Aphantasia: A life without mental images
bbc.com
bbc.com
When I think of my living room I can very clearly place where the couch is, its three dimensional form, what's next to it, the colour of the couch. However, when I recall these things in my head it's almost like I recall a "couch" object with a certain "couch" shape and a "blue" colour, as if they are semantic tags attached to my memory of the couch. For the life of me, I can't "see" the couch in the minds-eye. However, I could probably draw it by iterating over my memory of its properties.
Crazy.
The only analogy I can draw is this:
Imagine these "concepts" in your head:
Recursion
Monad
Quantitative Easing
Now, when I think of things like:
A Dog
Flower
Sunset
Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)
Perhaps take an empty piece of paper and imagine drawing a big letter on it. I've read before that non-visual thinkers can experience visual thinking that way.
I kind of suspect it might be similar to how blind people experience "visualizing" something where they've got the contours well-mapped in their head, but of course I have no way to know that for sure.
But colors are almost impossible. Also I don't “see” light.
So I can say with some confidence that both extremes exist in the literal sense and this is not at all just a matter of describing the same qualia differently.
Honestly the questions given in the test don't seem to well capture my abilities. I have no ability to recall my own mother's face, but I can is of reconstruct it from facts I know (length of her hair, shape of her jaw, anything I've noticed explicitly). I get sensations of colors in short bursts if at all, it is not a dimness. And motion, rotations, and spatial relations feel real to me even if I can't see them. When it tells me to imagine a rainbow I don't see color, but I feel it's arc in the sky, even trace it mentally with imaginary hands. That aspect is not dim and vague. Makes me wonder if the author of this test either did not have this condition or had it in a different way than I.
How do you remember faces or your house, or your car?
I do have normal visual dreams though, which apparently many people with full-on Aphantasia don't. And I can picture and manipulate geometric objects in my head, that kind of thing.
Again, I guess it's mostly that my mental images tend to be vague and indistinct. I really wasn't aware that some (apparently most!) people see perfectly clear mental photographs of things. Now I'm trying to figure out how I haven't noticed the lack of this ability more! It seems pretty significant.
It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a useful understanding of that experience from survey answers. Sort of like when people claim non-human mammals have no consciousness or sentience because they don’t talk.
For example, just because the picture-book illustrator profiled in this article has a “vivid imagination” doesn’t mean she can literally visualize a full-fidelity photographic mental image of a whole book spread. As a photographer, when I see a scene I can “previsualize” what kind of picture I might get after fully editing/printing the image days later. But that just means I can conceptualize particular visual effects, think about the lighting, texture, contrasts, colors, and put them together in an abstract thought, not that I can precisely “see” the picture exactly as if it were finished in front of me. I would say I have a “vivid imagination” for photographs, but my mental experience of remembered or imagined vision is probably pretty similar to yours.
Think of it as personal stereotypes. For example I often imagine how a character looks before getting to the physical description and in that case it's very hard to change my predefined image. Even if e.g. the description says it's a tall blonde character with a big nose if I had already imagined the character small and with black hair I can't change that throughout the book. I've actually tried to and it's very hard. If I concentrate I'll get the correct image out but next time I'll encounter the character I will automatically think of the previous picture.
Personally I think this is pretty regular and other people are like that too, but how can I be sure?
Like a psych 101 student, I immediately think I have a touch of any vaguely described mental condition, but I also know I probably don't.
> can the two figures in each set be made identical by rotating them in space? [0]
this isn't my domain, so without knowing any better i would kind of expect the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and its abridged version to ask similar questions. but if they didn't, and you wanted to create another test, here's where i'd start:
1. devise a test with a bunch of similar questions (to the one in the above example) of varying difficulty. use these hypotheses:
H_{0}: there will be no difference in performance for people with aphantasia
H_{1}: people with aphantasia will perform worse.
2. find some people with aphantasia and test them to get a baseline.
3. test a random sample.
4. compare results. maybe use a one-tailed test.
[0] link to image: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-psycholo...
Something I tried to visualize recently, and found quite challenging, was trying to remember this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yW--eQaA2I
I watched it a couple of years ago, and last night I replayed it in my head, but with great difficulty.
Very clear; I see some cons cells, making up a list, whose CAR holds the symbol BEACH, the main connective of an abstract syntax tree describing the whole situation.
Can people actually see memories. I'm really missing out if so.
On the other hand I am very bad at recognising people or visualising faces! Even if I try to visualise my own face or the faces of my parents or a celebrity like Bill Clinton I get something that's very uncanny, distorted and missing details. The part of your brain for recognising faces is signicant in size and very specialised, so it makes good sense that you might be able to visualise faces but not other scenes or vice versa.
BTW, I am a VERY visual thinker, I even do algebra in my head by imagining equations floating in space in front of me and moving terms around "physically". But I'm not an extrovert. If I can't visualise something (e.g. much of abstract algebra) I'm hopeless at it.
It's very sensitive to attention/intention: asked to visualize a person, I'll mostly imagine the face and general build – not even picking specific clothes – unless that person is very associated with some outfit. But if I think more about some specific prompt – say, "what were they wearing at some recent event", or "think about their hairline" – I can call up (or pick) reasonable details.
I suppose you could say it's no more vivid than it needs to be, and with concentration it becomes more vivid/detailed, but never quite like the solidity of a photograph. (Well, maybe while deeply concentrating with eyes closed, or half-asleep, or actually dreaming, there can be moments of seeming realism...)
Also, most of the time I have a lot of difficulty pulling up a mental image of a face, even one I know well, or holding onto it if I do manage to briefly capture it. (But I don't seem to have any particular difficulty recognizing people by their faces; I'm not picking out features or anything like that -- I definitely remember faces and what they look like; I just can't see an image of a particular face in my mind (clearly, most of the time).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280134
Meanwhile, I once answered a question from a person on Quora whose premise was that people can imagine "audio and visual" stimulus, but not "odor, taste, or touch". I suspect that was based on the asker's own peculiar dominant senses and style of memory, as I addressed in my answer:
http://www.quora.com/How-come-our-brain-can-interpret-ideas-...
Happens in dreams to some extent too - I generally dream normally (?) but if I become lucid then everything I try to look at disintegrates.
For the record, I'm a programmer who always wanted to do something artistic. Coming to the realization that I just wouldn't be very good took a long time to accept.
I can imagine my girlfriend's foot a little more in detail, e.g. changes in skin tone, but I can't remember the shape of her individual nails. Some of the details of my girlfriend's, I can see in my mind, the others are mostly a blur. I can't see in detail what I haven't noticed in real life. The details I see are because there was a scene where she made a very appropriate facial expression in response to a situation and I remember that detail very clearly - like the way she smiled and tried to convince me everyone said she had a beautiful smile on our second date.
Also - I notice the images I conjure in my mind are always a lot dimmer in brightness than when seeing images with my eye. I can remember them being bright, but I see them as dim - even when imagining the sun and the sky. It's like looking at a computer screen in bright sunlight.
It still doesn't seem that vivid to some of the people described in the article.
However, this doesn't disqualify you from the arts under any circumstances! You might never be a photorealistic painter, but you might be better at, say, photography, as it's more about elimination of elements, or certain types of illustration (or music but I assume by "artistic" you meant visual arts). And, as usual, it's mostly hard work and only like 10% talent...
This year? Galton (famously) published on this in 1883!
I stopped reading novels for fun about 5-6 years ago but this past year I've started reading at least one book every couple of weeks, and I feel that my ability to visualize things has improved.
On a related note, I wonder how you could measure one's change in visualization ability, since it's so subjective. I had a very difficult time answering the questions in the article, since I had no frame of reference.
Definitely not the severe case that the article describes, but I didn't realize that this was unusual.
i seem to have lost it at some point in adulthood. i have no idea when.
i started doing it again while using drugs, and this caused me to become aware that i'd lost an ability i once had. it was very hard to explain to people what this ability was, but i rememberd being able to visualize fantastically complex scenes in my head, as a kid, and getting some sense of this back while high.
in the past i could imagine any complex system of gears - like a clock, and zoom in and look at any part of it.
it's like the projector bulb is broken. an image flashes and goes away.
has anyone found a way to redevelop this?
Almost everything gets better with practice. Memorization experts have often used visio-spatial 'memory palaces', imaginary places they can fill with items to remember. Simply trying to use that technique might help build visual recall flexibility.
Perhaps it'd separately be worth trying a sensory-deprivation soak-tank?
Curiously, my ability to recall sounds and music does not seem to change with fatigue. Whether I'm feeling energetic or super tired, I can bring to mind any song I'm familiar with or hear arbitrary words spoken in the voices of my close friends and family. My suspicion here is that simulating sound is much less expensive and therefore the ability not as easily degraded. That would not be surprising considering the anecdotal point that I can get headaches from too much sunlight but not too much noise (unless it interrupts my sleep).
Actually this was discovered by Sir Francis Galton more than 200 years ago: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Nor is it particularly rare.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is not the experience itself, but the fact that people are so surprised when they discover that other people's mental experience can be so different to their own.
In a conversation that moves quickly, I probably wouldn't begin this process of streaming images, but if I spend more than a few seconds on an idea, they just start arising. To me, it is "thinking" - it is much closer to me and more effortless than the logical articulation of abstract concepts.
And I'm terrible at recognising faces, but pretty good at remembering facts.