The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Your comment made something click for me: I just realised that I'm losing this ability somehow.
I'm in my late twenties, and as a teenager I was very into reading novels, very dreamy and would daydream constantly about things ( real-world situations, memories, or fantastic ideas).Nowadays I barely get into fiction, pretty much all I read is either technical or essays, and it's been a while since I have a memorable dream. My memory is horrible for personal events too.
I don't know whether this development of my personality is due of barely being able to see something in my mind, or the other way around - but I just tried, and realized that I can't do it anymore. I try to visualize a car, or a landscape, and I just can't, only abstract concepts come to my mind. I'm only getting flashes of an image when trying to "see" familiar faces, like those of my family.
Any head injuries, antibiotic use or other big changes?
(Not sure about antibiotics, but I did lose some pre sleep visualations after a course of them, I think)
I am aphantasic at least since I'm 14. I definitly wasn't (as) aphantasic around the age of 10-12. I used to daydream a lot back then, and when reading fiction I had an image in my mind how those characters looked. In a way I still daydream when I don't constantly distract myself with my phone, I just shifted to "daydreaming" in more abstract concepts instead of visual imagery. And while most of my reading has shifted to technical and other nonfiction work, I very much still enjoy fiction.
Though as I am typing this out I am questioning my motives for liking fiction. I like fiction mostly for exploration of moral and ethics, as well as philosophical questions. Basically I read fiction to further my understanding of the world, which is the same reason I read a lot of non-fiction.
If I try to play an RPG game now, instead of enjoying the feeling of being inside a new world I'm just eagerly waiting for new plot developments while being frustrated at having to walk through places that the old me would have loved to explore.
It could be some sort of deficiency though.
This phenomenon I found referred to as astral projection[0], mostly in esoteric circles.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AstralProjection/comments/7ofaol/se...
I have this too. I feel that, for example, if I visualise a room of people I know but when I actually go and look at any detail then the situation goes. My hypothesis is that my immediate memory doesn't have the detail I'm wanting to look at so pushes me away rather than make something up or just give nothing.
The seeing with closed eyes is, I think, just the same but a local location.
Thinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility. What if no-one had a mind's eye and Aphantasia is simply the lack of a delusion of a mind's eye. Such tricks performed by the brain are well documented with regard to time, decision-making, optical illusions. Derren Brown exploits a lot of these for entertainment.
That leads to a philosophical notion of whether the delusion of having a sensation qualifies as a sensation itself. Would that make it the opposite of blindsight where people have the experience of being blind while being able to experimentally demonstrate they can see?
The talk went further to suggest that we don't actually 'see' with our eyes either, that our eyes and senses sends raw information, more like a description and the concepts are built in our mind, our experience might be like we're looking through our eyes and see a kind of picture of the world; But actually that is an illusion and our visual experience is more conceptually based which is why we are vulnerable to things like focus-blindness and other optical illusions where any kind of camera or picture taking device would not be.
A similar thing may happen with mental images. You "see" the pirate, but unless you are looking at the trousers you can't tell their color (the same would work with a real life pirate in front of you)
However, if i had a picture of a pirate, even a cursory glance would tell me if he had trousers on, even in the absence of hairy legs, censored, smudged, missing, i would notice it instantly and know it was missing before being asked.. but not if the image was in my mind, which means mental images don't act like actual images.
Anyway, the reason why people have to have drawing explained to them is because you have to translate 3d into 2d. Perspective is hard. And different parts of the brain can, essentially, fight about it. I suggest "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" for more info.
I've also 'cured' it, using a technique called image streaming, which most aphantasia sufferers can do. Very few aphantasia sufferers are actually incapable of using their mind's eye. It's hard, but apparently it gets better with practice. I have "seen" a mind's eye picture. It took me about 6 days before I saw something. I've not kept it up as it was kinda cool, but I've got enough projects on at the moment without adding another.
An easy test for you is to ask a friend to picture a person. Now ask what colour their coat is. For me and you, we have to make that up, add a new property to the description that is essentially a list of properties we know a person should have. For them, they already know, as they've "seen" a picture of that person. They don't say that they'll add the purple coat property to the list of characteristics, they have already seen a picture where the person was wearing a purple coat.
It's not mass delusion, it's a real thing. Also, of interest, is that there are degrees of skill, so some people have extremely vivid mind's eye, and some people have fuzzy, or black and white, or not very detailed, etc. Here's a good starter article:
I did it for about a week before I started seeing images, so it does take some practice and some time. I found recording myself while I did it helped me to keep speaking, which helped the process. The first few days were frustratingly without any progress, but things did start to come together about day 6 or 7.
At the time I had a ridiculous amount of projects I was trying to do, realized I was overwhelmed and this was one of the ones I have parked until a later date. I will try it again as it did seem to be working.
The article proposes and falsifies a different hypothesis (that aphantasic subjects actually have a mind's eye but have the delusion that they don't) but the scientific argument is equally valid against this hypothesis. There is a difference in implicit behavior (in this case, priming during binocular rivalry), so the difference between aphantasic and non-aphantasic individuals seems to go deeper than metacognition.
Whether it is a delusion or not is interesting. It might be moot. Maybe the judgement of realness or delusion is whether it is a competitive advantage or not. I have read that people with more synesthesia than me who can e.g. see numbers in colors, these people can pick out numbers faster off a page as they just go by the color. The color is processed in at a lower level, so it does come out as a competitive advantage.
For me, the visualization of everything is useful in interface design. Conversely I find it hard to talk to people sometimes due to the translation lag.
Re. the last paragraph, the delusion of a sensation vs. the sensation itself: Very interesting. The vision of the visual field in front of you, the vision of the surfaces and things and light in front of you, that vision does not exist there — it only exists inside your mind, physically inside your head. It is the delusion. Furthermore, the colors you might see do not exist at all.
Could be a type of synesthesia:
I don't and I have never doubted in somebody not seeing images in their head when they reported that was the case, even if I do see these images, however clearly or unclearly. I don't doubt your aphantasia on the basis of my having a different sense experience.
My experience does not invalidate yours, but neither does yours invalidate mine. My view is a minority perspective, you are discounting my _suggestion_ outright with a claim of being closed minded.
To be clear. I do not consider it to be wrong to have the experiences such as this or not. The notion that I have declared a majority of people broken is just plain false.
Ideas can be wrong, misguided, based on false assumptions, etc. The way I experience the world, or you experience the world, is not wrong - it's just how it is.
> just that it would be an interesting possibility.
This interesting possibility is based on the idea that your experience is somehow indicative of a "higher" or more truthful version of reality than everybody else's. I don't see how it's in any way helpful or productive.
> Thinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility.
I think your harsh reaction to his thought experiment is entirely anti-intellectual.
I don't think that's the case. A lot of racist or discriminating ideas can come from a place of "Well, my basis for thought is my own direct experience with no regard for how other people experience it or the validity of that experience." When his doubting of other peoples sense experience is solely based on his own sense experience without any interest in scientific basis or context, it's not an intellectual line of thought - it's just pseudo-intellectual rationalization for his own sense experience.
This in itself is probably worthy of study (and I hope someone is already researching this area).
That people have different experiences is uncontroversial, but the depth of feeling that seems to come from a challenge to one's sense experience seems disproportionately severe.
Consider the Blue and Black/White and Gold dress and Laurel, Yanni. There were extremely heated arguments over these otherwise trivial curiosities.
Yes. Because the lack of empathy is appalling. Whether it's this topic or the dress color or whatever, there's a crazy amount of lack of empathy for other points of view and other ways of experiencing the world - thus, all the pointless arguments over something that is just down to equally valid ways the brain interprets the world. I never argued with anybody what the right color was, because that was never the point or the interesting part of the whole thing - the interesting idea was what part of the brain is responsible for the differences from person to person, and that people take for granted how they experience the world.
Are you able to imagine sound? To me, imagining and hearing sound, and imagining and seeing images are equivalent relations. It seems obvious to me, but of course since we're talking about the literal differences of the way human minds can function here, I can see how it might not be to some.
Do you dream at all? I can still picture a lot of scenes from my most vivid dreams.
Do you read fiction? It's hard to imagine what's that like if I can't, well, paint a picture of the scenes you're trying to imagine, like in a movie.
(edited to clarify the last sentence)
However, I can know where objects are in a room and am excellent at navigating a city in my mind. It's like the data is there, but I can't visualize it, if that makes sense.
Music and sound recall is excellent. I have good memory of spoken words, and I can play songs in my head in what seems like full detail.
I dream. I kept a dream journal for a while and had a lot of detail. Though, I think I had more visualization then. I can definitely still recall dreams with a lot of detail though. But it's like my waking thoughts: the images aren't vivid.
Fiction is easy. I don't have visuals in the rest of my life, so I'm hardly missing them there. I think the same thing happens where I imagine a room with objects, but I just can't quite see it. But it's there.
What is hard is poetry, most of it I simply can't get into. There are a few exceptions. I've liked some ancient greek stuff, and I liked Felix Dennis. But most is just dull for me.
I'm not really into hiphop and it occurs to me this could be part of it....
I can imagine sounds extremely well. For songs I feel like I have a CD player in my head, remembering even surprisingly subtle nuances and bits of a song. No musical background at all - maybe I should have been one.
Dreams are sometimes extremely vivid - sometimes I wake up astonished and the colors and the imagery I saw, but the memory quickly fades. After finding out about aphantasia I'm frustrated to hear that others can do the same thing while awake.
Read tons and tons of SciFi for the last 40 years. No images through, it's like listening to a radio play. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to movies, TV, and comic books - for the supplied visual material.
I play piano and sing (badly), so when I imagine sounds it's imagining moving the muscles to create them -- either my fingers or vocal chords. By 'imagining moving' I mean similar to subvocalization or imagining, like, throwing a ball or something -- there is clearly some interaction between my muscles and my brain when I do it, like it is simulating the muscle activations necessary without actually executing them.
It makes me particularly good at identifying tunes from the first few notes.
I dream, my memory of dreams is much worse than most.
I used to read a lot of fiction, I don't anymore due to depression, when I finished a book it tended to send me into a crash.
When I did read fiction the words on the page were what was happening. It feels to me like painting a scene from the words and then looking at it with your mind's eye to get the experience is just a middle step that I skip, the words provide the experience directly.
It might also be possible to check with MRI which areas of the brain are active and whether there's a difference between those groups. If something known to process visual data is active in some people and not in others it would be evidence against the delusion hypothesis. In fact, some of the cited papers seem to be doing something like that.
There are experiments showing that some people who are cortically blind can make decisions based upon the vision of which they have no sense experience. The McGurk effect demonstrates people having an experience that isn't real. In fact the McGurk effect also shows how difficult things get with terminology when you 'hear' something different to what you hear. It's the same problem I mentioned above. If you feel like you are hearing 'da' when your ears receive 'ba' what are you actually 'hearing'?
I told my friends, some of whom went "ah-ha!". Oddly, someone who ran a lot of our WoW raids basically put 2+2 together and recognized why I had an almost impossible time on some bosses.
I also found out my mother has it - and she didnt know it was a thing either.
I had ALWAYS thought people were just bs'ing when someone would say stuff like "visualize this or that".
It's a shame that it feels like it hampers (or partly hampers) a lot of fields I am very interested in.
I have 0 visual ability when awake, but fully vivid dreams and vivid lucid dreaming... so theres just something that turns that off completely while fully awake.
I remember being really amazed at photo-fit artists and how they could recreate faces someone else had seen just from an explanation. It was only once I realised I couldn’t make images in my head that I realised it wasn’t the artist who had super-powers, it was the person who could actually remember someone else’s appearance in their head and tell them what to draw.
I heard chess masters are way better than normal people at remembering legal chess positions but no better than average at remembering illegal ones.
So I think it could be about learning a better representation with fewer artifacts.
I remember waking up and playing Tetris in my head before I got out of bed. I could keep track of the piece falling, the next piece and the board as it stood.
Even when I started programming, I would just remember like, the pattern the code made, and where it was within the file structure. I never used an IDE - I kinda felt like I could fit the entire thing in my head and just compile it dynamically to imagine what it would do. Some languages are easier to do that with then others. Even before that, learning HTML coincided with dreams of simply writing HTML and seeing the results.
I had a nightlight until I was at least 12 (off and on), as I would imagine the craziest things happening while I slept. I also suffered from sleep paralysis - I can still picture some of the demons that were on top of me from 25 years ago.
To this day, I live in a daytime world of constantly daydreaming, making up scenarios, and playing them out. I probably shoulda went into film.
Anyways, y'all aren't like that? Weird.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f1c0/e09b9909a751de4f1c15cd... Spatial versus object visualizers: a new characterization of visual cognitive style. [2005]
Here's an imgur album of the two most important figures from the paper, which might very well already summarize the majority of it for you:
The eyes are not connected straight to the main brain, they feed into a 'frame buffer' which creates an image. The brain then looks at what is in the 'frame buffer' and can also add/feedback into it.
This is partially why psychosis can seem so real. One part of our brain feeds into the 'frame buffer', the other part of the brain interpreting what you see can't tell the difference between input from the eyes and feedback from the brain. Those spiders you are seeing are as real to you as if you really do see them with your eyes.
This also goes some way to explaining how the 'gorilla walking through the basketball game' illusion works and other visual tricks such as not seeing the blackout when your eyes move - you really didn't see that cyclist etc.
(I've explained that in my simple language from recollection as it's how I easily understand it.)
Same with faces: I guess nobody can really 'see' a face in their imagination, at least not for more than a few seconds of high-resolution short-term memory. They can, however, use their knowledge about nose shapes etc. to construct a symbolic model of the face in their mind.
As a boy, way back in the sixties, age four or five, one day I overheard my parents talking of 'color tv' and the possibility of getting such a thing. "What is that?" was my obvious question. "A tv that can show colors, of course". "But our tv does do color", I informed them, and was promptly told it didn't. But of course it did. I was adamant. I knew that television was full of colors, and always had been. I could describe the colors of all sorts of things I'd seen on our tv. I remember knowing for a fact that a Volkswagen in some series I had been following was bright red. Stupid parents for not realising.
Next time the thing was turned on in all its vacuum tube glory, everything - to my immense disappointment - was greyscale, and remained so for several years until an actual color tv was actually purchased.
One interesting aspect are psychedelics. I only get open-eye visuals but almost no closed-eye effects except for light flashes (black & white, no imagery), even on high doses of LSD/Mushrooms. But i do get dream-like, very abstract 'recreations' which are hard to describe. I get to relive memories etc, just not see them.
But, using DMT - i visualize like crazy with abstract / geometric colorful patterns. And even when totally sober, i sometimes dream/recall those patterns during sleep, which wakes me up immediately because it's so overwhelming compared to my dull normal dreams.
This makes me think that i actually can visualize, i just block it out (i'm a very headstrong/rational person) and i'm working with meditation techniques to open the gate (or chakra, if you're esoterically inclined) permanently, so far unsuccesfully.
I do think that more research here would be great as i'm convinced it also impacts creativity and thinking patterns. For example, my strong creativity outlet is music; visual art is foreign to me.
But anyway. Normally, I do not see stuff that isn't (arguably) there. With my eyes open, or closed. But I can imagine stuff, and reason based on those imagined images or whatever. That is, I can do all those object rotation tests. I can imagine some thing, and create it in wood or metal, without anything but crude drawings.
Or when I read a good description of a fight, for example, I can imagine how it would work. Or not, if it wouldn't.
But is this basically a form of blindsight?
Also, it was my impression that people who experience stuff that isn't there are typically diagnosed with some sort of psychosis. And from my experience with psychedelics, I know what that's like. Even with good marijuana, I sometimes see and hear people talking to me, just before I pass out.
I can't imagine how it would work if I were constantly seeing stuff that isn't there. How could I, for example, drive a car? Or walk across the room, even?
So am I confused, or aphantasic?
When I "imagine" images, they're not usually superimposed or mixed into the input from my eyes like you described. They're on like a "second computer monitor" in my head. Maybe this helps you understand what it's like?
I "see" what I imagine, but I also can see what it is that's in front of my eyes, and the two things don't conflict with each other.
Here is another description of it, and a test in the first part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI
I mean, how does driving work, when you see what you imagine?
Edit: And now that I think of it, I have had some accidents where I reacted to what I expected the other driver to do. But they did something else. One in particular I remember. The car ahead of me had a turn signal flashing. I thought that it was the right one. Or at least, that's what I remembered. So I passed on the left. And hit the other car, because it had turned left. And I recall thinking that I actually saw the car turn right.
I'm glad that doesn't happen more often :)
It does remind me of blindsight. That is, people who complain of blindess, but obviously do react to visual input.
From wikipedia "spatial imagery consists of mentally representing spatial relations between the parts or locations of the objects or movements.".
Analysing whether a written description of fight choreography would work in actual 3-dimensional space is very much spatial imagery, a strenght of aphantastic people.
I can also reason about the three-dimensional shape of a banana and create a technical drawing of one, rotate objects in my mind, fold objects in my mind etc. But all this sounds like spatial imagery, and does not involve me actually having a mental image.
I wouldn't describe it as "mental images", but I certainly have mental representations. But these mental representations are about the 3d shape, the behavior, texture etc. Images on the other hand are not properties of an object, they are projections of 3d geometry into 2d space (with the added work of simulating light to properly shade the image). I suppose I would be decent at painting if I put the practice in it, but the idea of an actual mental image is foreign to me. For me, creating an image is basically a conscious translation task, and without a medium to record my progress I can't handle at best basic shapes.
Basically talking about images is no different to me than talking about textures, or the propagation of smells, or the orbits of planets.
Myself:
• I can “visualise” images moderately well; ditto the tingling feeling of UV light and pins and needles (the paresthesia, not the objects of the same names); and both real electric shocks and the experience of the same description that happens when withdrawing from SSRIs.
• I can “visualise” sounds, balance, sustained pressure, heat, and kinesthetic senses to the level they have sometimes become indistinguishable from my actual senses;
• I can sometimes switch off pain
• I cannot “visualise” smells or tastes at all. Pattern match to other similar tastes and smells is only possible while I am experiencing the thing I am trying to compare.
This is interesting. Can you elaborate? Is this something you have worked on or is it just intuitive for you?
I have been able to do this exactly once in my life, during a meditation session in which I was meditating on external sounds. I also had acute pain in my elbow, arthritis-related. At one point the access concentration became very focused, my sense of self disappeared and I could not distinguish myself spatially from the sounds I was hearing. At the same time the pain in my elbow also detached from me. It was still all present but it was just no longer my problem. The sense of relief, the surprise that this was possible, and the realisation I could do this with just my mind, the blissful feeling from the intense concentration; it all added up and I simply broke out into surprised, joyful, laughter. It dissipated in a minute or two after that. Therefore I'm curious by what you mean about being able to do this.
For lack of better words: the situations have involved knowing the cause of the pain, knowing it represents nothing important, and making it totally cease from the point of view of my (I dislike this phrase but don’t have a better one) conscious self awareness.
I read that this was common and I polled people I knew. Some people can vividly recall many smells, whereas I can do maybe one or two, and only with so much difficulty that I'm not sure if I'm just tricking myself. I don't know if anyone can visualize the _elements_ of smells, though.
I have had poor visualization for years. I do remember being able to see images in my head when younger though. In a fair of detail in some cases.
A few years ago (when I had already lost much visualization) I took a course of antibiotics for MRSA. After that I lost the ability to see colourful visions pre-sleep.
I used to get the most fantastic images in full colour with incredible detail. Then when on the antibiotics they seemed dark. Now I can still have visualizations, but I can't see them. (Meaning, they're happening, and I get glimpses, but I can't continuously view them)
Sort of annoying as they were a good way to fall asleep. Focussing on them hasn't seemed to rebuild the ability.
Do you know which exact antibiotics? Some antibiotics have psychoactive effects.
How would I search once I found them?
If I specifically force myself to imagine how it would look if I was at a specific position looking in a specific direction (i.e. do the 2d projection), I can in-paint in my mind starting from a black canvas, focusing sequentially my attention on a part of the canvas making details appear at the center of attention. I scan the canvas a few times in-painting details, and then I try to mentally take a step back visualize all those various details in a unique coherent picture, by un-focusing attention. It kinda work, but it needs to get into it. It's easier to imagine looking at a photo from the scene I'm trying to visualize. I noticed my eyes do some REM when I do this. Color and illumination comes last. Closing eyes helps. I can mentally do a "street-view" experience of my home, moving inside and answer question about details, but I need to focus my attention first on the relevant area.
Those mental exercises are quite funny, not sure how useful they are though. Once you add some moving objects (like pendulums) in the scene in your mind, it gets even harder to make something coherent. Then you can add animals and people, wind. Noises, music. I guess when you add complexity, you must relax your attention to make a coherent global picture, then you get into a flow-like state, and it becomes more similar to a lucid dream.
On the other hand of the spectrum, I'm not quite sure about auras too. It's kind like of synesthesia but for people instead of numbers. I guess the brain hallucinate colors around object/people to make it faster to process. I find it quite unnecessary to hallucinate rather than having a specific feel about the person. And I feel it's quite reductive/intolerant to put/interact with people into a category based on subconscious perception. But I guess that if I was a bouncer, I'll probably be seeing colors around people too.
To conclude this already too long post, I think aphantasia is probably very correlated with hyper-attention.
Once I started thinking about it more, I realised I can actually imagine a very precise scenario, except that it is always behind me. It could be similar to how a blind person perceives the world, not seeing anything but knowing that everything is there.
The way I see it, I can process two different worlds at once. I've always been very good at modeling abstract things in my head, e.g. binary trees or a graph.
I do feel I'm missing out somewhat on richness of experience. When I try to visualize it's as if there's just a texture to the blackness in my mind, like a handprint in mud.
I recently learned about Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). It's hard to tell based on textual descriptions, but it does seem to relate to aphantasia and the fact I can't recall most of the past, whether it be ten days or ten years ago.
It’s crazy how little we understand our mind still.
I only found out about aphantasia early 2018. I had always suspected there was something different/difficent and went to a university study, and just reaffirmed my IQ and discovered that I reallly get slow on some tasks - I find the answer fast enough but I have a lifetime of distrust on my processes, so just out of habit do double or triple checks (which dont really make better answers, just verify what I am writing is what was meant, I guess). Of course, no one knew about aphantasia at this point.
I failed geometry in jr.high hard. It was almost impossible. But making and passing calculus was relatively easy (long story short: parents moved, lied about passing geometry).
I have mild dyslexia, so I think that mixed with the other just makes it reallly hard.
I think you assume it is required to do it visually only because you do it that way. Personally I've had no trouble with that kind of IQ test without using visualization.
Edit: here's the article, rotation stuff is in the 2nd paragraph on page 2.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120615154334/http://discovermag...
I also found throughout life I cannot easily transfer my ideas (like, if I have a concept for something, its not an image, its just a collection of ideas or concepts) into something physical
(found out about aphantasia early 2018)
How many coders here also can't picture things in their mind visually for longer then a quick flash?