image in their head, and then reproduce it on paper. I think this is very rare, if possible at all. (Of course this is possible with simple imagery, but we are discussing photorealistic copies of the Mona Lisa here.)
In the latter case, one assumes to see details, but in fact one does not, and one cannot focus on details, nor reason with them.
I'm painting a black-and-white distinction here, but I suppose that in reality it is even more complex.
Does this make sense, or do you still insist that there is no meaningful difference between these two interpretations? In that case, could you point out where you think my reasoning goes wrong?
All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise. The brain is never a lossless memory replay device, even if it feels like it to some people.
But my original point was more that the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise. There isn’t a homunculus in your head with a little film projector.
> All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise.
I tend to agree, but I suppose that the level of lossiness varies from person to person, and depends on training and concentration.
> the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise
Interesting! Would you say that the same mechanism applies to the feeling of hearing or tasting things? Or are those fundamentally different from visual experiences?
And what about observing the real world, is that the same experience as replaying something in one's head, but using a different input source?
Nope I didn’t realize she was facing a particular direction. I’d consider that a lack of knowledge. But if I did again it would just be words.
I don’t believe that people have a high res magical image. I believe there’s something that feels like visual stimulation which is used as a reference for information. I don’t have anything that seems remotely visual.
Forget the Mona Lisa, maybe you've never seen it even in a book. Do you know what the shape of your country (like from a map) looks like? Of course you do, and it's not because you went around and did your own border survey, it's because you've seen the shape on maps thousands of times, and you can picture it in your head.
I've seen the Mono Lisa in Paris, twice. And no I have absolutely no idea which way she faces as I never bothered to commit that factual bit of knowledge to memory.
It's definitely real - I just need to draw/map out things on tos like drawio all the time when things get too complex to hold in my head as just memorised words and relationships
It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying.
No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head.
The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely.
(I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
My "screen" isn't anywhere in space. It's in my internal world. If I want to see only it, I take a step out of reality, into my head, and there it is. Doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or closed, there's just another reality I can enter.
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
Sounds like you actually have the opposite, hyperphantasia, perhaps even of an extreme kind. I also lucid dream, very vividly, but I cannot superimpose things from my mind onto my visual plane, it is more like the above parent for me, it's in a separate area from the visual plane altogether, and I suspect that's most people except for those with hyperphantasia.
Yes, from what I've heard from other people, I have pretty extreme hyperphantasia.
The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
That's interesting, how detailed are your models you pull out to observe? Are the models static? It's like you have your very own mind-linked AR setup.
They're as detailed as my attention to them. If my eyes stay open, I can add details to the model. It's not like taking a photograph I can look at later, so for example, if there were a playing card on a desk, and all I had consciously noticed was that it was a playing card, not that it was the queen of hearts, I wouldn't be able to close my eyes and then determine what the card was from the model.
But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back.
I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!
That makes sense, for me I can do everything you talked about, including having them as detailed as my attention to them and doing spacial manipulations, but I simply cannot bring them into the real world so to speak, to superimpose them on my vision. They still exist only in my mind's eye, the plane behind and above my visual plane, as the commenter said above.
Yeah, I don't have a division between the planes unless I choose to. I can separate them, but it's just as easy to keep them together. I think of them as the "inside" and "outside" planes, the only major distinction between them being that other people can only see things in the outside plane. They're not separated in position unless I want them to be.
For what it's worth, I can also hear them. I carry on conversations with people who aren't physically in the room all the time. For example. (My doc assures me that this is fine as long as I know they're not in the room and I don't trust what they say without verifying!) It's extremely useful for bouncing ideas around, even if it's really only an elaborate way of thinking about something by myself in several ways. I find it intuitively easier to discuss something with another person than just to sit and think about it.
I will say it's not much of a tactile sense, though. I can use my hands to manipulate things if I want, but I don't feel them nearly as clearly as I can see and hear them. I guess I also just don't do this as often, because how something physically feels isn't usually terribly important to me. Same reason I look at and listen to a lot more things for information in the outside plane than I touch.
I draw pictures. Had some difficulty dreaming up a part to create in engineering school but 3D cad programs made my own shortcomings irrelevant.
We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice.
I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is.
The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people.
I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
I can confirm that this is real. It also isn’t much of a problem job-wise.
I can’t do creative work like drawing a picture, but I can (and do) think up algorithms and write code. I would describe it as: I can’t do creative visual work, everything else is fine.
Imagine thinking in concepts instead of images. I can't visualize a hammer or a face, but I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.
I can't visualize anything. If I close my eyes, I just see some vague light coming through my eyelids. I can "imagine" for a lack of a better word, the graph and all the nodes and edges "existing", and can reason about its properties based on that.
Believe whatever you want, but visualization ability is like every other aspect of human experience: it exists on a spectrum
I can only visualize involuntarily as I'm drifting off to sleep, so I know what it is and what it's like. But I can't consciously do it, never have been able to, even with decades of deliberate practice.
I feel like I have two visual fields. One that feels like it is through my eyes and of the outside world, and then another that has images or ideas that I can conjure up (almost like eigenfaces or other low resolution concepts). The second visual field isn't within the first, but feels like it is also roughly centered where my brain is.
Yes, same! Sometimes it almost feels like HDMI1 and HDMI2 or something, and I switch between the two during dreaming and sort of superimpose them somehow when picturing something
A really interesting question here, to me, is if aphantasia is more common now than it was before. There's a whole collection of non-"neurotypical" conditions that seem more common now (though its always possible they are just diagnosed more and more likely to be expressed in lifestyles that require more complex thought). It also seems likely that our focus on literal "visualization" (picturing a picture) is amplified by the media that surrounds us - thousands of high fidelity photos of the world. Perhaps previous generations simply had less cause to try to visualize things in a "photo-realistic" way?
Can people with Aphantasia still have visual dreams -- where imagery is more real and vivid and more involuntary than willed .... than what they can 'see' when awake and conscious and are trying to muster up an image on purpose with closed eyes ?
I tried visualizing some images now -- and it seems harder than I expected, seems harder with eyes closed (makes eveyrthing feel too dark and low contrast). But I think my dreams are more vivid than that.
Also I relized that when actively trying to imagine things, the "resolution" or sharpness/focus of the mental picture is very narrow -- I can only imagine the "details" of texture/surface of things when focussing attention on a very small and narrow field of "vision".
When I was a child I remember dreams occurred but they did not contain any vivid representations of anything. Just abstract images. Nothing you could classify as vivid, let alone a representation of reality in any sense.
The whole concept that you can actually “see” something that is not real and happening in the moment is non sensical to me.
Vivid dreams are just mysterious to me as the minds eye.
Until we can probe into people's minds (some advanced MRI or something in the future) and display them on a computer screen, there's no way to call bullshit on people who claim they can "see" the apple, you only have your subjective experience for that.
And I don't believe for a second they "see" in the real sense, again, because I don't see anything. Only time I really see is in my dreams. So rather, ask people "do you see the apple just like you see it in your dreams?" I bet they don't.
Or funk knows, again I repeat, I only have my sensory experience to relate to and there's no visual element in it when I close my eyes.
I used to do tech support before remote desktop became easy. When talking people though screens I had to do a lot of visualization of what I thought they were seeing so I could explain what to do next. Was it like a dream? Sometimes pretty close but just a computer screen.
Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas. But I have no problems drawing an imaginary bike.
> Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
Yes. For most people it's more like a "schema" or a lossy compression. It can be placed in space, left or right or above or below other image-fragments, there can be colouring, shading, motion, sound. But it's not a faithful bike-image, although it's hard to notice that unless you try to draw it.
There are also other reasons why mental visualization doesn't necessarily mean one can draw it faithfully. For me, mental imagery has a kind of unstable three-dimensional quality, where I see the image from multiple overlapping, shifting perspectives, kinda like a Cubist painting. Different parts of the image have more or less detail over time; I can't hold fine detail about the whole thing simultaneously. If I wanted to draw it, I'd have to pin it to one perspective for long enough, and I can't make my mind do that.
This shouldn't be so surprising -- perspective and realistic representational art took a long time to develop in human history. It's a skill that has to be learned, and I haven't learned it.
Some people really can imagine a photorealistic picture of the bike though. They're usually either savants or trained artists.
Well I can say what happens with me, although as should be clear from this whole thread, other's experiences might be very different!
Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like.
The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'. So i can understand how - some people - can 'see' what they think a bike looks like but then draw a mechanical mess.
Of course there are people with perfect recall, and others who design bikes for a living and so on. I'm really just describing how it could happen for some group of people.
That makes sense. So perhaps you could simplistically think of it like this then: the brain remembers things somehow, and when recalling, it runs that internal representation of that memory through some kind of a machinery that visually presents it to you? Only in some people that machinery actually doesn't produce visuals, but something else? (And I would seem to be one of those people).
"Drawing from imagination" should not be taken literally. It's a blueprint, a thumbnail. By the time you're done, what you have on paper is significantly different, if not totally different from what you were imagining.
It's so wild to me that people can't see pictures or hear music in their mind. I've always assumed everyone could do it but it just goes to show how little we know about the human brain.
I was reading the other day on HN that some people don't have an internal monologue and think very differently than I do (like thoughts just "appear" somehow?)
Now I'm wondering if there are any mind capabilities people possess that I don't? Humans are truly fascinating.
The biggest problem with these questions is that they in my opinion don’t actually measure anything.
“Imagine a ball falling of the table.”
Asking questions of what was under the table or the color of the ball is useless (imo).
Let me explain: Recall a dream of yours. What is out there in the dream world? Can you tell me what the retail tax is in that dream world? What house number the door of your dream world neighbor has? No? For me the answer is no. Because I only create answers to these questions if they are relevant to the dream or asked.
I forgot the study, but it claimed that people often retrospectively imagine detail based on the question asked. (Citation needed)
I like to believe that dreams and imagination share aspects. And one aspect I see in both of them is that, similarly to video games, any detail is kept to the necessary minimum.
It doesn’t matter what is under the table, it is about a ball falling off the table. Its color doesn’t matter, the color has no effect on the story.
If you retrospectively ask me those questions, you’re just testing if I’m going to make one up in the spot, make one up on the spot and tell myself I didn’t or not make one up on the spot.
I think of my imagination as an abstract realm I can control, that is limited by my ability to comprehend. It’s less vivid than a dream, but a dream gives me no control. Anything I imagine is a feeling, there is no incoming physical aspect.
And the reason why it’s so hard to measure or quantify is because it is best described as a feeling.
One of the times aphantasia has been brought up here somebody posted a guide to training your brain to see more vivid imagery from someone who alleges they started out aphantasic and trained themselves to not be.
Does anybody have the link, I've been searching for it for like a year since I forgot to backup my bookmarks before a resinstall.
I don't have a specific link, but the general method is called "image streaming". It's pretty googleable so you should be able to find something similar at least.
While laying in bed with fever I realised it's much more easier to imagine moving things than static ones. Imagine red apple? To hell that, my apple gonna spin and rotate, and be chopped by sawblade flying by, while slowly oxidizing cut parts
I realized that the ability to visualize is probably on a spectrum many years ago while discussing science fiction fantasy books with others. And I am probably someone whose ability to visualize is a lot worse than others.
I wonder if this could be induced in people who suffer from hallucinations to reduce or eliminate their symptoms? Maybe their system is rigged into overdrive the other way. It says on wikipedia that there are 'cases reported of acquired aphantasia'.
I don’t think hallucinations and having a “minds eye” are the same thing. A minds eye is different in the sense that it’s entirely separate from the “visual feed” you get from your eyes, they’re not combined so you can’t really mistake them as a hallucination; hallucinations trick you into seeing things that are not really there such as when people with schizophrenia can see people who are not actually with them — I remember seeing this guy on Instagram with a proper schizophrenia diagnosis that showcased this very phenomenon in action and the way he dealt with it is by using his phones camera to check whether the person they are perceiving is real or not. You never have to do that if you have hyperphantasia (the opposite of aphantasia) because it’s very easy to tell whats real and what’s not, and more importantly, it takes mental effort to create and maintain these imaginations in your mind and you can have total control over them.
I also found this study asking a similar question about many different types of mental illnesses, though some of it is about making people that have aphantasia better able to visualize to treat things like PTSD:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9614338/
I think adults with hyperphantasia can easily tell what's real and what's not, but I had a lot of trouble with it as a child. My parents were afraid I was hallucinating, so took me to see a child psychologist, but it turned out I was just pulling things from my extremely acute mind's eye into reality while awake like many people do while dreaming, and I hadn't figured out that didn't make them "real" in a way other people could see like it did in my dreams.
(I shudder to think how differently things could have gone if I had been misdiagnosed with a severe mental illness when all I actually have is an unusually powerful imaginative ability.)
That doesn't mean I can't recognise people when I see them, though that can sometimes be a struggle. It's just that I can't (or don't) "picture" them later.
I've never considered it a problem. For a start, because I've no clear idea of what I look like, either, I've never had to worry much about that. Slightly more strangely, and it took me a long while to realise this, I've never taken or collected family photographs; I've managed to remember who my relatives are perfectly well without having to get them to pose, yet it's my relatives who think that's odd.
If there is a downside, it's that I'd make a terrible witness. But I have a feeling that most witnesses are fairly terrible, it's just that most of them don't know it. As you said, we all experience things in unique ways, and that's only a problem if we forget it.
Which is largely why I don't care for "aphantasia" as a label. It's like having a word for people who don't dream in music or visualise mathematical functions; it'd include so many, that it'd serve no purpose.
How do people with aphantasia draw/paint/design? I always thought you had to kind of visualize those artistic things in your mind before manifesting them on paper/screen?
For myself, drawing never required having it visualized in my mind. I knew what I wanted to draw and could put it on paper. However not without difficulty. Using a model, or image to reference certainly helped.
As a simple example. Do you picture the letters you are going to write before writing a note? I don't know the mechanic, but I can write notes without effort.
In the same vein, simple objects like geometric shapes are very easy for me to draw, no visualization needed. I suspect it's the same for most.
However, I did give up on drawing because I recognized I couldn't visualize a scene and place it on paper easily. It felt like I was drawing with poor planning which resulted in lots of mistakes, corrections and ultimately frustration.
However, I'm not sure if I qualify as someone with true aphantasia or not. I can visualize things, but I can't hold them in my mind. I see it briefly, like a flash, but can't hold onto it. I've tried to practice holding an image in my mind without success.
For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.
You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.
My mind's eye doesn't care whether my eyes are open or closed. I can copy things back and forth between "reality" and "internal reality" quite seamlessly, so I can either keep my eyes open and bring things from my mind out into reality, or I can close my eyes and bring things from reality into internal reality. I don't strictly speaking have to close my eyes for the second one, but for example if I need to picture the room I'm in from another angle, but it's an inappropriate time to move from my seat, I can just copy the whole room into my mind, either close my eyes or unfocus and ignore my eyesight for awhile, and move things around inside my head. If there's a lot going in in the room, it's sometimes easier if I actually close them so I can spin the room around to the perspective I need.
Yeah also same. But I'm trying to clarify for a lot of people who think they don't visualize because the bar is set where they think that they have to close their eyes in order to visualize things.
This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.
I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.
I have aphantasia. I don't see / imagine imagery either awake or asleep. So I don't know that my dreaming experience is particularly different from my waking experience in this way.
I am curious how is solving geometry problems for you, can you imagine slicing some geometric body with a plane and what it results? or given some geometric figure and an instruction to build some lines can you see the result without drawing it on paper ?
Fro me it feels that imagining things uses completely different brain part, because for me it does not feel or look like stuff in my dreams or what eyes can see, imagining things feel different,the scenes feel to me unclear, disappear fast , I do not have the ability to lock the image or rewind like in a video. Remembering a recent scene has a lot more details and colors then some old memory.
For geometry stuff is the same, I can't say I see it but somehow I have an animation my head on how I can transform the geometric stuff, but it is not vivid and it is not like a clear video, feels like is a different part of the brain that does this not the optic part.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
This analogy may be less communicative than you think, as for me, reading a book is like watching a movie - I don’t see the words on the page, I see what’s happening in the book.
When I was a kid, I was asked “how do you read so fast?” often and I would always proudly report than I can scan paragraphs and filter out the useless ones without reading them.
For example, I was reading some Pratchett and noticed that I had no idea how the protagonist ended up on a cliff (?). And then realized that I had automatically skipped the paragraph that talked about the cliff ascent, because it was “just a scenery description” and therefore useless.
I also remember having a long argument with my ex-girlfriend about the style of journalism where articles start like “I entered a small, dimly-lit room and Mr Brown, age 53, stood up from his massive oak desk and [blah blah blah]”. Like, this is all just fluff, I want to know what Mr Brown says and thinks and that’s all. I didn’t realize people might actually imagine the scene and enjoy it.
Going back to books — I think I care about how the book sounds more than I care about the plot or the vibe. I loved Lolita solely because the narrator was constantly playing with words, for example.
Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book.
To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.
But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.
I have a very limited visual imagination. I don't know if I would describe it as complete aphantasia, but I think it's close. Dreams are the only time I can see pictures in my mind.
Yes, from what I've heard other people with aphantasia often dream normally. I certainly do vividly, while struggling a lot to visualize even simple things in my minds eye.
I don't think this is a very reliable test, and it even verges on misleading, as there is a degree of complexity that may lead people who do not have aphantasia to believe that they do have the condition. I think this line of thinking with your "test" has been what has led some people in the comments to say that they believe that the condition may just be a result of miscommunication on what mental visualization entails, since they believe that those who claim to have aphantasia believe that they have the condition due to not meeting a threshold of visualization.
However, it appears that for people who actually have the condition, visualization never gets to any specificity. One could be unable to answer a single one of the questions on your test, yet that does not necessarily mean they have aphantasia, as aphantasia is not the lack of detail in visualization, but the lack of any visualization at all. Some people who have aphantasia have attested in these comments that they cannot picture anything in their minds at all. Many of them attest that they don't even visualize when dreaming.
I like this test because it’s not your answer, it’s your reaction to the question that matters. If you read this and think “uhh is that a trick question?” then you probably have aphantasia.
My initial reaction to reading this the first time was to go reread the story more closely to find the answer. But the answer isn’t in the story. For many people the answer is just a truth that exists when they hear the story and are asked the question. If it’s not you likely have aphantasia.
Maybe you are just very lazy at filling in the details of the scenery? A questionnaire based approach doesn't sound very objective to me. A condition with the only "realiable" diagnostic being the VVIQ test, is not a condition at all.
Even replace "circle" with "straight line." I think tests like above (balls, people, details) miss the point that in actual aphantasia you literally visualize nothing
I think this hits closer to the mark. For any given description, if a person is able to visualize anything at all, then they don't have the condition. If they do have the condition, then they apparently can't visualize anything.
I emailed Adam Zeman (the neurologist who coined the term being discussed here) a while back seeking clarification about exactly what the experience of visualizing something should be like -- pasting the thread below.
His replies were short, but he managed to pack into them not only a comprehensible answer to my question, but also hinted at something I really hadn't expected in his two-word final reply: "Pseudo- mostly..."
To clarify, a pseudohallucination is a "hallucination" that you know isn't real. A hallucination, strictly speaking, is imaginary sensory input that you don't realize is imaginary. So, his reply seems to suggest that he's encountered people whose hyperphantasic pseudohallucinations (being able to overlay vivid visualizations onto the field of stuff they're actually seeing with their actual eyes) sometimes cross the line into bona fide hallucinations; i.e., they lose track, even if only temporarily, of what's real and what's imagined. Which is just endlessly fascinating.
Readers/commenters on this topic may find it interesting -- sorry, most of it is me going on about what my visualization is like, but I guess it forms the necessary backdrop for some of his answer to be useful anyway.
I'm looking for some clarification on the exact nature of visualization as I'm not sure what it's meant to be like.
The Wikipedia article on aphantasia mentions activation of the visual cortex. So am I supposed to be generating an actual visual input that I feel like I can see with my eyes?
When I visualize something, it's not really there on that literal visual level. I physically see the inside of my eyelids and the visualized image is not projected such that I feel like my eyes are actually seeing it. Instead it's somewhere else; sometimes it feels as if it's somewhere behind my eyes. Nonetheless, the image can be vivid in its own way, precise and consistent. I can rotate and manipulate it. I can move a light source around the object and "see" the shadow change, or place my point of quasi-view within a scene. This comes along with mental impressions of other sensory inputs that, similarly, are "vivid" but clearly not actually being sensed from the outside world.
Is this what it's supposed to be? What point on the scale would reflect this in the visualization quiz?
Thanks
======== Adam: ========
…it sounds to me as if you are in the 3-4/5 territory…seeing imagery as if you were ‘really’ seeing is the exception, but for most of us visual imagery has a visual ‘feel’, which sounds to be the case for you…
======== Me: ========
Thanks for the reply. To clarify, the "really seeing" exception is akin to a visual hallucination, or rather pseudohallucination?
I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based on playing back memories as movies in my head. Especially childhood memories suffered. Also reading books is a very different experience, as when I previously would make up movies and picture the characters visually when reading, now it's all black. That said, reading books is still an enjoyable experience, it's just very different.
I also stopped dreaming in images for a long time, which was weird. It's still very dim (not so vivid), but at least that part came back.
That sounds incredibly sad and frustrating. I can't imagine what it's like to suddenly lose that ability, being so dependent on it.
Indeed many of my childhood memories are mostly sequences of pictures, the emotional content kind of "floats" on the imagery. It must be very frustrating, being forced to reinvent how you experience your inner life and memories.
Edit, after reading some more comments: are you musically inclined? Did your ability to hear melodies in your "inner ear" suffer similarly?
It sucks, but that's life - there are worse things and life is still plenty enjoyable. In addition, I lost my sense of smell/taste completely and that was much worse to be honest (but still, you learn to live without and focus on what's good). If I had to choose between the two, I'd choose being able to smell/taste any day. Funnily enough not because of food, but actually because of the added experience you get when walking in nature or other places - smell has so much to do with experiencing things, but you never consider it until it's gone. Luckily it came back, even though it's been 2.5 years now and it's still only 80% normal (but 80% is quite good!).
As you mention, the most sad part about it is actually the childhood memories, but I still have the memories of course, they're just a bit more "facts based" than re-living experiences.
Luckily, I didn't lose my inner ear or even inner monologue like in another reported case [0]. I do play instruments, so I guess I was/is musically inclined to some degree. I still have ability to imagine music exactly like I would hear it, unlike a friend with aphantasia who can't.
Another interesting detail is that I regained the ability before losing it again (Covid re-infection), and during this time of recovery I could gradually see grey, blurry images that got better and better. It's like the image generator in my head didn't have capacity to create full blown images, but only low res ones. Which makes me believe that in my case the "image generator" was damaged as I couldn't even dream in pictures, while for most people with aphantasia that's not the case, as they can dream normally.
On the bright side, I don't get horrible, lifelike images popping up in my head anytime I hear about something disturbing. Not that that was a big problem, but it's something you notice. It makes me believe that people with aphantasia might be better at coping with disturbing events, as they don't have to re-live the experience visually. But that's just a theory.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-stopped-having-dreams-...
Smell is super tied to memory so that could be the cause of your imagery issues. I almost completely lose my sense of smell due to concussions in early adulthood but occasionally it randomly comes back (briefly) in full force. Anything I smell at that time triggers very visual memories in my head from childhood.
Thanks for the thoughtful, thorough reply. Here's to hoping you don't get another bad reinfection!
It's such a weird disease, covid. Makes you wonder what we'll eventually find out about all these long-tail symptoms in 20 years.
Neurology is still such a black box medically. Did you by any chance have a brain MRI at any point? If yes, and your willing to share, what portion of the brain was impacted? If more than one, has there been diagnostically visible change between them? Did you get any treatment? I can be reached at first at full tod moc if you prefer.
I've had a brain MRI to rule out other causes (tumors etc), but it was clean. I don't think they looked specifically for tiny damages to areas (if that's possible), but I'm not sure to be honest as I only got answer that there were no signs of disease.
Those of us who have had this from birth look at y'all and wonder what life is like literally hallucinating stuff 24/7.
Well maybe it's a good thing. You live in the present instead of an imaginary past. The past is gone no matter how much your mind tries to come up with images. The memories no longer have any existential significance apart from causing you trauma, generating false sense of pride, etc. Helps you to do and try new things instead of relying on a past you once lived and no longer exists.
I do tend to think I live a bit more in the present because of aphantasia. However, I also do have an experiential memory. It's not great, and largely not visual, and to the degree there are any visual elements they're pretty useless, like burnt fragments of a Polaroid. I think you're kinda having a hard time imagining this condition.
> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize
True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.
I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.
You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.
I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance.
Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.
Not sure why I was downvoted (I know it wasn't you), but it sounds like we are on the same page.
It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.
I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).
If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.
Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?
I think I know which ability you refer to, as my fear when I discovered this was that I couldn't work as a software developer anymore (before I got a grasp of what had actually happened, it took a while to actually understand the extent). I used to visualize arrays/tables/graphs in my head (like images/fancy animations) and do operations on them to imagine how one could transform them etc. But I also had/have a native sense of "depth" to data structures, which I also used. That one can move around in a data structure in a sense, I'm sure you know very well what I mean. Luckily that ability is still intact, which I've been relying a lot more on lately, but I can imagine you being much better than me on those kind of tools. The mind is so extremely fascinating, and it's so weird to think of the ways we think of things.
I tried visualization exercises (there's a lot more to the story that I didn't consider space to add here) and the first time they worked rather quickly, so I regained the ability in the course of days. But as I mentioned in another comment, I contracted covid again and then it was even worse than it had ever been and training didn't feel like it worked. I regained a little bit since that infection, but got covid yet again (it's an awful disease) and then it was back to square one. It seems like something in the brain had to heal before I could train it back up, but I'm afraid that the damage will be/is so severe that it will not be possible to recover (especially since I couldn't even create images in my dreams).
I might get better over time if I just stop getting covid, but as isolating myself is out of the question, that's unlikely to happen. Unfortunately it seems much harder to recover each time. Since last time it's not really been recovering. On the bright side, my sense of taste/smell has not been damaged again, which has been great.
I'm aphantasic, but I also have a very good visual/geometric intuition. The brain's a funny thing that way. Give me a shape rotating problem and I'll get the answer pretty rapidly compared with a baseline, but it's by a process that doesn't involve explicit visualization.
Hopefully you'll be able to access similar mental pathways with practice.
Geez, what a rough time! Fascinating, though, yes I too have that "sense" of data structures - really interesting to hear that others do too!
I'm pretty sure you can regain the ability. Covid damages the brain, and the brain "forgets" how to do certain things (like smell or visualise or focus), but brains are incredibly powerful and flexible, and can re-learn these things. I myself have long covid and lost a lot of sensing ability, but have been able to improve my senses of smell and touch by training with promising results. Here are some techniques people have used to help learn/relearn how to visualise: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/
Can't hurt to try, right?
Thanks for trying to help! I answered in another comment, so you can see a better reply there, but I've been trying (a lot) of these things and the short version is that it seemed to work when my brain had been given some time to heal, but repeated covid infections might have made it permanent in my case, or at least given the prospect of future infections. But time will tell. My smell/taste survived the last infection(s?), so there might be some hope that it gets milder.
It's so weird, as I know exactly which "muscle" to trigger to make it happen, which I guess someone having aphantasia wouldn't instinctly know, but it just doesn't do much.
-edit- Oh, forgot to mention, in the beginning when I trained on visualizing again (back when it did work), I got _so_ exhausted in my brain afterwards, it was like really trying to used some damaged "muscle". I find that really fascinating. I'm not able to invoke such exhaustion in other ways, that quickly.
I was aphantasiac(?) most of my life and I self discovered similar techniques to what they discussed in the Reddit while learning multivariate calculus. I was trying so hard to visualize the integrations and using the “fuzz” I see when I close my eyes to infer the shapes then one day I could actually see them in my minds eye. I never applied the technique to other things because I didn’t have the same motivation to practice that induced my first breakthrough but I am pretty confident the technique works. The plasticity of the brain is remarkable and it’ll adapt to what you need it to do if you work at it.
As someone outside the spectrum completely, I can sympathise with your lack. I find you experiencing both sides fascinating. But the reason I replied is that my wife is a Chinese medicine practitioner, and also treats using a not so common method of scalp/brain acupuncture. After contracting COVID myself and losing all sense of smell and taste, she cured me in one session of that technique. Minutes after the needles went in my scalp I got back about 5% of my senses and by the evening it was all back. I don't know where you are geographically but it might be something worth exploring.
Thanks for your tip/reply. My sense of taste/smell is much better now and seems to be on a good trajectory as well, I won't seek more treatment at the moment. What you describe kind of sounds related to a stellate ganglion block[0] which can have these instant (and for some permanent) effects on covid-induced anosmia.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-lost-t...
I was referring to scalp acupuncture as a maybe-potential-who-knows remedy to the Aphantasia, but it's a projection of it curing my smell/taste in minutes, not a "scientific assertion". It's not the same as described in the link. I'm referring to acu needles at the top of the scalp in specific locations, triggering whatever nerves are there.
Covid was/is a weird one. Hope you get your visuals back. I've never had them but if I did I wouldn't want to miss them.
I just realised that I had similar experience. I can still picture things in my mind but dreams only came back a few weeks ago after being absent for a long, long time. Thinking about it it's not been months but a year or two.
I know it’s basically cliche at this point to recommend psychedelics for anything, but one effect I’ve certainly noticed is a strengthened mind’s eye in the comedown and following days. More so with acid and more so for legitimately visual trips than smaller-dosed, heady trips.
Im not sure if my total aphantasia comes from a burnout or whether I was born with it. After a severe work related burnout, when things came to, some things did not return to normal. I have learned about aphantasia recently and did not test before the burnout.
Alert: if you were happy to learn about aphantasia, you might also be happy to learn about SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), which I think is correlated with aphantasia.
SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes.
Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ
You’ve just made me realize that my brain is (more) broken than I thought it was.
This explains why I lose every argument with my wife about things that happened in the past.
No! You can fight back! The thing I have realised about SDAM is that although you don’t get that emotional/movie/visual experience, you also remember what you remember.
My wife (and particularly my daughter), have vivid imaginations that can make memories up at times. If I’ve “fact-committed” a memory, it’s not wrong.
Granted, this only helps in the 0.1% of cases when you have done the fact memory committal and can thus have any argument at all. For the rest it’s “I don’t remember that, and your memory is unreliable, so…”. Ahh the comforting couch, I should just take my pillow there now ;-)
Oh no… that is just every marriage.
Your brain isn't broken. You're just a man.
Now wait until you have arguments about the future…
Perhaps you just think you are loosing.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I always feel like a complete tool when people talk about events in their adolescent years or even if we talk about the movie we watched at the theater yesterday. I remember what the movie was about and I'm probably able to recall one or two scenes that had the most impact on me, but then someone roles up and starts a discussion on "all the scenes where Rebecca and Lydia felt lost and how they were set in similar places" and I'm just lost myself. I'd be able to recall they were lost but not what scenes there were to transport that idea to me.
Memory is a funny thing, you can in fact remember things that didn't actually happen or just completely misremember things that did happen. See, for example, the 'Lost in the mall technique': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
Interesting, combined with the article below I also start to wonder about more connections/correlations.
I have many vivid dreams a night, and often wake feeling exhausted. I have been thinking this might be my brain overcompensating for aphantasia. First time I have heard of SDAM, and that certainly applies to me, along with face/name memory, especially people out of context.
I speculated the other day that it could be 40 years programming has rewired my brain. Great at making logical connections, mapping/route memory is amazing, along with logical analysis.
Probably SDAM is related to depression too. If we are not able to recall the happy times/memories in the same way as other people do, not counting those technical solution wins!
Also as bad as my memory is, SDAM or old age ;) it actually feels worse since Covid and plenty of fuzzy/foggy brain days.
'Sleep deprivation disrupts memory' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681345
[edit] tried to explain it better.
I started a small meditation where I attempt to walk back through the whole day as best I can, while trying to drift to sleep. It has made me appreciate my life more and I remember more mundane details because I have at least recalled it once, if that makes sense.
Unless it is a day to forget... If you have too many of those, you know something needs to change.
correct - it’s like playing an extremely low resolution “replay” of that moment in time.sometimes the frames skip but it’s still visible to me.
Huh, when reading the parent comment I didn't think it applied to me because I felt like I remember stuff that happened in enough detail to walk through the sequences of events that happened, but reading this makes me think that maybe I don't actually have it because it's nothing I'd describe as being able to "watch" it as much as just recall the details. I could potentially imagine a visualization of the vents I remember, but I certainly don't remember what enough of the details actually look like to replay the real thing.
idk. I can watch my memories but I often see myself slightly in the third person in them, as if from over my own shoulder, which imples they're not really what I experienced but more like a reconstruction from place and dialog.
All I have are one second long snippets, but they are visual (+ audio, smell, etc.).
Yeah, for me, it's like watching a movie through fog. Although, I feel like when I was younger, I had far more vivid recall.
>And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ
what the fuck
I am also like this. Why would I remember that? I don't remember almost anything I don't work to remember or is unusual. It's amazing to me that people do.
(I also have aphantasia and find it extremely difficult to believe that the entire thing isn't just a misunderstanding of language.)
What is the point to eat a good breakfast (any good experience) if you don’t remember it?
>Why would I remember that?
Why wouldn't you lol
Because it's useless information. Some people (like my wife) remember literally everything, at least until their brain fills up. I, on the other hand, have to explicitly commit to memory things I want to recall later. If I don't, it's gone. And why go through the effort of committing something as useless as what I ate for breakfast?
You have to realize that it's you who is the oddball, not the rest of us.
It's not useless information - I get to track what I ate when, I get to figure out the recipe if I like something etc etc. Imagine going "What you had for breakfast is useful information" as if your brain isn't already full of useless information.
> at least until their brain fills up.
(X) That's not how it works.
>If I don't, it's gone.
As I said, for the rest of us, it isn't an issue. We just remember. You don't - so you just go "it's useless information." It's not for us.
As you are discovering in this thread, everyone's brain works differently. You are exhibiting the mind projection fallacy--assuming that everyone else's mind works the way yours does. In fact, neurodiversity is a thing and pretty much every person out there has a unique mental experience.
Ha. That describes me perfectly. I have heard the distinction between “episodic memory” and “semantic memory” made before, and so I just thought that my semantic memory was a lot stronger than my episodic memory. I hadn’t realised it had a specific name. Thanks for sharing.
FWIW, I’m also very much aphantasic (I’d be a 4.5/5.0 on the test in Guardian article).
Holy cow, that's me. Thanks for this tip.
Whelp… TIL… again
Memory is a weird thing.
I think I have this. But didn’t know there was a name for it other than shit memory.
I've sometimes wondered if I could have aphantasia or perhaps be low enough on the visual imagery spectrum to have some of the practical effects of aphantasia.
When I try to visualize an object, I can in some sense visualize it but it feels very indistinct. It's like I can't see the object as a whole only the specific details I focus on. For example, I have a friend who wears circular glasses and has a handlebar mustache. I can bring up a general image of "circular glasses" or "handlebar mustache" in my mind. However, I cannot imaging his face with glasses and a mustache. It almost feels like the way that you "see" things when you are only half watching a TV show or are partially zoned out while driving. In some sense you are seeing them but it's difficult to pull up details.
When I visualize a scene, I'm not sure I "see" it so much as I form a spatial map of the scene.
I also find that the "images" that do get stored in my memory are more like impressions. Maybe in some sense I can "visualize" them, but they are really more like impressions of how they make me feel or the "vibe" that I get from them.
It's a spectrum and I think your experience is probably typical. A minority of people see nothing and another minority of people see vivid images. Most people get varying degrees of fuzziness.
I see vivid images of pretty much everything except faces. Faces are blurry (but then I can't recognize people's faces in the street and instead rely heavily on contextual clues, what they were, etc...)
I consider myself aphantasic and would describe my process similarly. I can kind of "draw" shapes in my head with sort of strokes of light like a kid writing their name in the air with a sparkler. While doing it, I can in fact feel my eyes physically moving around under their lids. Anything that isn't a rudimentary shape is out. This comes in handy while thinking about software because I can pretty easily create and trace connections between things in a sort of imaginary network.
I experience basically the same thing with sounds, which I've never heard anyone talk about. If you ask me to imagine the guitar solo from "sweet child of mine", I'm not going to hear the actual song in my head, I'm going to hear essentially the same thing as if you asked me to describe it (with lots of beedly dee type sounds). I can recognize a person's voice, but I can't will it into existence without hearing it, instead I would hear my own imitation of them, however bad that is. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but media tells me it's not.
This sounds very similar to my experience as well. Memory and mental visualization are very fuzzy. Like a camera with a dirty lens and very narrow focus. I can't even imagine my wife or children's faces clearly. I can picture an environment, but it's like a low res image or impressionistic painting.
I can think very clearly in text however, so I can imagine vivid descriptions of a physical environment and with descriptions of fine detail. But it's stored as text, and only blurrily rendered to images.
Recently, I've gradually realized that I struggle to recognize faces and some significant chunk of my social anxiety comes from this. If I see a face often enough or in large enough doses I can recognize it, but if I see it only occasionally and for brief encounters, I really struggle. I think it may be related to my inability visualize.
A key thing here is that you can train the ability to visualise. You probably don't spend very long per day trying to picture your friend's face with the glasses and mustache, but if you did, you'd find that over time, your ability would increase.
I think I used to be able to visualize earlier but by the time I learned about aphantasia I had already gone years without it.
Why I cannot say.
Sometimes when I get a lot of sleep and relaxation I think I can visualize in ny head.
Oh, and I can visualize at least one relative, but only a certain passport image of that person.
And I can draw to some degree, so I clearly know roughly what things look like even if I cannot visualize it internally.
This is just normal. I wouldn't overthink it. If you were truly "aphantasic", you'd know; if you truly had preternatural visualization abilities, you'd know.
Respectfully, you don’t know which experience is really normal (most common)
It's easy to infer which is normal based on one's experience of the world. The world would be very different if it were otherwise.
But all the comments in this thread show how different the experiences are. Personally, I can’t tell after reading all of them (and previous HN discussions too) which is common and which is uncommon: clear, fuzzy, abstract, or zero visualization.
Experience of the world, not HN...
I think that's normal. At least that's also how it works for me.
Yeah I’m exactly the same. It’s like I can “visualize” my proprioceptive sense for where things are in space but it’s more like a lidar map.
that's basically what I experience. When I learned that many artists picture their entire drawing in detail, and then put it down on page roughly as they imagine it, I couldn't even imagine that.
I wonder where you learned that. To my knowledge, there are only very few artists who work that way.
Source: can draw pretty well myself, do not use this method.
i heard this from my art class teachers when I was growing up, and from a few friends who went on to be comic strip artists. However, going back and reading a few interviews of my friend, it seems like he actually imagines fairly simplified storyboards before drawing them, not a wholly formed final image.
This is not how artists work at all. I don't think any school of art has done that, other than for very rough composition (where objects go in space). Most schools of art from deep history all the way to today train with copying/sketching from life (training the eye to go where you want it), while also teaching general truths about light, color, proportion and anatomy.
People who draw out of thin air usually have these trained references in mind, so when they draw a pose they're not so much simply copying from their imagination, but from facts and past experience, about knowing about anatomy, light, and proportion. You draw as you go and see what's on the page, and you can build out a world that didn't exist, but not so much from mind's eye, but somewhere in-between the page and prior experience.
None of the above training or sketching would be needed by someone with a photographic memory or an imagination that can hold that level of mass detail (they'd only need to know practical techniques their medium depends on). There have been people like that such as Austin Osman Spare, but in the main the vast development in art has to do with learning about anatomy, proportion, light, color, and technique as taught by all the great masters.
Cartoons are a good example how a style comes not so much from the imagination, but how one very naively and simply draws characters and then builds off that natural style into something refined. This comes from playing on the page, not imagining what one wants. If you copy other people's cartoons you can also learn different lessons, and that has to do with training the eye and technique.
I really hate these aphantasia questions. It feels too subjective.
I can visualize in a sense, but I would never talk of an image. In fact closing my eyes makes it harder for me to imagine anything.
I can recall my dream from last night for example, I can describe it quite well. If you now would ask me to in my mind modify for example the color of the floor, I couldn’t. Because in “dream reality” I very much remember it wasn’t.
I can daydream, I can imagine vividly. But the moment anyone tells me, “modify what you’re imagining like this”, it all falls apart.
Also what is interesting is the quality of detail between me describing the imaginary situation and reconstructing it in real life. A lot of aspects are lost under a haze when describing it, but when reconstructing it I can tell you if an aspect is right or wrong, not what it should be.
That’s of course my personal experience. Just I feel like Aphantasia is this buzzfeed like diagnosis illness, where you really have a lot of interpretation.
I agree, the interpretation factor is huge.
I can picture things in my mind's eye, can remember what people look like, walk through the recent past, etc., but I don't see them painted as images on my closed eyelids as though I was seeing them with my actual eyes. When I remember I "see" them but not in a literal visual sense.
Like if you asked me, "When you came to my house yesterday, did you see a green apple on the table?" I would scan back through my memory "visually" and if I encountered a memory of a green apple I would say yes, but I would only see that apple in my "mind's eye". Does that qualify as an image? Because I wouldn't really call it that, it's just a flash of mental objects and sure some imagery.
So am I aphantasic? I still have no idea.
What I've learned is that there are people heavily focused on their senses and then there are others who take in information in other ways (possibly intuition, etc) because they are always in their head.
I have an incredibly poor short term memory, my wife an amazing sensor. She notices everything.... object placement, where things were weeks ago. I didn't notice an elephant walking by me years ago in Thailand; nor last week in a western state town I didn't the open carry long gun that a guy had whom I spoke to for 5 seconds. [he was protesting through engagement]
These are running jokes. I also can't relate to a majority of the world (sensors) - however, I can solve complex multi-chain problems in my head that they drop out at step 1.
Oh, thanks for this. This is the idea I had in my head about this as well. Especially in dreams, it just feels like the brain gives you "what you need" for the dream and -- because of how brains work -- "ignores" the rest, which is why you can't recall it, you never "needed" to.
This feels way more like "people not really grasping how brains work" than some condition.
Seconded. It is unfortunate that social media polarises the two camps. I'm happy that people start considering this subject as a "spectrum", which allows for some more interesting discussions.
What I find strange is that so many people actually believe that their brains have a built-in raytracer. Why did, say, Boris Vallejo need real-life models and photography if there are so many people out there who can simply visualize everything in an instant?
Agree 100%. I pretty much discount everything everyone says until we start running hard science experiments.
One way to measure scientifically is to ask somebody to picture a room. The the experimenter keeps describing adding items to the room until the experimentee can no longer recall. By defining positions for all these items one could verify it is indeed visual memory by asking location questions.
I don't know if other people have thought of this and started doing it yet, but they should.
I have a pretty strong geometric imagination, but it's shape alone. When I try to convert it to a colored raster image, I get a transparent silhouette. How would you differentiate that? Also constructing an image by description isn't the same as making an image by myself from nothing.
If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that is already pushing it.
These kind of "mind-travels" are sometimes done at end of yoga classes. For me, they are complete pointless, and I usually fall asleep.
I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.
On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk alongside a wood, but every time I try to picture it, my mind balks. Also, combining a wood with a mountain I find tough, other that a mountain covered by trees. I think it is because of their genealogical dissimilarity.
What part of the world do you live in?
Areas of the American west, with mountains above treeline and meadows, can have exactly this topography.
Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.051055,-121.796685,3a,75y,30...
I live in urban Vietnam. However, my visual imagination is derived heavily from paintings, particularly those of the romantic era (eg the Hudson river school). The promt suggest something very asymmetrical, which is anathema to the romantic schema (they avoid asymmetry but also too much symmetry). Not saying it's impossible for me to get there, just very difficult.
I guess the larger point is that vusualisation is as much fiction as it is recal.
By the way, I love the gmap link image, but I don't see it as an effective responce to the hint. I see it instead as a classic vista (I.e framed window-form).
Put yourself on the side of a mountain, with a steep drop off on the left.
Far to the left, you can see more mountains, but trees and hill block your view on the right. It's really common to see while hiking, though usually you turn to the downhill side to take a picture
Yeh... I can now see that. Thanks. Context is everything. Though I paint landscapes, I rarely stray outside the city. hence my knowledge of landscapes is mostly from paintings, not real life. The scene you describe is difficult to find in the painting lexicon (for it's asymmetry), though doubtless common in nature.
Huh. I have a lot of trouble visualizing things in general, I suppose I would be a "4" on the scale from the article, but this prompt is actually easier than most for me. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time hiking in mountains?
For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.
I also can vividly "hear" music, not really voices, but I can put a track on in my head almost as if listening to the radio. For people that can't do this, it might sound great - and it is quite cool except for waking up many mornings with a random track stuck in your head or hearing a particular riff over and over again.
I don't tend to remember faces of people I've recently met - there are times when someone says hi, starts chatting and I think "who the hell is that?"
> For me, I can imagine the feeling of being on a windy path, spatially aware of the paths the forest, the mountains - even a stream, but in terms of "seeing" it's more like walking into your bedroom in the dark and knowing where the bed is.
I can imagine this, but if someone just says "you're walking down a winding path", I visualize something much more like the original parent. It takes nonzero effort to bother to mentally render a scene like that, so it doesn't just happen when someone says something; I have to actively want to be imagining it. I don't have some scene ready-to-go that I can drop myself into.
The above changes if a specific place is named, somewhere I've been. Then I'll generate some scene based on my memory.
Your second two paragraphs could have been written by me.
I don't have a problem identifying faces. I'm not great at putting names with faces, but that may be separate.
I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think
When you say you think in words, does that mean like you see printed words like a page of text? Or just audible words?
It’s really hard to describe, but not even audible words. Just the idea of words, I have to actually speak to hear the words.
Not the person you asked, but for me: "audible". i.e. my thoughts are an inner voice.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I do think in an audible stream of words.
This has led to an odd quirk in my experience as a software developer: I hate keywords or variable names that don’t have an obvious pronunciation, like “fn”. They interrupt the stream and make me stumble in a way that doesn’t seem to afflict people who appear to experience written words as grouped glyphs without hearing them.
(I’ve chosen to read “fn” as “effin” as a puerile expression of resentment.)
You can't think of what a STOP sign looks like? Or your country's flag?
Not who you asked, but also have aphantasia.
"think of" is far too ambiguous here to really meaningfully drill into the differences of _how_ people think about things. I know that a stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue. Thinking about it just involves no imagery.
Information you might rely on visualization for, I don't (because I can't). I couldn't tell you with any confidence what my family that just visited this afternoon was wearing (something I assume is easier for people who would remember it visually), but I can recall what happened - in what order, where, who said what, etc. - throughout their visit.
I have a vivid imagination. My stop sign visualized as looking up to your right at a stop sign a few feet above your head, so a proportionally distorted octagon. The coating is metallic red and near-white and has a mild flaky look to it as some colored metal has, with a hint of rainbow from the sun that lights it from my back. There is a standard metal post with holes in it. There is a mostly blue sky as background framed with small leaved, large trees. I know that if I paned down, I'd see grass with small, yellow flowers.
When I lose my wife at the store, I often realize I would be useless in describing what she was wearing if I had to. If friends were over, I wont recall their attire unless it specifically came up, then I might remember it for years.
I know what they look like. Could describe them to you. Draw them on a piece of paper. Can't visualise one in my head.
Heck, I can't even visualise what my wife and kids look like, something that my wife finds astonishing (and sad).
I'm useless at art, for the most part, with no visual imagination to work with.
Yesterday we were at a clothes store, and I could tell my youngest that I didn't think a particular set of clothes she was trying suited her, and was able to make specific suggestions. I can look at clothes and decide if they'd suit. Not because I could see them together in my head, or picture her wearing them, but because I've learned the rules, for want of a better way to put it.
I know what they look like (and could happily draw them), but I can't close my eyes and picture them.
I can think of them no problem, but I don’t visualize them it’d more that I think of their abstract representation.
> I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.
> On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
I'm the same way. I can almost replay entire songs in my head, and if I hear a repeated sound I can replay it slowed down in my head to count it, but in college I discovered that I had trouble recognizing faces of people when I'd meet them a second time. This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.
I don't have perfect pitch, but I can hit concert A perfectly. One of the sounds I can vividly recall is the sound of an orchestra tuning!
> This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.
We are very good at remembering and recognizing small details. You may have a trouble with faces yet you may have no trouble with a minor details what makes you recognize the person even if you actually struggle to recognize their face.
Anecdata: I always had not such a good eyesight, which, of course, only got worse with the age. Recently I stood at the bar entrance and recognized a friend from ~30 meters, despite what:
- he was in an unfamiliar to me clothing
- he wasn't with a cane like our previous couple of meetings (broken leg)
- I can't see shit at ~2 meters
Just a combination of his height, walking pattern and ~hair colour (and what he definitely headed to that bar and was not passing by) made me recognize him despite what I, quite literally, barely could see him.
I feel my memory/imagination is abstract, spatial, relational and factional. With that prompt I "see"/experience looking at the dark with a torch. I go over all the details one by one, but I don't see them it's just abstract concepts, like colour, shape and location. I don't "see" a whole picture when zooming out. It's just the aggregate concept. This might also be related to my dyslexia, why I'm good at abstract stuff like maths/programming and why I'm very good at direction and path finding. I have a good memory (but more of an indexing problem as I grow older ;) I consider myself quite creative (I love DIY stuff and creating things), but especially at improving, tweaking. Less so at starting from scratch. I have an eye for details. That's why I'm great at pairing on tasks. I have never experienced these things as a disability, but more so as talents.
I think my auditory visualisation is on the outlier side, I will literally sit in the car with nothing on the stereo just humming along to what I’m imagining in my mind.
It’s almost like I’m actually hearing music (or I can imagine people speaking in basically any accent) - even full orchestral. But it’s subtly different in a way I can’t really describe.
My image visualisation is much weaker, I can imagine moving images, in colour and everything but it’s much more vague.
I have to picture somewhere else I've been before that is like that. I can't make up new realistic landscape images in my head. That said, I'm not an artist
exactly all of this for me. and I've just learned about SDAM which kinda really resonates as well.
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There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.
Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogramming our visual hardware to form abstract concepts in the minds eye rather than visualizing concrete objects.
> There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.
But you're probably only reading about aphantasia in tech forums like this one.
For me it's the other way around.
I was always good at abstract sciences, like math and theoretical physics. Partially because I could operate in my mind with my very own abstractions.
But I'm for example very bad at chess and tetris, because I can't visualize.
This has been true for me at least since I was 5.
I can own at Tetris but I am miserable at chess. The types of visualization are completely different IMHO.
Well I'm bad compared to top 10% who play at crazy speed. I can't plan top far ahead though which makes me slower. And I'm too old I guess
Since we are going with anecdotes and gut feelings, I’d say these things aren’t related at all. I can imagine pictures, sounds and also have always been good at abstract thinking. Also chess and tetris are a matter of practice mostly, imo.
It’s funny though you can learn to visualize in chess through solving puzzles. I couldn’t do it at all at first but after awhile it clicked and I could just move pieces in my head.
I know an aphantasiac who is very good at chess.
I'm not convinced. I have aphantasia, yet I know I have vivid visual dreams, and I have at least once experienced even more vivid imagery in a waking state while meditating. I don't think - at least not for everyone - that the ability isn't there. It seems like something is inhibiting it when I'm awake. That, if anything, makes it a lot more frustrating. E.g. I've chased that meditation experience for a long time
In my case, I seem to have enhanced spatial reasoning when thinking about objects, rather than something visual.
For example, if I’m asked to think of an apple, I don’t see an apple (with no color etc.), but I can “feel” an apple in the sense that I can abstractly reason about the 3D space of an apple.
Again, there’s nothing visual about it. It’s almost as if I’m blind, and can form and reason about an apple as if I had only ever been able to hold one.
I have the same experience. Often times I find myself skipping steps when explaining things to other because I'm referencing a very obvious (to me) spatial disconnect between two concepts. I've also noticed that I'll gesture to where in my mind those concepts are located spatially.
Other quirks:
- I am also always aware of which direction "home" is. I can't remember ever being lost.
- I have an automatic annoyingly good memory for songs and sounds
- "Remembering" feels more like a bundle of sense impressions being re-expressed than it does recall. This is nice because I get much more "complete" impression of what my mind remembers happening. Not sure when this changed for me but it was after definitely after a few years of meditating.
None of this is ever visual though.
Now that you mention this, removing color from the exercise and focusing on the spatial features made the exercise incredibly easy. Trying to visualize color seems to be more difficult.
I think that would be hard to gauge. From what I recall supposedly ~4% of people have aphantasia (iirc this includes minor forms, not just complete). If there are hundreds of thousands of people on this forum, there are likely thousands with aphantasia.
And whenever some niche topic comes up that relates to some group, they all come out of the woodwork to congregate. I certainly do whenever this topic comes up.
I'd say it's the other way around, people with Aphantasia trend towards tech. Especially software is very abstract, you can visualize parts of it in your head but it's often not enough precise or just too complex. Even a small imprecision makes it pointless, which is very frustrating. Compare that to something like (UI) design, architecture, animation, visual effects etc. Where even rough visualizations help a lot.
Do people without aphantasia actually visualize for loops, class hierarchies, design patterns, etc…?
If not it would be easy to explain the result of the “visualize an apple” test. It’s just like visualizing a “for loop”. You’ve got a good idea of what’s it like and yet visualize absolutely nothing.
I do visualize images I have seen in the past that represent class hierarchies, I can visualize UML representing design patterns, and also can visually compose these UMLs, I can even write code in my head as I see it on the screen, for example I can change background color or font. I can only do it for small snippets, but I do see them they are not just text. Whenever I want to solve a high level design problem I actually see the systems stylized, a cache, a database, client, server, arrows between them, the same way they appear on the screen. I can easily imagine all kinds of dashboards charts and whatnot. All these to some degree of complexity, I need to make some effort to actually take a mental picture of the screen remember and visualize it after a period, unless is something I see every day. So yes people can use images to do their work every day as programmers.
I think there is also a phenomenon where bits of the human condition are given a label and then suddenly sprouting a subculture on the internet where people get excited to be part of something special. Some kind of disease fetish.
I can’t even imagine approaching a problem without some visual representation.
I see functions I wrote hours ago, maybe not every line of code but pseudocode at least. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve solved bugs just visualizing code before falling asleep.
I asked a non-tech loved one right now and she doesn’t see anything either. I almost suspect people are claiming they “see” things when they don’t and it’s just a deep understanding of what something looks like.
While certainly some of that does happen. The language around visualization is complicated. But we know that there are people who have no ability to think in language and have no internal monologue, whereas others can do so strongly. Given how much variability there is in everything else with the brain, it would be rather strange that it isn't also true of visualization.
After all, everything we experience is our brains' interpretation of our sensory inputs. And if we can visually experience things that don't exist, whether through dreams or hallucinations (drug induced or otherwise), it stands to reason that if your mind knows how to control those same pathways you could create images in your mind.
What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.
I feel similarly, though less about the lack of objective testing and more about the inability to even be sure we're talking about the same thing. Like I can visualize stuff fine, but not literally see it like some Hololens overlay -- it's in a sort of abstract internal space separate from what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I wonder whether some self-diagnosed aphantasiacs only think they are because they overestimate how potent "normal" visualization should be. (Or maybe these visual hallucinations are normal and I'm underdiagnosing myself!)
One method to possibly tell the difference is visual analogizing. Like, "picture" the Sydney Opera House, and then (without thinking in words) name some other objects it resembles. Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
I disagree. Asking someone to name shapes that resemble for example the Sydney Opera house seems to me just a test of creativity, not ability to “visualize” something in your head.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our version of this “visualization” or “image” or … looks or even feels.
It is a creativity test, but doesn't how you get there matter? From what I understand, aphantasiacs think in words, verbalized concepts, remembered facts, relationships, etc. So I'd expect that to make a visual analogy they'd have to first think through the properties of the thing -- "OK, I know this building is white, triangular, curved, near the water..." -- and then come up with other things those attributes describe. But I can just "see" the shape and color of the building in my mind's eye, and mentally make it be something similar, without any internal monologue at all. Actually, if you just gave me a written description of these traits, I'd have a harder time coming up with examples because they're just abstract properties without any specific image to anchor them to -- I could do it, but I'd have to think about it some. But doing the same exercise with a mental image feels much easier.
How can someone judge if two things look similar that are not before your eyes without visualizing them in their mind? Surely some visual comparison and matching must be going on in their head?
If you’re looking for objective measures, aphantasia correlates inversely with objective measures of visual memory.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is.
For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no color because it’s just an abstract concept. For me it is a white outline on a black background, very vividly.
For the test to be meaningful, it should still produce accurate results when the subject is pretending to have the condition (the SAT wouldn’t be helpful if you could ace it by acting as if you know the all answers!)
Consider a turing test of sorts: I want to convince you I am phantastic, you are tasked with determining whether I am faking it. Could such a test be realized?
Consider, for example, the “draw a bicycle” phenomenon. Many alleged phantists are wholly unable to correctly render a bicycle onto paper, and furthermore they are often unable to self-evaluate that their renders are bogus. Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
Of course this test does not have perfect recall/accuracy, it’s just an example of how the results can be counterintuitive.
> Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
As one, I don't draw, I construct. A set of rules make a bicycle a bicycle, so pick a part, draw it, then sequentially continue attaching parts per the rules, and at the end, it's a valid bicycle that functions. The resultant drawing is considered good, though I couldn't "see" any part of the bicycle before or while drawing.
This isn't from an image, but it is arguably a mapping.
Similarly, I've observed those who can mentally organize concepts but can't visualize pictures are often better able to render frameworks onto whiteboards than those who picture scenes.
It's made me wonder if the same parts of the mind are used for the one or the other, as if remembering everything visually uses up circuitry that could support semantic-space-time.
A anecdote along the same lines as your drawing vs constructing observation:
I happen to be fairly adept at wood working. And I often think up novel constructions that people quite fancy and indeed are willing to pay their hard earned bucks for.
Once I have thought these things up, I am able to render them to paper/CAD very easily for concrete plan creation. I am never surprised at the appearance of the thing when it is rendered to CAD, I always knew that’s what it would look like. I never saw it in any visual sense, but I knew exactly how it would appear, and I could answer in great detail any question someone might have about it (barring, perhaps, the sorts of questions that require trigonometry/excessive number crunching – the reason I’m putting it to CAD/paper).
To me, this means there isn’t a binary “has ‘imagination’/does not have ‘imagination’” divide. Rather, folks perhaps have different methods of “visualization”. Some folks have a “bitmap” approach (≈Photoshop). From the comments here, it seems some a “vector” approach (≈Illustrator). I would perhaps describe mine as a “CSG” approach (≈OpenSCAD/Grasshopper/etc.).
What’s nice with this phrasing is that nobody is missing anything. Nobody is a-trait. Everyone just has a different method of doing the same sorta thing, perhaps with some relative strengths and weaknesses accordingly, but no fundamental lack of ability to answer any particular question.
But who knows, maybe that’s just cope.
The article uses the VVIQ test (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), taken on the Internet, to select aphantasiac participants. I cannot take research like that seriously.
> For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless.
If you are not an aphantasiac, how do you know what meaning this question has for one? I am pretty sure aphantasiacs can "imagine" a triangle with some color in it. It is just that this imagine manifests differently than it does for you, but how can we measure that objectively?
To elaborate, even for an aphantasiac, a triangle or a color is not something abstract. You can draw it on a paper, and it is right there. If you close your eyes, you can remember what you have drawn on the paper, aphantasiac or not. So how exactly do you distinguish the quality of memories here? Certainly not with vague internet questionnaires. Research like that makes me really angry.
If I say "imagine a triangle" and ask you what color it is, why would it have a color if there is no image there? I didn't ask you to imagine a red triangle. Only a triangle. The only way it logically gets a color is if you are visualizing it.
In my mind there is an infinite void. No color per say, think of the void of space, without a single spec of dust.
This void is a 3D space. There is a general sense of up, down, left, right, front and back.
In this void I materialize a triangle. It is a wireframe. 3 lines, all the same length. No color, they are just lines.
By default the triangle is resting on one side, pointing up, and facing me. I can then rotate and move my mind "camera" around it while simultaneously rotating and moving the triangle as well.
The more complex the shapes, the more shapes, the harder it is to maintain coherency. I can close my eyes and concentrate to help.
I can assign colors if I wish to, but they are not really there visually. More like an extra information attached to the shape.
I understand your reasoning, but it is not very logical. It depends on what you mean by "imagine a triangle". A triangle doesn't have to be filled with a color to be a triangle. Why would you imagine it with any color in it in the first place, not just a wireframe, being transparent inside? So if your triangle doesn't have a color, it might be because you are more accurate in your imagination, not because you have no triangle imagination.
So without a proper way of defining things like "imagine" or "mental picture" first, tests like yours or like VVIQ are not well-defined. Now, maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I have aphantasia. Or maybe I don't understand the meaning of VVIQ because I am a logician and mathematician, and I am very peculiar about "meaning". Maybe even both. Without a doubt though, VVIQ is not an objective test, because its elements are not properly defined.
The point isn’t to rigorously define “visualize” or “imagine”—we will probably never be able to do this. The point is to use a verbal prompt to elicit a mental experience and then to try to probe that experience.
> A triangle doesn't have to be filled with a color to be a triangle. Why would you imagine it with any color in it in the first place, not just a wireframe, being transparent inside?
That’s just it: when I imagine a triangle, it is a definite image with a definite color. The visual details like color come automatically for me. I cannot imagine it in the more abstract way you are describing. If it’s a wireframe, the wireframe is gray. It’s always a full, colorful, 3d scene, perhaps vague but definitely with visual detail.
My answer would have been. Hang on a second you never asked me to imagine a triangle WITH a color?
What else has this triangle got? A flavor? A smell? A name? It would have never occurred to me it had a color in the first place before you asked.
> The only way it logically gets a color is if you are visualizing it.
This does not follow. I can imagine a red triangle without visualizing one.
What does this mean? What do you see when you "imagine" versus when you "visualize?"
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless
I confirm.
I would have probably picked up a color at random to play along with the whole “mind’s eye metaphor” before I realized people can actually “see” for real and it’s not a metaphor.
I don't consider myself having aphantasia (I can visualize stuff in my head), but if I imagine a triangle it doesn't by default have a color. It would if the instructions were something like "imagine a red and a blue triangle", but when I only imagine shapes they don't necessarily have a color.
The second paragraph of this Guardian article mentions, and links to, but doesn't expound on the biophysical pupillary response to mental visual imagery.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbq8w/how-pupil-size-can-re...
If someone with normal mental visualization ability pictures a "bright" scene, the pupils contract just as they would in response to a bright visual stimulation. Aphants' pupils show no physical response to this test.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018072/
Speaking from experience as an aphantasic person, I think it is definitely possible to test objectively. For instance certain IQ tests will test the subject's ability to identify what a pictured object would look like if it were rotated in a certain way.
I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section except that one... where I scored 1st percentile. If that's not a strong sign of aphantasia I don't know what is!
This is actually one of the things about aphantasia that has already had a (small) study[0], and the results are actually the opposite! The participants with aphantasia were more likely to both (a) take longer to answer and (b) be _correct_.
I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning are mostly (but not entirely) orthogonal spectra, and it's completely possible for people to fall anywhere on either, just based on how their brain developed its internal strategies throughout normal life.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26792259_Loss_of_im...
Yes, objective tests must somehow take into account the multitude of coping mechanisms that people with the condition have developed. "Spatial reasoning" for example is very close to logical reasoning, and I don't see why people with Aphantasia shouldn't be very good at that, albeit slower in "spatial" mode.
Can you read text when a book is upside down?
fMRI can probably spot it for people like myself who are fully aphantasic.
But:
1. "Imagine a table. There is a ball on the table. The ball rolls off the table onto the floor."
2. "From memory, what color was the ball? The table? The floor? What did you see under the table?"
Neither I nor any other, uh, aphants, that I have known have answers to those questions. Imagination still works, and answers to those questions can be produced interactively if handled appropriately, but, ex: we weren't imagining colors and we didn't see anything at all much less "under the table".
Alternative:
1. "What do you think people do, specifically, when they "count sheep" to go to sleep?"
Our answers to that should just be hilarious for you. Hi-larious.
Understand that we thought you folks "visualizing in your minds eye" were speaking metaphorically. Entirely metaphorically.
"mind's eye" is a metaphor. You, like everyone else, have two eyes, in the front of your face. There isn't an extra one embedded in anyone's brain.
Just to understand the baseline you're working form, what data are you drawing on when stating what's "normal"? It has appeared to me throughout this conversation that you are starting from the assumption that your internal experience (at least, with regard to mental imagery) is consistent with the majority and making assertions about the majority based on that.
If you are actually drawing on a larger amount of data, specifically pertaining to the mechanisms of people's internal experiences, that'd be useful to know. If you are not, I'd gently suggest that you're working from a flawed statistical assumption, and that looking at the numerous interactions in this thread where people describe materially different internal experiences ("I can only recall tastes in terms of descriptors" - "I can experience a taste by imagining it"[0]) may be more informative without presuming universal consistency.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40764813
I'm not sure what you think you've gained or stated with this remark.
"Mind's eye" and "visualization" refer to actual experiences. Those of us with aphantasia (no exceptions that I've encountered so far) did not realize these words referred to actual experiences.
Define "actual experiences". Normal people can not imagine an object like a red apple and actually see it, same as if one existed right in front of them. They can "visualize" it (just like you, it sounds), as in they can think of what it looks like, they would recognize one, they can even imagine broader scenes involving this apple (like an entire grocery aisle) but there is no "actual experience." You couldn't walk straight otherwise, you'd constantly be dodging imaginary objects that you'd be seeing.
The generous interpretation of everything you've written so far is that you have aphantasia and don't realize it, and when it finally registers you'll feel like a real ass about these comments.
There are less generous interpretations.
> Define "actual experiences".
People without aphantasia literally count sheep to go to sleep.
No, they literally do not. "Counting sheep" is a mental exercise. Or do you think people invite actual sheep into their bedrooms?
The pineal gland in the brain has sometimes been termed the "third eye":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland#Society_and_cultu...
Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
There’s a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast about aphantasia. They specifically talk about a test for the condition. It’s worth the 30 minute listen.
Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA.
I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate?
That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia.
For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.
> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details.
> Do you think that's accurate?
I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap.
With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it.
[0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
Thanks, those are great points. After more thought, I somewhat agree I was overweighing the value of visualizing things in my mind. I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc. So maybe that's analogous to aphantasia. It's just that we're talking about the sense of sight versus taste. From a practical standpoint, there isn't much value even if I could taste something as part of a memory. It would make the memory even stronger and more vivid though.
> I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc.
For what it's worth, I can't conjure anything other than a few fleeting details for something visual. When I manage to surface a distinct image, it vanishes pretty fast. But (if I can remember it) I can "imagine" the taste of a specific chocolate bar, a sound (particularly voices) or how something feels to touch very distinctly. I'd say "accurately" as well, but that's hard to gauge.
Interestingly, I think my tendency to visualize makes me a slow reader. I can suppress it with effort, but typically my pace slows down to let me imagine observing the story.
I don't think that's part of "visualization" itself. I don't visualize a scene, but I still can take a long time if it's interesting or has a lot of detail. I remember reading the Lord of the Rings books and it has really long descriptions of the scenery and sometime it took me a very long time to read it, just so I can get all the details. In other parts I read over it as fast as I could to get on with the story.
I imagine that's the same for "both sides".
Movies and TV shows are a really exciting topic. But first to your questions: You are totally right, I can't recall a scene from a movie with all the details. I couldn't paint it, as I'm not seeing it like when it's right in front of me (in the movie). But I could definitely describe it and it will sound indistinguishable from what you would describe, the difference is that I'm remembering the description and you are remembering the scene itself.
Rewatching a movie is the same, I remember seeing the movie and I also remember all the scenes (the ones I remember); you might remember a scene by color and "images", I remember it by description or concept. But the result is the same: I remember having seen it.
A really nice perk (for me) is that I don't remember the individual actors. I remember the role played, but not who has played it. It's not like I cannot distinguish actors from another, but I just don't remember actor X played this and that role. I really don't understand the problems with changing actors in sequels, it's the same role; maybe played a little bit different, but still the same role.
I know a total of maybe 5 to 10 actors which I recognize among different movies.
A good way to think about what it is like to be color blind in a world where others see more colors is to consider tetrachromats. From Google:
> "People with tetrachromacy have a fourth cone in their retinas, called a tetrachromat, that allows them to see up to 100 million colors, compared to the average person's 1 million. This extra cone gives them access to new color ranges within the yellow and green spectrum, which can create millions of new color variations. "
I can only imagine how much more vibrant the world looks to them in terms of sunrise and sunset, walking in a forest, etc.
As the saying goes: it's impossible to imagine a new color.
I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.
I learned about Aphantasia about eight months ago, and it really sent me for a trip. I have no problems visualizing in my mind and sometimes can get lost in it, to me that’s what daydreaming is.
I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
We have these common concepts which are actually very personal everywhere. Even with good eyes the color perception differs a lot between different people. For most it's obvious that this is red and this is blue, but in between the colors it gets very fuzzy. The same goes for sounds and smell and touch, so for every sense.
Totally, the gold/blue dress picture is a perfect example of that[0].
I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue.
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-th...
> but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around
Most people can't draw (at all) and I think that supports your point.
Example: https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
When awake I imagine things but they're fleeting, hazy etc. and I have to really concentrate.
But something happened to me a few years ago, I can't really say what. Basically my dreamscape when I was asleep changed. I went from sort of greyscale dreams with 1-2 people at a time, very little audio to basically full-blown movie quality with up to thousands of people in the scene. Long ago I achieved a lucid dreaming state but it was always a bit boring somehow, there wasn't much happening. Now I can do the same and there's a whole storyline going on for me to experience.
Also when waking up I could now just turn around and immediately go back to sleep and resume the dream.
My point in all of that is that somehow when my full conscious mind isn't present it's as if in computer terms I just have a lot more CPU power available for creating the scenery, up to the point where it's as real as real life. I'm sure it's not a "CPU" issue, the brain should easily be powerful enough to do it while conscious, but maybe it's more of a survival thing.
How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation? I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation, as if it’s some kind of minority report style interface that appears before you and is perceived by the eye. It’s simply being able to reconstruct physical entities as mental models. Again, without being able to do that it just seems impossible that you could navigate from memory, unless every destination is recorded in your mind as a series of “left, right, left, left, right at church” instructions that you’ve managed to memorise, but surely you’re not doing that? You must be about to walk through the steps of a journey in your mind? I struggle to believe people are getting through life without this ability, it seems so essential to me in all sorts of scenarios.
Maybe, but what other people write about their visualization experiences is completely alien to me. It's not a matter of degree.
Is there any analogy between reasoning about relationships and paths through complicated source code code vs paths through a street map? I don't think I visualize either, I just kind of absorb knowledge and piece together plans.
I don't have an inner monologue either, and I find that I've not infrequently found myself having to pronounce a word I've only ever read before. Ihhave to invent a spoken pronunciation for the first time ever and get self-conscious. It's not the same as aphantasia, but kind of similar. Well, maybe: when I see a movie about a book I've read, I never say, "oh, that actor looks different than what I thought the character looked like".
I don't mean to argue that aphantasia is "real", but I do feel there is evidence for it.
The difference is the recognition. If you tell me "to go right at the wall with the lion on it and left after the blue door" you're giving me an immense difficult task. If you want to totally screw me just show me pictures of the wall and the blue door, I probably be really lost.
It's not only about what is visualizable, but also what form of representation is comparable. I can read a map in a matter of seconds and find my way. I can find a car plate within my line of sight instantly. The way to the parking lot behind the <insert picture of something> and finding the blue <insert car brand> there is basically impossible for me. Of course I'm able to concentrate, but it doesn't come naturally.
> How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation?
How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
> I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation
I find the utter disbelief expressed by people who don't have aphantasia exhausting. It would be similar to encountering someone who has been deaf from birth and trying to convince them that they're not really deaf, they just don't understand what it means when other people say that they hear things. They could also hear things if they just try harder.
> How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
I assume they create a mental model of space. To me, this is basically what I’m describing as visualisation. In ones mind one can arbitrarily place themselves in space and move around it. I guess this is slightly different to conjuring up an image, but to me it feels very similar. If you can “see” space in your minds eye, it seems like you could see other arbitrary things.
I’m not saying I don’t think this is a real phenomena, just that it’s hard to empathise and understand it.
If you could describe your experience of navigation from memory I would appreciate it. When someone asks you for directions somewhere, what goes through your mind?
because the average person relies so heavily on visualization in their day to day life, people that claim they dont have this ability but also seem to have no discernable difference in the way they interact with the world is what is confusing. everyone understands that deaf people exist because its really fucking obvious when someone is deaf. they interact with the world differently.
its really weird to me, and most everyone that you could be looking at a cup and trying to commit its visual properties to memory, and then close your eyes and be complete incapable of re-constructing even a vague visual representation of it.
I can visualize nothing, but have excellent navigation skills. I can accurately remember the geospatial arrangement of cities and locations and routes I visited only once decades ago. That part of my brain has nothing to do with “seeing things”
do you have any experience of feeling like youve been at a particular place before. if you dont remember seeing it, do you just remember the arangement of landmarks like dots on a grid?
It’s an innate sense which most closely resembles proprioception (knowing where you arms/legs/etc are), or remembering where you put your keys. I suppose maybe it’s similar to “seeing” landmarks on a map (not necessarily a grid) but it’s simultaneously abstract while being very well defined in some intuitive sense: I know the Vatican is this way and the Colosseum is that way and the Spanish Steps are that way (and every other spot I cared to notice on the map), and no matter where in the city I walk and so long as I know which way I’m facing, I’ll 100% know the relative direction and distance of every other spot (as well as the pathing! Not just locations but also streets, etc). It’s actually hard for me to get lost.
You can see references to this geospatial sense in ancient Roman times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words.
Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery).
So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.
I'm almost aphantasiac, so for me it's actually easy to believe—visualizing things is hard enough that I can imagine not being able to do it at all, but also possible enough that I can imagine it being easier to do.
I can't see things in my minds eye. It's not a thing for me
You have no idea what a very simple object or shape, like a Christian cross or a McDonald's logo, looks like without having one in your sight?
Similar questions throughout this thread make it clear that people assume recognition and/or knowledge of what something looks like is tightly coupled to internal visualization, but (writing as someone with aphantasia) they're not. I can draw both of the examples you gave, thinking about them (including thinking about how I would go about drawing them) just doesn't include an image in my head.
Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
Back before GPS, people used to give each other driving directions based on landmarks... go straight 2 miles, turn left at the red brick schoolhouse. Now, that sounds like the condition you describe - you know red, you know brick, you know what schoolhouses generally look like, but since you've never been to this specific place there is zero mental picture. When you finally get there, it's a surprise, you've found the thing that combines all the elements. But the next trip, there is a mental picture. It's probably extremely vague and lacking any detail, but it's still something, the next time it won't be a complete surprise.
Someone with the condition you describe (zero mental imagery) would, constantly, feel like they are seeing basic objects for the very first time, you wouldn't recognize anything at all, this would be a highly debilitating condition just like severe amnesia.
I can only tell you that I do not have mental imagery and am not constantly surprised by my surroundings. Object permanence has absolutely no dependency on visualization; it is completely unsurprising to me that the stop sign near my house looks the same each time I encounter it.
I totally get that you, having lived a life where mental imagery is such an integral part of your baseline experience, assume that many of the things you rely on it for require it. However, the human brain is impressively adaptable, and it turns out many, many aspects that people assume are linked (and may well be for them as individuals) are not globally so.
This thread is full of such realizations - people assuming ability at chess, art, tetris, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, architectural design, conceptualizing of DB schemas, etc. must be correlated with facets of thought like strength of mental imagery, presence of an inner monologue, ability to dream, etc. In all of those cases, people have chimed in with (anecdotal, to be sure) counterexamples. It turns out brains are generally capable of doing a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.
In another comment you wrote "stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue". The fact that you knew all of that without having to actually find a stop sign and look at it, that's mental imagery. It may be a skill some people are very good at (i.e. they can remember lots of small details) and others are not, but it's not that you don't have this skill at all.
What I know is that people describe not having aphantasia like
“I’m sitting in a room with a dog and a TV. Then someone says ‘visualize a stop sign.’ And, so then I’m sitting in a room with a dog, a TV and a stop sign. I’m know the stop sign isn’t real. It might be fuzzy or even black & white. But, I can see it between the dog and the TV.”
Well… I know exactly what a stop sign looks like. But, there’s no stop sign in the room with me and my dog. It’s not there at all.
No, that is more like hyperphantasia, where the visualized object is superimposed on top of one's visual reality. Seeing something in one's mind's eye is more like there is a a buffer right above my visual reality where I can imagine something inside that buffer. It is not superimposed over reality but I can focus on both the visual buffer and the imagination buffer simultaneously.
The woman in the article describes that she has no problem identifying faces she has seen before, in fact, she is better at that than average. It is just that she doesn't see these faces as a picture in her head.
So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the hash of a picture, and performing comparisons using the hash, not the picture itself.
It sounds like people simply have different definitions of "a picture in her head." Her mental processing sounds entirely normal on all counts.
I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes are closed, my guess is everyone would fail.
I suspect the 3.9% estimation is wildly inaccurate but that the condition / spectrum is true.
In the 1-5 guide, I'd probabably rate myself a 99 or something silly. I feel like the equipment is capable of visualising, but I just don't know how to operate it.
However, I do have involuntary visualizations. My dreams are images, very unlike thought. And in the last 5 or so years I can recall 2 occasions where I was in a relaxed state and pictured things without really trying, so I know it's possible to have dream like images when awake.
My wife says she can just perfect recall stuff. I entirly believe she can visualise, but I believe she confuses what happened with what she can see. She also states she can visualise the apple, or pretty much anything else she wants.
Don't close your eyes. Just picture it in your head. It has nothing to do with invoking closed eye visualization.
When you read a word relating to something you've seen or regularly experienced, how is that processed by your mind?
For example if you were asked to draw and color a basketball, how would you approach the task without 'seeing' something in your mind?
For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown".
All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture".
OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".
Same way I remember somebody's name.
Do you picture name tags on people? It just comes out of nothing in my head.
I always see a face together with the name, yes. The name is mostly audible but I also visualize the text in a white font.
Can you hear or imagine sounds in your head?
No, like images it's just the concept of the sound. As I can identify images (also people or faces), I can identify sounds, but I can't imagine them.
Instead of a picture of a forest and some cracking of wood, I just have these words in my head and not the real picture/sound.
Same for every other sense.
How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quickly. I've heard that people like you make great scholars for that reason.
I read about three times as fast as other people. I'm still not better in absorbing the information, I also make errors and miss key points.
The difference is that a book is already in a format I don't need to convert (to images) anymore.
About the 3x: if I need to show someone something to read on a screen and need to wait to scroll to the next page, I just read it 3 times and scroll then, it normally fits a "normal" reading speed.
I read very fast (English and code, and my native language), and I have a very vivid visual (as well as auditory) imagination. Wonder what I traded off in this setup.
Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.
Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised.
Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
Not the GP either I can’t do any of that.
Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.
Can you hear your own thoughts when thinking in sentences? If not what does thinking a sentence through feel like?
I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head.
Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
Do you dream? Dreams are generally heavy on mental imagery.
Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758231
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book. There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
Not OP. I don’t recall any dreams since childhood. If I had not experienced a few myself, I would have a hard time understanding what a dream even is. And my 10 or so dreams only had abstract images. Defo not like a movie or reality where you can “see” things, people, objects. I don’t recall much about them anyway except being slightly mildly freaked out at the time for experiencing something which was not “real”.
Not op, but sleeping and shortly after waking (like seconds not minutes) are it for images.
I dunno how often you guys dream but a standard night for me is it's dark out and then it's light out without a dream in between.
Ever had a lucid dream?
Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description.
It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.
Yeah, I can also wake myself from those dreams by raising my heartrate and it won't be throbbing when I actually wake up.
Have you ever taken a hallucinogen?
No
This makes so many moments of my life make so much more sense.
I don't have full blown aphantasia I think but mental images are always very hazy and dark to me and calling them up takes immense effort. Seems like I'm a 4 on the VVIQ scale.
On the other hand, imaginations in psychotherapy, be it for exposure it for revisiting childhood places and moments, still work for me. They are just not very visual. They contain emotions and haptic aspects, sometimes sounds and smells, but the visual is kind of like really old polaroid pictures. They frizzle out at the edges really quickly, they never move, the colors are muted and sometimes off.
At least now I know that people who claim that books evoke vibrant mental images in them are not bullshitting me. And I can stop sitting there with Lord of the Rings in hand, staring at a wall for 10 minutes and wondering why I still don't manage to "see" what Moria looks like.
I'm (apparently) aphantasic, having learned about the concept on a couple of months ago. However unscientific the [VVIQ](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) is, I couldn't answer a single question with anything other than "No image at all."
What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.
I don't see anything. I feel like we're talking past each other. I am skeptical that "visualize an apple" to some people gets them the mental equivalent of a Blender model where they get a 360 degree view of the image and from there they are able to apply arbitrary transformations. I can "replay" songs in my head with pretty good fidelity to the original if I remember enough of it, but I think that's fairly common.
I can confirm it's basically a blender model in my head I can ~arbitrarily transform at will. Worth noting it's not just visual, I can 'touch' the surface of the imagined object(s) or whack two together and 'hear' what that sounds like.
Strangely, I can easily do this in my dreams, or when I’m on the verge of sleep, but not at all when I’m awake. It’s like a different brain takes over. Really want to “unlock” this ability, would help a lot with art.
OK maybe I'm just jealous. I've only asked my siblings about this but none of them see anything either.
Ask these people to actually draw or paint the apples, and it quickly shows that they do not do lighting and shading correctly. Even with a lot of training.
Just look at art history. Only very few people managed to render things somewhat accurately before the invention of photography. And the consensus is that these exceptions (such as Holbein or Vermeer) used technological tricks to aid them.
My hypothesis is that people have an internal imagery that is extremely realistic and detailed, because they perceive the actual world in exactly the same way, using the same processes. One does not "see" the image on the retina in their mind's eye, one "sees", if I'm allowed to use the metaphor, the vector embedding somewhat further down the line.
Now, if people train their mind to actually see more detail, they find out that the brain is actually rather limited in comparison to a camera.
Yeah I am in this camp as well. I can also do things like, after the apples are smashed together I can see heir bruises, rotate them, make 2 more bruises, etc. while keeping the bruises in their same spots.
It’s actually really annoying because when I’m stuck on a problem I essentially solve the whole thing in my head. I just see all the issues with possible solutions and back them out.
I wonder if it drives my boss nuts because I can go a whole day basically committing nothing, and then bang out the solution very quickly.
I actually have been actively trying to “just start writing, see what pops out” and it isn’t coming very naturally, which is kind of obnoxious.
This means you should be able to create a drawing/painting of the apple (or of whatever scene) as if it were standing in front of you?
Do you generally expect anyone to be able to create a drawing/painting of anything in their visual field? Just because I'm staring at the grand canyon doesn't mean I can put it to paper. That takes extensive practice and skill.
I‘m saying you should be able to do it as well as if it were in your actual visual field. Which might be very badly, depending on talent and experience, but not worse. And I was asking a question, if this is your actual experience. Because while I can visualize and rotate and transform objects in my mind, it’s not comparable to actually seeing them, and it doesn’t translate to being able to draw/paint them as well as if they were in front of me, by far.
I have come to believe there are different type of intelligences, we all have a few, just different.
I do believe a subset of humans can rotate a mental image in their head. I know an accomplished UI / UX artist who would do just this. He'd create an image in his head, observe and critique it from angles and then create in "reality"
I can listen to a song 100 times, and not tell you more than 5 words in a song, nor the beat. My early teen son (a sensor) can sing the entire song after a few listens.
I used to think the only intelligence sign was being highly logical or able to solve complex problems. Because that is what I know. However, I've come to learn there are large swath of intelligences I don't have, and have not personally valued in the past, but others have them and can do great things with them.
This awareness has even allowed me to believe in a wider growth of intelligences at the spectrums, even to a type of supernatural gifts.
i think calling those things different types of intelligence is dumb. those are just skills.
I am exactly the opposite, I can very easy imagine an object in my mind and apply a texture, color skew it, rotate it. I can easily visualize a chessboard with pieces that I can change colors and even move. I can visualize moments from past, faces, places, I can even draw them to some degree however without much talent. But for the life of me I can't remember my favorite music unless I start hearing it and then it comes to me, just to fade away seconds after I finish listening to it I can remember lyrics but without the music. I think that I kind of remember (chorus) national anthem and some children songs 1-2 of them, but I can sing along once the music starts. I have a very good memory otherwise, never had to use a todo list for my daily routine.
Does that mean you don't remember "catchy" music/songs from advertisements/tv/radio? That is a huge gift
Can you change the songs you replay in your head? I think there is a spectrum of audio imagination as well. For example, I can speed up/slow down, add reverb, change pitch, remix, change lyrics, etc.
Yeah I can do pretty much all of those. I'd prefer being able to do this sort of thing with images though :\
A popular topic here:
Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951990] 105 points|negativelambda|3 months ago|114 comments
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887661] 86 points|bookofjoe|3 months ago|89 comments
More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
For those of you who do not suffer from dead-on aphantasia but simply have bad visualization/memory recall: you may find great industry in learning to draw, paint, sculpt and immersing yourself in perceptory recall to essentially, in an analogous manner of speaking, strengthen weak muscles. You may go so far as to find the book “ The training of the memory in art and the education of the artist” by B., L. Horace to be of interest. Do not skip on music and try to find ways to engage physically as best as possible. Perception works best in totality, and people who have strong visual recall often have other strong recall functions as well, disabilities notwithstanding.
For me, visualisation is related to memory recall. If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation. For aural imagination, such as music composition, I imagine snippets of music I've heard, then combine them. There is a visual component to that, but it's symbolic, not vivid. If I need to imagine something I haven't experienced, it's like a combination of line drawings, animation and written and spoken language. It would look like a mess if I could project it. Colours are there, but they're not vivid. They're more like bad watercolours. If I take my time, I can clear up the image, and over time it becomes more vivid. This is actually how I write. It's a slow process, but it's the only way I can think clearly. I find social conversation difficult because it tends to move faster than my ability to visualise so I find it dull and uninspiring. I prefer to spend my time slow-reading literature.
Contextual conversations are ok, such as business or academic conversations, because the language is generally a closed set and visualisations are well practiced. But social situations can be without context, and difficult to navigate.
> If someone asks me to imagine a scene, I'll run through memories of actual experiences and combine them where necessary to produce an approximation.
When someone asks me to imagine a scene, I don't really do that. That scene with mountains, trees and a lake? It's like three labels just kinda being there... waiting to be updated based on what comes next.
But if I make a focused effort, I can sorta do it. I can recall seeing something which might look like that, and recall some visual aspects. Not super vividly, but something I could at least use as a basis to draw a sketch for example.
But just by default, those images from my memory seldom come up just reading something. I have to focus and spend time recollecting. But they never ever become vivid as in real life, not remotely close.
I‘m also a self diagnosed aphant. I was so relived when I found out, school was very frustrating since there are so many learning methods that are built for people with a mind that’s able to picture stuff also hard to remember faces, I usually only know some facts about people, like they have red hair, brown eyes… even family members
but I can at least hear sounds in my mind :) I read that this is a similar spectrum thing where some people hear nothing and others can replay everything
What about sexual fantasies? Can people with aphantasia imagine the other person in any manner? In the article, the writer claims she can’t even imagine her ex-boyfriend.
I can imagine anyone, anywhere, without even closing my eyes. In many situations, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had this ability since early childhood. It has not made me a sex-craving maniac, though; I’m quite stable.
I cannot. It's easier to imagine the sensations of being with the person than it is to visualize the person themselves.
I can't visualize the faces of any of my exes but I can vividly "feel" the memory how we felt being next to each other, sometimes if I focus this starts to include smells and sounds as well but no visuals.
Of course they can picture things in their mind, that's how they see.
To explain the not-joke: the things you see are not "out there" they are in your mind. Now of course the things you see through your eyes are there, but the images are imaginary, the eye and brain do all kinds of things between the retina and the mind to make the imagery you see. Your visual perception is constructive.
Metaphorically speaking, the camera works, these folks just don't know how to hit "play" on the tape. They have the neural "circuitry" to visualize in their minds (or they would be blind!) they just aren't using it.
> Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
Learn to use your brain folks. It's the most sophisticated computer in the known Universe and you can learn to operate it.
I'm very interested in this topic, so I'll go ahead and describe my experience.
I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures into your mind and superimpose an apple onto them, like adding a layer in Photoshop, perhaps with 90% opacity or a bit of inconsistent flickering. That's probably the best way I could describe the experience. Those edits I create are on another visual layer, inside my mind, which requires an active effort to have a consistent visual experience, but of course sometimes it can passively activate and you're just daydreaming without any effort. Personally, I have a hard time imagining faces. They change, they melt, sometimes they become inhuman. I only have consistent faces in my dreams.
The places I know well, I can fully navigate inside my mind, just flying around a town, going down streets and such. I, of course, don't believe neither the scaling or the distance is accurate, but it's convincing and consistent enough for me at the level of abstract thought.
I fully get immersed in the books I'm reading or listening to. It's the best part of reading a book.
I can imagine smell, taste, sound, touch, sight and even other senses like balance and whatever else. Sound would be the most vivid part of my imagination. High consistency and fidelity. I also have an inner monologue which I use in second person communication, addressing myself from the perspective of another entity.
I have anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and problems with rumination. I experience memories with a lot of emotion. Whenever I look at art or listen to music, I also tend to have a deep and powerful emotional reaction.
I am exactly the same as you and I also have the same exact anxiety intrusive thought flashback rumination memory issues. It's totally a trade-off but it's not a trade-off that we willingly made when we were being wired up by our genetics lol.
That sounds heavenly to me.
It is such an essential part of my life that suddenly losing these abilities would be devastating. Aphantasia should be considered a disability. I feel as if you're losing an essential part of human experience.
In second year university I took a difficult 3d calculus class. I struggled for weeks until I suddenly developed the capability to visualize and manipulate 3D objects with axes, rulers and protractors in my mind. It like instantly leveled me up. Before that I had only done 2D math.
Much like autism, every time one of these articles comes up, half the population of HackerNews says they have it.
Where do we get this idea that there's a "normal", and everything outside of that requires some special diagnosis?
I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition. At least I couldn't imagine doing any job I ever head without the ability to manipulate visual information in my head.
I have aphantasia, and I don't feel handicapped at all. The only thing where I really notice differences is when trying to describe people. Since I can't visualize them in my head, I can only describe "known facts", like "they have brown hair". I would make a lousy crime witness...
This was my biggest puzzle as a child: how do all those people in crime shows describe suspects? And was it just made up?
The other ones for me:
- "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..."
- counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.
I still counted them, it just didn’t make sense. It was more a spreadsheet - spreadsheep? - than visualizing real sheep.
And it didn’t help me fall asleep at all.
I had to laugh so much because of spreadsheep. Thank you.
When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame. It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.
Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.
I thought it was all metaphorical or for dramatic effect.
If I think of basically anything technical I get an image in my head. Any algorithm I write first exists in my head as a visualization of what I want to do. If I can't visualize what is going on I can't understand it and am in a state of confusion.
I might not have complete aphantasia, when trying to imagine an apple I struggle to imagine it beyond a circular form with a rod pertruding from an indent at the top. No color, no texture. As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
But I don't feel like I am impacted in imagining simple algorithms. I also construct them of very simple forms and rearrange them in my mind. I also feel like it is a lot easier for me to imagine things „automatically“ due to it being memories or being a byproduct of thinking about something. But my mind struggles constructing these images at will.
Also taking a pen and drawing these things up can replace some of the missing imaginary power :)
> As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
This matches my experience - I think of it a bit like a really slow CRT, the phosphorescence fading before the image can be composed.
It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
Interesting. My wife swears she has no visual mind, but she has remarkable spatial awareness when it comes to “this object will fit in that space, and must go through this sequence of manoeuvres to reach it” - she’d have Dirk Gently’s sofa up the stairs in a whistle.
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
That's interesting! It's very similar with my partner
Yep, that’s how it works for me too. Maps of all kinds are really easy, following someone saying „and on the red wall left“ is impossible.
>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
You can have a conceptual model of how things relate in space. Something like a class diagram or a DB schema. It doesn't need to be visual.
This seems totally contradictory to me.
There is a lot of evidence that aphants score higher on spatial reasoning tests than those with vivid visual recall and are over represented in fields like math and science.
These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.
Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.
How so? A DB schema is not visual: it's something that lives inside a DBMS. Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.
>A DB schema is not visual
How is it not visual?
>Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.
Boxes with arrows are clearly visual. The text, at least, for me just is a representation of those arrows and boxes.
> How is it not visual?
Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.
> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.
You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?
The boxes and arrows image representation of a schema is not the schema itself. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
> How is it not visual?
(not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen before"). I don't see how any of these wouldn't still be considered visual mental imagery and I'm starting to think that the people saying there's a semantics issue here might have a point.
When I 'visualize' it's not an image at all. It's the concept of what the image would be showing, which the above posters have called a graph or schematic. But that's an analogy, and not to be taken too literally. I don't visualize a schematic. I instead feel the connections and relationships between concepts. It's entirely non-visual.
I see, it sounded like you were saying you were visualizing a schema[1] (not schematic) of a house but thought it didn't qualify as visualization for some reason.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
1. https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/miikkulainen.visua...
2. https://www.pastery.net/vvapdr/
I think this is where I go by default, and I've described it before as a low-resolution wireframe. Only the particular part I'm paying attention to is there but I know what's around it and can shift focus as needed.
Almost like rendering a 3D image, but stopping early. I can also go full color with effort but it's generally unnecessary.
this!
I think it’s also the reason why I was good at maths, very used to conceptualize stuff
This is spatial reasoning, no visualization required. I have always had exceptional spatial reasoning, and while I can visualize it quite well, it is entirely unnecessary for function. My brain contains a detailed model of the topology of space that is quite separate from what the space actually looks like and can reason about it intuitively without visualizing it. This makes things like navigation easy even in places I have never seen before and therefore can’t visualize — I don’t need to know where I am to not be lost.
I just „visualize“ a map or blueprint, not as an image, but as concept. Think of it as an image of text and lines.
You're still describing it as an image. I think it would be more accurate to say that you feel the connections between the represented concepts as might be illustrated on a blueprint. But it's a non-visual experience.
Hey, it's me! Except I'm a guy.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker.
When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
Wait, do people see images of a clock in their mind? Like you, I know spatially where the hands should point so I assume this is what “seeing” is. Do people see a clock… like a legit visual when they close their eyes?
Yep, and I can even make the clock tick
Apparently, yes.
Asked to think of the Mona Lisa, there's just... nothing?
There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that.
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
Both my wife and one of my co-workers experience hi-res images superimposed over their actual vision when prompted (and occasionally involuntarily). This opposite end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia[0]. There are accounts in this thread of people having trouble reading books because they're too caught up in the visuals the story creates in their head (something that same co-worker has also mentioned happening).
I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
Indeed, I just wrote a sibling comment before I saw yours about the same phenomenon, hyperphantasia. I don't think that the parent is right that it's just "memories and concepts," it actually is vivid imagery for most people who don't have aphantasia. It does seem like the parent has some sort of aphantasia, just not as severe as seeing nothing, it seems to be more of a spectrum rather than a binary.
> I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts.
Some people do, hyperphantasia. I can do this, perfectly visualize the details of the Mona Lisa and examine it from any angle in my mind's eye. If I am in a semi-lucid state while nearing sleep, I can do it even more intensely, as the other day I was visualizing waves bouncing around in a maze and I could see every single bounce.
However, you're right that most people cannot do it so vividly, but it is not the case to say that it's simply memories and concepts, it actually is images and video inside their heads.
How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details?
Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
> How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details?
Can you describe the difference to me based on your experience? I don't quite understand what it would be, because in my mind's eye, I can literally see the entirety of the Mona Lisa. It does not feel like a "feeling," like happiness or angriness, those are what I'd classify as feelings.
> Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
I don't draw so it would be limited by my drawing ability, but I can reproduce it pretty well if I tried hard enough, as I can visualize it completely in my mind.
It's probably impossible to tell the difference (which would explain the lack of understanding of opposing groups in this thread), unless one tests their ability to actually see the details instead of merely believing that one sees the details.
If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
Note that I'm not interested in memory aspects here. If one can't differentiate minute details, yet still see them highly realistically, then what exactly is it one sees? Probably not the same as the real thing or a photographic image.
A follow-up question would be whether the envisioned details are stable enough to draw or reason from, or whether the image keeps changing in one's head. In the latter case, the process of phantasising may be more akin to what diffusion models do.
> If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
I see what you mean, yes, it's not eidetic or photographic memory when I see it in my mind, I can't see all the small details like that, but I can see it as if I took a picture, not an extremely high resolution one that shows every brush stroke, but more akin to something like this photo's level of detail (I can visualize the people in the crowd as well) [0]. I might even say that I cannot see the details because I actually have no knowledge of them (exactly how many folds or creases there are), than being unable to visualize them entirely. For example, I can see the Mona Lisa with 4, 5, 6, folds in her sleeves, all different images in my mind. Some people however can see every crease exactly as it is but that's much rarer, it's photographic memory, and it's not really what I'd call a normal person's (without aphantasia) experience. It is likely even trainable with more exposure to the actual underlying artifact such as observing the painting in-depth and remembering via visual snapshots what it looks like.
There are others with aphantasia, perhaps milder forms of it, who cannot "see" the Mona Lisa as a photograph, they just see a blur or something more akin to curves and lines that they must focus on, sometimes without color. These people would have less stable images in my mind, but generally my images are pretty stable. I'm curious to hear about what you can see in your mind's eye. Based on what you were saying, it seems to me like you're more on the belief or feeling side, or is it that you can completely see an image in your mind that's stable?
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/05/02/arts/02reyburn3/m...
> How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details?
Is there a meaningful distinction?
Most certainly. In the first case one can actually use data to base decisions on. In the latter, one is merely hallucinating something which has less information value.
In both cases you're "merely" experiencing the feeling of seeing those details. That's what it means to remember something with a brain.
Allow me to try again: in the first case you actually see the details in your mind, and you can reason with them, by separating out single details, focus on them, and reproduce them in a meaningful way. This would allow an artist to form a highly detailed image in their head, and then reproduce it on paper. I think this is very rare, if possible at all. (Of course this is possible with simple imagery, but we are discussing photorealistic copies of the Mona Lisa here.)
In the latter case, one assumes to see details, but in fact one does not, and one cannot focus on details, nor reason with them.
I'm painting a black-and-white distinction here, but I suppose that in reality it is even more complex.
Does this make sense, or do you still insist that there is no meaningful difference between these two interpretations? In that case, could you point out where you think my reasoning goes wrong?
All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise. The brain is never a lossless memory replay device, even if it feels like it to some people.
But my original point was more that the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise. There isn’t a homunculus in your head with a little film projector.
> All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise.
I tend to agree, but I suppose that the level of lossiness varies from person to person, and depends on training and concentration.
> the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise
Interesting! Would you say that the same mechanism applies to the feeling of hearing or tasting things? Or are those fundamentally different from visual experiences?
And what about observing the real world, is that the same experience as replaying something in one's head, but using a different input source?
Nope I didn’t realize she was facing a particular direction. I’d consider that a lack of knowledge. But if I did again it would just be words.
I don’t believe that people have a high res magical image. I believe there’s something that feels like visual stimulation which is used as a reference for information. I don’t have anything that seems remotely visual.
Forget the Mona Lisa, maybe you've never seen it even in a book. Do you know what the shape of your country (like from a map) looks like? Of course you do, and it's not because you went around and did your own border survey, it's because you've seen the shape on maps thousands of times, and you can picture it in your head.
Not everyone can.
I've seen the Mono Lisa in Paris, twice. And no I have absolutely no idea which way she faces as I never bothered to commit that factual bit of knowledge to memory.
It's definitely real - I just need to draw/map out things on tos like drawio all the time when things get too complex to hold in my head as just memorised words and relationships
On the other hand I have a hard time believing people actually fully see visual information in their head.
It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying.
No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head.
The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely.
(I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
My "screen" isn't anywhere in space. It's in my internal world. If I want to see only it, I take a step out of reality, into my head, and there it is. Doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or closed, there's just another reality I can enter.
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
Sounds like you actually have the opposite, hyperphantasia, perhaps even of an extreme kind. I also lucid dream, very vividly, but I cannot superimpose things from my mind onto my visual plane, it is more like the above parent for me, it's in a separate area from the visual plane altogether, and I suspect that's most people except for those with hyperphantasia.
Yes, from what I've heard from other people, I have pretty extreme hyperphantasia.
The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
That's interesting, how detailed are your models you pull out to observe? Are the models static? It's like you have your very own mind-linked AR setup.
They're as detailed as my attention to them. If my eyes stay open, I can add details to the model. It's not like taking a photograph I can look at later, so for example, if there were a playing card on a desk, and all I had consciously noticed was that it was a playing card, not that it was the queen of hearts, I wouldn't be able to close my eyes and then determine what the card was from the model.
But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back.
I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!
That makes sense, for me I can do everything you talked about, including having them as detailed as my attention to them and doing spacial manipulations, but I simply cannot bring them into the real world so to speak, to superimpose them on my vision. They still exist only in my mind's eye, the plane behind and above my visual plane, as the commenter said above.
Yeah, I don't have a division between the planes unless I choose to. I can separate them, but it's just as easy to keep them together. I think of them as the "inside" and "outside" planes, the only major distinction between them being that other people can only see things in the outside plane. They're not separated in position unless I want them to be.
For what it's worth, I can also hear them. I carry on conversations with people who aren't physically in the room all the time. For example. (My doc assures me that this is fine as long as I know they're not in the room and I don't trust what they say without verifying!) It's extremely useful for bouncing ideas around, even if it's really only an elaborate way of thinking about something by myself in several ways. I find it intuitively easier to discuss something with another person than just to sit and think about it.
I will say it's not much of a tactile sense, though. I can use my hands to manipulate things if I want, but I don't feel them nearly as clearly as I can see and hear them. I guess I also just don't do this as often, because how something physically feels isn't usually terribly important to me. Same reason I look at and listen to a lot more things for information in the outside plane than I touch.
I draw pictures. Had some difficulty dreaming up a part to create in engineering school but 3D cad programs made my own shortcomings irrelevant.
We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice.
I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is.
The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people.
I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
I can confirm that this is real. It also isn’t much of a problem job-wise. I can’t do creative work like drawing a picture, but I can (and do) think up algorithms and write code. I would describe it as: I can’t do creative visual work, everything else is fine.
Imagine thinking in concepts instead of images. I can't visualize a hammer or a face, but I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.
>I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.
So you can visualize a graph, as if it were drawn out on a sheet of paper?
I can't visualize anything. If I close my eyes, I just see some vague light coming through my eyelids. I can "imagine" for a lack of a better word, the graph and all the nodes and edges "existing", and can reason about its properties based on that.
Would you describe this as similar to proprioception? Like one knows the position of his own limbs without looking or visualizing.
I find it easier to believe that this is a failure of communication.
Believe whatever you want, but visualization ability is like every other aspect of human experience: it exists on a spectrum
I can only visualize involuntarily as I'm drifting off to sleep, so I know what it is and what it's like. But I can't consciously do it, never have been able to, even with decades of deliberate practice.
I feel like I have two visual fields. One that feels like it is through my eyes and of the outside world, and then another that has images or ideas that I can conjure up (almost like eigenfaces or other low resolution concepts). The second visual field isn't within the first, but feels like it is also roughly centered where my brain is.
Yes, same! Sometimes it almost feels like HDMI1 and HDMI2 or something, and I switch between the two during dreaming and sort of superimpose them somehow when picturing something
A really interesting question here, to me, is if aphantasia is more common now than it was before. There's a whole collection of non-"neurotypical" conditions that seem more common now (though its always possible they are just diagnosed more and more likely to be expressed in lifestyles that require more complex thought). It also seems likely that our focus on literal "visualization" (picturing a picture) is amplified by the media that surrounds us - thousands of high fidelity photos of the world. Perhaps previous generations simply had less cause to try to visualize things in a "photo-realistic" way?
Can people with Aphantasia still have visual dreams -- where imagery is more real and vivid and more involuntary than willed .... than what they can 'see' when awake and conscious and are trying to muster up an image on purpose with closed eyes ?
I tried visualizing some images now -- and it seems harder than I expected, seems harder with eyes closed (makes eveyrthing feel too dark and low contrast). But I think my dreams are more vivid than that.
Also I relized that when actively trying to imagine things, the "resolution" or sharpness/focus of the mental picture is very narrow -- I can only imagine the "details" of texture/surface of things when focussing attention on a very small and narrow field of "vision".
I don’t dream.
When I was a child I remember dreams occurred but they did not contain any vivid representations of anything. Just abstract images. Nothing you could classify as vivid, let alone a representation of reality in any sense.
The whole concept that you can actually “see” something that is not real and happening in the moment is non sensical to me.
Vivid dreams are just mysterious to me as the minds eye.
Yes, I have aphantasia and also have visual dreams.
I always figured daydreaming was just a metaphor, and had no idea most people could use visual faculties outside of an actual dream state!
Agreed. I'm exactly the same. I also thought daydreaming was a metaphor.
Until we can probe into people's minds (some advanced MRI or something in the future) and display them on a computer screen, there's no way to call bullshit on people who claim they can "see" the apple, you only have your subjective experience for that.
And I don't believe for a second they "see" in the real sense, again, because I don't see anything. Only time I really see is in my dreams. So rather, ask people "do you see the apple just like you see it in your dreams?" I bet they don't.
Or funk knows, again I repeat, I only have my sensory experience to relate to and there's no visual element in it when I close my eyes.
There are some studies which do show differences in neural activation across people who describe subjective differences in visualization.
2023: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544909v4 2021: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/ 2017: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521...
I used to do tech support before remote desktop became easy. When talking people though screens I had to do a lot of visualization of what I thought they were seeing so I could explain what to do next. Was it like a dream? Sometimes pretty close but just a computer screen.
You clearly have aphantasia.
> do you see the apple just like you see it in your dreams?
Yes, pretty much.
Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas. But I have no problems drawing an imaginary bike.
https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...
> Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
Yes. For most people it's more like a "schema" or a lossy compression. It can be placed in space, left or right or above or below other image-fragments, there can be colouring, shading, motion, sound. But it's not a faithful bike-image, although it's hard to notice that unless you try to draw it.
There are also other reasons why mental visualization doesn't necessarily mean one can draw it faithfully. For me, mental imagery has a kind of unstable three-dimensional quality, where I see the image from multiple overlapping, shifting perspectives, kinda like a Cubist painting. Different parts of the image have more or less detail over time; I can't hold fine detail about the whole thing simultaneously. If I wanted to draw it, I'd have to pin it to one perspective for long enough, and I can't make my mind do that.
This shouldn't be so surprising -- perspective and realistic representational art took a long time to develop in human history. It's a skill that has to be learned, and I haven't learned it.
Some people really can imagine a photorealistic picture of the bike though. They're usually either savants or trained artists.
Thanks. I guess I was confused about the difference between remembering something vs seeing it in your mind.
Well I can say what happens with me, although as should be clear from this whole thread, other's experiences might be very different!
Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like.
The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'. So i can understand how - some people - can 'see' what they think a bike looks like but then draw a mechanical mess.
Of course there are people with perfect recall, and others who design bikes for a living and so on. I'm really just describing how it could happen for some group of people.
That makes sense. So perhaps you could simplistically think of it like this then: the brain remembers things somehow, and when recalling, it runs that internal representation of that memory through some kind of a machinery that visually presents it to you? Only in some people that machinery actually doesn't produce visuals, but something else? (And I would seem to be one of those people).
"Drawing from imagination" should not be taken literally. It's a blueprint, a thumbnail. By the time you're done, what you have on paper is significantly different, if not totally different from what you were imagining.
It's so wild to me that people can't see pictures or hear music in their mind. I've always assumed everyone could do it but it just goes to show how little we know about the human brain.
I was reading the other day on HN that some people don't have an internal monologue and think very differently than I do (like thoughts just "appear" somehow?)
Now I'm wondering if there are any mind capabilities people possess that I don't? Humans are truly fascinating.
The biggest problem with these questions is that they in my opinion don’t actually measure anything.
“Imagine a ball falling of the table.”
Asking questions of what was under the table or the color of the ball is useless (imo). Let me explain: Recall a dream of yours. What is out there in the dream world? Can you tell me what the retail tax is in that dream world? What house number the door of your dream world neighbor has? No? For me the answer is no. Because I only create answers to these questions if they are relevant to the dream or asked.
I forgot the study, but it claimed that people often retrospectively imagine detail based on the question asked. (Citation needed)
I like to believe that dreams and imagination share aspects. And one aspect I see in both of them is that, similarly to video games, any detail is kept to the necessary minimum.
It doesn’t matter what is under the table, it is about a ball falling off the table. Its color doesn’t matter, the color has no effect on the story.
If you retrospectively ask me those questions, you’re just testing if I’m going to make one up in the spot, make one up on the spot and tell myself I didn’t or not make one up on the spot.
I think of my imagination as an abstract realm I can control, that is limited by my ability to comprehend. It’s less vivid than a dream, but a dream gives me no control. Anything I imagine is a feeling, there is no incoming physical aspect.
And the reason why it’s so hard to measure or quantify is because it is best described as a feeling.
My daughter has aphantasia. I can't imagine what it must be like for her - my visual imagination is ridiculously rich.
I can traumatize myself with what I can see in my mind's eye it's so strong, but for her, she has absolutely no ability to visualize whatsoever.
One of the times aphantasia has been brought up here somebody posted a guide to training your brain to see more vivid imagery from someone who alleges they started out aphantasic and trained themselves to not be.
Does anybody have the link, I've been searching for it for like a year since I forgot to backup my bookmarks before a resinstall.
I don't have a specific link, but the general method is called "image streaming". It's pretty googleable so you should be able to find something similar at least.
Thanks! That gives me a lead to follow.
Like the blind who can avoid bumping into things perhaps https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/out-of-mind-out-o...
While laying in bed with fever I realised it's much more easier to imagine moving things than static ones. Imagine red apple? To hell that, my apple gonna spin and rotate, and be chopped by sawblade flying by, while slowly oxidizing cut parts
I realized that the ability to visualize is probably on a spectrum many years ago while discussing science fiction fantasy books with others. And I am probably someone whose ability to visualize is a lot worse than others.
I wonder if this could be induced in people who suffer from hallucinations to reduce or eliminate their symptoms? Maybe their system is rigged into overdrive the other way. It says on wikipedia that there are 'cases reported of acquired aphantasia'.
I don’t think hallucinations and having a “minds eye” are the same thing. A minds eye is different in the sense that it’s entirely separate from the “visual feed” you get from your eyes, they’re not combined so you can’t really mistake them as a hallucination; hallucinations trick you into seeing things that are not really there such as when people with schizophrenia can see people who are not actually with them — I remember seeing this guy on Instagram with a proper schizophrenia diagnosis that showcased this very phenomenon in action and the way he dealt with it is by using his phones camera to check whether the person they are perceiving is real or not. You never have to do that if you have hyperphantasia (the opposite of aphantasia) because it’s very easy to tell whats real and what’s not, and more importantly, it takes mental effort to create and maintain these imaginations in your mind and you can have total control over them.
I found a reddit post about it and I think you may be correct, though it seems like their hallucinations aren't 'full fledged' (they report seeing shadows, not people or what have you): https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/baf5fv/can_peop...
I also found this study asking a similar question about many different types of mental illnesses, though some of it is about making people that have aphantasia better able to visualize to treat things like PTSD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9614338/
I think adults with hyperphantasia can easily tell what's real and what's not, but I had a lot of trouble with it as a child. My parents were afraid I was hallucinating, so took me to see a child psychologist, but it turned out I was just pulling things from my extremely acute mind's eye into reality while awake like many people do while dreaming, and I hadn't figured out that didn't make them "real" in a way other people could see like it did in my dreams.
(I shudder to think how differently things could have gone if I had been misdiagnosed with a severe mental illness when all I actually have is an unusually powerful imaginative ability.)
is there a version of not being able to visualize faces of people you know? asking for a friend.
from all i read about things like this, the more it become apparent that we all experience things in a unique way.
Sure. At least, I've never been able to do this.
That doesn't mean I can't recognise people when I see them, though that can sometimes be a struggle. It's just that I can't (or don't) "picture" them later.
I've never considered it a problem. For a start, because I've no clear idea of what I look like, either, I've never had to worry much about that. Slightly more strangely, and it took me a long while to realise this, I've never taken or collected family photographs; I've managed to remember who my relatives are perfectly well without having to get them to pose, yet it's my relatives who think that's odd.
If there is a downside, it's that I'd make a terrible witness. But I have a feeling that most witnesses are fairly terrible, it's just that most of them don't know it. As you said, we all experience things in unique ways, and that's only a problem if we forget it.
Which is largely why I don't care for "aphantasia" as a label. It's like having a word for people who don't dream in music or visualise mathematical functions; it'd include so many, that it'd serve no purpose.
Perhaps you are looking for prosopagnosia or "face blindness"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
How do people with aphantasia draw/paint/design? I always thought you had to kind of visualize those artistic things in your mind before manifesting them on paper/screen?
For myself, drawing never required having it visualized in my mind. I knew what I wanted to draw and could put it on paper. However not without difficulty. Using a model, or image to reference certainly helped.
As a simple example. Do you picture the letters you are going to write before writing a note? I don't know the mechanic, but I can write notes without effort. In the same vein, simple objects like geometric shapes are very easy for me to draw, no visualization needed. I suspect it's the same for most.
However, I did give up on drawing because I recognized I couldn't visualize a scene and place it on paper easily. It felt like I was drawing with poor planning which resulted in lots of mistakes, corrections and ultimately frustration.
However, I'm not sure if I qualify as someone with true aphantasia or not. I can visualize things, but I can't hold them in my mind. I see it briefly, like a flash, but can't hold onto it. I've tried to practice holding an image in my mind without success.
I am curious: do people with aphantasia dream?
For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.
You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.
My mind's eye doesn't care whether my eyes are open or closed. I can copy things back and forth between "reality" and "internal reality" quite seamlessly, so I can either keep my eyes open and bring things from my mind out into reality, or I can close my eyes and bring things from reality into internal reality. I don't strictly speaking have to close my eyes for the second one, but for example if I need to picture the room I'm in from another angle, but it's an inappropriate time to move from my seat, I can just copy the whole room into my mind, either close my eyes or unfocus and ignore my eyesight for awhile, and move things around inside my head. If there's a lot going in in the room, it's sometimes easier if I actually close them so I can spin the room around to the perspective I need.
Yeah also same. But I'm trying to clarify for a lot of people who think they don't visualize because the bar is set where they think that they have to close their eyes in order to visualize things.
I think that sounds normal. The mind's eye is more like evoking the sense of seeing something without actually seeing it.
This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.
I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.
I have aphantasia. I don't see / imagine imagery either awake or asleep. So I don't know that my dreaming experience is particularly different from my waking experience in this way.
I am curious how is solving geometry problems for you, can you imagine slicing some geometric body with a plane and what it results? or given some geometric figure and an instruction to build some lines can you see the result without drawing it on paper ?
Fro me it feels that imagining things uses completely different brain part, because for me it does not feel or look like stuff in my dreams or what eyes can see, imagining things feel different,the scenes feel to me unclear, disappear fast , I do not have the ability to lock the image or rewind like in a video. Remembering a recent scene has a lot more details and colors then some old memory.
For geometry stuff is the same, I can't say I see it but somehow I have an animation my head on how I can transform the geometric stuff, but it is not vivid and it is not like a clear video, feels like is a different part of the brain that does this not the optic part.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
> It’s more like reading a book.
This analogy may be less communicative than you think, as for me, reading a book is like watching a movie - I don’t see the words on the page, I see what’s happening in the book.
When I was a kid, I was asked “how do you read so fast?” often and I would always proudly report than I can scan paragraphs and filter out the useless ones without reading them.
For example, I was reading some Pratchett and noticed that I had no idea how the protagonist ended up on a cliff (?). And then realized that I had automatically skipped the paragraph that talked about the cliff ascent, because it was “just a scenery description” and therefore useless.
I also remember having a long argument with my ex-girlfriend about the style of journalism where articles start like “I entered a small, dimly-lit room and Mr Brown, age 53, stood up from his massive oak desk and [blah blah blah]”. Like, this is all just fluff, I want to know what Mr Brown says and thinks and that’s all. I didn’t realize people might actually imagine the scene and enjoy it.
Going back to books — I think I care about how the book sounds more than I care about the plot or the vibe. I loved Lolita solely because the narrator was constantly playing with words, for example.
Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
I don't read very often because it's just words and therefore not very interesting unless it illicits emotion and / or for learning.
I just checked... yes, I dream with imagery.
But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.
But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.
And my audio/music recall is excellent.
I have a very limited visual imagination. I don't know if I would describe it as complete aphantasia, but I think it's close. Dreams are the only time I can see pictures in my mind.
Yes, from what I've heard other people with aphantasia often dream normally. I certainly do vividly, while struggling a lot to visualize even simple things in my minds eye.
Many vivid dreams a night, almost like the mind is over compensating, quite exhausting at times.
I think they do dream. But their dreams are quite different from those who can visualize normally
Mu girlfriend does, vividly
Just another data point, but yes. I can dream quite vividly, exactly the way people describe visualizing things day to day.
How do you know if you have it?
Quick test: Try to imagine the following and then answer the questions beneath.
Imagine a table with a ball on it. A person is approaching the table, pushes the ball gently, and the balls starts to roll.
Questions:
(1) What color has the ball?
(2) Is the person male or female?
(3) What material is the table made of?
(4) When you answered questions (1)-(3), did you know the answer beforehand, or did you think about when you were reading the questions?
Depending on your answer to question (4) you can assume if you have it or not.
I don't think this is a very reliable test, and it even verges on misleading, as there is a degree of complexity that may lead people who do not have aphantasia to believe that they do have the condition. I think this line of thinking with your "test" has been what has led some people in the comments to say that they believe that the condition may just be a result of miscommunication on what mental visualization entails, since they believe that those who claim to have aphantasia believe that they have the condition due to not meeting a threshold of visualization.
However, it appears that for people who actually have the condition, visualization never gets to any specificity. One could be unable to answer a single one of the questions on your test, yet that does not necessarily mean they have aphantasia, as aphantasia is not the lack of detail in visualization, but the lack of any visualization at all. Some people who have aphantasia have attested in these comments that they cannot picture anything in their minds at all. Many of them attest that they don't even visualize when dreaming.
I like this test because it’s not your answer, it’s your reaction to the question that matters. If you read this and think “uhh is that a trick question?” then you probably have aphantasia.
My initial reaction to reading this the first time was to go reread the story more closely to find the answer. But the answer isn’t in the story. For many people the answer is just a truth that exists when they hear the story and are asked the question. If it’s not you likely have aphantasia.
Maybe you are just very lazy at filling in the details of the scenery? A questionnaire based approach doesn't sound very objective to me. A condition with the only "realiable" diagnostic being the VVIQ test, is not a condition at all.
I've found this to be the most reliable test.
Erm... here's a simpler test:
(1) picture a circle
(2) do you see a circle?
(3) do you still see a circle?
Even replace "circle" with "straight line." I think tests like above (balls, people, details) miss the point that in actual aphantasia you literally visualize nothing
I think this hits closer to the mark. For any given description, if a person is able to visualize anything at all, then they don't have the condition. If they do have the condition, then they apparently can't visualize anything.
If you close your eyes and only see the dim light coming through your eyelids, that’s it. If you can visualize anything, then no.
Close your eyes. Do you see anything?
I emailed Adam Zeman (the neurologist who coined the term being discussed here) a while back seeking clarification about exactly what the experience of visualizing something should be like -- pasting the thread below.
His replies were short, but he managed to pack into them not only a comprehensible answer to my question, but also hinted at something I really hadn't expected in his two-word final reply: "Pseudo- mostly..."
To clarify, a pseudohallucination is a "hallucination" that you know isn't real. A hallucination, strictly speaking, is imaginary sensory input that you don't realize is imaginary. So, his reply seems to suggest that he's encountered people whose hyperphantasic pseudohallucinations (being able to overlay vivid visualizations onto the field of stuff they're actually seeing with their actual eyes) sometimes cross the line into bona fide hallucinations; i.e., they lose track, even if only temporarily, of what's real and what's imagined. Which is just endlessly fascinating.
Readers/commenters on this topic may find it interesting -- sorry, most of it is me going on about what my visualization is like, but I guess it forms the necessary backdrop for some of his answer to be useful anyway.
This topic, or the comments diverging from it, also seems to overlap with the topic of "unsymbolized thinking"; I've dumped some more stuff of possible interest on that: https://www.pastery.net/vvapdr/ with a bit of context in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40774163
======== Me: ========
Hi,
I'm looking for some clarification on the exact nature of visualization as I'm not sure what it's meant to be like.
The Wikipedia article on aphantasia mentions activation of the visual cortex. So am I supposed to be generating an actual visual input that I feel like I can see with my eyes?
When I visualize something, it's not really there on that literal visual level. I physically see the inside of my eyelids and the visualized image is not projected such that I feel like my eyes are actually seeing it. Instead it's somewhere else; sometimes it feels as if it's somewhere behind my eyes. Nonetheless, the image can be vivid in its own way, precise and consistent. I can rotate and manipulate it. I can move a light source around the object and "see" the shadow change, or place my point of quasi-view within a scene. This comes along with mental impressions of other sensory inputs that, similarly, are "vivid" but clearly not actually being sensed from the outside world.
Is this what it's supposed to be? What point on the scale would reflect this in the visualization quiz?
Thanks
======== Adam: ========
…it sounds to me as if you are in the 3-4/5 territory…seeing imagery as if you were ‘really’ seeing is the exception, but for most of us visual imagery has a visual ‘feel’, which sounds to be the case for you…
======== Me: ========
Thanks for the reply. To clarify, the "really seeing" exception is akin to a visual hallucination, or rather pseudohallucination?
======== Adam: ========
Pseudo- mostly…
Does anyone else think this is complete bullshit?
I, a random HN user, can personally attest to having never pictured anything and being a 5 in the sense of this image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Aphantas...
And apparently they can prove differences with MRIs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
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