Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015)

nytimes.com

59 pointsTomte103 comments

Every time this intriguing subject comes up on Hacker News, which is a lot, I end up with the distinct impression that the spectrum of reported condition is more a function of our inability to convey and compare the inner experience, than of variation in the inner experience itself.

I've always wondered if there are people out there without an inner experience at all. How would you even tell?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

> Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims, it is metaphysically possible, which is all the argument requires.

That's not an argument, its just imagination! (with apologies to Monty Python).

Alternately, individual humans function totally differently on the inside, but the language-adapter provides a comfortable illusion of consistency :P

I admit that improving objective measures, like brain-scanning techniques, indicate that isn't so likely.

> individual humans function totally differently on the inside

My completely uninformed guess is that this is unlikely to be true. I expect with roughly the same biological equipment we are more or less the same, with some minor differences, some surprising innate exceptions, and of course cultural/upbringing differences. And of course, some visible biological differences which cause behavior/thought differences.

Like the parent post guesses, I think at least some of the reported differences with aphantasia come from people reporting their inner experiences differently, and that they are probably more alike than we think. But of course, I also believe there are some real differences, too.

It's hard to have this conversation without having a specific way to talk about the inner workings of the mind.

For example, a biologist could (possibly) say that a person who couldn't visualize things had a mind that was almost identical a person who could.

A psychologist might say that nonetheless this represents a large difference in function.

Both would be right in their own way, but you'd need to define the internal thought process in a specific and uniform way before you could qualify it was a "different" or "similar."

Yes, agreed. It's very hard to have this conversation!

I guess I'm just saying it's very unlikely (to me) that any given two people function "totally differently" internally. I agree there must be differences, some of them astonishing, but I have a hard time believing those two people are totally different. It's the same biological hardware supporting the same kind of software -- maybe one is Windows and the other is Linux though ;)

Nothing of what I'm saying is scientific or definitive, just my gut feeling. I'm aware of the dangers of comparing people to hardware/software, and I know it's a flawed analogy.

This probably accounts for some of the variation between people. I notice that I can't really tell if I have aphantasia or not.

I know that in my younger years (say, up to 15) I drew a bit. I remember that, for simple shapes, I could my 'mental eye' to come up with an image and trace it on the paper.

However, I stopped drawing at about 15 or 16, and did a lot of programming and math. I find it really hard to come up with a mental image of anything. Even if I think about the face of my girlfriend I can only give particular features without really having a sharp image of her face.

So my impression is that it is trainable (and the skill fades if not used).

> I end up with the distinct impression that the spectrum of reported condition is more a function of our inability to convey and compare the inner experience, than of variation in the inner experience itself.

Interesting idea—which do you think is the universal inner experience, then: do you think that everybody can visualize images, just some people don't realize it, or that nobody can visualize images, and just some people are confused into thinking they can?

The second alternative can't be right: I know I can visualize images and I'm not confused about it :) I can picture the face of my relatives, or an animal, or my house, down to the colors. I could draw them or paint them from memory (and in fact, I'm pretty good at drawing).

Similarly, the first alternative can't be right, either: I know I can't visualize images, and I'm not confused about that, either. I can't do any of those things you're describing.

Why not both?

Why would internal invisible thought processes be the same but all visible processes be different?

This article may not be the best example, but there's good evidence that inner experiences differ, based on our actual capabilities, e.g., Feynman's/Tukey's experiment that one could count time while reading but not talking, and the other could count time while talking but not reading.

I imagne that is a large part of the issue, but the article begins with someone who noticed a difference in his own experiences, following a candidate triggering event (an unspecified minor surgical procedure.) This is not proof of anything, but it suggests that in some cases, there is something to the idea beyond just mis-communication.

In this case, there is also the physical evidence from brain scanning. I would guess that some proportion of those self-reporting as aphantasic would be indistinguishable from the general population by such measures.

There's an easy test. Ask someone to visualise the face of a friend and then ask about some detail that isn't one people normally note, like how thick the person's eyebrows are. Those with the ability to visualise will be able to see it and relate the information. Those without, like me, will not.

The best “test” for this I’ve heard is to ask people how many windows they have in their apartment. They might say 5 and then you ask them how they came to this conclusion. A normal thing to do is to walk through your apartment in your mind and count. Someone with a Aphantasia either remembers the number or cannot answer this question.

You don't need to visualize anything there, do you?

I just go "kitchen, one, living room, another two..."

But I'd have to think hard which way the windows swing open, unless they are double windows.

Do you know your living room has two windows without seeing it in your mind?

While typing that question I had a flash of an image of the wall with (2) windows.

I have a vague picture of a white frame behind a couch, but nothing definitive. For example, I don't "see" any color of the couch, even though I can tell you the color if I think about it.

It's more a "conceptual windows behind couch" than my real one.

I suspect I'm on the spectrum quite a bit towards Aphantasia (which would explain a few things), but not at the very end.

The same way I know 2,3,5,7 are the first primes without flashing a picture of the number line in my head, or Beethoven's 5th starts "ba-ba-ba-baahm" without flashing a picture of the sheet music in my head. Most of my memories are not stored in graphic form.

Beethoven is sound, so that's different from sight. Can you hear Beethoven's 5th in your mind?

I'm a visual type, so I can't wrap my head around how one could think without pictures. How do you retrieve the information about windows in your house? I can just walk through my house through my mind, but if you don't see... how else would you retrieve information that you don't have memorized?

I have memories of opening up all the windows in my apartment, so I know I have one in the bedroom and one in the living room. The memory is more "felt" in the motion of my arms in unlocking and sliding said windows than "seen". If you asked me how many panes of glass it has, I couldn't tell you. At least two, because it opens by sliding sideways, and that doesn't move the whole window. Are there crossbeams subdividing the two portions vertically or horizontally? Maybe a grid? I couldn't tell you. I can't even tell you how many panes of glass my mental image has, it's too indistinct.

Having just now stood up to check - it looks like the answer is 3 planes of glass for the living room window, which I never would've guessed. The two sliding panes, undecorated aside from their frames, and then another fixed pane above - presumably so the movable bits aren't as heavy by reaching all the way to the ceiling - with a wooden lattice/grid subdividing it into a 2x6 grid.

I personally don't quite have aphantasia - I do have the ability to (very weakly) visualize. It's so weak I grew up thinking the "minds eye", "visualizing", "counting sheep", and "memory palaces" were all overly flowery metaphors that meant thinking non-visually about concepts. I didn't get the draw of scenery descriptions, and still can't effectively turn them into worthwhile visualizations. I was never disturbed by the characters described in books looking different than I imagined them when a movie was made, because I'd never imagined them visually.

Say reality has a vividness and observable detail of 10. Dreams also rate a 9 or a 10 when I experience them - subjectively indistinguishable from reality except by realizing that what I'm experiencing might be "impossible" by the rules of the world as I know them, and that the more likely explaination is thus that I'm dreaming. On the other hand, visualizing those same dreams from memory - or visualizing any other memory - might only rate a 1, if that. Trying to visualize a non-memory - e.g. trying to visualize "a beach" if I don't take the specific effort of thinking of a specific beach I've been to before and trying to remember that beach specifically - I get the outline of a circle, and two straight linear lines - without color or texture or anything, representing the sun, the horizon, and the interface between sand and sea.

I'm semi-convinced this is partially down to habit. My default pattern as I go about my day is, when seeing things, to reduce them down to their concepts first, and then to remember those concepts, and then to later recall those concepts and reenforce those memories, rather than the weak and forgotten visual memories, which in turn means a very weak mental visual library from which to draw from for synthesizing visualizations, and very little practice remembering or recalling such memories.

As an experiment along those lines - I made a point of observing and remembering the visual representation of various lane-merge road signs during a commute. Turns out there's a bunch of different patterns in various rotations - mostly yellow, but some orange. It's still a memory heavily renforced by concepts - the 3 dashes of one pattern, the S-bend shape divided into approximately thirds. I could draw them pretty accurately. Ask me to draw a speed limit sign and... well, I know the color scheme, and there's a large number, and I could tell you where several are and what the limits are. I think they say "speed limit" on them, but I couldn't tell you if the words go above or bellow the number, or maybe both? Perhaps it varies by sign? Is there a "MPH" too? I have remembered that road signs are ALLCAPS and sans-serif (by straight up realizing those were questions I could ask and answer for myself by observing reality), so despite not knowing where on the signs the words go, I at least know what the shape of the letters should be pretty accurately.

That test doesn't work, at least for me. I can't visualise at all, but I can think about my house and remember how many windows are in each room. The difference is I remember them abstractly, not visually.

Yeah, when i'm visualizing i'm just describing how something looks with language. I could write out a description of walking through my house and counting the windows i find, and that's pretty much the same as what i call visualizing. I even dream occasionally without visuals, just me telling the story of what's happening in the dream.

Do you have audio, scent, taste , or touch memory?

I can't visualize, but I have all those. So for example I can think about objects abstractly, remember their smell and feel them.

Same with me. My description of it is that my "visualisation" is not "visual" but "conceptual". I don't SEE the room and therefore the windows, but I know the concept of the room with it's windows.

That's a really good way of putting it, and it's fits me to some extent too. Thanks.

For me its almost like that. But I have like a vague visualization. Like I recall what it looks like to be standing in those positions or looking in that direction, but it's never a sharp or stable image. Rather very fleeting.

To me it's like there is a visualization ability that is turned all the way up when I am asleep and turned most of the way down when I am awake.

Why would it be more normal to walk through apartment then just simple remember the number?

Because it's enormously abnormal to remember such a useless fact.

You would remember just from cleaning them and thus knowing how much work remains repeatedly.

I would know how much work remains by visualizing the uncleaned windows in my apartment.

That does not imply it is abnormal to remember overall number after you visualized it few times. I would even argue it is abnormal to not remember result of calculation you have done multiple times.

It's a useless number. People don't tend to remember useless numbers they can recalculate with no effort. Same with the number of doors or plants.

And they also don't need to visualise whole house to get that number. That strikes me as the more absurd way of finding the number even when you are calculating it.

Can't argue with that. It's just easier to visualize a complete city with all the houses inside of that city than it is to remember a useless number. At least for me. Text is hard for me to remember, pictures aren't.

So count something you see, but dont interact with? Most people do not count and rememeber every object in their homes. The point is to illustrate that some people dont have working 3D models in their minds, not to argue about what method for remembering is easiest for you.

You do interact with window every time you clean it. Is it someone else who cleans where you live? If yes and you dont pay them, you should participate in cleaning too.

You do interact with windows every time you check they are all closed before leaving for holidays or weekend. Every time you close it and open it. Most people have small number of rooms and exactly one occasionally two windows in it. We are not talking about how many books you have nor anything like that. We are talking about large visible objects that are few in numbers you interact with fairly often.

Also, the point was not to illustrate point, the point was to diagnose visualization problem based on remembering number of windows.

Even when interacting, why would you count them?

You don't need to consiously count them to remember how many of them are.

Plus, while cleaning them or checking whethe they are closed, you will be like "two done, three to go" enough times to remember "five".

Not really. I think "two rooms to go", not "x windows to go". There's no point in counting or adding, so I don't bother. Also, I only clean my windows once a year, if that. There's an hilarious story about a spider family having bred on the other side of a closed window I hadn't opened all year. That must have been at least 500 spiders. It was hard to even look through the window, so I eventually bothered to clean that one early. Maybe a mistake, seeing how half of those spiders than entered into my room, but, whatever. I don't mind spiders.

> walk through your apartment in your mind

I.e., most people don't just remember the number off the top of their heads, but will have to take a couple of seconds to build a mental image and count at the time the question is first asked of them.

I understand that. I just find it ridiculous that this test considers a way that does not involve visualisation as something abnormal or proof that the person has the disorder.

Tests like your first question are often poor indicators because people without an ability will develop other skills or methods to compensate. We don't just walk through life not knowing anything that's going on around us.

After being asked "How many X are there?" a few times, for example, we figure out that counting and remembering minutiae is important.

I once read an article about aphantasia which showed a bunch of blocks, and later showed different orientations of blocks and asked if they were the same or not. If you could, the article concluded that you had good ability to visually rotate a 3D object in your mind. I don't know if I do or not. That sounds difficult. But I could say right away which shapes sounded the same.

I think the more important question was how they came up with the number. If you lack the ability to go through your apartment in your mind and count the windows AND do not happen to remember the number outright, it might indicate something like aphantasia.

Absolutely -- but realize at that point you're asking a brain for an explanation of how it operates. Self-reported data in social science is not the most robust.

Especially in the situation where you're trying to figure out if someone has constructed their own methods to mimic 'normal' ones. The more effective and internalized the method, the less likely the person is going to be able to identify and report it.

Just look at all the people who are saying they're surprised to learn that "picture it in your mind" is meant to be literal. Their mimicry is so effective they can't recognize it in themselves.

My brother in law has aphantasia. We've had long conversations comparing our experience, or lack thereof, of mental images. One thing he says is that for remembering faces, its more like he can store a hash or metadata of a face, then when seeing a person again, can check that the hash or meta matches. Also, he doesn't get "earworms", that is, pieces of music that encode and replay in his mind ad nauseum. When asked to imagine a given piece of music, he inadvertently hums.

I have aphantasia and love the analogy to hashing. It matches my experience quite closely in as much as I can't really imagine faces in the abstract, but can verify a match in the real world with ease. Reminds me of NP-hard problems in that respect – verification is easy, calculation is hard.

With respect to not being able to imagine music though, I don't think the two are necessarily linked. I most definitely get earworms, and as a guitarist rely heavily on my "mind's ear".

That's interesting, because i visualize only by describing a thing to myself in words, but my inner ear can play a song just as if i were listening to it and i get earworms all the time.

> One thing he says is that for remembering faces, its more like he can store a hash or metadata of a face, then when seeing a person again, can check that the hash or meta matches.

That is normal way of remembering things. Pretty much all drawing from life tutorials for beginners put emphasis on human memory being bad when it comes to visual details. They explain in depth that mind simplifies and you should look more then draw.

Great analogy to hashing. I call it "seeing in concept instead of visuals" but hashing works better for facial recognition :)

In regards to music - for me it's the opposite. I can't visualise to save my life, but I can compose an entire symphony in my head and hear it in all it's glory. Or "perform" any accent I've heard before perfectly in my head (of course it won't ever come out even close to how I hear it internally if I try to actually speak it).

Do you mean hash or a description? A hash is a completely opaque symbol. A description is notes like shape, color, nose size, eye shape, etc

When i was in 9th grade preparing for a bio paper my friend told me to just visualize diagrams with your eyes closed, i just couldn't and found out this was not normal. I stumbled on Blake Ross's note* on this and realized i was not the only one. When i showed this to my younger brother, he told me that he had the same condition, while our parents don't.

*Link to the note: https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

I can visualize specific, static picture like stock photos, but I cannot manipulate them.

eg. "picture a venn diagram" - I can imagine the basic one with A, B and C overlapping a bit. I cannot adjust how many items are there or how they overlap or what colour they are.

"imagine a beach" - standard photo of a beach you see in travel ads. Usually include text like "discover Greece!"

"picture a cat" - the most common photo of grumpy cat, I can also switch to keyboard cat, poptart cat, Garfield, Felix the cat, but I can't picture a "regular" cat despite having owned one for over a decade

I wonder if that counts as aphantasia or just severe lack of imagination. Since I'm not "blind in my mind" - I've a large internal database of pictures, but I can't do the "picture yourself on a beach" thing either.

I can draw anything somewhere but can't really close my eyes and visualize be it stock photos or manipulated.

I think there is a fine line between "picture yourself in X,Y,Z" vs "close your eyes and visualize a simple thing that you know well". Don't know if there is a standard test to find out if you indeed(medically) have it or not.

That's not aphantasia. You can see things in your mind.

This reminds me of the recent article where not everyone has an inner monologue

https://insidemymind.me/2020/01/28/today-i-learned-that-not-...

I wish more discussion of aphantasia would discuss what the people who have it do instead, as they do not appear to be cognitively impaired and perhaps even the opposite they do posses the ability to reason counterfactually, so could it all be about the level of abstraction - symbolic/verbal imagination by default ?

I just "see" in concepts, not visuals. Until a year or so ago when this all broke out (some Pixar head of animation spoke about himself having it), I had no idea that was a thing. I thought everyone "see" in concepts. I had no idea people actually "see" when they "see in their mind". It was quite a shock knowing I'm missing out on free cinema. But I managed 40+ years without knowing about it, I can pull another 40 at least being aware of it.

What about memories, can you audio-visually recollect conversations, arguments etc. that you've had or just their content ?

I can recollect the conversation's audio track, down to diction and intonation. I cannot recall a visual image of it, but I have the "abstract concept" of it pegged down. It's the best I can do. Considering i didn't know any better most of my life I guess it's ok. I just wish I could get some visuals. On a side note - dreaming works - i rarely remember dreams but when I do they are visual, and hmmm... some substances in my youth did trigger actual visuals.

Interesting, what about looking at a photo - say of a red apple on a green plate like this one:

https://previews.123rf.com/images/anthonycz/anthonycz1711/an...

Then closing your eyes and not trying to imagine a red apple on a green plate but instead trying to recollect the image you saw ?

I will recollect an apple on a plate. I can maybe tell you the colour of the plate if I'll remember it. But the image will be 100% blank. Nothing there but darkness. You know those spy films where the hero memorised all the exists and items on the table so he can use them later? I'll be lost and/or dead in those situations. My sense of direction is horrible at best. I get lost on a straight road with a GPS (this is not an exaggeration - I do).

I'm still skeptical that this is an actual thing. I think people might just be overestimating how clearly other humans can visualize something in their minds.

Do people with "aphantasia" see visual imagery in dreams?

Yes. Only voluntary visualizations are impaired. (N=2)

I have this condition and used to think `mind's eye` was just an expression!

In this tweet, I'm a hard 5, while everyone I have spoken to is a 1 or a 2 - https://twitter.com/premium__heart/status/122561067717752013...

I do see visual imagery when I'm dreaming, but cannot voluntarily bring the imagery back when I'm awake.

I think that this other image with simple geometric shape (a star?) that was circulating on Twitter was better for ranking the mind's eye; I think on your image, some people responding 1-2 may really be 2-3.

Myself, I'm 5 too. And it really pisses me off. I wish the mind's eye was trainable. Is it?

(And to answer GP's question, during the - infrequent - dreams I have, I'm usually a perfect 1.)

Nobody has proven that it's not trainable, so I'd assume that it is. But what's a good training method? Maybe a visual hobby, like video gaming?

I'm someone who is exceptionally good at visual things. For the apple, I can do way better than the example picture (1) on the Twitter image. I can not only do 2D, but 3D. I can rotate the apple in my mind and slice it and then rotate the slices etc. Found out about this by accident, while watching YouTube videos with visual puzzles, that were completely obvious for me with a single glance.

And I spend most of my free time on visual hobbies, like playing video games or watching movies. But maybe I'm just attracted to those hobbies, because I'm a visual type.

> Nobody has proven that it's not trainable, so I'd assume that it is.

I've never heard of a successful training regime, or even of anyone who successfully trained it, so that's an evidence against it being trainable.

> And I spend most of my free time on visual hobbies, like playing video games or watching movies. But maybe I'm just attracted to those hobbies, because I'm a visual type.

I'd guess the latter, because I also spend a lot of time on visual hobbies, like playing video games or 3D modelling, and it didn't help me in any way. I still don't have a mind's eye when I'm awake.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. A good training exercise I can think of is to build complex Lego models according to the instructions. It's how I spend lots of my time in my early childhood, before I was allowed to play video games and watch TV. By touching the pieces and rotating them yourself you get good image training of how shapes look when you rotate them. Building things in a 3D space based on drawn instructions from only a single point of view should also help to build mental images.

If this a clinically accurate way to diagnose aphantasia, then I must have it, as I dont "see" anything. To me this smacks of a facebook share post, though....

If people are diagnosing themselves with this (or the star one I have seen elsewhere), then I think there is clearly confusion between hallucination and visualization.

Maybe a more straightforward test: can you watch a movie you've seen again, but in your mind? I can. (But I have trouble to keep the timing straight and will fast forward unintentionally to the parts that were interesting. I'm also constrained by my memory if it's about movies I haven't seen in ages.)

I can't see an image but I can describe an image as though I've seen it which leads me to believe it's a deficiency in communication between the hemispheres of my brain.

I can still dream. As a teenager I learnt to lucid dream so I could use my sleep to visualize things. Interesting stuff.

The few dreams i can remember are all about feelings. Like i am moving in an abstract world. I know what is there, i know what is happening, but i am incapable of describing it in term of senses. It just ...is ? Like i can only relate to it through how it makes me feel and how my model of their relationship with the world is. I cannot describe any physical or visual aspect.

And i am probably on the extreme of aphantasia

I have no visual imagery in dreams either. I still have spatial awareness and can move about unimpeded, but there is no visual element to it. Other dream senses are uninhibited.

While conscious I can play back long complex pieces of music in my head, and can imagine fairly vivid tastes and touches. But I can't picture my wife's face.

I can't see anything, except the static from my eyes. I can remember how it feels to touch things, their attributes, their smell and so on but that's it.

Sometimes, if I concentrate really hard, I may see a really short flash of a small part from a visual memory. But I can't say that I have any control over that, so it's not really helpful when trying to remember things.

Dreams are visual though.

I have a hypothesis that this condition and ADHD are related. ADHD researcher Dr Russell Barkley links Vygotsky’s theories of childhood development to the mechanism by which ADHD interferes with executive function [0]. An ADHD brain would be less capable of imagining things and holding those images, which would lead to failure in development of self-directed action via those imagined images. Is this ”aphantasia”? I’m not sure, but I find it plausible.

The prevalence for ADHD has been cited at 5% in children and half of that in adults. A commenter here says aphantasia has been guessed to be at 1-3% [1], which would be a rough match. Another commenter describes their ADHD and aphantasia [2], and I am under the impression this has been reported often. If there was a causal relation I would expect to see these kinds of overlaps in the data, but it’s really the researcher’s description of a failure of imagination that makes this hypothesis especially interesting to me.

What do you think? Has anyone looked into this?

[0]: https://youtu.be/sPFmKu2S5XY

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810934

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811184

I don’t have ADHD, I’m pretty laid back actually, but I don’t have a mind’s eye.

I was 30 or so before I realised “the mind’s eye” wasn’t a metaphor, and people really could visualise things in their head. My brain doesn’t work like that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature...

I remember things using rules. Whenever, for example, I need to tell someone to turn right or left, the mantra “I write with my right” pings off, somewhere in my head. It just did, writing this. It’s the way I remember facts, apparently rules are much easier than random facts.

But how could that be a feature ? Well I can build fiendishly complicated mental models layering rules on top of rules. I can’t see them, but I can use them to predict results, and it gives me insights that most people don’t grasp without the explanation that I’ve just discovered for them. My brain just makes these rulesets up, examines, discards, and reformulates them without conscious effort. I get the end result, and (most times) a consequence-chain back to the problem starting conditions.

I do wonder if being forced to figure stuff out without the ability to visualise is what made me have what I consider my primary skill - the ability to look at something, conceptualise how it could work relationally, solve the problem in my head, and only then justify that solution by working back from that solution to the problem I was trying to solve in the first place.

For the people I work with, it sometimes seems like magic. For me, it’s Tuesday. I do sometimes wish I had a mind’s eye, but I think what I do have makes up for missing out, just in a different way. So as I said, bug or feature, it’s really not that clear to me - I could see the argument from both sides... :)

This lead me down a rabbit hole of researching to try and understand what it is, if I have it, and really understand what it is not. At first, yes, it matches me, I see nothing but my eyelids when I close my eyes, because that is the stimulation my eyes are receiving, no different from waking up at night and it's pitch ass black in my room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqJ42oGOM8 This video gave me a context to what it is not and answered that no, I do not have it. I can mentally visualize my cat, in full vivid description though I see (visually with my eyes) nothing but my eyelids.

So to actually see something, to hallucinate vision which does not exist, is not what people normally experience. People can learn to hallucinate and see actual vision when their only visual stimulation is their eyelids, to project what they think visually to the actual sensory input of vision.

So as I understand from the few hours of research, if you are unable to describe an object without visually seeing it with your (open) eyes, then you would actually be aphantasiac.

Various sources are putting the base rate of Aphantasia between 1% and 3%. Both myself and my brother have it, but neither of our parents do. I feel like this is evidence for it being a recessive inherited disorder. Considering we're both male, it might also be weak evidence for X-linked recessive in particular.

I saw a video on youtube of someone claiming to have aphantasia, but to me it just seemed that they were misinterpreting what others would "see" when they visualise something.

When asked to "picture" something, for some reason they assumed people would actually see a faint version of it in their visual field - and because they couldnt "see" it, they believed they had aphantasia.

e.g. when asked to visualize a clown sitting in a chair in front of them, they expected people to actually (however faintly) see a clown in a chair in front of them. To me that is hallucination, not visualization.

Of course, it could be ME misinterpreting it, and people do actually "see" things they visualize, and I have aphantasia.... How would I know? What is the experience for you? (if you dont mind me asking)

Since I had discovered I have this condition (about 9 years ago), I spent a lot of time interrogating many people about how _they_ 'see' things, and it is definitely a spectrum, though I'm very close to one end of it.

For example, a simple "Close your eyes and imagine a cat. [pause] What color is it? What's it doing?" question results in:

Most people: Orange. A bit scruffy. It's playing with a ball of yarn beneath a chair. I can clearly see it jumping around.

Fewer, but still common: It's orange. It's just suspended in nothingness in a fixed position.

Me: What do you mean color? You didn't tell me I need to give it a color!

Imagining something just summons the concept of that thing to your mind. You can attach properties to the cat and you can analyze it, but unless a given property has been attached in particular, it's simply null.

On the other hand, the people at the far end of the visual spectrum draw a complete blank when you say "Imagine an un-cat leaping over the chair".

OK - I think I understand what you are saying. I would have the same problem as yourself with that visualization.

I also have an extremely poor memory. For me, the (very few) memories I have are like a very blurry monochrome photo. I have always believed this is anxiety related (I have chronic anxiety and ADHD).

FYI, I have just done this cat question on my partner, her cat was grey and was sleeping... I asked her if that cat had a colour before I asked her what colour it was, and she said it did. For me, that cat would have no colour. Its possible I would then add a colour when asked the colour.

The most spectacular thing about this is that no matter how people visualize things, everyone always assumes the rest of are the same. So for me it was completely mind blowing that others can truly _see_ things, while for them they couldn't understand that I couldn't. It's just not the kind of thing you discuss with people often, so we just instinctively generalize from one example. Typical mind fallacy.

I've since heard of a second instance of the generalization phenomena - Some people wipe their butt while still sitting, some stand up. Unscientific polling showed that the split is roughly 50/50 in a population. But no one had any idea of the other groups existence at all.

Surely there must still be a squat involved for the stand-up wipers, otherwise their butt cheeks would be compressed together. Or maybe they have different shaped butts? How would we know!?! Maybe its to do with the butt/seat ratio?

Im not sure if I could fit my hand in the hole the same time as sitting down. Definitely a squat guy, or generally a one cheek pivot, as im pretty lazy :D

I'm highly suspicious of that 50/50 split.

Every time I see that stated, I only ever see sitters being surprised that standers exist, not the other way around.

They might exist, but either they're are much smaller minority, or it has a strange correlation with how they use the internet.

It does seem obviously to be a spectrum. I only realised that I have some degree of aphantasia when I read an article on it.

I think there's also an element of things being "faint" in your mind's eye. For example, there's a McDonald's and horse racetrack that I drive by every day on my way to work. I can sort of visualise some constituent parts, but there are no details and there's no overall picture.

I also don't know how much of the visualisation is just me recalling (in abstract) what is there, since I am very familiar with it.

> Me: What do you mean color? You didn't tell me I need to give it a color!

That would mean you don't have the condition right ?

I can visualize a ball, but I only make it a tennis ball after I'm asked to do it. Similarly, my car doesn't have a color until it must. I can make the scene really robust as I build on it, but won't unless I need to. Almost like a 3D graphic renderer.

IMO, that's probably a more conceptual way of looking at it. You are able to decouple your concept of a cat from the color and tendencies, and can build it up from more basic primitives than others can.

> "Imagine an un-cat leaping over the chair"

Can you elaborate on what you see here ? Sounds really interesting.

I did more of a "scene + cat-ness everywhere (deep dream style) - cat in the particular position". So the background had cat hair all over it, and then a cat shaped grey/transparent contour jumped on top of the table.

For the record, I can do all of those. When asked to visualize something, I see it in my mind, as if a memory. Very detailed, full color, sometimes moving, sometimes static.

But IF asked to visualize something floating in front of me, I can do that too. It cannot ever be mistaken for the real thing, it's not a ghostly image or a hallucination, but I can sort of pretend something imaginary is sitting next to me and I can, through voluntary effort, "see" it.

Whenever I want to draw something -- or build a scale model -- I always try to visualize the end result first.

I can visualize things in front of me. A hallucination would be a visualization that I can touch. I cannot touch my visualizations.

"[..] being a recessive inherited disorder"

Is it fair to call it a disorder? It seems like people that have it are fully functional. To me, it looks more like a difference in brain processing styles.

I can't avoid to think what other differences are we missing, just because we all assume that the other people process the world like us.

I've kind of taken to calling it a 'disorder' when talking to others, as that quickly carries the "I can't do this thing that you can" message. I can see how 'disorder' might be insensitive or offensive to others, but I really didn't care about the semantics in my case. Wikipedia calls it a 'condition' which seems like a better term.

Another interesting read on the topic (April 2016): https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

It's actually a condition I seem to have. I cannot for the life of me "imagine" what a room would look like with furniture re-arranged, and also have immense difficulty in "imagining" situations even with faces I've known my whole life.

This always reminds me of the following Feynman story about how we do something as "simple" as counting:

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf

Anecdotally, most people I've asked (myself included) seem to have an easier time counting in their first langugae, even if they haven't spoken it very often in years (I'm far more fluent in my second language, English). So it seems like for many mental tasks, there can be a variety of neural implementations.

OTOH early sensory areas in the brain all seem more or less isomorphic (modulo injury & disease). Where, when, how do individual brains start to diverge?

Side note: I finally read “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman”, and found out about his discovery of art — I believe those are some of his drawings in the link you shared, and they’re quite beautiful.

Try the Aphantasia study from Exeter University:

Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)

https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153

I wonder if there's any overlap between people who don't have an inner voice and those who can't visualize.

http://archive.is/7SeN3

This makes me wonder how aphantasia correlates to the small subset of people who report absolutely no visual fx from hallucinogens. They definitely feel the potent effects of the halucinogen, but somehow non-visually.

Francis Galton writes about this and related phenomena such as synaesthesia in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. A remarkably personal account by a pioneering scientific mind. Highly recommended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com