Aphantasia

Can you accurately draw something while looking at a photo of it? Most people can't. Seeing something and drawing it are obviously different skills.

What you may not understand about other people's mental visualizations is that they're somewhat fuzzy and unstable. It's very difficult to zoom in and out or to focus on the details. The better you know something, the better you can visualize it. There are also degrees of the ability -- some people are very good, and some aren't.

> Other people think they have a visualization but do not.

I know someone with aphantasia, and he was confused about whether or not he had it for a long time. I think this makes sense: you can't imagine being 100% certain you see something in your mind because it's a "sense" that you don't possess, so you assume other people aren't certain.

I assure you that you're absolutely wrong. I am absolutely certain I see things in my mind and that it's common for people to be able to do so (with varying degrees of stability, accuracy, clarity, etc.). Especially faces, I can see them very clearly. It is somewhat a function of memory.

I'm not sure asking someone to draw "a helicopter" or "a bicycle" (inherently an abstraction) is a good way to get non-nonsense simplifications. It's like asking for "a face" and expecting something that isn't cartoonish? Also, I doubt all non-aphantasiacs can draw tolerably. That said, I do sort of assume it's a spectrum, and that there's a similar-ish 1-10% of people on the far end who visualize very well.

Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can?

Visualization and ability to draw are separate. The latter can be trained, and I imagine that if I learned to draw better I would probably visualize more accurately, but I am convinced that the limiting factor in my ability to draw a bicycle is my lack of ability to draw and not my lack of visualization.

In any case, at least some people do have visualizations. There are artists that can look at something and then draw it from memory. For myself-- and I'm a fairly talented amateur-- I can see nothing in my head as I also have aphantasia. I can draw nothing from memory. When I draw something from scratch I'm having to build it on the paper and I can never repeat a drawing.

Aside from my anecdata there's another key piece here that the article mentions: people with aphantasia lack voluntary visualizations: they can still have them involuntarily, such as when they dream. I know I get pictures in my head when I dream. It's an experience that's quite distinct from the normal day to day blackness in my mind's eye.

I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.

I've asked someone to visualize a house then asked them how many windows it has. They didn't have a answer. This isn't any different from what I'd say. I can try to imagine an apple. I know it's red. I know there's a stem and a green leaf on the stem. I know the shape of a Macintosh, with the wide top narrowing at the base. But the serrations and veins of the leaf, I'm not sure of. And I'm fairly confident that most people who claim to be able to visualize couldn't describe the leaf well enough to distinguish it as an apple leaf and not some idealized idea of a leaf. Could they describe it well enough that an artist could draw it?

For two reasons.

One. They actually have the wrong mental model of the machines and really imagine them incorrectly. Basically, they've never paid attention to the details, so they get them wrong mentally, but because they aren't sure anyway so they never notice a discrepancy. If they had to rebuild the machine, that's the mess they would probably build unless they stopped to really think about it.

Two. They don't know how to draw. One aspect of learning to draw from memory is to learn how to focus on specific detailed areas and then build out. You need to train this skill before you can do it well.

> When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.

As you learn to draw, if you have a good imagination, you begin to learn how to interrogate your mental images systematically. To rotate the drawing, focus in on specific details, etc.

Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things.

Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that.

If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing.

If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy.

I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week.

Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try.

A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen.

The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig...

Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is.

For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.

Now I can make full corporeal models that move in time and walk around them.

Learn.

And people don't visualize things the way I learned. They "see" the same spotty attention-point cloud they move around in in real life, one spot at a time. Plus many didn't learn to draw. Also learn.

When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting.

I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually “seeing” it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger.

Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They can’t visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

I can't imagine not visualizing things. My undergrad was in mechanical engg, so it was kinda central to our field.

Imagining a 2d machine drawing as a 3d figure, imagining the interactions between various moving parts or system of joints and levers is expected of you.

The way I think reflects the visualization itself. Usually, it takes quite long to 'load' a complex system in your head and visualize it. But after it is done, I can describe intricate details of it. I also get irrationally irritated when someone interrupts me in the 'loading' phase, cuz I have to start all over again.

For a similar reason, I have a very natural affinity to graphs = undirected-trees and flow charts as they serve as a visual representation of what is a symbolic relationship. I am also completely unable to recall language or isolated-facts perfectly, but can do the same for visual systems.

I am famously 'the whiteboard guy' at what is now an ML job, so I can believe that not everyone thinks of these systems visually. But, visual intuition in some form is and has always been core to how to how I understand stuff.

> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines?

In my case, the key points of interaction are visualized clearly. (eg: point of contact for gears, or a joint, or multi head attention on a single node). The rest is invisible in an out of focus sort of way, like things in our peripheral vision are out of focus and practically invisible, but you're still seeing them.

> I tend to think that I have a better understanding,

I maintain that vision is a crutch. It helps develop an easy to grok intuition, that works within the realm of visible way you'd think of interacting with the system. True intuition of things requires moving away from the visual intuition, and one that is grounded purely in the key axioms of that idea itself.

An example would be us thinking of differentiation as slope of a curve. The visual grounding is helpful but a more axiomatic understanding would allow you to grok concepts like [1], where the slop method falls short.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM

1. Dreams. I have "after-images" of dreams for brief moments after I wake up, but then rapidly fade, as do memories of what happened in the dreams unless I quickly make sure to fix memories of specific details in memory by thinking about them after I wake up. And so I have memories of having the dreams and seeing images in them, though I can't recall the dreams themselves.

2. I've meditated for years, and once I had an experience where I suddenly could see clearly, as if I was on a movie-set. Everything was clear. I could turn around and see what was around me. I was lucid - I could have fallen asleep for a moment, it's possible, but I was controlling the "camera", and I was fully aware it was not real, which sets it apart from most dreams for me. It was also a far clearer image than I recall from dreams. I call it a "movie set" because it was clear to me it was not real and it felt like a "replay" of events happening around me that I was not taking part in, which also does not match how dreams feel to me.

3. I occasionally see very brief, fuzzy flashes. E.g. in writing #1 above, I for a fraction of a second saw a flash of my grandparents cabin, which was the subject of a weird recurring nightmare I used to have where on one side of the cabin it was sunny, while on the other side there was a torrential downpour that eventually became a wall of green water. I can describe the cabin in great detail, but I can only see that very brief flash of an image, even that inconsistently.

So, I know my brain can create visuals of different fidelity under different circumstances.

At the same time, when I "visualise" things, the "visualisations" are entirely spatial, not visual, and I can reproduce abstract drawings with a level of precision that I can't copy if I sit down in front of something and try to draw it. I remember a particular time in school (as I type that, I can recall the layout of the class-room, down to where I sat, how we were seated in groups of four, what the desks and chairs looked like, but I can't see it) where we were given the task of doing two drawings of our shoes: For one we were to draw purely from memory. For the other we were to put a shoe in front of us and copy it.

My drawing from memory was very precise. I remembered almost exactly what my shoe looked like, and drew a stylised and precise representation of the concept of that shoe that incorporated most details of it. My drawing from having it front of me was far more fuzzy and impressionist, with lots of imprecision and imperfections that were not there in the stylised drawing from memory. But it looked more like the real-life shoe.

My point being that I see no reason for you to assume that how people draw things are linked to their ability to visualise the thing. I can draw things I can't visualise in ways that are many ways better than how I can draw things sitting on my desk in front of me, but in some ways worse. I think it is in part because the lack of visual recall forces me to compensate by learning the details of something.

E.g. another comment asked about number of windows in their house. Well, I can't see my house, but I can "spatially walk around it" and count, but if I do I quickly realise that if I could visualise the house it'd likely be fuzzy in parts because I need to think about certain rooms because I mostly see the house from the inside and in some rooms the curtains towards the road are usually drawn shut. I see no reason why someone would accurately be able to recall or visualise most objects, because most of the time we don't really look at objects properly. People superficially pay attention to just some details and never bother to actually fully take in enough detail to ever remember an object the way it actually looks.

So when you say other people think they have a visualisation but do not, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion: People don't have an accurate memory, as you point out. And whether or not it is limited that way for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that visualisation is limited by recall and imagination, and that you can't "test" whether or not people can produce visualisations by judging their ability to recall an object precisely.

Why can‘t we draw perfect helicopters from mind?

The same reason most can’t draw a perfect helicopter when having one in front of them.

It gets difficult to do more than simple calculus and algebra problems purely in my head, so I start offloading parts of my virtual workspace to a meatspace page.

I just do all this visualisation without seeing anything, but I describe myself as a visual thinker.

I describe aphantasia as not being able to literally see things with my mind's eye, but still having the feeling of seeing them. Like running a headless browser.

Try this neat trick I just discovered: Try to visualize colors. Close your eyes, and just try to picture a red, then a green, then a blue. I never realized I could do this, and it actually requires a good bit of concentration. But it's super satisfying, especially given my aphantasia. I really can "see" the color like it's right there.

How's your "inner ear"? Can you hear music perfectly? I can.

What was the point at which it "clicked" for you? For me it was an AskReddit thread a few years back with a prompt of "When you hear a 'three X walk into a bar' joke, what does the bar look like?" It had just never occurred to me that people can actually visualize a bar when they hear that joke.

I've dabbled a bit with that kind of work and I find my mind's eye to be critical for it and I would have no idea how to undertake it if I couldn't visualize something.

Oddly, I can visualize things very well in specific circumstances. For example: if I spend a lot of time playing a new game, I can recall images from it and manipulate them with ease. There are times where I listen to podcasts while playing a game and images from the game pop up when I recall anything related to what was in the podcast.

I'm also an aphantasiac, as it were, and I've got some considerable trauma behind me that doesn't phase me the way that people who learn of it think that it ought to. I've never seen that expressed before but I understand what you mean. Thanks for sharing.

[0]: I suspect that's just code for pumping him with an overdose of opiates so he would die quicker and with less spasms and no pain, but I can't be sure. I kind of think it's an open secret in medicine that they do this, though not sure, and I appreciate her service in helping us all be more comfortable in that room with her action that day.

That is the best description of mental arithmetic I’ve heard, I love it.

Thinking about it, I guess I solve problems by moving numbers into certain positions relative to each other based on the operations then watch them split apart/combine, grow/shrink, etc. I always assumed it was a weakness in my math skills but the dance metaphor is a profound reframing, thanks!

From point, to colored points, to simple shapes, to textured surfaces, to lit and moving mechanisms?

I learned. You can too.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

I've had tactile hallucinations for many years now, sometimes when I'm in bed with my eyes closed (but nowhere near asleep) it feels like something is grabbing or poking at my face, or at times that sometimes is under the bed and breathing but at a different rate to my own breathing. Especially the tactile hallucinations on the face, these feel incredibly real, to the point that I usually open my eyes at least once just to confirm.

However, thats clearly nothing I can control. The ability to be able to control that seems amazing to me

I usually describe what you refer to as a sense of space on a monochrome model as being as if I've loaded a JSON file listing out all of the points on a 3D model, but there's no renderer to view it with.

After about 30 hours in I was getting really wild enhancements to my dreams and some changes to my “mind’s eye”. Almost like mono vs stereo or black and white vs colour, but it was more like what I thought was 3d was actually 2d and I only found out after it smacked me in the face.

> A blind [astral] projector gave me the following explanation regarding his perceptions during dreams and OBEs. Being blind since birth and being a successful projector is a fairly unusual combination, to say the least. Over the years, my investigations in this area have unearthed many important clues concerning the nature of perception. These provided me with further clues as to the nature and dynamics of other aspects of OBE. In the out-of-body environment, perception is absolutely everything. Therefore, understanding the nature of perception is paramount to understanding the dynamics of OBE and the entire range of related phenomena.

> My question to CB was "Could you please expound on your nonsighted condition and how you perceive things during your OBEs?"

> C.B.: I've been blind since birth. My optic nerves didn't develop while I was in the womb, but I still have vivid OBEs and dreams. It's hard to explain just how I sense things and get around while I'm out of my body, but I'll give it a try. I experience no real difference between my OBE and dream perceptions. When I have a dream or OBE, I am very aware of what is around me, but everything is always three-dimensional. I can't perceive anything as two-dimensional, such as what's on the surface of a picture, but can perceive the canvas and frame as a whole very clearly. The area around me is extremely vivid in my mind, in all directions, and is very detailed. This awareness is much stronger than my normal awake perceptions are in my own home. When I project it's like I can feel everything around me, as if I am continually touching everything with my fingers, with my mind, with my senses reaching out and touching everything around me all at once. My senses extend a long way, much further than usual, and I can feel into the distance around me in probably much the same way as sighted people do with their eyes. I get around fine when I'm out of my body, with no hesitation or doubt about my surroundings at all. I never worry about bumping into things and can sense exactly what is ahead of me and around me at all times. If I meet people during an OBE or dream, I can instantly tell what they look like and what they are wearing, just as if I were running my hands all over them. This isn't really sight, as I have no idea of what color or light is, but my dream and OBE perceptions are about as close to sight as it gets for me.

From page 42 of https://ia902904.us.archive.org/28/items/AstralDynamicsANEWA...

My question about that has always been where the dividing line is between the people that can supposedly accurately describe places they haven't physically been and whatnot, and the mental blueprint of the brain going brrt :P

It's arguably half-tangentially related to what you describe, mostly because of the reference to hands.

An interesting note: taking bupropion (or, I assume, any similar stimulant) at bedtime drastically improves both the frequency and visual imagery of my dreams. Moreover, while taking it, should a dream turn lucid, my subjective experience in the dream is one of suddenly being unable to fixate on specific details of objects or direct my gaze (as if my visual field is entirely peripheral), rather than the 3D-modeled resin.

My brain is definitely capable of generating mental imagery, and I'll get flashbulb imagery as an automatic response to cues, but something interferes with the ability to visualize things while I'm awake.

But the strange part is I experience above-average visual recognition memory. It's like I can take those "chalk drawings" and pattern match them ridiculously fast against real stimulus. I can recognize faces and street corners from decades ago - but only if I see them again in real life. I can't conjure the image up in my head without the corresponding stimulus no matter how hard I try.

Personally, I find it strange that non-aphantasic people can effectively hallucinate on demand. It's the equivalent of hearing voices in your head - a disconnect between sensation and perception that, honestly, reduces my trust in their judgement. I know people who are strong visualizers (can play movies on demand behind their eyelids) and find they tend to have a terrible ability to accurately convey a story - presumably they've visualized their fantasy scenario so much they're unable to differentiate it from reality? My narrative + chalk drawing memories are consistently more reliable, if not more sparse.

This is how I went from not being aware "picture yourself on a beach" was more than a figure of speech to being able to decompose mechanisms and take measurements all in my mind.

This is exactly how you do it.

Your eyes have nothing to do with it. Your brain fakes your eyes seeing stuff for you, and it can fake other things for you if you ask it.

I never have trouble imagining things as they do clearly 'render'—I can picture scenes, shapes, faces, motion, the styling of text I remember, basically anything—but it doesn't result in true visual output where I can see things as if I have my eyes open. If the latter is something that people can truly do, then I guess I do have some form of aphantasia.

I'm an aphant and police sketch artists seemed like sorcerors of the Dark Arts to me up until the day I realized most people can visualize.

Hmmm. Supposing that problem were to be applied at a subconscious level to the mechanism that recalls faces, perhaps poor connectivity between visualization and (that area) is one potential reason/mechanism why people have face blindness?

I have been learning how to draw over the last 2.5 years, since discovering both that I also have aphantasia and that some of the best animators in the world do, too. I always thought it was unapproachable for the same reasons. I started with the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

I had to quickly open the post and search for a word 'dream' and found your comment.

Btw. for me visual imagination during pre-sleep even when very sleep deprived is same as when being wide awake. Dreams themselfs are a little more vivid perhaps, I'm not completely sure. Which reminds me a phrase 'lucid dreaming'.. a supposed state where can you volountarily control your dream to utilize it as some kind of matrix/construct.

Did you try advancing past that though? Trace a word letter by letter, read it backwards? Take two points, move them apart? Make one green, one blue?

It took me months to get from points to a spinning pyramid with colored sides.

It feels a lot more like proprioception than visualization.

If you quiet it down and ask yourself "What am I afraid of happening?" you'll get an answer. It will usually be something you need to urgently attend to, or you'll regret it.

It's like an inverse conscience.

I have once imagined music strongly enough it was the same subjective experience as if it was real (except for the conscious awareness it was internal, but that was literally the only difference).

I can alter my sense of which way down is on a whim.

I can’t imagine tastes or smells at all, merely recognise them when I experience them.

I imagine thermoception more strongly than pain, but nowhere near as strongly as sound or gravity.

I can imagine non-painful touch stimuli almost, but not quite, as strongly as gravity.

I can imagine false proprioception with middling strength, including the perception of having a differently configured body.

I would start with 3-4 minutes of boxed breathing back when I learned visualisation. Nothing would happen if my mind was doing the monkey thing, grasping at this, then at that, then at something else.

That's like "depression". There is no one kind. How depressed are you? Very? Not so much?

How would you even know?

If you don't notice the relationships of parts, don't break things down – you can't do it.

Don't be afraid of your dreams. They are part of you. Part of your mind, consequently brain, which is a body part.

When dreaming you can do much more than visualize. Dreaming is a different skill.

You can learn dreaming too.