This has been nagging me for weeks since I 'discovered' that almost everyone around me can visualize things in their mind. Frankly, it helps explain a lot about my life. The inability to picture the face of friends, family, places I've visited, all contribute to a sense of isolation and distance that I feel daily. My strong preference for non-fiction, too, is likely an artifact of reading fiction word by word but 'seeing' nothing interesting. My failed attempts at all sort sorts of meditation and mindfulness exercises are also now suspect. The anecdotes about being unable to understand the concept of 'counting sheep' also resonate strongly with me. That face-blindness is also commonly co-morbid also helps me understand that aspect of myself better.
All in all, while I don't feel 'robbed' of this ability to visualize things, it does seem to lob off a chunk of things which are particularly joyful to the human experience. I can't really visualize a future life for myself, let alone my current life. To discover all of this after decades of being alive is quite mind-blowing, and I'm glad it's getting the wave of media attention that it is now (or else I would not have known).
But then, perhaps, in this case, ignorance would be a bit more blissful.
I've got aphantasia too. When I first heard about it about a year ago I was surprised to learn that others can actually see things in their mind's eye. Had to confirm with friends and family, with questions like 'so you can actually see a ball if you think about it?'. Their answers blew me away.
So far I've boiled the side effects down to:
1. A complete and utter lack of direction. I literally get lost in suburbs surrounding my home (i'll very often take an extremely sub optimal route home from a store that is just 10 minutes from my home - a bit embarrassing tbh, gives my wife a laugh though). These are streets I've travelled for over 30 years. Apparently quite common with aphantasia.
2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Regarding no.2, photos are super important. There was a period of 10 years or so where I didn't take many photos, and that period feels like a black hole.
I'm not sure I connect either of those side effects. I discovered I have aphantasia a couple of years ago from a chance encounter with a previous news discussion of it.
My sense of direction is fine to good, and as far as I can establish, it's common to visualise "metaphorically". So I'd visualise a route or 3d model as another might visualise honesty - I know what it is, I can precisely express it, but I can't picture it in technicolour. It seems to work well enough that hobbies over the years have included model engineering - including design, fell walking and geocaching. I never needed a 3d model to "see" a plan, even while drawing it, even though I cannot "see" it. Saying "I just know" seems completely inadequate, but that feels like how it works. I can pick up on potential problems where a) might interfere with b). Language gets difficult for this!
I can juggle a model but again metaphorically. I can do it quite easily and it never occurred to me in 50 years that images were an optional component for others. :)
The only other I've encountered with a similar lack of images among my friends reports just the same ability to do direction, map reading and spatial interrelation just fine, without seeing it. Just knowing seems to be enough to do the rest.
Rumination and regret is perfectly possible too - the feelings, the consequences is plenty enough to get that going. The pictures are better on radio also applies - not a literal picture but the feelings and the metaphorical. :)
Have you ever noticed a similar effect with sounds? Or does it feel like a purely visual/spatial thing?
For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it. Is that just as weird for you as being able to see a ball?
> For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head
sigh you've got to be kidding me. You can actually replay a sound in your head??
well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(
I've also never been able to sing along with songs. It always blows me away when my wife can just start singing along with a song she's heard a few times.
Some people are able to do a lot more than that, once I was sitting on a plane next to a guy who turned out to be an orchestra conductor - he was silently reading an orchestra score like a book. I mean that was a dense score, some modern symphony for dozens of instruments, and the way he described it to me was he simply hears it in his mind just like if he listened to an orchestra recording. Most incredibly, he said he has never heard this particular music performed before!
I think these skills are to some degree learnable.
That orchestra conductor probably spent a large part of their life studying music. Part of learning music is ear training: the ability to name/write chords by hearing them, and conversely to "hear" them in one's imagination given the name (or from written music). No different than the way many people "hear" words in their head when reading.
It's not that hard at all. After some years studying music as a kid I can read piano sheets. He with 10+ years of experience can definitely cope with much more complex ones.
Ha, don't feel bad. That skill is important for maybe less than a thousand people in the whole world to have. And it can be done with computer programs anyway.
Yes, I think that is common to be able to replay music you've heard in your head. I feel confident this is another thing that is a spectrum, not binary. So some people just need to hear something once and have it perfectly, others need to hear it a lot and still don't remember it well.
My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.
I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know.
> My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.
Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.
Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button. :)
It's super interesting how memory works. Like, I can remember the content of songs because they have rhyme and rhythm and pleasantness, but I can't remember anything else word-for-word. I'm the king of paraphrasing jokes and quotes, because I can never remember how they originally went.
edit to add: I'm just kidding about the brain damage thing, but seriously, I very much don't like the idea of presenting this as "aphantasia" as though it is a lack of something. I think it's (probably) just a different system that's optimized for different kinds of behaviors.
I do also suspect that the mental visualization could be learned. I feel like when I played Legos as a kid I was incidentally practicing my visualization, perhaps the only reason I'm good at it now is an aggregate of those kind of coincidences.
In my case, songs or melodies are nearly always playing. If I'm awake, chances are that something is on in my mind's radio. Conversation and writing seem to be the only activities that consistently quiet the music, though there are other times during the day when it's less noticeable.
This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.
I’m much the same. I think that’s part of the reason I’m quite a good musician and can play by ear really well. I can visualise auditory/musical things far more vividly than I can images, and correspondingly I find visual art quite difficult. I can still imagine images to a reasonable extent but I suspect that people who can draw and paint well probably can do it more to the extent I can hear music!
Interesting. I wonder if the musical practice led to the mental music. I am also a musician, but I'm not certain whether the mental music began before or after I started playing (I started playing more than ten years ago as a teen).
I have an almost pathological hatred of silence on the outside - because when there is, there's also silence on the inside. Unless I actively think about a tune, or decide to hum or whistle a song, there's no radio. So I'll only hum/whistle or sing a few bars or a chorus and distract to thinking about something else.
So sitting in silence quickly becomes wearing. I have to keep thinking of stuff, and music, to fill it.
Now if I go fell walking or find myself in a forest or on a deserted beach, there's always enough sounds of nature that it doesn't feel silent. Not like a house, class or exam room or office can. It's only that which quickly gets oppressive.
> well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(
I see it more as tradeoffs that make us different. For example you may have noticed that you are better than average at folding paper in your head and other spatial tasks. You have your aphantasia to thank for that.
I can hear/imagine a human voice singing, (similar to the way my internal voice 'talks' when thinking) but i usually can't imagine instruments, because they always end up sounding as if they are performed by a human voice.
Several times i did listen the sound of instruments as if real, but it happened only before falling into sleep, and just thinking about that would wake me up enough to bring the human voice back.
I would separate visual and spatial. They are not the same thing.
Part of the reason why I didn't realise that others are literal about being able to 'see' with their eyes closed is that I can tell you spatial relationships more precisely than most people I know.
I know and can recall where things are in relation to each other with ease.
E.g if you asked me to sketch rooms in my house, I would be able to reproduce it in a huge amount of detail even though I can't 'see' them,by walking through what is where in relation to what and plot it out.
If I draw from memory rather than from sight or imagination, however, - something I learned as a child without connecting the dots - was that I do tend to draw in a much more 'sanitized' style. Clean lines etc. As if I'm drawing a diagram.
Interesting - I think that matches up with my experience. As I said in a response to another comment in this thread, I don’t have anywhere near as strong visual visualisation as I do auditory, but thinking about this third axis I think I do have quite good spatial visualisation. I’ve always been way better at diagramming, planning layout of things (part of my job is designing circuit boards and I used to do web design back in the day), etc. than artistic drawing.
For some reason I can do more artistic drawings if drawing from fantasy (I still don't "see it") or sight than from memory. I think that is largely because when drawing from fantasy I don't need to painstakingly recall the spatial relationships as much, even if there's an extent of recalling an archetype of what I'm drawing...
And the closest I get to auditory recall is internally humming the music - I can recall e.g. operatic arias that I have no hope in hell of reproducing with any accuracy out loud, but I can hum them out internally with a lot greater precision, but I can't hear them in any other voice than my own (and I can sense muscles around my mouth twitching as if I'm vocalizing while doing so)
I have aphantasia too as I said in another comment, but I have an excellent sense of direction. I'm excellent at learning maps in computer games too.
I also wouldn't describe myself as able to let go of things easily. When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
Similar here. I can reconstruct spatial relationships from memory in great detail, to the extent that before I realised people are literal about being able to see things, I considered myself to be a very visual thinker.
E.g an example I often used is that I remember pieces of code by how they look on screen to the extent that the syntax and formatting is something I'm unusually obsessed with because it affects my recall, and that I remember pages from papers I read 25+ years ago by visual appearance and layout.
But I can't see them, even though I can recall them to the point that I know what they would have looked like had I been able to see them.
I believe that I have aphantasia, this is all coming on very quickly right now, but after talking to my wife for about 30 minutes I'm certain of it. She highlighted the fact that I don't have any ability to recall my dreams outside of exceptionally rare instances.
I, too, have a good sense of direction and am often relied upon to be the guide on hikes or backpacking trips in places that we've never been before. I know how to read maps and use a compass and orient myself but that is less visualize than it is analytical, IMO.
But! I also have the black hole effect that the GP described. I have an almost uncanny ability to just get beyond trauma and bad experiences and I'm seeing now that that is probably due to this black hole memory effect. I don't carry memories with me the way that other people do, but I've known that about myself for a while. It's caused some strife in my life, and it continues to do so, but I've taken to keeping a physical journal and making frequent notes about things that happen throughout each day. The act of writing this stuff down seems to force these things into my memory. I learned recently that my father operated similarly in his career, using a single sheet of A12 folded into quarters where he'd divide each quarter into an hour of work, with 8 folds in total representing the average day. When he worked 12/16 hour shifts, he'd add additional folds.
And, so... I guess that in light of this, I've always wondered if I'll have dementia or Alzheimer's late in my life. My paternal great grandmother lived well into her 90s, but my paternal grandmother succumbed to dementia in her mid 80s. My maternal family has some folks in their 90s, as well, and everyone there seems to have their memory in tact. But, my father has had his struggles and I've personally noticed that my mother is starting to struggle with conversational memory recall today.
Everything you've described rings 100% true with me as well (great with directions, can only recall dreaming every few years, no issues moving part traumatic events, etc).
I have not yet tried journalling as a coping mechanism; I may have to give that a go.
> have an excellent sense of direction. I'm excellent at learning maps in computer games.
That's interesting. I wonder how your mind has learned to compensate. Maps are such visual things, you must be tapping into some other brain areas to store/retrieve this information.
> When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
hmm, interesting. Maybe this part of my personality isn't related to the aphantasia.
Basically, aphantasiacs tend to do just as well at spatial reasoning tasks as people with imagery, but tend to be somewhat slower and do not exhibit the gender gap that has been identified in the broader population.
I'm aphantasiac as well, and can identify with some of the experiences you've mentioned in this thread, and not at all with others. My spatial reasoning is great, and I'm a singer who has no problem at all with singing along to songs - if they're sufficiently regularly structured, even singing along with the chorus the second time it happens in a song I've never heard before. However, like you, I cannot replay sounds in my head. Memories are easily put behind me.
We're clearly very early in understanding what impact aphantasia has on people. It's a fascinating topic, and always interesting to teach people about.
A map is just a visual representation of spatial relationships, and often a poor one because it's from a fixed vantage point that is certainly not well suited to visual translation into what you see at a street level.
When I look at a map, I rarely try to remember what it looks like (I couldn't visualise it anyway) - I remember directions and distances relative to other places.
> 2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Are you sure? I am not a psych(atr|olog)ist, but that sounds consistent with some sort of dissociation. People can even be impacted by traumas that they do not remember at all.
I don't think either of those are necessarily aphantasia. I'm an excellent navigator, and in general I know the spatial arrangement of things well. Likewise, though I'm pretty stoic about stuff, I can feel shame or other emotions about past events long past.
I have aphantasia, found out 9 months or so ago, but can meditate fine. The main point is to focus on nothing, the sound of your breath can be used instead of imagining a flame or sphere or whatever. Another technique is to tap everytime a thought comes into your head, and dismiss the thought.
I also voraciously read fiction, so I doubt you not liking it has anything to do with aphantasia, but find overly descriptive portions of text boring and will often skip them.
Also, you can almost certainly learn to visualize with your mind's eye, very few people have actual incurable aphantasia from what I've read. I did some exercises, image streaming, and it was starting to work. After a week or so I started seeing images. I had too much on my plate, so parked it for now.
Aphantasia gives you more control over your mind and makes meditation easier. As a person who does not have aphantasia I can tell you we have very limited control of the pictures that pop up in our heads.
If you told me to not picture a welsh corgi barking at a ball, my mind would instantly picture it. There is no control over this reflex. Literally if you had a mind reading machine and a gun pointed to my head and told me not to picture that corgi or you'd shoot me, it would be mind blowingly hard and near impossible. It's similar to the reflex that allows you to understand language. "Do not understand the words that are coming out of my mouth..." not possible.
Thus in knowing that we have limited control over it you should know that at least for some people the mind wanders... if we don't direct the mechanism to picture a flame or a sphere it will proceed to picture other things, it can't be turned off insomuch as your general ability to understand english can't be turned off. Therefore meditation is easier for you.
Also you can't get songs stuck in your head. Sometimes that part of your brain that builds these virtual scenes just decides to sing that one catchy song all the time.
> My failed attempts at all sort sorts of meditation and mindfulness
There are forms of mindfulness and meditation practice that don't require visualization, and in fact are quite the opposite. A typical exercise is to pay focused attention to a particular body part, sensation, or environmental aspect.
If anything, I can't think of any aspect of mindfulness meditation that requires visualisation. You can do mindfulness meditation with open eyes - one of the popular introductory books (Mindfulness in Plain English) specifically describes mindfulness of breathing on the basis of focusing your vision towards the tip of your nose, and part of the reason is to maintain focus without being distracted by visual input.
Keeping the eyes half-open during meditation is a common way of preventing falling asleep.
I'm utterly unable to visualise for the most part except for one experience that was totally revelatory to me during meditation years ago, which I after learning about aphantasia realises must be what most people experience all the time.. But the inability to get my minds eye to work has never been a hindrance to my meditation as far as I can tell. If anything I do not get distracted by visuals, yet there are more than enough other distractions so I'm mostly happy about that during meditation.
His experiences are very similar to yours. I want ask you about its advantages (if I may): Is it something about Aphantasia (absence of fantasy?) that could help with being better at HCI? Or, any other positives you see come out of it that helps you professionally?
I'm curious why you were trying meditation and mindfulness. I would have theorized that those with the ability to visualize have a greater need to control the incessant waves of distractions running through their minds, where your mind would naturally be clearer. In essence, that this medication doesn't work on you because you are not sick. But since you sought it out, there must be a reason you felt you needed it.
I cannot fathom not being able to picture my loved ones at any time. I know it gives many people the little motivation they need to push through hard times.
Do you happen to use photos and written word more than others to try and make up for it? Is that even a remedy?
Not the GP, but... It used to bother me, many years ago when my wife and I first started dating. As a result, I've always kept a framed photo of us on my desk. At work at first, also in my car, and of course nowadays I have thousands available on my phone. Working from home full-time, I have one of our engagement photos in a frame on my desk. I guess I just never put together before why I was doing that.
Not The grandparent, but I’m also aphantasic. I think the question doesn’t make sense. Why would I seek to remedy the lack of something I never experienced having in the first place?
Aprantly the rest of the world goes around hallucinating 24/7. I find that frightening.
A canvas which doesn’t exist upon which you “paint” imaginary imagery. As someone who has only ever experienced sight when my eyes are open, I don’t know how to relate to that other than hallucination.
It's not like seeing things that aren't there, it's like watching a movie, you know it's not real. It's kinda like two different visual channels, and perhaps hallucinations are what happens when people can no longer distinguish between the two...
You're missing the point. What if I told you I see an imaginary friend with me all day long. Everywhere I go, he is there doing his thing, making snide remarks and commentary that only I hear. I know he is not real, and I never get confused about that, but I see him nonetheless. You'd think that's weird, right?
I have the same opinion of people's purported "mind's eye" and visual imagination. Like, I'm able to recall things that I've seen, but they come back to me as grab-bag of feelings, abstract concepts, and an enumeration of qualities and characteristics. Not a reconstruction of a picture or anything like that, or a movie playing in my mind's eye or whatever.
This has never really been a handicap for me, except in art class which I was never any good at (Art teacher: "Just focus your mind on your subject while looking at the canvas, then just paint what you see. It's easy!" Me: "... wtf are you smoking?") Or when I went to pick up my fiancé from the airport after I first prolonged separation, and I got worried because I honestly couldn't remember what her face looked like.
But back to the analogy, it seems as if nearly everyone around me goes around life with an imaginary friend that only they can see, and I'm the only one who finds this weird. Like how can you even trust your senses if you're able to conjure up full sensual experiences in your imagination? I find this scary because it counteracts my own certainty: if my mind is seeing something or hearing something, IT'S REAL.
Not without the use of medication, no, which may or may not be related. When I do, the character of the experience depends on the dream but typically is experienced through feeling and abstract form. It never had the character of photo real-ness, real or imagined, that others often describe when talking about their dreams or mental imagery.
This thread and TFA is blowing my mind. I've never been able to visualize things the way that others seemingly could but I never took the time to actually be conscious of that fact.
> But then, perhaps, in this case, ignorance would be a bit more blissful.
I'm not sure how I feel about this right now, but it's not going to be bothering me for a while...
I'm absolutely curious, have you ever tried to draw something, in any way? When you were a kid or more recent? What did you/could you draw, and where does it seem like the image of the drawing came from?
I'm aphantastic and I'm very good at drawing. I come from a family of academically trained artists and almost ended up becoming one myself, actually.
Drawing from imagination is actually drawing from memory. In my case, even though I'm unable to visualize the object I'm about to draw, I can recall facts about its features, then rely on spatial and analytical thinking to "reason about" their forms, proportions, perspective, light, shade etc. From there, the visualization process happens and gets refined directly on the paper/canvas.
I'm aphantastic and have taught myself to draw fairly well over the past year. In fact, it was only in learning to draw that I learned what aphantasia was. Many lessons described "picturing" something in your mind's eye, and it slowly dawned on me that people actually "see" a picture in their mind -- I had assumed that was just an analogy.
I have tried some exercises that started helping me with mental visualizations. I've seen gotten quite busy with other stuff, but I think that if I had pursued those exercises, it had the potential to help. One exercise is called "image streaming", and although I'm skeptical it helps with general intelligence as some people claim, I have heard some fairly convincing stories of people with aphantasia learning to visualize: http://www.winwenger.com/ebooks/guaran4.htm
Edit: I'm now reading a lot of skeptical takes on the image streaming I describe above. So I'm no longer as optimistic that it would be helpful.
You saying that has flipped me over the edge, I think perhaps I'm somewhat aphantasic too.
I can picture things to some extent, like I can imagine the Mona Lisa, but not really the full image, just more like a sense of the painting, with a myriad of elements of the painting floating like words in a word cloud. I can't see it in the setting of the Louvre really, indeed it's struck me all my mental imagery is basically black, like an edge detect effect - I can imagine a bit of white wall if I try, so perhaps I just need to practice.
I've been painting for some time, but always use imagery to paint from - so many times I've said something like "when you try to think of a rabbit you just can't remember what one looks like" and no one has ever said "can't you just picture it?"; but it strikes me that I can't.
I do have a relatively good ability to make up stories, and have always loved fiction books. My memories aren't really pictorial though; so I guess I can fantasise about being in a situation in the same way as I can recall being in one.
i’m also (seem apparently to be) aphantastic and draw quite well. it’s just like you say - i “reason” about a remembered shape and light based on facts and physics, not “observation”. i reconstruct how the thing should look based on what i know of it’s geometry, not what it looks like. interesting to hear someone else say this! i’ve never quite put it into words.
I can, and I draw with more mechanical precision from memory than from sight. I used to be quite good at drawing, but I'm out of practise.
However I know precisely where in relation to each other the window frames in my bedroom are, for example, and how they are shaped, and their colour, and how the panes are separated, and what colour the curtains are and how to reproduce the brushed appearance of the curtain rod, and so on.
I can't see it. But I know exactly where very small details are in relation to each other, so I can reconstruct it piece by piece mentally and put it to paper.
I've mentioned elsewhere that prior to realising most people are literal about seeing things in their mind, I saw myself as a very visual thinker because of that. My spatial recall is well above average.
Imagine a blind person knowing where everything around them in places they are familiar with, I guess, except I have the benefit of being able to learn the spatial relationships through sight, and can also recall e.g colours though I can't see them.
I'm now going through a process of realisation that is explaining my struggles with learning to draw! I sit down pencil ready, but no 'inspiration' comes and I can't think of what to draw.
I now realise I have not actually been able to visualise in my mind's eye (I can see vague shapes/colour but can't bring it into focus) and have to constantly measure or 'guess' at drawings. I've been wondering why many artists seems to be able to draw 'on the fly' or copy things so quickly where it takes me many checks and measures (which is improving in speed over time with practice).
It has left me feeling like I have no creativity or inspiration, but not being able to visualise explains a lot and gives me an avenue of focus to work on.
Can anyone provide good resources for developing visualisation capability? It appears from comments here it might be a condition that is treatable?
The picture we conjure up in our mind is also not the most detailed picture. It's not exact. It's a very blurry image but not in the same sense that an image is made blurry through a camera lens. It's also not an image, but a 3D model and it usually sits in some sort of relevant but made up setting.
For example. If I was told to imagine a barn, the first image to pop up is the barn. For no apparent reason, the barn is red.
How many windows does the barn have? No clue, didn't even realize that the barn had some windows. I can then sort of materialize the windows into a concrete amount (two for example). But do note that before I thought about the windows the 3D model of the barn existed in a state that can only be conjured by the imagination. The barn literally had an unknown amount of windows, not no windows or some windows, but I just wasn't thinking about the windows. The other weird part of this is that we don't consciously realize that the model is incomplete, yet if we took this incomplete model of the barn and put it in the real world we can then instantly identify this inconsistency and weirdness.
Also for no apparent reason the barn is sitting on a grass field and it's dusk.
If you can dream, the image is exactly the same as your dream. Blurry three dimensional objects that can materialize in greater detail as you focus.
This describes my minds eye perfectly. For me it’s kinda like seeing only at the point of focus without any peripheral vision. My minds eye darts around picking up details as I imagine them.
This fits way more with my experience than the other comments so far. And as you say, the indistinct form of imagined things is the same in dreams.
There are some differences I can think of with my dreams. One is that of course it really does feel like you're there in a dream. When I imagine something while awake, it's more like a little model surrounded by nothingness in my head.
Another is that in dreams things are often strange, proportions all wrong, just general weirdness. Imagining while awake, you have control over the form.
There are people in this thread saying that they can essentially replace their reality with imagination while awake, "projecting" the scene in front of them. I can't do that, but I can imagine a scene well enough to get by. Maybe there's not so much Normal vs. Aphantasia at all, but a whole spectrum between the two extremes.
I imagine like this, it always seemed to fit well with Bertrand Russel's conceptualisation of the "table" in his beginners treatise on philosophy ("Problems of Philosophy"). The barn in my mind is the concept of barn, it's not really solidified in to an image-able object.
In dreams I enjoy the contradictory nature of things/people, like someone in the dream is themselves fully and also someone else; or a barn say is painted red and made of wood whilst simultaneously being entirely constructed of windows, and the windows can't be looked out of ...
Yeah, it's a bit like how your mind fills in the blanks for the blind spot in your vision where the optic nerve is. You don't even think about the fact that the data is missing until you go looking for something in that spot.
Just to provide a counterpoint I have aphantasia too and I like fiction books a whole lot. About fifty-fifty split with nonfiction. Chanting and observational meditation don't seem to be affected in my case.
Often when I hear people describing their experience with visualization, I wonder if I have a mild form of this. I am able to visualize things, think of visual scenes, manipulate objects in my mind, etc. But it's never at a level of fidelity I would consider 'looking at an image in my mind'. It's more of a nebulous, hazy thing, impermanent and lacking in detail. Faces in particular are very difficult to visualize; I don't have any real difficulty remembering what people look like or recognizing them, but summoning a complete mental picture of a particular face is usually elusive.
Yeah, threads like this make me wonder similar things. Lots of people here are using terms like overlay and superimpose that seem foreign to me.
For those in the thread that can work on imagery in a visual manner, does it feel like the images are taking the same path as ones that actually hit the retina? To be more precise, could your visualizations be roughly matched by an idealized Augmented Reality headset? If that sounds close to most people's experiences thats weird to me because my vague visualizations seem to never interfere with my actual visual plane, but rather a more abstract in-brain space.
Love discussions like these, subjective experience is crazy.
Chiming in as someone with fairly strong visual imagery (I think...)
I think there are generally a variety of ways things can "appear". However it's never the same as true AR. For example, with true AR, you could be fooled into seeing something that's not there. But I can't fool myself (deliberately) with my own mental images.
Having said that, it subjectively feels like the stimulus originates in a different part of the brain at a low level, but eventually both "mental visual" and "true visual" stimulus are unified to some degree.
Like yes, I can visualize a ball in my hand, but it'll always be in a different layer from my actual visual input of my hand. Like two different layers in Photoshop.
Also, beyond the AR concept, one of my favored types of visualizations is what I call "playing myself a movie". It's pretty much what you would imagine, basically watching a movie with my mind's eye. I can watch the movie and look at "real things" at the same time. Works great for falling asleep as well.
> Like yes, I can visualize a ball in my hand, but it'll always be in a different layer from my actual visual input of my hand. Like two different layers in Photoshop.
This blows me away. It's absolutely stunning to me.
I've never had strong visual imagery, but recently I've been practicing visualizing mental images as well as attempting (and failing) to overlay those images over my vision.
Whenever I do visualize images, they feel as if they are positioned behind just my forehead or at the top of my head. Sometimes I imagine this as a sort of "canvas" on which I can imagine or draw images. With your example of visualizing a ball, the ball and my hand can be on the same "layer" on this canvas, but do not affect my vision at all.
What I find interesting is that I can actually move this canvas around spatially or create new ones. On each canvas for example, I can imagine a different rotating object. As well, each canvas retains its image as a form of short-term memory. So I can switch focus between different imagined images or compositions.
I'm curious - with more practice - how mental imagery can aid in memory. Recently I learned a song in a language I do not understand, and the words of the song would appear on my mind's "canvas" almost like karaoke or like reading off imaginary flashcards...
It's always interesting to read about how other people's experiences are similar or different to my own. The minds eye is endlessly interesting.
My strongest experience of something like this was always when half-asleep on public transit, commuting home in the evening. Those rare times, I was indeed "tricked" by what amounted to a lucid dream.
I knew I was on a bus, because the sounds and feelings maintained continuity with reality. But the details I saw were completely made up. My eyes were closed, I think, but it didn't feel like that was connected to my ability to see. Because of the swaying motion of the bus, I knew where we were, and the scene I was "watching" was based on that. I was able to move, and think normally about my day, and did not notice that I had fallen asleep.
Of course, I eventually woke up. Reality was significantly less pleasant than my dream. The dream bus had been much less crowded, and clean, and generally more atmospheric and warm-toned, even the sunlight.
Does that sound similar to what you meant by trance consciousness?
Obviously subjective but I feel I have very strong mind's eye visualization.
For me it is not like AR.
It is kinda like PIP. Picture in Picture.
If my eyes are open while while visualizing the more deeper I go into the visualization the less my true visual field is apparent. If I get really deep into a visualization my true vision fades to almost nothing unless I am jerked back to visual reality by a loud sound or if the visualization exercise is over.
It seems more like working directly with the visual models that exist in my brain.
For example when you see a ball you see the object and it's light rays hit your eye then it goes to your brain. Your brain says, "that's a ball".
To know it's a ball the brain compares the object with it's model of ball. If it matches it must be a ball.
When visualizing it's like working with the basic model of what a ball is. I can slowly increase the detail of the visualization but there is an upper bound where other details start to disappear.
Honestly, after writing this I feel "simulation" is perhaps a better description than "visualization".
What I find doubly crazy is that this is an aspect of subjective experience that's relatively easy to describe, compared to others, and we're still only now realizing how much variation there is. I strongly suspect that the entire structure of thought varies greatly from person to person, but we're largely unaware of the differences because we've all implemented the same interface, so to speak.
Yeah it's weird; I have a fairly vivid recollection of a picture of page 606 of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", in a blurry photograph taken against a carpet (this is where Snape kills Dumbledore); I can generally remember where on a page I read a passage in a book; but there's no way I "see" the page.
Ditto for other "visualized" things; I just have no idea whether the qualitative experience I have of "visualizing" things is anything like what other people do.
Whenever I read about this phenomenon, there doesn't seem to be a good quasi-objective metric of this subjective capability to visualize -- there's no test or questionnaire I can use to see how my abilities rate against others'.
I think there's room for some experimentation / science here and probably a viral online quiz that would get some lucky content creator a solid stream of interest for years.
> Whenever I read about this phenomenon, there doesn't seem to be a good quasi-objective metric of this subjective capability to visualize -- there's no test or questionnaire I can use to see how my abilities rate against others'.
There certainly is. The Vividness of Visual Imagery questionnaire, or VVIQ [1]. It's been referenced in most of the recent aphantasia research I've looked at.
This describes my experience too. I remember books in general, as well as source code, by visual appearance of the pages of text and any illustrations, but without being able to 'see' them.
the way you describe your experience matches mine. i often suspect that people who seem to describe the “augmented reality” version are just using the wrong words to describe what you and i are experiencing... seems impossible to imagine visualizations actually overlaying my visual field like AR!! are they for real?
> does it feel like the images are taking the same path as ones that actually hit the retina?
I can remember or imagine voices like they're really hitting my eardrums. The more familiar I am with the voice and especially with what it says (like phrases the person commonly says), the easier it is. I used to routinely say goodbye to my mother before leaving home every day, and on the days after she passed away I would remember her voice on leaving like she was really speaking to me. As time's passed though, my memory of her voice has faded somewhat, so I can't really do that now.
I have been able to imagine visualizations like I can really see them, but for that I need to be on the brink of sleeping. Right on the point that you can dream while still being aware of reality.
I’m the same with music. I can “hear” music played back in my head with every detail as though I’m listening to a recording. I can get the same rush as I do when listening to the actual recording, and I assume this massive reward I get from music has something to do with why I can remember it in such detail. No surprise that I’m also a musician.
I find that visualisation is unconscious. I can decide to focus on something and I have the feeling of a picture, rather than the picture itself. I can answer questions and gain an impression of where features of a picture are, but an image that I see somehow, not really. And if I shut my eyes, things are just black.
Agree. I can sort of apply algorithmic visual processes on images in my memory. Edge detection, object identification, primary color identification, etc.
Anything more than that seems to be primarily the domain of my actual visual system. I can observe things like light, shading, fine details when I'm actually looking at something but those are almost never present in "minds eye" visualization.
Maybe its because I've trained my minds eye to be a more abstract interface over the years. And by getting better at holding a complex system in spatial memory, the ties to the actual visual system are weaker.
I've got a similar issue visualising faces. Recognition is ok most of the time but it often feels like I'm using other cues more to differentiate between people. I can visualise things but like you it's hazy and never fully formed. I've often wondered if this might be affecting my dev work - people describe so much of what we do in terms of how we visualise things.
I can certainly see imagery, but never to the level it becomes hallucinatory.
Instead, it feels more like a background process. The more I focus on a mental image the less I "see" the visual input to my retinas. I've attempted to figure out how many visual streams I can see at the same time and I struggle to imagine more than three. If I focus very intently on all of them it seems I don't see any of them in great detail.
Certainly if I block out my visual input or focus on some unchanging imagery it becomes far easier to make my mental imagery more intense and detailed, but they can also be disrupted quite easily again by some new visual stimuli or an errant thought.
Can anyone here give a good description of what it's like not to have Aphantasia? I'm having a very hard time believing this condition isn't the norm.
Edit. For a condition which supposedly affects only a few percent, the reaction to this article here and on Twitter contains a suspiciously high rate of people being surprised to find out they've got this and shocked that everyone else hasn't.
The more I read about this the more I feel that the variety in reported inner experience is more to do with the variety in reporting than of the experience itself.
I find myself able to relate to descriptions from both sufferers and non sufferers alike, but then again could often take extracts from each and be hard pressed to say who was claiming to be which.
I don't have aphantasia. With concentration, I can essentially override what I'm actually seeing with other imagery. For the most part, it's dimmer, duller, and less "present" than actual sensory input. It's much easier to do if there isn't a lot of actual visual input, because it's dark or my eyes are closed. I think many people can do this with great ease. For me, it depends on how hard I try, my mood, and maybe other factors I can't identify.
I can recall memories or visualize things that have never happened. I'm not sure if my recall is reproducing what I actual saw, or reimagining it from something more schematic. I suppose mostly the latter, maybe with a little of the former.
I can do the same thing with imaginary sound, far more easily. I'm not sure if people with aphantasia have difficulty here, too.
And with great difficulty the other senses.
Fairly often, these sensory reconstructions happen involuntarily. Which is basically what "daydreaming" is to me.
I can override my eye sight in the right conditions (with various degree of how much I override it) with another whole world created by mind in front of me. Ofc is FAR far far easier when it's dark or I am alone or I am hearing music, but you get the point.
For example when doing some shadowboxing I actually put fantasized people in front of myself which fight me and react to my moves, and I can see them as I see a real person until I remain focused. I often change also the location and the background to suite better my fantasy.
It's like shutting partially your eye system and making your mind go in full control.
edit: I said this to explain how much I can push it. But to make a simpler example, I _Very_ often fantasized at night, before bad and with eyes closed, of having an adventure in a post apocalyptic world and I can see everything in first person in my mind like I am really there and everything is real
No lie. His description sounds like he's a better visualizer than I am, but not really different in kind, just intensity. I could probably do that if I practiced more often. When I was under 15 or so it was easier and closer to what he described. But still, if I'm reading the right book I essentially cannot see the page anymore because the visualization is so strong and intense that I'm in that other world, not in ours anymore.
I recently read Clarke's The City and the Stars. His description of the city of Diaspar is so strong that I feel like I have literally been there in exactly the same way as I have been to Yellowstone. I know I can't get on a plane to go back there, but if I open the book again I will be there again.
Another favorite book of mine is The Good Earth. I have experienced Wang Lung's life in almost the exact same way as Picard experienced another man's life in The Inner Light. I read that book in a single uninterrupted sitting because the experience of living someone else's life from beginning to end was so enthralling that I could not stop.
If you want to know why Harry Potter fans are so obsessive, it's because the books are very easy to visualize. Millions of people have a "lived experience" of being Harry throughout 7 years of wizard school and that experience leaves a mark on you. When I saw the movies it was a bit odd because I'd already seen a different set of "movies" in my mind and they got some details wrong.
I used to play soccer when I was young and I would always visualize the trajectory of the ball in my mind before I kicked it. This wasn't just muscle memory (though I don't doubt there's a strong connection between the two); I would describe it like being able to see 1 second into the future and having the ability to superimpose the trajectory of the ball on the scene in front of my eyes.
I now take portraits as a side business. When I schedule photoshoots with models and think of locations, I'm constantly visualizing in my head the scene, their poses, the lighting, etc. In my head these aren't still images or snapshots, but I'm on set with the model and I'm able to move around and interact with the model to try different angles and figure out the ones I like and don't like. I never take written notes about the shots I want to try and get, I just spend the few days leading up to the shoot mulling over ideas in my head and by the day of I know exactly what shots I want and how to get them.
I also noticed as a kid that when I would read fantasy books that I would sometimes get so engrossed in the imagery and descriptions of the scenes that I would stop processing the words on the page. When I would "break out of it" I would be able to remember exactly the movie scene that had been happening in my head, but I wouldn't be able to tell you the last few sentences I had read even though they perfectly described the scene I had been experiencing. This visualization of novels made me fall in love with reading as a kid.
I know you almost feel like 90% of the world got in on a huge psych joke a few years ago on a day we skipped class. Kinda of like that "dihydrogen monoxide found at 99% of crime scenes".
Idk if you know but Aphantasia technically covers all senses. For example I can hear music in my head. It's kinda faint and fuzzy but it's there and well defined. Meanwhile I can't imagine a simple green triangle. Maybe you have it in some ways and not others? You should think about it - kinda blew my mind.
This is a very objective thing, probably some can do it more or differently than others but I don't think we are just describing the same thing differently.
For me, I can picture whatever you might think of, enough to be able to copy what I imagine on paper or sculpture. However, this does not overlay with what I am seeing with my eyes as other people have described happens to them. What I see with my eyes, and what I imagine in my mind are in two different places. When I dream it can be very very realistic, as high detail as real life, and I can think it is real life (if you cannot visualize in your mind, what are your dreams like?). But when I wake up and open my eyes, there is no longer confusion. This is real life.
I also very very frequently can remember someone's face, how they act, what they do, and not remember their name. I can remember a whole conversation with them in video and not remember their name. But it feels like this type of visualization is different than picturing a sphere or some imaginary thing. It is a memory, a memory that I can manipulate, but based on reality.
Something I have always wondered about others, when you speak, is it just your thoughts in your language that you voice? Like, is your thought in language? I must translate my thoughts into language, and it is sometimes very difficult even though I am good at expressing myself. I do not usually think in language, unless it is some basic thing I am repeating to myself. It feels like some other people actually think with words.
While I wouldn't say my thought is strictly verbal, I often form understanding by letting my verbal stream of consciousness ruminate. I starts off as a technical almost schizophrenic rambling. Over time, as my stream of consciousness passes over the same ideas, they become coarser grained and easier to express to other people. Unfortunately easier != easy since I still need to translate from my idiosyncratic vocabulary to normal human speak.
Oh man I'm the same way, If I have a minds eye, it's strong. I've also been terrible with language, like I have difficulty speaking in real-time. I'm much better now but I actually used to wonder how people can talk the way they do.
One of the students in my middle school put it into beautiful terms. One day, they say "You know, the TV in your forehead?" as they put 3/4 a square with their fingers onto their brow (like a "C" shape) I still get chills thinking of the phrase sometimes, it just was so understandable and approachable for us 6th graders.
> The more I read about this the more I feel that the variety in reported inner experience is more to do with the variety in reporting than of the experience itself.
I think there is very strong truth to this. Words get in the way when trying to share internal experiences. Also, by reporting and discussing your experiences, you affect them. Memories of past experiences, and expectations for future experiences, are both affected.
For that reason, and without having digested the scientific literature, I would recommend against labeling oneself as having (or not having) aphantasia.
But then, I feel that way about pretty much all labels, especially ones related to cognition. They're fine for communication, but not for your internal perception of self.
It's totally foreign to me to think about "picturing" something in that detail. I can describe the physical attributes of an object if I think about it, and most of the time I just equate that to "visualizing" or "picturing" it. The thing that stands out to me in that Reddit thread (and other descriptions of how "normal" people visualize things) is that there is extra context. That's not something I understand at all, and so I'm convinced there is actually a fundamental difference.
There is a fundamental difference. If I had a pair of VR goggles with me at all times that could play back short recordings of my life and if those VR goggles could also create helpful visuals that go along with my thoughts (sort of like a power point presentation with infographics and clipart), then it would be something like what I see when I "picture it". For a moment, I put on the "VR goggles" and the outside world is blocked out while I see an inner world.
If I write fiction I start to create the scenes and people in my mind as if I'm staging a play or building a level in a 3d engine. The words I write down are then a description of what I'm seeing, as if I'm writing a review of the play I just staged.
A further interesting line of thought: Can you re-hear sounds from memory? Can you re-feel touch? Re-smell? Re-taste? Can you re-experience emotions? With a bit of focus I can do all of those things, though it helps if the original memory is strong. My "inner ear" is especially strong, maybe even stronger than my "inner eye."
I can absolutely replay music in my mind at will. I often will wake up with a song "stuck" in my head. But, I cannot visualize things. I cannot re-hear the voice of loved ones. I have absolutely no idea what it means to be able to re-feel/smell/taste. That is well and truly beyond my ability to comprehend.
Man... that sounds awesome... Your description is actually the first time I've been sad about what I'm missing.
I definitely can't re-feel, re-smell, or re-taste. That's not the least bit ambiguous in my brain, I just have no idea what that even means. Re-hearing? I'm not sure... I can think "words", but there's nothing especially "audible" about it.
My imagined hearing is bordering on hallucination, and by that I mean an imagined "un-real" experience that is so present and detailed that it can be hard to distinguish it from actual sound. I can distinguish it, but it's right on the line.
If I want to hear a guitar I'll hear it with all the clarity of a real guitar. I hear the echo of the vibration. The sound of phantom fingers moving along the frets. Tiny metallic sounds as dry calluses squeak across the strings. And my chest will swell in excitement at the rich sound that I heard but didn't hear.
To test this I played the first ~30 seconds of The General by Dispatch in my head, then compared it to a Youtube video. I haven't heard the song for about a month, but I'd say my memory of it was about 95% correct with only a few notes out of place and a small number of missing/added aural details. In fact the sound memory was even more emotionally intense than the recording, like the difference between hearing a song live vs. a recording.
I can only imagine how crazy this must sound from your perspective. I am a productive member of society and not some kind of crystal spiritualist.
OK I think by now we need to accept that everything in humans is a spectrum. I think most people don't have the level of internal visual detail that they can describe an artists rendering. Meanwhile very few have no detail. Plus it covers all senses.
So for me as example: I listen to metal and while I don't have super high quality sound in my mind, I can for the most part play a whole song in my head even the very intricate solos. If I knew the instruments and could play that we'll I could play it off the track in my head. However I can't imagine anything visual at all. No simple geometric Shape, no colors, not even a dot on a white backdrop.
I think most people are just shocked this is a thing and theyre too quick to say they have nothing when they probably have something. I'd give detailed tests like asking to imagine a tree and ask how many branches it has or what kind it is.
Any rate in sure in a couple years well have some nice professional tests to take for a more precise understanding.
So just to be clear, I didn't know people were not like me, but writing this I realized it explains a lot.
I rarely forget a face, and routinely remember random people on the subway. I don't say anything but I'm almost always the person who remembers the other person first, and it almost offends me that someone doesn't recognize/remember seeing me when I remember them. I can usually tell who people are based only on gait and body proportions. I recognized a girl once just from her hair color, and it wasn't something noticeable, just a very muted blonde almost brown/gray hair, but I only knew one person with her height and hair type.
I have incredibly powerful imagery. I woke up once after realizing in my dream after breaking a window that the glass shattered with incredible physical accuracy, both material properties, and physics. It's in dreams that I notice certain things, like how did I know water/smoke/fire/cloth reacts like that? how did I know light bounces in that way? how did I know that subway tracks looked precisely like that? Like I never took the time to study any of it, but the real world accuracy and a high level of detail is there. I can visually take objects and rotate them in my head, I think someone mentioned this and I can confirm. And I always found it suspicious people couldn't rotate something they see in a 2D picture in their head (or at least they would say something that implies they have no idea what it looks like from another angle).
Having said that, I think there are parts of my brain that is so stunted I sometimes wonder how the hell I got to where I am. I feel like I have several streams of information coming into my head, and I have to process them asynchronously. I zone out all the time because I'm having a "Doug" moment (if anyone remembers the cartoon), where I'm vividly daydreaming. The images are so strong, it seems to black out what I'm really seeing (but not really, its more like getting extreme tunnel vision and being hyper focused on your imagination). Traumatic memories are terrible. I see and pretty much re-live bad experiences over and over again. I can sit still, not move physically and play movies in my head for hours. To be fair though, I'm probably closer to the other extreme, and to me the benefits outweigh the cons.
Well, not having it would allow you to think visually, I guess.
I don't think visually most of the time, but I can picture things if I want to. I can even build whole "scenarios" in my mind and play them out, visually.
I can imagine a cube in my head and rotate it around and such. It's a sort of voluntary daydream. I'm not literally overriding vision, but rather I can hold a limited imaginary scene in my head.
Think about blind people. They can still know where things are, and project forward in time that if X, Y will likely happen. Neither spatial reasoning or causal reasoning are tied to visualisation. That's what it's like for me to think both about the past and the future. I can't even imagine why you'd need to visualise something to knowing where it is - it's such a total foreign idea to me.
Is this one of those things like how some people read by speaking to themselves in their head, but you can read without doing the speaking part. Some people create the imagery, others have a meta-view of the situation?
I find the terminology around this to be so vague as to be meaningless. Rather than using the words "image", "visualize", or "see" I'd rather use the more specific term "hallucinate", or to "see something that is not actually there". To those in this thread that do not consider themselves to be aphantasic I would propose this question: in your mind's eye, whatever that means to you, imagine a sphere or a barn or whatever physical object is easiest between you and your screen. What are its qualities? Is it opaque, translucent, transparent? Does it obscure the text on the screen? Or can you only hallucinate the object with your eyes closed? Or do you not hallucinate it at all?
Personally, I can imagine my apartment in detail down to the relative placements of most objects, proportions, the colors, the way the wind enters if the window is opened. I can do similar for past apartments going back 8 years as well as my parent's home. Hell, I can imagine the Reno's steakhouse from my hometown that I haven't been to in over 13 years in much the same way.
I do not consider myself to have aphantasia, however none of the "visualizations" I mentioned are hallucinations as some comments in this thread imply. I do not perceive them with any of my senses, including visual, as if I was there now. Rather it is more of a complex conceptualization in my mind.
While I understand the desire to use less vague terminology, to hallucinate usually implies that it is done involuntarily.
Based on your description of your abilities, have you considered that what you're describing is spatial thinking, rather than visual imagery? It is common for people with aphantasia to retain strong spatial cognition.
Point taken. Merriam-Webster says "usually arising from disorder of the nervous system or in response to drugs (such as LSD)" so I take "usually" to mean not always.
Regardless I hope the distinction I was drawing comes across clearly.
Regarding spacial thinking, yes it seems fairly accurate however where I would expect it to break down would be recollection of colors, touch, sounds, tastes, or smells. But I don't feel I experience such a breakdown in ability to recall those either albeit in the same conceptualized not-connected-to-my-realtime-senses way.
Out of the examples given in this thread I would say faces are the most challenging object to recall. Though, depending on the distinction of the features I can also do that without much difficulty.
> where I would expect it to break down would be recollection of colors...
Could that not be explained by simply storing that information as "textual" data? As in: using spatial imagery to recall the layout of a room, and basic knowledge to recall the color of the walls.
> ...touch, sounds, tastes, or smells.
These other senses are considered separate from the topic of Aphantasia. It seems there are many people with good visual imagery, but none of the other senses... as well as people with zero visual imagery, but some or all of the other senses.
I have zero across the board, unfortunately.
Could you explain your taste or smell imagery? My recollection only goes as far as "I remember liking this dish more than most things".
Perhaps I have overblown the ability to recall taste or smell, or at least it was incorrect to say there isn't some level of breakdown in comparison to the spatial/visual recollection we were discussing.
In general, I think of it in the terms you might hear someone on the food network describe a dish. "High notes", "low notes", "mellow", "pungent". On Sunday I made biscuits and sawmill gravy (good southern boy that I am). Sawmill gravy has a distinct profile, it's a base of nutty/earthy from the roux and peppery. I start describing the constituent parts, however if you asked me to describe "peppery" now it's getting more difficult. The only way I would have to describe it would be how your tongue and throat burns when you taste it.
You can see I'm getting more vague and conceptual.
It's entirely possible that as you say this is just "textual" data, however that feels like a drab description of what feels to me like a more vivid experience. It feels as if there "more to it" than just recalling information.
Unrelated, but I also think it's interesting how as we start talking about other senses how entangled memory is. We aren't talking about a nondescript sphere hallucination in my visual field anymore, but rather a memory of my Sunday brunch. When I imagine the smell of beer I inevitably will recall the last time I was at the bar with some mates and the spatial/visual memory of that space as well as my emotional state, etc.
That sounds very similar to my experience. Memories in my head can be made up of visual data, but once that data is encoded it doesn't seem to have any interaction with the sensory system.
Imagination lets me recreate the scene, object or face in my mind in order to probe and ask questions, but it no longer seems linked to my senses.
My ex made me realize I had this a few years ago. It was like everyone here says, the literallity of seeing things in my mind escaped me. I'd always assumed sayings like counting sheep were just metaphorical.
It kind of goes to show you how moritifyingly behind we are in understanding and articulating our cognition. Autism was right up there until a few years ago. I believe there's a lot we still have to open up to ourselves. I'm not religious, but maybe exploration of the self and mind is more warranted than our society currently expresses. Of course, it's easy to slip into quackery, but I almost wonder if it'd be worth a few more nut jobs if we collectively self analyzed more deeply. Maybe there's a lot out there to our happiness and evolution were missing out on if it's taken this long to realize there's a sizeable number of people who can't sense internally.
Funny side note - despite having Aphantasia I have two degrees in physics. I could never follow in class (literally couldn't imagine what the prof was trying to hand model) and animated gifs made everything instantly understandable. The agony I felt in those programs seemed a little more justified after I was told about Aphantasia. A little.
> I'm not religious, but maybe exploration of the self and mind is more warranted than our society currently expresses. Of course, it's easy to slip into quackery, but I almost wonder if it'd be worth a few more nut jobs if we collectively self analyzed more deeply.
I think I get what you're saying, but I'm bewildered why recommending more philosophy within society warrants insulting people who are religious, grouping religion with quackery, and grouping philosophy with quackery. I'm not religious either but this was a weird direction to go with your point.
I'm more saying religion has been the traditional way we explored the mind and "spirit" or whatever but as we move out of religion we now have a void. Most people just aren't purely philosophical, so what I usually see these days is hippie shit like how crystals heals your mind. I'd recommend more philosophy but I'm also a realist and a lifetime of trying to convince ppl to engage philosophy has left me to believe it's a lost cause. So instead maybe Wed make it simpler than philosophy and do more exploration inwards.
Not the parent commenter, but I also have very limited visual imagery. It is extremely rare for me to be aware of having had a dream (maybe once a year or so). When I do though, I certainly remember 'seeing' things.
For the most part I don't dream :/ Though I can sometimes experience a flash of a scene in my dreams. Or at least it feels that way - I think there's a distinction on that that this science is still missing.
Would anyone imagine (no pun) this condition has any bearing on the current theory of how empathy is formed in the human mind (mirror neurons and 'replay' neural networks)?
I have very weak visualization. One way of describing it would be that I can close my eyes and tell you where everything is in my house, or map my way downtown. But I don't see anything, I just know the spatial placement of everything and how to move through it.
But if I try to see the stuff, it's as though there is a brief flash, and I see an outline for a second or so, and then it isn't there. But I know what's there.
I don't think I was ever strong on this front, but I think my ability has been declining gradually. I'm 33 now. I remember arriving in a new country at age 23, and I could recall everything that happened when I arrived: my drive in, arrival at my new house, standing in the rain.
I can still recall much of this, but I have a memory of seeing it and having great visual recall of this. But, how accurate is a memory of a memory? I didn't take any notes, so it's hard to say for sure what I could in fact recall.
One odd point: I used to get the most vivid images while lying in bed with my eyes closed, falling off to sleep. The most fantastic scenes would flow from one image to the next. I think it actually helped me sleep. These were also notable in that I couldn't visualize that way during the day.
One day I had to take antibiotics for an MRSA infection. I recall the images that night were dark and foreboding. I haven't had colourful images since then.
Sometimes at night I get glimpses of them. It's as though the images are happening in the background, and I can catch them but without colour. And I can't always see them, so I can't follow, and the images stop.
Haven't found anything in the literature about antibiotics causing this though, so I'm not too sure, it may have been coincidence and instead just gradual decline that crossed a threshold around then.
Has anyone had gradual decline of mental images, loss of pre-sleep visions, or had either of these precipitated by antibiotics?
> One way of describing it would be that I can close my eyes and tell you where everything is in my house, or map my way downtown.
I can do this, (also for simple 3d shapes needed to solve school geometry problems) without closing eyes, because i seem to do that independently from visualisation.
But sometimes i see very vivid images just by closing eyes, after having some intense new visual experience
- as a child when i was playing checkers the whole day i would see the game board
- after the first time being in a forest i could see forest any time i would close my eyes for several days
-after seeing the "What Dreams May Come" movie i could see images in the painting style (and it was the only case when i could control the images).
- after playing a new computer game the whole day i can see images from that
But the intensity of the effect have declined over time, presumably because it is harder and harder to find new visual experiences.
> I recall the images that night were dark and foreboding
could this be related to fever? I remember as a child i was seeing really chaotic images when having 40 temperature.
I wonder if there is aphantasia for sound too. Several times i was able to listen music as if played by a real orchester, but simply noticing it, was making the music stop leaving only an outline.
I have had a loss of visualization over time. I can recall having vivid images in my mind’s eye when I was younger. I think my loss of imagery happened after I went blind for a couple of years. But the temporary blindness was due to retinal detachments, which were the result of a head injury. So I suppose the injury may be partially to blame?
I’m not sure though. I’m pretty convinced that blindness changed my brain in a very dramatic way. I learned to move around in the dark, orient myself with sound, and learn to understand spacial relationships in a totally new way.
Now, it’s almost as if my brain used vision, but doesn’t really need it anymore. And that includes seeing things in my mind’s eye, which I can hardly do at all anymore.
Sorry I'm not sure of the relation to antibiotics, but Hypnagogia is something even aphantasics experience. It's typically more involuntary than not, so it's grouped with dreams rather than visual imagery/thinking.
I'm having trouble operationalizing the "blind mind's eye" concept. Catmull's brain knows what a sphere is, and my brain knows what a sphere is, and we can both describe the experience of seeing a sphere, so we both know what one "looks like."
Compare this to the phenomenon of "face blindness." My friends who suffer from this genuinely cannot describe what makes Angela Merkel's face (for instance) different from others because they lack the facility to remember it. But I can, because I don't have face blindness: Merkel's face is wrinkled, craggy even, with crows feet that resemble smile lines.
I hate to muddy the waters here but for years thought I had face-blindness before realising that I have Aphantasia.
You're exactly right: I know what a Sphere looks like but I am missing the bit that the rest of the world seems to have where they can conjure up an image of it. Even less abstract objects like a desk or Angela Merkel's face, I am quite unable to picture.
To answer your question, if I ask you to picture a barn in a field, you presumably have no difficulty in doing so. You've probably even made assumptions about things like the colour of the barn, the weather or surrounding terrain and have a sort of portrait with a barn at the centre, but I can't do that. I am having difficulty describing what I get but it's nothing close to anything like that. I know my barn is made of wood and I know it's in a field but that's about as far as I can get.
I'm happy that this is getting discussion because obviously it's quite strange to find out that a) you're not wired the same way as the majority of the world and b) that your self-diagnosis isn't a medically recognised condition. I'm excited to see what research comes out over the next few years.
Many people, in my experience, exaggerate the ability of the mind’s eye. Ask them to picture Bugs Bunny and they’ll say they can see him perfectly, give them a pencil and ask them to draw the shape of his mouth and they’ll flounder, because they were never really seeing that sort of detail. What they were “seeing” was more like the memory of a symbol.
I think people's ability to imagine scenes, and then render them, are two very, very, very different skill sets. In fact, have somebody render the scene right before your very eyes, or even try to render bugs bunny from the image they see right in front of them.
I can imagine enormous paintings from the Prado in my head, but could I render them? No, and I have decent artistic ability (not great, but I could probably do a decent bugs bunny).
I’m not asking them to copy it exactly. I just want them to put everything where it should be.
A better example is probably a bicycle. Everyone knows what a bicycle looks like. Ask someone with a great “mind’s eye” to draw one with all the parts in the right place. I haven’t tested it, but my guess is that they’d struggle.
What I find interesting about those (I've seen something very similar before, maybe even that set) is that people don't bother to be informed by the obvious inability of the device they drew to function.
I think there are two separate skills: the ability to remember the visual symbols and the ability to draw them. Even if you can remember the symbols in great detail, you still might not be able to draw them if you haven't acquired drawing skills. However, anyone with deep visual recollection should be able to notice when something has changed. For example, they should be able to notice if Bugs Bunny's tail changes from upward-pointing to backward-pointing without looking again at the original.
Personally I wouldn't describe it as a medical condition, it has no adverse effects at all, and I wouldn't want to "cure" it. Whats wrong with having a spectrum from no imagery to vivid imagery and accepting that mentally healthy people can be anywhere on that spectrum? This tendency to classify any variation between people as normal or abnormal is completely unnecessary in this case.
You've inherently assumed that a medical condition must be bad. It is, literally, a deviation from the normal human condition which is brought about by a medical abnormality. To identify it does not require fixing it. But to understand it, to study it, you must be able to classify it.
I suppose that you can actually picture things in your head. I (being a software engineer) think of my aphantasia as being like having the hash of an image plus some metadata in my head. I can recognize that I've seen something before once I see it again, I can tell you that I've deliberately memorized some facts about it, but I cannot recall the image itself - there are no pixels.
So I can say that my two daughters have hair the same colour as mine (hopefully never to go bald like me!), and the colour of their eyes, but I simply cannot close my eyes and picture their faces no matter what I do. If you can picture people's faces, picture places you've been or even stare at some object in front of you right now then close your eyes and "see" a picture of it, you probably don't have aphantasia
I wonder: Given a graph paper and one point on that paper could you manually color in one at a time those surrounding boxes that a larger square (eg 5x5) or a equilateral triangle (aprox rasterized) or a rasterized line between two given points emerges? If yes, how would you do it? Would you need to run an algorithm of "which box to color next" in your head? Or could you just color in an entire region because you already know aproximately which boxes need to be colored? Do you know/guess which boxes you need to color before taking the pencil into your hand?
Because, given such a graph and a task to color some of the boxes to render a figure, if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it?
From a paper on aphantasia I read a while ago I recall that the difference is about which brain functions you use. Spatial thinking vs. visual. The former works fine in aphantasia, the latter does not.
As I understand it it's the difference between decomposing the barn into a cube and a prism, performing perspective projection on it, without the help of a ruler, and then rasterizing that into a 16x16 grid while also assigning colors while holding all that in your working memory at the same time and only being able appreciate it as an abstract 256-item long list of colors vs. having a finished and higher-fidelity result including grass and sky hallucinated by your visual system with little mental effort, allowing you to use the same downstream processing that you can also use when looking at the actual thing.
> if you know which boxes to color by just looking at the paper is the same as seeing the boxes colored in your mind, isn' it?
That's what I used to think it was for when people talked about picturing things. But it appears a lot of people actually see the shapes and some subset also see the colours with various degrees of fidelity as if they're in front of their eyes.
I know their spatial relation, but I don't see it.
What about flow diagrams on a white board? And what about coding? My coding process involves a somewhat visual process of imagining how functions connect to eachother. Is it just a logical or linguistic (like uh, using word tokens) process for you?
I feel like I have pretty good visual thinking (I can picture and walk around places I’ve been and imagined with no effort, although I don’t know if this is actually normal or subnormal since it‘s impossible to adequately convey how your mind works), but I don’t think about programs like that
I’ve always learned better by just reading plain text instead of looking at diagrams or drawing mind maps or whatever, when I think about facts or am constructing a program, the things I need just pop into my head, I don’t really consciously keep track of a visual representation of how things are tied together, I just “know” what I’ve already done and what still needs to be done without thinking about it
Doing that would slow me down, my textual thinking is obviously much faster than my visual thinking (or it’s just because I’ve never practised this)
I just tried to imagine the layers of the app I’m working on as a stack of blocks and it felt like a lot more effort and a lot slower than how I normally think about it, in which the descriptions of the different layers all pop into my head at once, and I can kind of cycle between which one is at the forefront of my mind. I can do this pretty much without effort
Not sure if this is helpful but I am at work right now building out my first Kubernetes cluster. I need a diagram of the different components to see how they all fit together and even though it's probably relatively simple, I can't picture it in my head and I am about to draw one on a whiteboard. If I can physically see something, I'm fine.
Coding is not at all visual for me because I lack the ability to picture anything. If I think of a function, I know what it does, I know what it returns and I know what arguments it should have but I can't picture a call graph in my head or anything like that; only metadata associated with things.
I cannot draw picture at all. Flow diagrams are no problem, nor is coding, as those rely more on a process or problem solving. I realized a long time ago I can hold all facets of large complex systems in my head, manipulate them (e.g. while out for a walk) and them simply write down the results later. There's nothing visual in this, it's a separate process.
I can dream a sphere. (Once had a semi lucid dream, but not really in control of that)
In an extremely relaxed state maybe I can visualise a sphere, like once a year, by accident, for a few seconds.
I feel like after a long time of practice I can sorta flicker a sphere, in order to describe it, but not really.
I cannot recall, visualise and describe a sphere, that's just not possible not a real thing to me. But I can logically tell you what a sphere is, without recalling it visually.
My wife can. She also has an idetic memory. She can picture anything she wants according to her.
Pretty sure I have this, but I've never really considered a struggle. Once read something about it being a potential outcome from a stressful childhood, which I had.
Similarly I have a shocking memory. Literally need to focus to remember more than one item from a store. Can't remember more than one name at a time, also requiring effort to remember just one.
Oh well. As an aside, I'm fairly successful considering background etc. :)
I suspect I have it. When I 'visualise' things, there's no visual component to it. Instead, I'm remembering an abstract list of features that the visualisation has. For example, with a sphere, I know that it's round, probably smooth, with a surface equidistant from its centre at all points. I don't 'see' a sphere in any way though.
With a beach, I know that there's probably sunshine, there's some water, some sand, it's probably hot, maybe some wind, some waves, some seagulls. But I don't see any part of this, so if you ask me for specific details they just don't exist and I couldn't tell you whether, for example, the beach in my mind is short or long.
When it comes to faces, I can't picture them and find myself often forgetting/not recognising people with whom I'm only tangentially familiar. I couldn't describe a person's face to you at all, but if you asked 'do they have a big or small nose', I might be able to recall that (usually not though). I'm more likely to be able to recall distinct features - skin colour, hair colour, etc., than I am features where there's a sliding scale (nose size, etc.) This even applies to people close to me such as my own immediate family, partner, etc.
I suspect you do, as well. Your realizations are very similar to mine when I first found out.
> I couldn't describe a person's face to you at all, but if you asked 'do they have a big or small nose'
The day I told my wife about this, she had me try to describe a woman who'd just sold us food a few minutes prior. I've seen this woman many times, but the only thing I could really conjure is that she was old. I don't have face blindness, no problem recognizing people, unless, like you mentioned, I very barely know them.
> This even applies to people close to me such as my own immediate family, partner, etc.
After that, my wife had me try to look at her face, then look to a piece of paper and immediately draw. Of course, artistic ability and aphantasia are totally different things, but it really cemented how little visual information gets retained. As soon as I looked away, all I knew was factual information like "curly hair", "mole next to nose".
Funny, most people have the opposite question: they can't understand what it would be like to have aphantasia.
The way you're describing "knowing what a sphere is" and being able to describe it, is how I explain to people what aphantasia is like.
Consider the possibility, even if unlikely, that you yourself have aphantasia. It is common for people with aphantasia to not realize they have it until a conversation like this -- they simply assume they are experiencing what everyone else is experiencing, and that the concept of "visualizing" something is more metaphorical than it really is.
Can you really see a sphere when you're not looking directly at one, in any sense of the word? Or do you just know what a sphere looks like?
Or, perhaps, am I visualizing a sphere or simply remembering what a sphere looks like? It seems natural that we can only visualize what we have already seen, so would there not be a relationship with memory?
I can't describe the face of my family members to a sketch artist. I mean, I know I can recognize their face if I see it, but I can't take 2 of them and tell you who has a bigger ear, or nose or lips, or if one has a more round or oval face. This is with my own family members I see often. I use to think that people who claimed they could visualize where lying and making it that claim up until a few years ago.
I don't have any problems visualising objects, faces, rain, snow, wind,...etc. But when it comes to drawing, I get stuck, especially if I try to draw a face that I remember/visualise almost perfectly. Why is that? What it takes to be good at drawing (not that "painter-level" drawing)? It's (relatively) easy for me to draw objects which have sharp edges and straight lines (like a table, door, sofa), but I have hard times with drawing more detailed things like human faces, animals and cars even though I can visualise them as if they are present right before my eyes. I imagine that if I were to describe someone to obtain, say, a police sketch, I'd not be able to do it because I don't know how to describe a face, even though I have a clear image of it in my mind. Obviously, I'd not be able to draw it myself either.
And some tangential thing, when I visualise things, I visualise them through my left eye (faces, especially. since you almost always see them, well, face-to-face), as if a projector projects them through it and I remember left parts of things better as if they're recorded using my left eye. I occasionally think about it, but haven't come up with an answer for myself yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I have hard times with drawing more detailed things like human faces, animals and cars even though I can visualise them as if they are present right before my eyes.
That's pretty normal in my experience as someone who went to art school. My best guess is that your "visualization" is a high-level representation that actually isn't detailed enough for the purposes of putting down on paper.
Most artists rely on rules of thumb (head proportions, etc.), practice, and looking at references to be able to draw people, animals, and other "difficult" things.
>Most artists rely on rules of thumb (head proportions, etc.), practice, and looking at references to be able to draw people, animals, and other "difficult" things.
Thank you for letting know. It explains a lot.
But what is the distinction between "visualisation" and "high-level representation"? It's still a relative thing, I presume, since there is no standards for it and it's certainly not in the same "level" across all artists.
Not saying there is a distinction, rather "visualization" is a scale of different levels of fidelity, "high level representation" being on the lower resolution end.
And drawing / painting for the majority of people is 95% education and practice. Some people have a knack for it, but almost anyone can learn to draw high fidelity people / cars / faces / animals with proper tutelage.
Next up: people discovering that not everyone hears an internal voice either. And probably many other variations of the same kind. The funny thing is that nobody really talks about their internal experience in such detail, so there's little opportunity for observations like this to surface. A rigorous multidimensional classification of "thinking styles" would definitely be interesting.
I've actually been compiling notes to do this! I've been fascinated by how every time aphantasia comes up on HN or Reddit, there's always several people who either discover they have aphantasia because of the article or had recently discovered it, because they had always assumed that expressions like "mind's eye" were just another figure of speech or idiom. It's made me wonder if one could create a survey of mental/physical experiences which would double as a way of informing everyone about the various possibilities & what is the norm.
Aphantasia is just the tip of the iceberg - there's a whole laundry list of 'abnormal is normal' mental stuff out there.
A partial list: they vary from the various kinds of color blindness to anosmia (unable to smell!) to blind people regularly having vivid visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome) to hearing voices (something like 10-20% of people occasionally hear voices) to lack of inner monologue to musical anhedonia (being unable to enjoy or be moved by music) to ASMR to misophonia to the nasal dilation cycle to 'intrusive thoughts' like 'the call of the void' to hypnagogia (hallucinations while falling asleep) to being aware of one's facial expression when talking to synesthesia to faceblindness to crying (I was shocked to learn that many women report shedding physical tears from sorrow on a weekly or monthly basis) to repetitive PTSD-like school dreams to long-running elaborate daydreams ('maladaptive daydreaming')...
(There's also the funny little lifestyle ones. Like, do you take shoes off or not? Do you take 'navy showers' or let the water run the entire time? Cereal then milk or vice-versa? Do you eat the same thing for lunch every day?)
I'm currently running an exploratory survey of these sorts of sensory differences to see their prevalence, especially among people with autism and SPD: https://surveys.autisticempire.com/117683
Prosopagnosia and misophonia are interesting, prosopagnosia both in terms of recognition but also how it affects sexuality (think demisexuality), and misophonia both in terms of existence and what pitches people find intolerable.
Aphantasia is also interesting in that there's a visual form and an auditory form, and my preliminary survey results show a large correlation with autism for the visual but none for auditory. More generally, it's also interesting how it interacts with things like depression, anxiety, and mindfulness as well as things like DP/DR.
I became interested in sensory differences because I do not feel hunger or cold (more common than you'd think, interoception differences), and then discovered I have aphantasia back before it had a name, but also have CEV of at least level 4 and can conjure it up with effort just by closing my eyes which is apparently far from the norm.
I have a suspicion quite a lot of revealing stuff has been written throughout history on these things, just with the author assuming everyone's like them. To take CEV as an example, Jung's "active imagination" as described in the Red Book sounds a lot like CEV level 4, and also resembles how some people describe shamanic journeys. I can also see how maladaptive daydreaming can start off slowly, lead to a paracosm before ending up with Gondor.
Gwern, bit of a tangent but I think actually related: have you by chance looked into thought loops at all? Obviously there's the psychdelic variety, but I'm also thinking of those described by sufferers of anxiety, depression, and especially anorexia.
I don't mean to take away something so small from your great posts, but...
> repetitive PTSD-like school dreams
I'd really like to know how common this is. I'm now almost ten years removed from my school years, but the vast majority (90%+) of my dreams are based there.
Disturbingly common, judging from the people I've asked about it. It took at least a decade for my own to go away. I too am curious exactly how common they are...
Not hearing an internal voice is, if anything, harder for me to imagine than not being able to conjure mental images. While images are a significant part of how I think, it's nothing compared to the constant internal voice narrating my thoughts every moment I'm awake.
I'm a zombie without any consciousness but never realized it until last week. I just go about my day like an automaton without any internal subjective experience and am perfectly happy doing so. I was talking to my friends and they were saying "it feels like there's somebody actually inside of me, experiencing things" and I was like "Oh that's funny, I don't have that sort of feeling at all." (kidding)
A while ago I took to asking people who speak fluent English as a second language what language they think in.
To my surprise, a lot of them said they don't really think in a language or voice.
I've got a King Arthur's damn round table up there having a roiling debate most of the time (not the norm), but I was surprised that so many people don't really have any sort of representation or "source" from which internal ideas originate.
Like you absolutely verbalize my thoughts to - if anything - an annoying degree.
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK for 19 years.
I find myself switching languages mentally all the time. My "voice" is different, and when I think in English, I think with an accent even though I don't really "hear" my voice when I think (it is very strongly distinct from sound).
Wasn't there some misanthropical meme about some people being "real" because they have an inner monologue and some being NPCs, because they don't? Like, if you don't have one you're just "reacting" to the world and not really deciding anything etc.
I think I'm partially aphantasic. I say 'partially' because I can picture the broad strokes about things in about the same detail as a watercolor painting run through a blur filter a few times.
This hasn't been any hindrance to my career in software, as once I grok something sufficiently it turns into an abstract knowledge tree that I work through on a subconscious more than conscious level.
I do lose track of things around the house constantly, but I'm not sure if this is a side effect of poor "where'd you leave it last" visualization or just everyday absent-mindedness.
My strongest past memories of landscapes are this way, which I have also described as something like an expressionist painting. My conjured mental images (picture a red star) are just black though.
Interesting that some great animators also have aphantasia. I always assumed that my aphantasia and complete inability to draw anything at better than a 5 year old level were related, but it seems some have developed an iterative process that works around it. That's pretty encouraging.
I have aphantasia but can draw fairly well, as long as I'm looking at what I'm trying to draw. But I can't draw anything from memory (because I have virtually no visual memory, it's very, very, very vague and fuzzy).
There are methods that claim to guarantee the student will learn to draw. I believe they start with simple objects (boxes, spheres, cones, etc.) and then begin drawing them shaded with different light sources and then progress from there.
Beyond the people with extraordinary natural ability, perhaps the rest of us just need to be taught what others can easily intuit?
I work with adults doing art work quite a lot. They are often upset that they can't just do it, they've not tried before, or last tried decades ago, but some how expect to just rock up and be great at creating something "artistic" without doing any practice or learning towards it.
I'm one of the "omg I might be aphantasic" set here today, but I've never really tried picturing things in that way I don't think, so perhaps I can but just haven't learnt to.
I'd say it's a feedback process, not an iterative one.
"Psychologists now recognize three basic types of visual thinkers. To determine what kind of visual thinker you are try imagining a triangle. Do whatever it takes to image that shape in your mind, How did you do it?
Some people cannot "see" a triangle in their minds until they draw it on a piece of paper or trace its outline on a table with the and of their finger.
Some people need to close their eyes, apparently because seeing interferes with their visual imagination. When their eyes are closed, however, they can "project" the triangle on the inside of their eyelids. Did your eyeballs move as you drew the triangle?
Some rare individuals can bring up the image of the triangle with their eyes open, superimposing the triangle on whatever they are looking at. A subset of this latter group can make the triangle change size, color, and perspective; they can make it twirl, jump, and pass through other figures. Steinmetz and Tesla clearly fell into this last category."
Elmer Sperry was notoriously good at mental visualization, to the point that he could supposedly just draw the projected outline of his mental images onto paper.
A lot of figurative art in previous centuries was also based on drawing bodies from memory. I think you can infer that some painters could really conjure an image (the configuration of a body) in their mind before drawing it, just like Sperry. But the feedback loop approach is equally valid!
None of those three seem to fit my experience of visualising things. I can conjure the image of a triangle in my mind with my eyes open without any difficulty, I can move it around, I can change its colour, I can make it shrink and grow; but it's not superimposed on what I'm looking at. It's as if I had a second pair of eyes looking at a scene entirely controlled my my imagination.
I love hearing how other people's imagination functions.
Your experience sounds similar to mine, but I feel like there's two distinct levels to the mind's eye.
There's the level you describe, where it doesn't feel like you're seeing through your real eyes but I find it's also possible to have images that feel very much like they're coming in through your eyes – almost as if there's a tap on the optic nerve.
For me these images are for the most part only visible with my eyes closed and most visible when falling asleep. I also cannot precisely control them in the same way I can instantly imagine a shape, instead I have to influence them indirectly bit by bit with lots of effort (but I usually get there – I'm practising to see if it can become easier). These images can be much more vivid, they're usually in full color and animated, but with a small field of view. It looks a bit like having a small CRT-style color TV at the center of my vision and it feels like watching a dream while you're awake.
To go into more detail on the process: when I close my eyes I don't see black but a sort of vague mix of colored blobs, a little bit like this but darker [0]. As I start to think, I pick out patterns in the blobs that look like the thing I'm trying to imaging, until eventually they sort of become full images that evolve on their own. They become vivid enough that I feel like the muscles in my eyes are straining to try to focus on them. It's not that dissimilar to those deep-dream images (but much less creepy!).
> These images can be much more vivid, they're usually in full color and animated, but with a small field of view. It looks a bit like having a small CRT-style color TV at the center of my vision and it feels like watching a dream while you're awake.
This almost exactly. I have experienced this a handful of times on waking. A stream of photoreal content, in a small round field of view in the center of my vision. The images often have fewer colors than real life, and some kind of artifact not unlike "scanlines" from a CRT. So far, they're also distinctly 2D. It's like watching broadcast from the part of my brain that's still dreaming, through my eyes. It's what I expect retinal projection looks like.
As opposed to the "back buffer" of normal visualization or daydreaming, there are separate "front buffer" phenomenon that are as close to hallucinations as I've ever experienced. If they happened at any time other than waking or falling asleep, I would drive myself straight to the ER.
The interpretation of "superimposed" is important here. It doesn't mean that the imaginary image and the real image are merged like titles composited onto a TV screen.
Reading your other comment, I think I sort of agree with it.
I can look at a sheet of paper and imagine something on it, and then draw that (if it's simple enough), but my ability to visualise something precisely enough to draw it rapidly degrades as the image gets more complex.
On the other hand, if I'm not intentionally projecting the image onto something, my visual imagination doesn't occupy the same space as my visual field at all. If anything it's "above" or maybe "inside" my head. I can then visualise an almost arbitrarily complex image, but if I try to focus on the details they shift: I'm "seeing" the whole but not the parts.
I don't think the definition of "bring up the image" is clear here. I can sort of do the 3rd thing, but I certainly couldn't draw a projected outline of that mental image.
Am I supposed to literally see a triangle? I can't do that. As far as I can tell, I'm "imagining it." The triangle doesn't interfere with anything I see, it's not really anchored to anything visual, and, while I can alter it, the triangle is not specific. It's a fairly ephemeral imagination or idea that I can conjure up. Most importantly, I'm not "seeing it," I'm "picturing it" or "imagining it"
Wait, I can't believe that I am a "rare individual" who can visually imagine things. Is visual imagination really not a wide spread ability among the population at large? I would think that it is the opposite. That aphantasia would be rare.
I'm like you, which I had assumed is the norm: I can visualize things, but that "visualization space" is completely separate from my normal vision. When I'm imaging an image (or, more often, a short "clip" of something) I can't also focus my attention on what's in front of me at the same time.
Math, CS, physics and engineering tend to attract people with visual/spatial aptitude. This may be because sighted people first encounter the subject matter of those disciplines through their visual perception. Whatever the explanation is, HN readers are likely to be an atypical population.
My interpretation of the "superimposed" comment is that we are not talking about images appearing as if literally overlaid on what we are seeing. What people experience is that an object that they are visualizing seems to be spatially located in the same place as their visual field—hence Elmer Sperry's comment that he could just "draw around it". Would you agree that your visual imagination and your visual field occupy the same space "in front of" your head?
If it's any help, what I'm trying to say about the relationship between real and imaginary is close to the mathematical idea of a covering space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering_space
I can "draw" the triangle in my mind, as you would with fingers in the air: I know the shape it would have made if I drew it on paper, but when drawing with my fingers in the air, my fingers leave no trail, and that's the same in my mind if I try to "project" something mentally.
I can draw a world map from memory with well above average accuracy, but I can't picture it even if I mentally trace the outline I would put on paper.
I can see a ball of plasticine revolving, changing shape and shaping colour at the same time very strongly with my eyes open, I can move it around the room, bounce it on my hand etc., yet I still can’t draw for shit. I can’t even draw the legs on a side view of a four-legged animal without it having three left legs, so I agree with the premise of the OP and don’t feel like artistic ability is really linked to this.
That's a really interesting insight. I fall into the third category, I was not very academic in school and it wasn't until University when I really understood that I learn best by visualisation, by doing and or experiencing something.
As far as drawing bodies from memory, it should be noted that Davinci was an art apprentice that would spend weeks just on the thumb, drawing it from different angles. At the end of that kind of intensive training, I imagine (hardy-har-har) that being able to draw the body from memory would come as naturally as the skills professional athletes develop.
My imagination is not the best, but when I am really high on marijuana and I close my eyes, I can imagine alls sorts of absolutely gorgeously bright and photorealistic visuals. I can imagine anything with remarkable photorealism during that state of mind. It's semi autopilot and spontaneous, though. My imagination also becomes very strong right before I'm about to fall asleep. When I'm sober, my imagination takes effort and is hazier, and not creative. I also want to ask people with Aphantasia, what do their dreams look like?
How many other things are like this? What abilities do I have that are rare, that I take for granted and think everyone else has them? What abilities am I completely ignorant of because I don't have them? I think this is a source of great misunderstandings because we think others think like we do. Something that is obvious to us is obvious to them. But that is not the case.
I used to get a lot of push-back about ideas at work in ways that confused me. I have started to develop a habit of stating the obvious, what I think doesn't need to be said and I usually would leave unsaid. It has been surprising to me how often the things I was skipping over are viewed as novel ideas.
I visualize things pretty weakly, pretty low on the ability-to-visualize scale.
I don't really think it has caused me many problems, except that I tend to get lost very easily. Luckily, we have near ubiquitous GPS now and Google Maps.
On the other hand, I have good mental auditory capabilities. I can, say, play "air on the g string" in my head right now with near perfect fidelity, or just imagine new music in real time as if I were simply hearing it. Some people apparently can't do that, but can do the visual equivalent.
> I can, say, play "air on the g string" in my head right now with near perfect fidelity, or just imagine new music in real time as if I were simply hearing it.
For me, I wish there were a way to easily get the music I imagine outside of my head. The best I've been able to do is whistle it, sing it, perhaps each "track" and record it; I've played around with 4-track recording too. Tried trackers, but always get lost in the nuances, or trying to create a particular sound or whatnot...
But it's the same way with my visual side; I can think of things, but anything beyond technical drawing I am pretty weak at doing (and the only reason I have some success with technical drawing is that I took a few years in grade school doing it as an elective).
I am surprised that nobody mentioned pineal gland. As Descardes, it is where soul sits. Pineal gland also called "third eye". Pineal gland gets light information from skin and eyes and produces melatonin. Melatonin is a serotonin-derived hormone that modulates sleep patterns. People who has aphantasia also report that not having dreams. Calcification of pineal gland is proved scientifically and mostly caused by fluoride. Aphantasia might be related to this.
People with aphantasia may or may not dream visually. There's actually quite a range of experiences just within dreaming. For example, not everyone dreams in colour and not everyone dreams in first person.
I discovered I had this a year ago. Honestly, I always thought I had some kind of learning disability. Some kinds of tests are very hard, I cannot picture anything while awake, I literally cannot remember anything about my life visually, learning faces takes a long time, I failed geometry, and struggled with any kind of visualization math past that (despite doing quite well in calculus)...
Then there were the careers I was drawn to: creative things like graphic design, drafting, etc that I utterly failed at. I had ideas of what I wanted to do, but the step between transforming the thoughts onto paper was always a fight. I studied photography in school, and could never convert it into a profession because I found being creative enough to get clients wasn't coming to me - I would be burnt out on small projects for no reason I could fathom.
I ALWAYS assumed people who visualize chakras or meditate with a object focus were just faking it.
I remember reading about this a year or so ago, and telling some friends. One of them immediately recognized it as why I utterly failed at some MMO raid mechanics.
So there is probably an unending list of ways this has impacted my choices, and I can only hope young kinds get a chance to learn they have this and get some guidance on what effects this will have on certain tasks based on the level of visualization they have.
I noticed this when I was a kid- I was playing with lego space ships one day and suddenly realized I could no longer visualize an actual space ship- it just looked a lego thing. I thought it was odd and sort of forgot about it until recently when somebody else said they were troubled by it.
Discovering 3D rendering was a huge thing for me- suddenly, rather than having to work incredibly hard to visualize things in my head (or do mental rotations on them), I could build a model world and move things around until I saw what I needed (this was super helpful for molecular structures, but also for neural network architectures and complex workflows).
I have aphantasia (hate the name, no phantasia my ass) and I wonder what kind of: 'color blind are people with better contrast' type of stuff there is. I remember reading that there is a significant amount of extra resilience for traumatic experiences due to not being able to get the memory visualized again, again and again which makes it easier to cope. If anyone has more info about other positive aspects I'd appreciate it.
Obviously there's a lot of variance as everyone's different, but here's a list of benefits at least some people with aphantasia report:
* Being more in the moment. An example of this is being better at mindfulness, as well as simply not living in the past or worrying about the future as much.
* Less prone to trauma. You've already mentioned this, but not remembering scenes with full sensory information appears to provide a level of protection in some people when it comes to traumatic memories that are otherwise relived and unable to be processed.
* Being better at abstract thought. Lots of people's memory is largely a kind of first person chronological narrative, made up of scenes on a timeline. Some people with aphantasia report they remember in a far more abstract structural manner, not merely confined to the visual. This is obviously also somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to remembering say past events.
* Thinking faster on your feet. Without the added visual element, it seems possible to be be more linguistically dexterous and witty because there's less delay between thought and words.
I hasted to add this is all a generalisation, and more about a propensity to be better than you'd personally otherwise be at these things as opposed to a superpower. I don't think it's coincidental that in Francis Galton's original paper on this, he found people with aphantasia are disproportionately represented in what we'd now call STEM.
I have an aphantasia and I'm a programmer, and I've personally found I'm much more able to reason about complex systems than average, and the way I think about them seems markedly different.
I can vouch for this. I have it too, and a few years ago my partner died. I was the one who found her dead, but because I can't remember any visual aspect of it, I'm sheltered somewhat from flashbacks of the trauma. I also hypothesise that it's the reason why I very rarely ever remember dreaming, and this is probably also helpful as I suspect I'd otherwise have nightmares about the event.
It has a double edged effect though: I also can't really visualise her face, and that really depresses me at times because it feels like I'm forgetting her memory (I have to remind myself that I'm not really).
Memory tends to be poor among folks with aphantasia, but supposedly whatever details we do actually remember may have less of a chance to have been morphed over time through re-visualization. So we'd make for better eye witnesses.
I am a paramedic with very limited visual imagery. I hadn't really put two and two together until you mentioned it, but I suspect this is a significant advantage.
It would be interesting to study vividness of visual imagery and PTSD in first responders.
Most people could draw a bicycle well enough while looking at it. But most people are hopeless when asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. But most people don’t have aphantasia. I do, so am sceptical when people say they can picture a bicycle (say) in their “mind’s eye”.
I suspect this is more that when people look at a bike, they don't notice detail and just recall the concept of a bike having two wheels - one forward and one back, a seat, some handles, etc.
Their failure to draw an accurate bike is in fact proof they don't have a photographic memory, rather than they can't visualise one. That is to say, they're entirely capable of visualising a bike that is incorrect from an engineering design perspective.
Then the “images” most people say they can imagine in their “mind’s eye” might be little different from what an aphantasiac like me would produce if asked to draw them. Perhaps I am not missing much at all.
It’s helpful, but if the task is to draw the imagined bicycle, then you would presumably add details as far as possible. But for most people the result is very far from what they would draw if a bicycle was in front of them. So what they imagine is not a bicycle. So most people can’t imagine a bicycle.
I can only speak for myself but the more I gain knowledge/memory of an object, the more I can fill it in. If I know "bicycle" very well I can visualize all the details - maybe not in full detail all at once but at least by thinking about each part in turn. If my memory of one is not so good, the details will remain not filled in, like a blind spot where my mind fills in the gaps and I don't even notice the missing data until I try to "see" those areas specifically.
The imagined bicycle may be a specific one I recall, or a mixture of various memories of bicycles I've seen.
This is incredibly interesting. About a year ago I began to acknowledge that I can't really force an image into my head, and if I try I can sort of get a vague impression of it, but it doesn't have color or anything. When I am free thinking I think my mind is able to conjure all sorts of images, but when I try to focus in on it, the image vanishes into that vague impression. And sometimes it is weird, I can think about all of the details and have sort of a distant detailed image of whatever I'm thinking about, but I can't bring it to focus. It feels like the uncertainty principle with my mind.
But it was a strange topic, so I never really discussed this topic with anyone. Based on what I am reading, I don't think I have aphantasia, or maybe it is a spectrum and I have it to some degree. But it is refreshing and also kind of sad at the same time to hear that others experience visualization drastically differently.
I'm still very much a dreamer and a thinker and haven't had any issues with my ability to visualize things. But hearing about how some of you are able to bring up vivid images sounds pretty magical. I do wonder if some of this is about how we as individuals explain things. Maybe what I am experiencing is actually normal but others describe it in a different frame of mind than my own.
It's a spectrum. Or at least vividness of visual imagery is. I'm extremely low on the vividness scale. Don't know if this makes me aphantasic, or something else:
Here's another potentially related issue: "memory palaces".
I tried memory palaces, place this there, place that here - but really it just failed for me, I couldn't remember any details about the place. I've remembered a full pack of cards just by repetition before (a while back!) but memory palaces just didn't work for me at all.
I would describe it as an inherently animated medium. I find it difficult to keep an unchanging image in mind, though it does make an excellent meditation exercise.
My mind's eye isn't like a framebuffer that I render to. Trying to visualize a direct analog of a still image is difficult, feels unnatural, and requires concentration.
Moving scenes are easier, even if the objects are unchanged. It's easier still when the nature of the objects change too. I think it must exercise the brain's simulation and prediction hardware - it's easier to render and it has a smaller memory footprint. I can "look" at a sphere, but after only a short while it starts to change, move, or rotate as though my camera is changing position. It might spontaneously change color from "red" to "blue", or start to squish into a spheroid. Or change into a scoop of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. Or other elements might come into view.
The changes aren't random - it feels like the scene takes input from a stream of thought just on the edge of consciousness. Maintaining the integrity of the scenegraph - the state and location of the objects requires constant corrective input to return it to its desired configuration. This is a separate and distinct act from the concentration required to "view" the scene in greater detail.
The bigger the scenegraph, the harder it is to stop the motion. I can visualize what starts to feel dreamlike in its detail and complexity, but it becomes impossible to freeze the scene.
Visualising does appear to be a skill you can actively get better at, for example there's some evidence to suggest describing what you're seeing out loud as you're doing it can increase your ability with time and practice.
I can superimpose my mind’s eye’s image over the images coming into my eyes, I can interact with these imagined things and make them do whatever I want. Requires a conscious effort for complicated things, but generally holding something in my head doesn’t require any more effort than conjuring it up initially
There's amusia, which is being tone-deaf; there's musical anhedonia (not enjoying or being emotionally moved by music); and anecdotally there are very large differences in ability to hear music - Beethoven, of course, but you can see a mention elsewhere in the comments of another composer, and here's one anecdote I was amazed by: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/agfbt1/am_i...
"This is why my favorite thing to do is drive and listen to music. I have thousands of songs I have coded to mental movies, all of which are (to me) incredibly exciting. It's legitimately more pleasurable than sex. I don't have much drive towards TV and books because I have this. I've never actually asked if other people can do this. AFAIK, it's just a me thing."
This past weekend, I attended the conference he was interviewed at for this article. During his talk, he mentioned he had them complete the VVIQ from University of Exeter (which the other replies linked to), the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/psychology/imagery), plus several more questions, maybe a dozen or so.
All in all, while I don't feel 'robbed' of this ability to visualize things, it does seem to lob off a chunk of things which are particularly joyful to the human experience. I can't really visualize a future life for myself, let alone my current life. To discover all of this after decades of being alive is quite mind-blowing, and I'm glad it's getting the wave of media attention that it is now (or else I would not have known).
But then, perhaps, in this case, ignorance would be a bit more blissful.
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