What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?
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.
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.
[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?)
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!
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.