People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
> "Our data also showed that individuals with aphantasia not only report being unable to visualise, but also report comparatively reduced imagery, on average, in all other sensory modalities, including auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, taste, olfactory and emotion," the team wrote in their paper.
I, for instance, am not aphantasic, but I fall quite close to that end of the spectrum. But I don't use mental imagery to store memory. When I am attempting to encode memories, I do so in the form of a narrative - narratives stick very effectively for me, and I have a pretty good memory (no one without a good memory survives medical school.) It's true, I can't just "remember" the image of relevant anatomy, but I'm fine with other mental models for encoding and retrieving information.
On plus side, almost everytime I eat sushi it's the best sushi ever.
At least for those of us endowed with the gift/curse of forming memories as life rushes by, they can appear to be composed of details our senses perceived around us enmeshed with details about how our wetware experienced that moment. Sometimes, we even have false memories of things that didn't happen, or that happened differently than we remember.
There's a separate world of practice where people develop mnemonic devices (spaced repetition, narratives, memorable nonsense phrases, memory palaces, songs/rhyme/prosody, hand gestures) to help memorize things better than we could do by accident, or just by thinking "remember X".
I would guess most people who are able to form memories can find a mnemonic device that works for them when they need to remember things. The very idea of a "memory palace", however, is so absolutely foreign to my experience of the world that I don't think I could have invented it on my own. Once someone describes it, I have an abstract understanding that the ability to arrange things in visual space could be a powerful mnemonic. I can, after all, remember at least a few things about many thousands of physical places I've been at some point in my life, even though I can't really picture any of them vividly. But, as a mnemonic, it's useless to me--I can't conjure it.
My partner can remember things like what shirt she was wearing when we went to a specific restaurant a decade ago. I have abstract knowledge that we have been to that place, but I couldn't tell you anything else about it. For her, memories like this are a springboard into conjuring many other details about the event. Sometimes her recall injects enough context to jog my own. Sometimes it's all lost in the fog.
Whether you are "good" or "bad" at memorizing things in an intentional way, unless you have infinite time to creative narrative mnemonics as life rushes by, I suspect aphantasia impacts your ability to recall daily life.
My mother passed away some 35-odd years away, and it really took me by surprise when I found out my little sister could visualise her and describe her from memory. I, on the other hand, could m and can recognise photos of her, but when describing her soul resort to learned facts: she was very pretty, slim, had brown hair and eyes, etc., etc.
Where the story turns, though, is how I remember things, as opposed to my academic (research professor) and artistic (painter/sculptor, and thus extremely visually oriented) wife. She continually misplaces her keys or glasses, for example. I have learnt to notice items, like them them amongst other things, and link them narritively (glasses on lounge table, keys on dishwasher, mask on sink…) and can then recall that without any real effort at a later stage.
It also fascinates her that I can read something like a programming manual like a story book and recall enough of it afterwards to put it into practice using the same manual only as a reference afterwards.
Horses for courses, I suppose.
It seems to be strictly limited to visual imagery however. I remember lyrics / poems / quotes better than most people I know and I do pretty well on those wine-training smell tests. I can easily hear music in my head.
I've never really thought of it as a disadvantage, I assumed that I just had a different kind of imagination.
Aphantasic participants scored significantly lower than control group 2 on all outcomes of the imagery and episodic memory questionnaires (all p < 0.0002, all r > 0.52, all BF10 > 1.42e8) with the exception of the factual memory component of the SAM.
So aphantasics (like myself) do have poor episodic memory.
Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65705-7
What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?
Are you able to take a table in your house and then imagine a soccer ball on it? Or do you still come up blank with just the concept and absolutely no mental imagery?
There's pretty much no color, no exact shape, clothing detail etc. No surface has any pattern, really. But I know extremely clearly how 3 people in my dream were positioned relative to each other and the room.
For massaging an equation into the desired form, I see its "shape" (abstract from the numbers, like we had to in school with variables) and know what changes of shape are desirable. More complex math, let's say, 700 * 13, I do in my head pretty much like those equations; shuffle it to be 7 * (10+3) * 100, (7 * 10 + 7 * 3) * 100, etc. In no part of that do I see the figure of the number seven; there's a "slot" that's a concept of seven, but it's not the shape of the drawn number.
But even in dreams, it is all about abstract things that move around me.
I can't picture a dog. I can (very, very crudely) draw a dog. Just like I don't "hear" words or songs in my head, but I can sing a song. I can't visualize someone's face, but I don't have any trouble recognizing them if I see them.
I know the "facts" that describe a generic dog, and I have a spatial awareness of how those parts relate to each other.
I don't see anyone claiming that they are "able to imagine an picture with [their] eyes open and have it cover the real world".
You specified "eyes open". Are you able to visualize things with your eyes closed?
Regardless, the way journalists talk about aphantasia, or more specifically, the opposite of aphantasia, has led a lot of people to believe this is possible (at least, I believed it based on what people have said they can do).
Maybe I am just exaggerating then, but i think this whole topic has got a lot of people worried that they are not normal. I don't think it's good for the mental health of hypochondriacs.
It's clear everyone is hardwired to see stuff like faces in something as simple as ":)", I feel it's related, but it's not my field, I can only wonder.
Is there any science done on this particular topic? It sure is super interesting but all I see about it is anecdote or very surface level stuff. It's clear some people do it better than others (my anecdata seems to indicate creative types might tap into it better?), but since most people is also affected by certain optical effects or tricks, the ability has to be present in everyone to a degree. Might be a thing that needs to be exploited consciously to make it "vivid".
It could also be a matter of priorities in perception. Like some people remembers lyrics better than songs, or numbers better than images. Maybe we are just taking our vision of the world in the way that's the most comfortable, and for some people it's images/sounds and for others "plaintext" information.
I know I really got a thing for visual information, as I can tell stuff like typos not from reading a word, but from noticing its shape is "off", like I'm remembering a printout of the word instead of the word character-by-character. (note that difference in typesetting does not affect the "shape" to throw me off. Unless it's very weird handwritten text, but that throws everyone off)
That would be like lucid dreaming while awake and I'd imagine it would be more well documented considering half of this thread claims to be able to do it. Actually, why are so many people trying to lucid dream at all if this level of visualisation is so common?
I don't think anyone is claiming that the latter is widespread, and I also don't think you're acknowledging that there are many people who can't do the former at all (myself included).
If you ask me to imagine something, there is no visual component to that at all for me. Internally, externally, nowhere.
Moving the goalposts is bad arguing. Bad arguing is often due to bad-faith arguing; but good arguing is hard, so it's also often accidental. Yet, people equate pointing out flaws in an argument with accusations of intellectual dishonesty: it's been politicised.
[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEX7G2N7CtmZQ3eB5/simulacra-...
[2]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Sorry, but this is too funny. There's some sort of fundamental difficulty when humans are trying to compare their varying (or not?) qualia.
Like those stoner-philosphy questions. ("Is the 'red' I see the same hue as the 'red' you see? How would we ever know??")
There's an element of that unsolvable problem here; of knowing whether the other person is describing their internal mental state using the same definitions as you are.
Even if you can think of an object, even complex ones, and determine through a visual method its properties, shapes and colors, it's "nowhere" relative to real life visuals. You could be spinning in place or blind and you can still visualize the image. I could think of a scene with a very bright light but I'm really thinking of a white color or a gradient, it's obviously not going to blind me because it's now flowing through my optic nerves. I mean I can do something like divide a screen in two regions with an imaginary line, but it's not some sort of futuristic HUD.
That's kinda why I think there's some relation between our ability to mentally visualize an image and the ability to recognize a face or find shapes in stuff like Rorschach tests. In other words I think everyone has the ability to visualize images mentally, they just don't exploit it because maybe they put more weight on other details. Where I can remember and play with images and sounds mentally with no effort, other people can remember huge amounts of text, or do complex math instead. It might be a matter of specialization, perhaps?
If I mentally listen to music it's clearly not coming from my ears (in fact the whole concept of sound direction doesn't seem to exist when I imagine sound. No stereo separation either.)
I find this whole stuff fascinating though. I wish there was some way to measure and/or capture those images/sounds and make them physical data, even if once captured it turns out to be a lot less detailed than what it seems. It'd be a security nightmare though!
There's a wide variance in visual imagery. I know people who can vividly imagine things with their eyes open, find it easy, almost automatic, others who have to try, and some who can't at all.
Similarly there are wide variances in how people think: some think very visually, some have an internal monologue (or multiple), some have an inner experience with neither.
I used to be nearly aphantasic - having only brief flashes of vision except on the edge of sleep - but have been slowly training the skill after finding out it's possible, and normal, to do more.
Afraid it's hard to explain, and if I'd been fully aphantasic to start (including when nearly asleep) would not have been able to make any progress.
Same type of issue as trying to explain how to move a specific muscle or unfocus your eyes
[0]: I believe this explains how, while I can do all this visualization, it's difficult to simultaneously "grasp" both spaces -- it's like both are there, but when I switch to mind space the visual one goes to the background and I can't process it too much.
When I paint myself I usually compose a scene in my mind. When drawing characters, I mostly follow whatever my mental image is, then as I trace the lines I can visualize how they connect. When drawing characters that aren't mine I make a point of not using a reference picture. Basically I can "see" the whole result as soon as I have the eyes drawn, then I just draw single lines until it's "traced", undoing if it doesn't fit the shape I need. Only problem is that at times I don't close lines so using a fill tool is always a pain. When painting proper I just make a quick color base and I add the rest until it fits whatever is in my head, then I add minor detailing to complete the piece in a more mechanical manner like "this gravel can use more texturing" or "add some grating in this robot's armor for cooling". My speed when drawing characters is very high, I at times like to speed-doodle stuff for friends and each piece takes about 5 minutes once I decide on an angle/pose, so the process doesn't seem to interfere with agility.
I can also doodle stuff while not conjuring any mental image (such as idle doodling on a notebook or such), however, it just has weird proportions or so. My point being that it's not something necessary at all as you can still paint/draw/write without doing it. Doesn't seem to be a necessity or provide any significant advantage over plain "logic" (as logic as creative stuff can be, but stuff like light usually works in rigid ways)
When doing things like coding I plan the structure in advance, but it doesn't resemble the process for visual arts at all. There's no mental image there, just something like "okay now loop here and call this function".
There also was a recent paper suggesting that increased baseline visual cortex excitability can lead to decreased imagery ability (perhaps due to a "saturation" type effect).
But there is not a ton of research out there on these topics yet, so it's all very preliminary.
Now re-read the above and consider that I've asked you to imagine yourself imagining something!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
What I definitely can't do is replaying something that visually happened if I'm focusing on something else, or not paying attention. The same goes for other physical stimulation like touch etc. If I'm not conscious about it I can't tell what happened before the moment I focused. So, if I suddenly find myself in a slightly embarrassing position relative to someone else in a crowded pub, for example, and I didn't pay attention, I couldn't tell if it was because the way I was moving or if it was because of someone else. But if someone said something I'll just replay it. Works nicely for listening to a language I don't know that well too, I just replay it and translate it. But in a conversation there's no time to do that, so I'm stuck.
(I'm not talking about creating or remembering a sequence of events and playing that in my head as a movie - that's not a problem. But there seems to be an always-on "cache memory" for audio while there's none for visual or other stimuli. For me, at least. What I'm wondering is - do other people have "cache memory" for visual or other input interfaces?)
I used to be into visualization as focus training. I can't "see" and change (move, change color) shapes in my mind at all. Artists I know claim to be able to do this. Obviously, Tesla (, Nikola) supposedly did this.
For those who can do it - to what degree can you do it? Can you imagine a circle? A cube? A rubix cube with color?
Edit: Since we are discussing this a lot - I am also a skilled lucid dreamer. In the sense that I trained myself for months to remember and control my dreams vividly. I realized my dreams have a "bandwidth limit" / "render limit". If I try to "look" at a detailed scene, it blurs and/or I wake up. Which, btw, is a huge argument against astral projection, not that anyone here likely ever even considered it to be real, but as a young child, I did.
At night before falling asleep it's pretty much like visualizing a movie, including motion and sound, the effect is somewhat stronger when eyes closed and not moving, I assume because "input" is mostly clear and thus doesn't conflict with whatever image you are conjuring mentally.
Seeing from other post, they say their dreams are pretty dull. My case is the opposite, my dreams are ridiculously vivid (including color, sound and touch) and there are very detailed environments and a lot of people moving around. I wonder if those things are related somehow?
EDIT: I have narcolepsy, perhaps that's a factor.
I still remember that dream vividly. Which is also unusual for me.
For me that's usually kinda how it goes. My dreams are usually rather mundane, borderline formulaic, although at times I can recognize places from my past that are altered (a little or a lot), or it's cleaner/with different materials or stuff like that. A thing that amuses me and seems to be uncommon, at least from what I hear from other people, is the amount of life. If I dream of a street, it's always going to have a lot of persons moving about. Entirely normal people, not people without faces or anything weird like that. They even remain consistent, like if I look somewhere in the dream, if I look back again, people retains their path and clothing. If I'm a bar or something there will be random patrons who I don't really interact with, but can be seen and heard like if it was a totally normal place.
Another amusing thing is that people claims they cannot read in dreams, but while there are times I have difficulty reading a thing, stuff like billboards or random "decorative" text are clear to me. Exceptions happen, for example a few days ago I dreamed I was doing a school test online on a tiny old-school flipphone and I was struggling to read the questions (didn't help the text was in garish colors, probably remembering something a teacher used to do in real life).
I can also get the feelings of taste, smell and touch, but for some reason the temperature is always "neutral". Like, if I'm dreaming in a hot or cold day, it'll be "neutral" in the dream, even if I later wake up because I'm too hot or cold. At times I dream I'm walking but my legs hurt (like when standing up for a long time) but then I wake up and my legs are in a totally neutral state, not in a bad position or anything.
The biggest drawback is that at times I dream I'm just doing my job (maybe with some minor differences in the room or so) and it feels like doing 3-4 hours of just real life, absolutely realistic work stuff. That is terrible. Once in a while I get a cool nightmare monster or setting (which I parasitize for my creative endeavors. Is it plagiarism when your subconscious came up with it?), but overall it's really mundane stuff.
Also, my dreams tend to be pleasant and chillaxing (like 99%), for some reason when sharing dreams people speaks of dreadful or depressing things or psychedelic nightmares and such. I'm glad it's not the case here. I have had weird psychedelic dreams during times of being extremely sick with fever but otherwise it's like some sort of virtual reality.
Makes me wonder if people who claimed to do stuff like astral walking just had the same "ability" and just had really vivid and realistic dreams instead. I also wonder how much of this is related to narcolepsy (I might be dreaming in a higher state of awareness than most people, but I'm not very wise on these topics).
I do have a certain degree of autonomy while in the dreams. I usually do what I want to do and go where I want to go, even if the results aren't exactly logical at times. I particularly like to admire certain architectural elements that are slightly off or non-euclidean. Most of the weirdness comes from stuff that is slightly off, houses with too many rooms, places with too many floors or unusual layouts or lighting, or stuff like a 1:1 recreation of a real street but it leads to different or entirely new places. My brain seems to put a lot of emphasis in stuff like structure and lighting. I wonder what that says about me as a person.
Not gonna lie, I enjoy the stuff a lot. Only problem is that it's too random and can range from incredible to ridiculously mundane and normal, so I don't quite take dream exploring as a thing. If the opportunity presents itself I'll milk it for all it's worth though, both from enjoying the dream and from whatever creative material I can take for myself.
I believe my wife cannot make images, and the differences between us that result are pretty wild. I'm dramatically better with directions and maps because she can't make a mental model of the map and how it relates to the real world. However she's very aware of her emotions in a given moment where it's very difficult for me to express how I'm feeling.
In terms of 3D imagery, I can visualized complex 3D objects and rotate them around, or navigate 3D cave spaces. But it requires significant focus, and the "framerate" is very low, like warping you mentioned. And for years I've spent time before sleeping visualizing things (often in 3D), so I think it's something I developed too (it's fun and I knew it was going to be useful -- when solving problems I very often resort to visualizations).
To be clear, I am not "challenging" you in any sense, but it's a good reality check.
Anyway - I am the same with maps, I can easily see the route in my head, but that has to do with being aware of where north is and a vague notion of where I am.
Getting better at drawing and creating takes time and practice. I'd go on youtube to take a look at how to get better quickly, there's a lot of good people on YT that are happy to share and teach.
One good 'cheat' is to use a camera lumisia or a reference mirror to see how light interacts with your media directly: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-to...
I'm likely an outlier though, as I'm a synesthete and my senses get a bit mixed up from time to time. So take that into account.
In more general terms, I can see and explore real and imagined environments, and listen to music with perfect fidelity - although doing the hearing bit only works well with considerable focus, and peace and quiet - visual I find easy enough to just ignore what my eyes are seeing, leave walking or whatever on autopilot. To be clear, it’s not like just imagining a thing, it’s more like overriding a sense. When I visualise, I am literally looking at something that isn’t there, when I listen, I hear as though it’s real - although any real noise immediately breaks it.
The latter is especially unlikely given that most people are limited to 5-7 "items" in their working memory. To design even a simple system, e.g. a brake caliper, that's way more than 7 items, and they aren't "atomic" items either.
Again, this isn't a stab at you, this is a stab at the concept, because it's kind of like people saying they can put on 5lb of muscle a month without roiding. Sets false expectations.
I can’t draw for shit, but I can and do make complex devices and systems with no written plan, just a picture in my head.
Oh, and I’ve put on well over 5lb of muscle this month, by doing brutal hours of manual labour and eating like a horse. Being out of shape but historically stacked makes it a world easier.
https://www.aworkoutroutine.com/steroids-vs-natural/
Maybe you did for one month, after a time of de-training, with all the ideal conditions.
Funny thing is, when I dream I can see anything.
The example I always give people is that when deciding what to eat and looking at things in the cabinet, or the fridge, or deciding where to pickup food, I just mentally "taste" each thing, and it really does feel like I have the sensation of eating that thing, and I decide based on which one tastes the best in that moment.
Some people with this ability can draw what they imagine very well, while others are not good at all. I don't see an issue - even if you project some image on a blank piece of paper so people just have to trace it everybody won't have the same results.
I would say my ideation process starts with a vague view of what I am trying to accomplish, and then gradually becomes clear. I'll have a general concept and can picture the end result, but without understanding how it is accomplished at first, which gradually becomes clearer as I think about it. I generally know I've got something when it "feels right".
My main artistic hobby is photography. One of the things I most enjoy doing is going out without a specific shot in mind and trying to "find" a photo by deliberately experiencing my surroundings. It is almost have an aversion to have a shot in mind before I go out to take it because it invariably doesn't live up to the visual I have in my head.
It makes me realize there's a lot of experiences we probably all take for granted and assume that everyone experiences the way we do, but we just kind of assume that when someone says they can see it in their head or they can feel it in their heart we just assume everyone means that metaphorically.
That's what that phrase refers to? I've never even heard of that before. "An abstract thing that you feel" has always been what emotions are to me.
However I can hear music very clearly in my head. If asked to visualize, say, an apple in my head I really don't see it very vividly at all. It's depressing if I'm being honest.
Usually no, but (anecdote); I cannot normally remember my credit card number, dreaming years ago i read the number aloud and when i woke i could remember the numbers that i had recited in the dream, i checked and they were correct... So at least sometimes in dreams the detail is real.
I have a theory that memory recollection is linked to social impulses, that our minds forget things on purpose (without our knowledge lol) as a tool for social integration. I've seen some indirect evidence of this in some sports, where people tend to be just about as good at a sport as their social peers, change social peers and they become better or worse accordingly. -this would have interesting implications for aphantasia treatment.
Compare your memory of, say, song lyrics - you might misremember some of the words but that doesn't mean your memory of the lyrics aren't real, you are remembering a real and coherent set of words, not making them up as you go. When you hear that song again and you know what word is coming up next that is not your mind conning you, that is just successful recall. Likewise you probably know the melody of the song; though you might not be able to transcribe it, you would immediately notice if even a single note was off. More impressive, you can probably correctly identify a song you haven't heard in years from a fraction of a second long sample. If you show me some tiny portion of a photograph of something I've seen before, I will similarly be able to identify it instantly.
I used to think that everyone experienced the world the same way as I did. Personally, as a visual person, I found graphs to be the most intuitive way of conveying information. How could anyone not understand a graph? But my brother can't make heads or tails of them. He's an incredibly intelligent person, but he fundamentally does not process and store information visually. I've met many other people who can think in ways I can't, such as people who can think visualize objects in 4 dimensions.
If you want further evidence that thought processing is not constant across different people, consider that it is not even constant over a single lifetime. What language do you process language in? If you learn a second language, most people, myself included, eventually reach a point where you can think in that second language without using your primary language as a mediator. The brain is simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly plastic. Entire regions can be repurposed to function in radically different ways. All evidence points to extreme variability in how our individual minds work.
It would be absurd to conclude that just because a physicist isn't a champion at billiards that he can't think in terms of vectors, or that someone with a speech impediment can't process words clearly in their mind. That someone who can see an image clearly should be able to perfectly reproduce it does not logically follow.
I was born with severe farsightedness and astigmatism(12 dipoters) and it went unoticed for a while, I learned to walk before I got glasses, I think it might be the reason my brain didn't connect the graphic card for thinking, does it make sense?
If you picture something like a pirate, and someone asked you about the scene, eg; what color are his trousers, what kind of shirt.. You will get a question that you don't instantly know, your mind will quickly 'colour/paint in' so you can answer, but the important part is that you didn't notice that bit was missing before you were asked, which is not now a real picture acts - you would have noticed the pirate had no trouser without needing to be asked about them.
eye-sight itself is an illusion to some degree, eyes don't send images, they send data that is re-assembled into a construct of abstractions, aka you don't see a cup until you know its a cup. there are a lot of optical illusions that exploit this.
What is the color of your underwear?
Perhaps you will remember what color underwear you put on this morning, perhaps you will check, but it would be pretty weird if your underwear's color was constantly on your mind. Nevertheless, I doubt you would argue that your underwear did not have color while you weren't thinking of it.
Now open up an image of a pirate on your screen. Click on the window and drag it down until the bottom half is off the screen. What color are the pirate's trousers? The computer is only displaying a portion of the image, so technically the pirate's trousers don't exist. But nevertheless the data in the image file would suggest that the pirate does in fact have trousers of a certain color, even if that color is just a number.
You are correct that visual memory does not work like a photograph, but why would it? Your eyes don't send photographs via mail to a little post office in your head, your vision is a means of processing the signals of huge numbers of neurons firing together. Visual processing ought to the same circuits in the brain as vision, the fact that it behaves like vision is evidence that those circuits really are in use.
Of course what I imagine is an illusion, no one is proposing that simply by imagining an object it will manifest in reality. The point is that it is exactly the same sort of illusion as the one that my brain makes when I see real things, and thus my perception of my visual thoughts is the same as my perception of the visible world.
And the point is that picturing something to many feels the same as looking at a picture, but in actual fact that feeling is an illusion.
>my perception of my visual thoughts is the same as my perception of the visible world.
If this were true, you would not know when the picture of the pirate was partially off the screen. Or conversely you would know that the mental image of the pirate had no trousers before being asked.
Picture Jack Sparrow (assuming you feel like you have a good memory of pirates of the carribean). In particular, picture his sparrow tatoo. Write down what color it is. Then look online at an image of it [0]. Is the color the one you wrote down that you pictured? Repeat this again for any image you feel like you remember. If your mind were simply making you think that you were picturing things correctly, what you write down should rarely match reality. On the other hand, if you are actually storing visual information, your memory should pretty regularly be correct. Not everyone actually does store data visually, it really could go either way.
With regards to your comment, the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a pirate's shirt. If you look at a photograph of someone, do you become instantly aware of all information contained within it with perfect detail? If so you must be great at where's waldo. For the rest of us, we perceive a gross overview at first and to identify any details we must focus in. But the fact that we don't know where waldo is before we look for him does not mean our brains are retroactively placing him into the picture.
But the idea that when you see a (real) picture, or scene in the real world, you actually see it all - thats an illusion. The mind doesn't work that way. You only see the little bit you're focusing on, but the brain tries to trick you into believing that you see it all. What really happens is that when you want to know about the trousers you focus on the trousers. Until you do that you don't actually know. If someone asks you to describe details about the pirate's clothes you'll first scan every part sequentially, add what you see to a list of answers, and then answer. Things work the same when you imagine a picture (for those who can do that) - you'll know the details only when you focus on each detail, and, as the image wasn't a physical one on the table top the mind fills in as and when it's needed. Just as when you process a physical picture.
A glance at the image would tell you those kinds of things, a 'glance' at a mental image should tell you the same, but it doesn't.
I agree that our experience of sight is an illusion as well, but its demonstrably different to the illusion of our experience of imagined imagery.
But that's beside the point. For me or you to have a mental image of a pirate with no pants on we'll have to create that image in our minds first, with missing pants and all, so how can you compare that with being presented with a picture on a table?
For sound, I can imagine sound and hear it essentially exactly as if I were to actually hear it, but the only sounds I can imagine are sounds I can make myself. I can't imagine a song per se but I can imagine myself humming it. Same as above, when on the verge of sleep my sound imagination can switch on and I hear music as if I were at a concert hall - dramatically different from my day-to-day experience.
Because of this, I can assure you that there are real differences between people's experiences, despite what others might tell you.
I used to be like that in the past. I would sit in a chair and the music would come. Then I knew I was close to sleeping, and it happened every night when going to bed. When I woke up the final stage of sleeping also had music, then it was suddenly, brutally switched off and I was awake. It felt as real as if it was heard live. The thing is, the music was always something I'd never heard before, and it was huge and with lots of instruments. Classical, mostly. It was very similar to the "music everywhere" experience in the Salaxian ship described in the novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".
For various reasons I went through a sleep-deprived phase, and after that time I lost the music. No music when going to sleep, and none when waking up. After many years I started to get a different experience, I would dream about music events (watching some band, for example, or some other event), hear nice (non-classical) music, and, if I woke up, trying to find a pen and write down the chords or the music - but it fades so quickly that after writing down the beginning it would all be gone.
The brain is the strangest thing.
Try taking something you know and putting it someplace else you know but which is unexpected.
Like your sofa in your supermarket's car park. Or your pet under your desk at work.
Can you now count the black hexagons in view, or do you have to decide how many there are first?
(Ok, now did you notice that they aren't actually hexagons, they are pentagons?)
I have no idea how reading would work without at least hearing it though. If you told me to read without doing this stuff it would be like telling me to think without having thoughts. Impossible.
He cannot picture anything internally bar the most basic geometry, and that requires active focus.
I know him to have a strong memory across the board, and no particular issues with reading (dyslexia, however he is a very strong reader. Certainly a lot stronger than average).
So I wouldn't say there's necessarily anything that prohibits a person with a weak minds eye from having good memory. Not arguing against the point he may be an outlier or that these two features don't often go hand in hand, just pointing out it's not so hard and fast.
Is akin to knowing your way home. I don't see the turns ahead of time, but I recognize them when I do. And I can remember the decisions ahead of time.
I think remembering decisions is ultimately my best way to describe it. Remembering making a choice. Something that is not sensory.
You have probably heard directions like, go straight until you get to the big tree, take the left path towards the creek...
Basically, I remember what choices to make at different spots. I used to be a pizza delivery driver. I could work out where houses were based on the street and number. But it was always an iterative process. I will remember what sequence of things should happen at points. And going to new places is always harder, because maps don't help me much.
Speaking from my own personal experience, my reading comprehension doesn't seem to suffer at all, and the speed at which I read seems to be much faster than average (for instance, if my wife and I are reading the same page of text, I'm done long before she is).
I have no strong concept of the sensory world of the text. I have a very, very vague impression of what a character looks like. I'm prone to forget explicit features that the author bothered describing because there's no durable image to factor them into.
I notice some people have strong reactions to casting calls in movie adaptations of novels. This objection is foreign to me; I had no strong image for it to conflict with.
I am more likely to find a turn of phrase beautiful for the words and sounds, than to have any sense that the thing it describes is beautiful.
I noticed this "ability" is very useful for stuff like studying. Like, if I arrange the data to study in a table or graph, it'll be easy to remember the shape and colors of the table/graph, giving me a hint on how many elements a group has or stuff like that.
I used to read a lot as a child, unfortunately I haven't seen a book I'm feeling interested in reading in a while, so I mostly abuse this "skill" by drawing or making games.
I read a lot - and the story unfolds in my mind's eye. But I don't hear the dialog as sound, unless I explicitly want to (if I wish to hear a sentence in my mind, using a friend's voice, I can). I don't even "read" the book (including the dialog), except at the beginning. When I get into the story it's just in the mind, I don't consciously read. And the dialog is also not voiced, it just "is". Which is one reason I've never felt that strange, foreign, or difficult-to-pronounce names are a problem (a complaint I often see in e.g. Amazon reviews). Never had that problem. And if I try to add a voice to a spoken sentence the reading slows down to "natural" speed, which is way way too slow for me.
(As for hearing sounds in my mind in general - I'm very susceptible to ear worms, and I don't use a car stereo - if I want to hear music I just hear it, in my mind.)
Funny story: one benefit of not being able to visualize things is that I'm never disappointed by casting choices (at least as far as appearance is concerned) when a novel is made into a movie or TV series. My wife was "upset" that Jaime Lannister in the Game of Thrones show had blue eyes instead of green, because she had such a strong visual image of what he should look like.
When I think about it more, I think I almost feel the sounds on my tongue, which is to say, when I try to simulate the sounds, I do so by imagining how I would make the sounds with my mouth.
Also your point about casting choices for movie adaptations resonates. When a movie is made of a book I've been reading I'm almost always just so pleased by finally being able to see what the character looks like, and have never felt disappointment.
If anything while reading about characters, my mind cycles over possible physical attributes wondering which a character might have, but never really building anything resembling imagery.
I'm also very good at knot tying. It's a hobby I enjoy, and a practical skill in rope rescue activities I participate in. Knot typing seems much more "spatial" than "visual" to me.
Interestingly, the article specifically mentions differences in spatial abilities as not being correlated to the ability to visualize.
"But other aspects of the findings suggest self-reporting may not be biasing the results that significantly: there were variations in answers coupled with data suggesting that spatial abilities - an ability to map relationships and distances between objects - appear to be unaffected in the volunteers."
Maybe that gives you a sense of my ability to visualize.
While in stark contrast, I can often take a few looks at an already tied knot, and reverse-engineer/decompose it's construction down to a series of steps that I can feel spatially I can then often, much later be able to reconstruct that knot based on the combination of the few bits I remember, and the general knowledge I have about space in general and knots in specific.
Somehow, I can draw quite well though. But not from mental imagery.
And, I can hear music clearly in my head, with a very long memory. I can easily play back a song as almost perfect audio, even if I haven't heard it in decades, with clear little details.
But I mostly can't make out the words of any music I remember, and in fact I struggle to remember lyrics in general, even of songs I've listened dozens of times. And my sequence-memory is crap.
Sigh... memory is fascinating.
I can also confirm the findings of this study. I rarly dream. I cannot hear music in my head. I also learnt quite a while ago, that my peers can remember the past in way that is mind boggling for me.
It's pretty depressing to be honest.
Do we already know if this is something which is inherited?
One of the perceived benefits IME has been that I seem to have a substantially higher capacity (on average) to understand things at a conceptual level than my co-workers.
Not sure if that's just a testament to how I learned to learn early in life, or if it's somehow a way my mind has compensated for the lack of sensory info in my imagination.
I've surveyed a lot of people on this - probably forty or so in person, plus another 100 or so in a poll on reddit once - and there's a pretty clear trend: people who perform the visual algorithm tend to be 'not math people', and are less accurate and less confident in their answer, or not even willing to try.
I'm aphantasiac and I can do a calculation like that fairly quickly and accurately, without any special practice. I basically use my verbal memory to store and recall cached computations instead of any visualization. My theory is that the visual brain is not really designed for storing precise information so much as the gestalt of an image, so it does less well on precise numeric details.
40 * 60 + 40 * 8 + 60 * 7 + 7 * 8
Basically a bunch of single digit multiplies followed by stacking zeroes
Among other things this scales better to larger numbers. I use it because it's more 'linear' -- I only need to remember one accumulated number at a time.
I foiled it like the other comment says (maybe somewhat of a visualization, since I "visualized" it as 40x60 + 40x8 + ...), and I remember the running sum by "saying" it to myself inside my head.
I performed each multiplication (grade-school multiplication memory lookup table, not actually doing the visual algorithm) and added the right number of 10's place zeros, then added it to the running sum. For this addition step actually, I do visualize as stacking the two numbers and carrying if needed. Then I "say" the result to myself and remember it for the next multiplication.
I will say that my first reaction to seeing "calculate 47x68 real quick" was reluctance and it was not an easy task to do mentally, but it was mechanically straightforward.
Something else which blew my mind, people who use image search preferentially to everything. Ironically the only time I use image search (unless I'm trying to find an image) is when I want a graph or tabular data.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness™ is "how can a physical system generate qualia?", where "qualia" is something like "the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions", or "what it feels like to have experiences".
I once ran into a very intelligent person (philosophically trained) who genuinely didn't understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness, or what was even meant by qualia. It occurred to me during this conversation that there might be genuine instances of humans out there who lack qualia. As opposed to p-zombies (hypothetical humans who lack qualia but claim they have qualia), real life qualia-less humans might just find the notion of qualia nonsensical. Perhaps there are even people out there who understand what qualia is, and outright deny that they have it?
I can imagine a hypothetical brain in a glass jar might survive like this, but for most people the absence of physical sensations while living in a body would be evidence of a very serious medical condition.
Of course being able to persuade yourself through sleight of philosophy that physical sensations are somehow illusory is a different class of problem.