Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

I can formulate sentences in my mind, but it feels really slow and cumbersome.

This isn't common at all, but the belief that it's happening is common.

What's actually happening is that people's thoughts automatically trigger language production, and they hear the words, the output of that process, in their head. But the thought comes first and the mental words are a side effect. Imagine your brain having an internal narrator who constantly reads your thoughts and shouts them out as formed sentences.

I doubt I am special in this regard, but perhaps just on the lower end of the spectrum for normal. I cannot draw to save my life because I can't usefully imagine it in my head before it goes on paper.

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/ff/ff_intro.php

There's lots more information about Face Blindness (prosopagnosia) on the http://faceblind.org site.

Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face.

Does that make it easier? It does for me.

For me the feeling is very similar to having a word just on the "tip of your tongue", where you know the word you want, you can feel it, its meaning, etc. You know you'd recognize it instantly if you heard (saw) it, but you can't quite bring it up.

Sometimes I can't even tell if I actually am visualizing a face or not, because it's like for a split second I feel like I can almost see it, but then when I focus on it, it's gone. And other times I know I have seen people's faces in my mind, but it's generally spontaneous, not when I actively try to pull one up. Kind of like seeing something in your peripheral vision, but not being able to focus on it.

Maybe you'd find it interesting, if you haven't read it already.

For example, something as simple as: What is more blue? The sky or a lake?

Or, on a practical note, if you are designing software, do you have a good sense of color theory, to be able to select colors that will look good together, or do you have to put it on screen and do some trial and error?

Also, your concept of the "milk voice" was very alien to me. I don't think like that. My inner voice is my own voice, with full emotion and inflection.

You might be interested in an exercise called "image streaming"[1]. The idea is to describe an object in extreme detail, as if you were giving someone instructions for how to draw it. Apparently this is one of the few things that allows my coworker to view images in his mind. Also see "backup procedures for people who don't get pictures" [2]

[1] http://www.winwenger.com/imagestr.htm

[2] http://www.winwenger.com/isbackup.htm

In essence, people can think visually, kinetically (feeling), aurally (sound).

Most folks imagine with pictures, but many don't. You are not alone.

For example: I'm sure you can imagine what it felt like when something really funny happened to you, right? And you could probably also remember listening to a song you heard on the radio. Now - recall what it felt like when you were on a beach (or a snowy mountain), and recall what it sounded like. If you cannot remember, imagine the feeling of the sun, sound and imagine the sound you might hear.

I often wonder whether the imagination can be improved like a muscle since I have trouble holding mental image outside brief flashes. I'm not sure if you can relate, but trying to picture something in my mind often feels as though I'm trying to recall the fleeting details of a dream; the harder I try the more foggy it becomes.

If I attempt the red triangle thought, I can place the concept of a triangle in space, but I can't see it.

Similarly for the beach, my mental model is all the concepts accociated with a beach positioned in 3d space, but I don't "see" anything.

However, on rare occasions I have "seen" things in my mind in absolutely perfect detail, but I have no control over what I see. I've also heard complete orchestras but have no control over what they play. Otherwise my inner ear is very limited.

I've always wanted to tame these abilities but don't know where to start.

I am very curious if they could make that connection. I know LSD puts the brain's visual processing into overdrive, perhaps it might make the connection strong enough to give you this mind's eye, even if only temporary.

What is the overlap between aphantasia and absence of memories? The example you gave was that you couldn't remember going to see Les Mis a year before, so that's not stored as a fact somewhere?

There was a (possible hoax) story a while back about a guy who could only remember the previous 15 or so hours of his life. He kept journals and had to jog his memory daily. One interesting proposal was that he was in a unique position to re-watch his favourite movies and compare his previous reviews to see, unbiased, if there was any change in opinion. Aside from the awfulness of the condition, that particular aspect sounded quite cool - you could experience things for the "first time" multiple times.

Does the same thing occur with aphantasia? If you see a movie that you love, presumably you can't remember any scenes from it later (though you I assume you would remember the plot)?

I mulled over that for a bit, and concluded that we all think without words in fact. The thought comes first, then it's translated into words inside our minds. It should be obvious that the brain can only form words after it's formed the thought.

So in your case, I find it impossible to believe that you don't have imagination. I think it might just be inaccessible to you (to your consciousness).

I think most thoughts are in fact unconscious. What we consciously perceive of our own thoughts is just a small part of it, the high level output.

So I'm thinking that for you, the "consciousness barrier" so to speak is just a little higher than it is for most people.

I do have dreams, but don't remember them ( after 10 minutes, i forgot them for sure).

I never understood how people could draw robot faces to describe a person at a police officer... It seems weird...

I have memories, but trying to describe something i will say "general things" like colors, objects, ... I can't describe my own house in detail... I describe my house with facts...

I had a crush on someone ( i dated her even a couple of times) and i even said her hair was dark-blonde... While i was not paying attention during chatting... ( it was not ...)

I find it dificult to describe color "variations". Not blue or brown, but a color like turqouise says nothing to me.

Is that the same thing then?

What i find similar: you mentioned engineers who have the same thing (i'm a .net architect) and i'm an INTJ personality according to Meyer Briggs ( http://www.personalitypage.com/INTJ.html ) which is also something of 2-3 % of the people ( like you mentioned the % of people who have Aphantasia). Perhaps this has something to do with each other?

I just took the test on the BBC and got the lowest score, but I'm still not sure if I have aphantasia or not.

I can "picture" scenes in my mind. I certainly don't have a problem with imagination or thinking up different potential realities.

But the picture I have is basically a literary description. If you asked me to imagine a beach I would rapidly compose a narrative composition of said beach: there's turquoise water lapping against the sand which slopes up gradually. Oh and there's probably a rock somewhere along the shoreline. And there are some palm trees. But in my mind this process is occurring exactly how it's happening here: as text.

That being said, I remain unconvinced that I actually have aphantasia. How do I know everyone else isn't having the same experience but describing it with images?

One point is that when I tried to imagine my best friend's face I couldn't come up with more than a general description. But perhaps this is just a poor memory of faces?

Like you, I also have a terrible experiential memory. I barely remember going to high school at all and the few memories that I do have from my life are basically stories—narrative snapshots which I have verbalized enough times for them to be embedded in my mind, just like the plots of my favorite books are. I can just as easily imagine the first time I asked out a girl as when Frodo destroyed the One Ring.

Are there any more scientific tests available?

In fact, I often know I'm about to drift off to sleep when the music in my head starts getting interesting. My dreams are often very intense, visual/audio experiences with plots and special effects, like AAA Hollywood movies.

I'll often wake up when the brass section of my mental orchestra gets too loud and I'll hear the last few beats repeating over and over as I gain consciousness.

I've actually found the multi-media/search aspects of modern chat systems very helpful since I can often reply what I'm thinking by just searching for a picture that represents my thoughts instead of writing out words.

I'm also absolutely terrible with directions on roads, but quite good inside of large complex buildings (my wife is the opposite).

One thought, instead of "giving in" to this fact, I wonder if exercising it might do something. Perhaps take some community sketching classes and work on drawing to see if exercising the unused visualization areas of your mind might activate them?

Could I ask if you drink alcohol? If so, do you experience an alternation in your mood like being more relaxed or having a different perspective on things?

I discovered one 'trick' to get around this: certain music would cause strong, evocative "music video" imagery to be conjured in my mind's eye for as long as I listened to it, with this being mostly directible (i.e. the emotional cues of the song were fixed, but I could constrain the imagery to anything that matched those emotional beats.) I considered myself a writer in my teenage years because I took advantage of those "synesthetic fantasias" to build up scenes and characters in a sci-fi setting of my own creation. Sadly, this ability faded with age.

More recently, I was diagnosed with Inattentive-type ADHD (and, to be clear, it was always there, rather than adult-onset; my parents just disregarded the advice of my family doctor and pretended I was neurotypical.) I began taking medication for it. My visual imagery is not ephemeral any more! I mean, it still kind of is, insofar as mental images will be lost the moment I temporarily lose focus on them—but I can now hold the images for as long as I concentrate on them.

I think I might now actually have access to the full "thought toolset" other people do, but since I developed and rely on this alternate way to go about thinking without it, I don't reach for visually-imagining as a way to do things, so it doesn't get used often.

On the other hand, I notice that, on ADHD medication, I have far fewer fleeting "unrequested" visual images. I can now imagine consciously, but it seems like the visualization capabilities of my subconscious have been switched entirely off.

Though, I do notice, if I go a day without taking my ADHD meds, the second night—when it's all washed out of my system, but my brain hasn't bounced back to producing any dopamine, so the amount in there is even lower than my baseline—I'll have really intense dreams, where the details of every scene are full of "grotesquely real" imagery, as if DeepDream were trained on Zdzisław Beksiński paintings.

This almost makes me wonder whether there's a sort of "cross-fade" potential between conscious and subconscious visualizing, controlled by dopamine. Really low dopamine: vivid dreams, no conscious visualizing. Average dopamine: meh dreams, meh visualizing. High dopamine: no dreams, vivid visualizing. (This would also fit with the observation that visual hallucinations are a symptom of mania.)

I've been unable to visualize anything except taste since the age of ~10. I figured that was something I had grown out of!

Also, I would assume the lack of visuals holds true for dreams as well? For dreams that you remember (if any), what were they composed of? Interestingly, some people dream in B&W and other people dream in color. [1]

[1] http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.de/2008/11/new-studies-on-b...

Thanks for writing this, by the way. This is totally mind-blowing.

Here's a series of things you could try.

- Sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" out loud.

- Do it again silently -- don't vocalize -- but keep moving your mouth, lips and tongue. If you're like me, you'll also still feel your throat and vocal chords moving.

- Do it again silently, without moving your lips, but still move your tongue and vocal chords.

- Do it again silently, but keep your tongue still, just move your vocal chords silently.

- Do it again, entirely silently, in your head.

I'd be interested to learn which steps are hard for you. When I'm singing a song "in my head" I'm actually doing any one of the latter three actions.

Relatedly, when I'm talking to myself in my head -- which I do often, usually while reliving an old conversation or anticipating a new one -- I often do the throat and tongue motions. Occasionally I even do the mouth motions, which is a good way to get people to look at you strangely :)

I read your inability to use Morgan Freeman's voice in Morgan Freeman's voice.

When you mentioned you were unable to hear the Star Wars theme my first reaction was how badly it clashed with the song in my mind's ear already.

I have a much stronger mind's ear than average. The loss of my mind's eye I would not notice much; sure it would make fiction less fun and dreams less vivid, but eh. But losing my mind's ear would be like going deaf. I have what amounts to a built-in iPod that can call up any sound I've ever heard, and many more sounds that I haven't. Going without a mind's eye would be a curiosity to me, but losing the ear would be like losing an arm.

May I ask if you feel embarrassment when you think about an embarrassing event in your past?

The adjustment is quite an odd feeling. I use mostly the same language to describe things as other people. I will use terms like 'mental image' or 'yeah i can see you wearing that', but to me it was far more metaphorical. I had the same realization about counting sheep. Now I feel a bit uncomfortable when I use some terms. I'm used to using them but that was when I thought everybody else was using them in the same way as myself.

I had wondered if the Text popups in the TV series Sherlock came from someone with without aphantasia trying to understand a description given by someone with aphantasia. I could describe what I 'see' when I think about something as a cloud of facts relating to the subject, If someone who inherently thought of such things visually tried to interpret my viewpoint I could quite easily understand how they end up with the effect used in Sherlock. It's not what I see of course. I don't see words floating in space. I see nothing. To some the idea of not imagining things visually must seem just as impossible.

I think it's different to imagination though, I can't visualize but I can imagine.

I tried this experiment:

Imagine two identical closed cardboard boxes. In one of them there is a duck.

I can't see the boxes but I can imagine them, and the box with a duck in it is distinctly different to the one without. My friends say they can visualize the boxes and they do indeed look identical, but strangely they still seem to know which one the duck is inside.

As an example, for the cube question, I would generally solve it by visualizing the shape starting out flat and then getting folded 90 degrees inward at each crease until it either forms a complete cube, in which case the answer is yes, or two of the squares are forces to overlap each other, in which case the answer is no. To be clear, I'm not imagining any person's hands actually performing the act of folding, I'm just visualizing the abstract shape floating an otherwise featureless void, folding of its own accord. In fact, here's a video that more or less shows what I would visualize: https://vimeo.com/64926672

Yes, although I don't think I was able to "see" things in my head before or after. I got West Nile Virus about 10 years ago, and was physically out-of-commission for most of a year. The particularly disturbing part was that even after I recovered physically, it took several more years before I recovered my mental ability well enough to reason about anything complex -- like math, or code. I just couldn't follow equations that once made sense.

Now after a decade, I think I'm back to about 80-90% of peak. I don't know if the small decline is residual from the West Nile, or to be expected with normal aging from 35 to 45. The experience drove home how little we understand the brain, or viruses. Consider how primitive our understanding of medicine was 100 years ago. I think it's likely that 100 years forward they'll look back at now with similar disdain: "They didn't understand anything --- they just let viruses run their course and do their damage!"

Usually I resolve it by remembering that west is left and east is right when looking at a north-up map, but I have to recall it every single time. I have never been able to bind the west / east words directly to directions.

Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".

When driving I do seem to have internalized that left = off road and right = across traffic. I never really noticed this until I drove abroad... I quickly realised I had to be very careful not to think too hard about what I was doing, because if I verbalized any of it then I just became confused. I also found it rather taxing to follow directions.

I have trouble with left and right and I'll often point left and say "turn right." I should also mention that I'm left handed, and our society (in fact, most if not all societies) are geared for right handed people.

Anyway, I learned left because one time we were walking down a specific street by our house - coincidentally on the way to a beach - and I guess I was asked to walk on the left side of the road or something. For some reason, I knew which side was the left at that time. So from then on, any time I had to know which was was left, I would just pull up a mental picture of that street, and then know that side was left.

What's interesting is, I definitely didn't use the same picture for right. I don't remember why, but I remember that some time later, my "right" reference became a mental image of the swimming pool where I was taking swimming lessons. I was at the edge of the pool looking out, and somehow (I've forgotten how - perhaps deducing from left) I worked out which way was right. So from then on I would visualize that view out of the pool to know which way was right.

IIRC I did it consciously for a period of time, then it would happen automatically, and at some point between then and adulthood the crutch faded away and I automatically knew left and right like most people. (I have no memory of how long that took, but it probably was still as a young child.)

Anyway, aside from whatever general interest that story might have, I wonder whether a similar technique would work for your wife? Pick a specific mental picture to associate with "left", then spend some time intentionally pulling it up whenever leftness needs to be ascertained. Then once it's cemented, do a different one for right.

I'm also good at visualizing writing. When I was a student, during tests, I would see in my mind's eyes the place on my notes or in the book related to the question.

To go to sleep, I quickly imagine a lot of beautiful landscapes repeatedly, spending maybe a few seconds in each landscapes.

When I remember a book, I usually remember how I pictured the scenes of the book. Even 12 years after reading the dune books, I can remember the gom-jabbar pressing on Paul's neck, I can remember Alia's tapping her finger with the same rhythm as the baron Harkonnen. I can remember Siona running from the wolves.

Even when the question was, "can you imagine their clothes" and the guy I was thinking of is well known for his, er, "drastic", clothes choices I couldn't do it. Much to my own surprise.

When I try to picture the examples in my mind, they all start out as a blurry blob like impressions that increase in detail gradually. It's as if I'm watching the drawing process occur step-by-step.

In the beach example I saw the following features appear one after another in this order: the sand, the water horizon, a set of palm trees on each side, a pirate ship, the sun, and a gift shop.

I never see whole images appear instantly but have met people that claim such.

I work as a software engineer. The rainbow and characteristic body poses are the only thing that I can even vaguely "see" (and that was being generous).

However, on the question about a lightning storm I can hear lightning striking around me but not see any images.

For instance, until I was asked to "Rate how vivid the colours of that person's clothes look in your mind?", I hadn't even imagined his clothes being ANY color. Once I decided that he wore a green sweater, I could "experience" the green color vividly.

I said vague and dim for most of them, but it feels like fleeting glimpses of bits more than anything else. I can't really imagine coloured objects, though I sort of label an object as coloured. Geometric arrangements are easy to imagine but I don't have a real picture. I have no problems imagining sound, music or voices. I'm not sure if I dream in pictures and rarely remember dreams. (I work in science)

All my "images" are descriptions, but for some of the questions I think those descriptions are vivid enough to count as images. (For example, gradient was a helpful term for the sun and the sky.)

I'm an INTJ engineer, in case that's a helpful thing to note. Audio and "feelings" are even harder for me to imagine, because I have less descriptive language

It's actually hard for me to imagine what people mean by pictures in the mind. Surely nobody imagines things the way they see things?

Do y'all visualize objects as amorphous blobs floating in space with little fish hook methods covering the exterior? When writing SQL, do you not visualize the ERD in your head? Might explain why I've always been strong in data modelling, but like everything, probably a downside somewhere else.

Poses, colors, and movements of people is very shaky, but I can do landscapes OK. But something about the structure of the questions bothers me... It seems like they are implying that I am observing the image, rather then generating it. Like, "how clearly can you see ____?" means I focus a bit and add it to the image, until I can see it better, but very little of the details asked about pop up unless I think about them, take the information asked for, and intentionally integrate it into the image.

I never remember images but I do remember feelings/sensations pretty well, so I might not rememeber the sunset, but I do remember the hot feeling on my skin, the sounds and my state of mind.

I know my mom 'remembers' the same way I do.

I almost never dream in visuals.

Nice to finally 'meet' others who are like me.

I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in further research.

I'm a computer engineer.

Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?

Also, when I see movies derived from books I know whether they depict the same setting I took from the book. I know if the characteristics mesh, but don't really recall "seeing" the settings while reading.

Tend to ace those spatial tests. I slaughtered all my friends in Descent -- I almost immediately had each entire spatial 3D map in my head and knew where to go to get anywhere regardless of ship vs map orientation.

So yes, I recognize your experience almost exactly.

As far as the nature of my minds eye, I definitely don't see pictures at all, but as you said "feel" abstract forms. When I imagine a familiar relative, I don't see an image, but rather I'm reminded of important abstract features of the person. It's as if my minds eye operates on abstractions rather than concrete representations. I also attribute my math ability with being able to manipulate these sorts of abstract visual/spatial feelings, which leads me to believe there's a connection. Even as a programmer my abstract visual/spatial machinery is working to operate on mental representations of the program state.

I wonder differences in ability on this abstract visual/spatial <---> vivid concrete representation axis can help explain differences in programming/math ability.

I was taking this test and thinking it was stupid, since well, duh, you just have to imagine it, I do basically all my remembering that way.

I've only recently become aware that the way I experience or remember the world is in any way unusual. I'd always thought that mental imagery was a metaphor for something or hyperbole. It also explains why my memory seems deficient. I've no problems with facts, but I have no memory of being a participant in events.

Contrary to the article, I have no problem recognising people. It's like I keep a hash of faces. If I close my eyes I'll have no idea what the person in front of me looks like.

The whole thing has me slightly sad.

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people they shared the space with.

1) I have a phonological loop and can easily imagine music.

2) My visuospatial sketchpad (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_...) is almost entirely spatial. I don't know the color of the floor in my kitchen, unless I paid attention to it specifically and verbally in the past. But I can use memory palace successfully.

3) I wonder if for me it's just an undeveloped habit which could be improved: I have dreams with pictures and colors once a few months, and sometimes I see pictures when I'm half asleep, but it's really hard to put myself into that state intentionally.

This topic is fascinating, what else some people have that others don't.

I haven't tried psychedelic drugs. Maybe I should start.

Similarly for sounds, except that I can always imagine sounds. However I can only imagine sounds that I can try to 'subvocalize' with my own voice (plus humming, whistling, etc.). When on the verge of sleep I will hear gorgeous, fully orchestrated (as far as I can tell) songs. Sometimes memories of ones I know well, sometimes either something I don't recognize or am subconciously improvising. It's extremely alluring and makes me annoyed that I can't do this at command. (Though friends who always have a tune of music in their heads tells me it gets annoying too.)

Number 8 makes me think the author is even more extreme than I in aphantasia.

One tenet? concept? component? of mindfulness is observing without judging, being fully in the moment and fully experiencing it.

The goal of (the various flavors of) mindfulness isn't to eschew emotion and become a Vulcan or anything. Emotions are great! The goal is to more fully experience our lives, including our emotions, by also being mindful observers of them...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...

I do think visual imagination varies greatly, even amongst those who have it. Mine is not particularly strong — everything I imagine is very "shadowy" and ill-defined, but nonetheless it is there. It is hard to describe such an intangible phenomenon, but imagining/remembering visually feels qualitatively different from imagining/remembering facts, sounds, words, etc.

For example, I can imagine the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, and when I do, I "see" the painting in my mind. This imagined image is far from clear or sharp, more like a fuzzy ghost of the original. Also, the imagined image is separate from the sensory input I'm receiving from my eyes. I don't see the van Gogh painting plastered over whatever I'm looking at. Instead, it's as if the two images coexist in my conscious awareness, although it takes a deliberate effort to maintain the imagined one, and the image from my eyes is much stronger and clearer. Closing my eyes can help me focus more easily on the imagined image.

My dreams are similarly lo-fi, visually speaking. The best way I can describe is that everything in my dreams is very poorly lit. It's like being in a darkened room, where you can see objects, but can't make out their details. This tends to frustrate me, and I often spend a lot of my time in dreams trying to address the problem by reaching some more brightly lit environment, and then getting confused as to why I still cannot see properly.

There are various meditative and esoteric practices based on exactly that.

In the second category, the engineer Elmer Sperry apparently had a serious facility for visualizing machinery, and would hold out a pen and paper to "just draw a line around it". It's mentioned in Eugene Ferguson's book Engineering and the Mind's Eye: https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onep...

The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as you've given your mind closure on the pattern, get your mind out of the rut of analyzing the pattern by listening to something else (also to completion.)

More precisely, the experience of having a song stuck in your head is strongly analogous to the experience of having been half-told a joke. You've sort of allocated a mental context buffer and it's waiting around to receive the rest of the context, so that it can then evaluate the 'punchline'. The simplest way to discard the buffer ("ruin the joke") is to just get the punchline early, without the rest of the context. If you go through a bit of music theory, you can recognize a song as a pattern of building and releasing tension. You could actually just listen to the part of a song that finally releases the tension—closes the matching parenthesis to the opening one your mind is stuck on—and that would do the trick. Listening to the whole song is just easier.