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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any concept of seeing something in my head. I always assumed it was a way to say "think about this thing" and never thought people could "see" it in any meaningful way. If someone asks me to picture an elephant, I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me. I can describe what an elephant looks like. I can draw something--poorly--that other people would immediately identify as an elephant. I can talk about the shape of an elephant, the parts of an elephant, colors, textures, and other physical properties. But I can't "see" or "picture" an elephant.

I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like that.

Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.

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I'm honestly not even sure if someone could describe their own experience of thinking about visual things with enough detail that I could tell whether my own experience of thinking about visual things is significantly different. When you started talking about having no concept of seeing something in your head I thought "whoa, that's very different from my experience." But then what you went on to describe sounds precisely like my experience. I can make poor but recognizable drawings of commonly-known objects like animals. I can also imagine large human spaces I've spent a lot of time in, like my apartment building or old Counter-Strike levels, with a fair amount of detail (certainly enough to describe how to navigate). But now I'm wondering what distinction you're making between being able to use your imagination to accomplish these tasks and "seeing" or "picturing" these objects in your mind. Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects? Surely that ability is extremely rare, and isn't what people mean when they say they're picturing something in their head, right?

> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?

It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's why I think it may have more to do with the language people are using to describe the experience than the experience itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.

If it helps, when I close my eyes I see black/darkness.

If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks like, I still only see black/darkness… but I can still describe the features of the room in very much detail. I definitely can’t conjure up a vivid image in my head, I would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly visual experience. Same with recalling what someone’s voice sounds like… I can imagine what someone’s voice sounds like, but definitely can’t hear their voice in any meaningful level of detail, yet I’m still able to describe the voice - it’s more of a feeling than a literal audio/visual experience.

I definitely wouldn’t describe my own experience as anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see black/darkness… (I think) it’s uncommon to literally see things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is abnormal?

Just by way of providing another data point: I was going down this exact same rabbit hole and my experience matches your description exactly.

I have no idea if I'm in the minority of humans in this, but when I picture something in my head, it has colors, shapes, and I guess I'm using the same brain hardware as when I use my eyes to process the "phantasm" of it. My mental model is that this facility is another "source", in addition to my eyes, that can be used to pipe sense data into the visual processing "sink".

When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text file got me thinking about what it would look like if my eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would look like (given what information I had about things like whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not, whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind of thing).

Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I keep track of whether I'm running out of various things (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so, it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent reality, with more familiar things being represented more accurately.

It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing it (my parents called it "staring off into space").

I'll second the first paragraph here. The demonstration I've come up with involves holding a hand closely in front of only my left eye. My brain lets me see both things, but my hand also has a 'transparent' characteristic when I'm focusing on my right vision. Back to visualizing, the 'other source' isn't anywhere near as crisp as the demonstration, and often is a mix of memory / imagination / caricature / labeling it with the concept.

It's still not clear to me if there's a difference between imagining I'm seeing something and actually seeing something in my head. When I imagine what it's like to see something, of course it has colors, shapes, etc. I can also imagine what a room would look like from a particular vantage point (although I may not be as skillful as it as someone who has practiced doing it and experimented with computer graphics). I guess I'm still curious if there's truly any difference in our experiences. I wonder if optical illusions work when we're picturing things in our head.

That's so interesting! I did the test linked to in the article, and I noticed that I am able to "visualize" object, but have decidedly a hard time to think about how I would perceive them if I looked at them - so I guess just opposite from you.

I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once. And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different sense.

> I wonder if optical illusions work when we're picturing things in our head.

I want to say that some won't work, since I know there are some that rely on design flaws in our eyeballs (placement of the optic nerve). I'm thinking specifically about the ones where you are directed to look at some part of the figure and notice that some other part has vanished.

I feel I am the same as this. I often build things from wood and steel. In order to plan parts to be made, where to do cuts and make joins I need to think and "see" how best to do that. I believe I do this quite well, and my thoughts work out well once I put my hand to my tools and make what I foresaw. But I don't believe I ever had a vivid hallucination of what I was making, more a hazy wireframe that gets the job done

Aphantasia probably has a single digit percentage incidence rate in the population but it is hard to know.

It's certainly hard to describe the inner workings of one's mind with adequate detail to compare them to others. However I believe this anecdote may provide some insight.

One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the elephant or apple in the article.

I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.

> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?

That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.

When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to sketching and ordering.

(environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-... )

Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who would arrange for a delivery the next day.

I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put them together. After running it through the fax machine to get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was probably the best place for me.)

The majority of installers in the field could do this, though some were certainly better at it than others. Most would start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight out.

I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head was the anomaly.

Now I'm curious which is more common.

> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space

I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely flustered my brain to the point of switching majors.

I'm also curious if there is any difference between these two experiences other than the words each person uses to describe their own experience.

Every time this topic comes up, there are people describing a world with a complete lack of visualisation capability of any kind (and it affecting their life/career, even, as in the person you responded to) and people describing being able to rotate things around in their head in 3d. And then a number of people, like you, claiming that it could just be a terminology difference. These are clearly very different levels of visualisation ability and it's not just terminology.

> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc.

I can do this too, but it is not literally a visual experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual perception, not visual sensation in the way that a hallucination does.

Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of something in my literal vision. Which is what some people are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing to talk about.

I don't know of anyone who can summon an image such that it blocks their literal eyesight. But in my head, I can still "see" the image, with definition, color, etc. I can vividly recall photographs and "see" the colors, lines, and details of those photographs in my head. I am still also seeing what is in front of me, though in a more "out of focus" fashion - my visual concentration is elsewhere.

I don't know how best to express it, but it's extremely visual. It's not just that I am recalling and describing - I am viewing and describing.

Ironically, I am terrible at drawing things because I can't see past the "big picture."

Super interesting. I can't "see" concretely at all in my mind - it's essentially always the back of my eyelids. But I am excellent at imagining just about anything, including rotating it around, zooming in, animating, etc. It's not seeing, it's more feeling I guess I'd describe it. I was always great at those "rotate this shape" questions on tests. Yet there's no concrete visual of it at all. Yet I can change zoom, colors, design pretty easily and have a good idea of what it looks like.

I'm terrible at drawing, but could describe any scene I'm imagining have a near-perfect idea of how it should look if someone drew for me.

You might be an aphantasiac with high spatial skills.

I'm an aphant with low spatial skills.

Though, FWIW, it sounds like you have more internal visuals than I do.

This discussion is fascinating. The various participants describe their experience very differently, but I still have absolutely no idea whatsoever if their internal experiences differ at all, or just the verbalizations.

Given that there are people who describe having no visuals of any kind and people who describe having a 3d rotatable view in their head, you should have some idea of how their internal experiences differ.

Personally I can imagine describing my experience as either a 3d-rotatable view in my head or as no visuals of any kind, depending on differences in the definition of “visual”.

But I can identify most closely with the other commenters here who describe their experience as more proprioceptive or spatial than visual per se.

> I can do this too

Not everyone can. That's the difference people are talking about.

Right, I think that's the case, but it's very difficult to tell where genuine difference in experience ends and difference in the way it's described begins, is the point. Language is just very imprecise in this area.

No, I'm literally telling you that is the case. I cannot do anything remotely like what you are describing. The concept makes no sense to me.

Interesting. When you rotate it in 3d space in your head, is the movement continuous?

I can rotate things in my head, but I get a very low framerate - roughly 1fps. Its easy for me to imagine the keyframes, but the interpolation between them is much harder.

I also tend to have a small rendering resolution - ex. I can render keyframes of details, but holding the entire image in my head simultaneously is difficult

I can close my eyes and see a picture or even video of any scene, from any angle, that I have seen before or that I could arrange the details of in my head, as if it were real. I don't even have to close my eyes, but it's more vivid if I do.

However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to recall it, the more blurry it becomes.

Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real. I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind, but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird.

The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament to the neuroplasticity of our brains.

If I understand OP correctly I think a test of sorts might be mathematical objects. If I think of a cube, I can visually imagine a cube in my head, turn it, and so on. It's not 100% percent detailed, it's harder to 'see' it than to actually see it, but is is 'there' in a way.

However some sort of abstract higher dimensional thing that doesn't have a physical analog I can't imagine at all. If there's really a difference in how people perceive these things than I imagine for OP there is no difference between visualizing any object but for others there is.

> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?

It's not a hallucination because that would imply it interferes with your eye vision. It's like a third eye, independent of the other two, so it doesn't interfere.

I consider myself good at visualizing form and space, but when people say they "see" something in their mind's eye, I assume they're not like literally having a full-blown DMT hallucination where objects appear solid and indistinguishable from physical reality. The "images" are part information. You can think about the shadows or the highlights and they'll pop out or recede as you think about them.

I actually have a thing where I can't process math without seeing geometry in my head. But I was never naturally good at perfectly visualizing real world objects. Instead of math and code, which came naturally, I pursued art college because I considered it a weak spot for me. And indeed, I wasn't very good at it... but years of classes and practice made me better, and strengthened my visualization skill. I think it can be learned and exercised, like any other part of the brain. Just like musical recognition can be learned, if not perfect pitch.

> The "images" are part information.

This. It is a mashup of both. I can clearly visualize many 3D objects in my mind, as well as zoom, pan, scale, rotate, recolor, animate, distort them, etc. But it is not purely visual, because I often "see" opposite side of a cube momentarily, which I should not be able to from this perspective.

So, it is not a rendering engine. It is not physically, spatially and temporally stable. Stability is lost especially as your focus shifts (e.g. "seeing" behind objects as your attention slips there)

The best way I know to describe this is by old and new Tesla FSD predictions which are sampled here: https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=3768

Improved version is how people talk about visualization, but the old unstable version is how (at least for me) it mostly is.

Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have memories of documentaries that “replay” in my head. When I am imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I can’t really see what is in front of me.

In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.

Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.

> Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild!

ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow.

How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that?

These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme

Yeah, that’s definitely more vivid than what I see, and I’m fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have trouble “seeing the entire thing at once”.

That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.

Usually, I can see everything all at once, fully detailed. Think of a screenshot, that's basically how it is like for me. I've even visualized entire websites in perfect clarity and reproduced them from that screenshot-like memory.

What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities.

If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination:

* I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery.

* The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part.

* The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail.

* There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update.

It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation.

It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.

It is not either or. I went from not never imagining things in visual way to having images popping up in my head by themselves. The brain started to visualize things, after I started to learn to draw. I knew absolutely nothing about drawing and used draw-a-box and youtube tutorials to learn.

I never felt like missing something and those images dont add much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.

I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of things and much better at noticing properties of objects around me.

>> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.

Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.

It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only this one specific difference in how people think.

I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.

Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots of psychology topics. Try autism.

As a sibling comment posited, its popular pretty much anywhere.

Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.

If there were a concrete phenomenon that's consistently observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We can't directly compare subjective experience, so any comparison is going to be filtered through the language of how we describe said experience, and so it's that much harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category and the extent to which people have it.

Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic.

Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is.

(Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.)

Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition.

Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.

I mean, if you have a strong mental imagery, it's not ambiguous at all whether it's metaphorical or not. It really is seeing. All experience is subjective, but it's like if half of people were seeing in greyscale and tried to argue that there may or may not be different colors other than grey, and that the discussion is pointless. The people seeing colors are like, uhhh no man, there are actually different colors and you're just not seeing them. It's incredibly obvious that there are more colors than grey. But when a large chunk of people see in monochrome, and even more people are seeing an extremely desaturated palette to where it's almost grey but not quite, the discussion gets muddied. And then the greyscale seers try to convince everyone that it's just a difference in language and actually 'red' is just a feeling. It's just absurd to anyone who has the strong sense.

Except this is nothing like color blindness. No matter how much you play with colors, you remain colorblind. Colorblindness also affects your life at least somehow.

This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops.

It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.

Are you implying that aphantasia is treatable by practice visualizing things? My own experience with it and everything I've seen (no pun intended) says otherwise, but I'm happy to read a good source of reasoning around your theory.

Yep. And it completely ignores aspect of it being something that you can train. It is more of mental skill, like ability to manipulate numbers in your head, remember worst and what not. I 100% doubt I am only one whose visual imagination got significantly better with trying to learn new strongly visual skill (in my case drawing).

> or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition

Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.

>Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too.

Oh sure, that too. I was just going for brevity in that part. As per my first paragraph, I'm not convinced that aphantasia is a natural category, which would be necessary for framing it as a condition.

(Although I'd maybe say I'm more "on the fence" than "convinced its absurd" -- I'm open to the possibility someone can come up with a clear test, I just don't see it and don't expect anyone to.)

Some artists have aphantasia. So it isn't just a function of drawing.

People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.

> When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.

Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I ‘visualize’ a tiger, it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read your comment I said ‘oh, wtf!’ out loud

Consider sitting outside and looking at a flowering bush or tree. At first it's just a tree. Then you realize that there are flowers on it (they were always there, but you weren't attending to them before). After a little while you'll again suddenly realize that there are bees buzzing around the flowers, and a nest halfway up and a few feet from the center on the right. You, most likely, did not have all that in your head on your first glance at the tree. It was just a tree. This is how many mental images are formed.

If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, or am asked a question about it, more details will come to mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a scene, like from a commercial.

The way it works for me (I can't visualize like that), it's like I am writing a story. I can say I see a tiger, then think about it and write down more details but I am always consciously adding stuff to the tiger. If I want details about number of stripes, I need to think about it and then "write" it. Never do I see something I am not consciously forming.

Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.

Ok, this is mindblowing for me. When I think of a tiger I have some kind of visual sensation, but it's extremely low on information. Like maybe 12x12 or 16x16 pixels. But not sharp pixels, but fuzzy, colored shapes, or very, very simple details, like whiskers. Like in a impressionist picture. But way simpler.

Never though that this was different of anyone else.

Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things i realised that apparently i can have this image only for about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of other people aswell.

Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class, despite trying.

For what it's worth, I'm also completely worthless at art, despite being on the opposite end of the visualization spectrum -- I can easily conjure very detailed visual (and sonic) impressions in my mind's eye, and the act of reading itself for me cannot be decoupled from "hearing" the words (tone and all) in my head.

It's depressing in a totally different sense, because I can never capture on paper the things that I visualize -- I just don't have the knack for art.

I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract thoughts in visual form.

My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.

Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that people ask you to explain how you know where things are.

I mean that's one specific example, but I get what he's saying. I'm super verbal and I used to do problem sets in college with a friend that obviously had much better visuospatial abilities than me. >75% of the time he'd be the one that really figured out the question. But then we'd go home to write up our solutions and I'd get consistently full letter grade higher marks on what was essentially the same work. He was just doing a way worse job of putting his own work into words.

Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.

You don't know how you know where you left your own things, but if I do know where a friend left e.g. their wallet or keys, I often do remember why. As if the novelty of the circumstance that allowed me to store the information also caused my brain to store metadata about that memory, e.g. the novelty itself.

I think of myself as a very visual thinker, but I actually cannot form conscious images in my head. This seems like a contradiction, but it's true anyway.

I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape.

It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself.

The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.

That's a funny connection, I'm also occasionally a lucid dreamer as well.

Same here. I could "think" about it, but I couldn't see it. I just tested this out in a completely dark room. Both with or without my eyes open. I just cant see it. I cant visualise an Elephant in my head. Not even the slightest. I never thought when someone visualise it they really meant "visualise" it. This is shocking!

I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend.

When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ?

And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.

For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.

> And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.

> For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.

FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a mental narrative voice.

I have "thoughts" or argument flows through my mind. But they are definitely silent and messy. So instead of arguing about it inside my head, I talked to myself, this makes things much clearer.

Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.

Do you just not hear your voice when you think? Are there words? How do you formulate ideas without words? What happens when you speak - do ideas just cross some event horizon and come out as vocalizations? Do you know what the words are going to be before you say them?

Just like I know I am thinking of an elephant, but I cant "see" an elephant. I know I am thinking about a topic and precise words I am using like what I am typing out now, but I cant "hear" the voice in my head of what I am typing / about to type.

My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my head without me realising I was actually saying it out.

So you’re unable to “think” a sentence word for word? You cannot think the sentence “If I were to grab that apple, then I would be holding it in my hand”? You’re unable to hear yourself say those exact words in your head as if you spoke them aloud?

If so, that is truly fascinating. What happens when you try to speak a sentence in your head?

I can intentionally think about words, but I don't most of the time, and when I do, there is nothing that seems remotely similar to "hearing".

Are you consciously thinking about every word you say before you say it?

Sometimes, sometimes not. I can structure my words before I say them and they literally appear to me like text on a page, in front of my mind, and I hear myself saying those words with various versions of intonations before picking out the version I want, then I say them out loud in that intonation to the person I'm speaking to.

Wow, that is very different from my experience. While I can consciously think about words, I can't "hear" them at all, let alone with different intonations. Seeing the words seems even stranger to me...

I do not think about each word before saying it.

When I think, it’s a mixture of 1) hearing my voice and 2) thinking in purely abstract concepts and relationships without putting English to it.

When I want to think in English, I can hear it plain as day, as if I’m saying the words aloud, with their exact cadence and accent. I can also “speak” with someone else’s voice and hear them say anything as clearly as if they were speaking in front of me.

Thinking in English can help me find the holes and gaps in my abstract thoughts, because I’m forced to formalize each logical leap and conclusion.

> You’re unable to hear yourself say those exact words in your head as if you spoke them aloud?

Zero. Zip. Dead Silence.

It may be fascinating but at the same time I felt I am sort of having some disability. Quite depressing now I know many people can do it.

> How do you formulate ideas without words?

How do you put your pants on without words? Serious question. It's like that.

For me, and I think for most people, "picturing an elephant" is very literal. For example, you could ask me to "picture an elephant" then follow up by asking "what is the elephant which you pictured doing with its trunk?" To answer the question, I focus my attention on trunk in the picture in my head in order to "take in" what it is doing (e.g., perhaps "it is curled upward but otherwise not doing anything" or it might turn out that "it is grasping a branch").

> Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.

Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or focusing attention on an image in your head in order to describe it, the way I explained above?

I would describe it this way: my mind kind of has a scratchpad of sorts that's separate from what I see or hear. It's a dream-like space that you can conjure a vague image onto that's visual in nature but distinctly different from literally seeing out of your eye and not in real space. If you are able to recall and play a song you heard in your head - it's reminiscent of that, but visual. I often do both. When I was younger I often visualized words in my head as I said or thought them.

You are definitely experiencing things differently from me. There is no question or ambiguity for me that I am 'seeing' something in my mind. It is nearly as close to seeing as I do with my eyes; there is no way that if you had this sense you would be unaware of it. I am not seeing the blackness of my eyelids at all. I'm completely unaware of the blackness. I'm seeing something as though it were in my vision. I can rotate it around and view it from any angle. It's as though the vision processor gets unplugged from the eyes and gets plugged into some part of the brain; different input source, but the output, that of experiencing sight, is nearly the same.

I expect that the clarity of this sense varies on a spectrum, with some people low enough that they don't have it at all, and others kind of having it but not very clear. I expect that the latter group are the ones commenting things like "I'm not sure if I count or not." But from what I can tell, I'm toward the higher end of clarity, and the sense is by no means uncertain.

Yeah it's confusing me too. When I asked a friend if he could picture a red apple he said he could 'see' it visually. If I do the same thing, I can't see an apple, but I do think about an apple, and I know what it looks like.

I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way :)

If I close my eyes and try to consciously see something, I see only black or maybe shifting colours. With my eyes open, and not consciously trying to form an image, I think I can see things I'm thinking about, though not in colour, but as soon I try to form an image, it slips away. It's odd - I'm not even certain I can see things unconsciously this way - I think I can, but I'm not really quite sure - the images are just on the very edge of conscious reach. This doesn't stop me being able to draw or paint reasonably well, and I'm really good at thinking about how three dimensional mechanisms work - I don't so much as form an image as just understand complex shapes without seeing them - but I still cannot just form an image consciously. To the extent I can, I'm more figuring out how I'd draw it than recalling the image itself.

The test from the linked article seems to assume people can visualize an actual image more than fleetingly, but that's not me. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is very good at visualization (I certainly can when I'm dreaming), but it's not a conscious thing for me, and the very act that the test asks for - think of a scene - is what causes any half-images to disappear.

I can't imagine doing math or electronics in my head without some concept of internal visualization. Assuming you do those things (if not there is likely something else that applies): When you rearrange equations in your head, are you not having some visual representation of them (actual equations in an otherwise empty space for me) that you manipulate? When you think about a circuit, don't you mentally think about where the current goes in an actual visual representation of the circuit?

What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or whatever was?

I think the answers to these questions might help me at least to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a different description.

For me it feels a lot more like proprioception. I understand the relationship of those things in the same way I understand where my arm is if I raise it over my head with my eyes closed. I have a very good directional sense, and I feel the same way about maps, etc. I can't visualize them at all, but I understand where things are in relation to each other.

I am 100% sure I cannot visualize things. I have been able, with _lot_ of concentration, "visualize" a blob of color. I was unable to control the shape or size, but could (kind of) control the color (between the choices of red, green, and purple). It was incredibly vivid, and I'm convinced that's what "visualizing means, and that people can do it with actual objects and scenes.

I do not as a general rule see anything but rather just have an understanding of the concept elephant - I think of the word, also if someone tells me don't think about X I can, so the whole now you can't stop thinking about X joke falls flat.

But I can make myself visualize it at different levels, I can do a quick command visualize in which I have sort of a flash of what is meant but it isn't a continuing image in my mind. Right now when I did the visualize Elephant thing I got a bit of an image that looked like the center elephant off the cover to Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr

If I do a much longer close my eyes and visualize I can make that image I flashed on more concrete in my head.

As a general rule I do not consider myself a visual thinking but a language oriented thinker. I understand things better by reading than I do by looking at images.

That is called aphantasia, which I learned about through previous HN threads - there are many but here's a comment with a link to the VVIQ test https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20268557

I found the test difficult.

I think of it like an offscreen rendering. I can see it in my mind and if I space out I begin focusing on the second screen instead of the first. In those fleeting moment I can only describe it as not seeing anything with my eyes, only my mind. When I realize it is happening, it is gone.

This is close to my experience, as well. Particularly if I'm also reading text or otherwise using my vision in an involved way.

Do you have visual experiences while dreaming? For me "seeing in my head" is most similar to those: certainly a visual experience but with less detail than when I'm actually looking at something. I believe some people's are much more detailed than mine, as some people can reproduce scenes in exquisite detail from memory.

Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite like reading from paper, but very similar.

For me, it’s very specific. I can visualize a generic elephant, a generic apple or other generic or static object. However, I could never visualize a person’s face for more than a split second. I can describe the person’s features, but never maintain an image of a person’s face for any length of time. If I think of their picture, I can imagine that picture. I’m not sure how else to describe it. It’s kind of weird, but I never really think about it.

I think aphantasia is a sign of a weak skillset - I think you can practice it. I try to create wireframe versions of the rooms I am in sometimes, but I suck at it. Ask me to visualize something and I almost cannot - but for some reason I can do wireframes. It's my lame version of trying I guess.

Not sure if this is helpful, but that doesn't sound to me like just different words.

I use the word "see" because it's the best word to describe what is happening in my head. It's not literally seeing, but... it's very close, it's not just me remembering details about what something looks like, it's "visualizing".

I'm sorry, I don't know how to put into words the difference between the vision happening in my eyeball and the vision happening inside my head. There are differences, but they are very hard to articulate and there are fewer differences than there are similarities. The mental and eyeball "vision" are definitely at least running many of the same subroutines.

My feeling is that when someone says that they think words like "picture" or "see" are just social conventions, I suspect they're having a different experience than me. I would probably have settled on a phrase like "picture something in my head" even if no one else used that phrase, I can literally mentally trace out the outlines of the thing I'm imagining in the head. It's not just a list of attributes or descriptions, it's a thing that I am... again, for lack of a better word, "seeing", even though I'm not literally seeing it via my eyes in front of me.

What sticks out to me is that I literally can't think of any word that could be closer to what's happening then the words "vision", "seeing", "picture". Calling it a description is less accurate, it captures less of the experience than the word "seeing" does. Phrases like "replaying a scene in my mind", "remembering a sound", "an image popping into your head", etc... those are not rough poetic analogies, those are descriptions that are extremely close to what is literally going on inside my head.

> I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me

I am not going to try and diagnose anyone over the Internet, I'm not an expert on anything, but yeah, if you're curious about it that sounds to me a lot like aphantasia, at least as far as I understand aphantasia. You say the concept of comparing what's going on in your head to a picture doesn't make any sense at all to you? At that point I suspect it's not a difference in language; I'm not talking about being able to draw something or describe attributes about what it looks like, I'm talking about being able to... see it.

I don't know for certain, but I feel like picturing something in your head is (again, while not literally exactly the same as seeing something in real life) still not an analogy I would need to explain to someone who didn't have aphantasia.

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Articles like this are so fascinating to me, there are a couple of different parts of my experiences (ADHD, asexuality) that I always assumed were completely universal and then later in my life found out weren't. Whenever stuff like that happens to me it's always a surprising experience, and for some weird reason I'm always excited when I see it. Once you realize that certain things that you think are unique about you aren't, and that certain things that you think are universal aren't, and more than that you realize how easy it is to be in a situation where you'd never discover that -- for me it makes me feel like the world and the people around me are more interesting, and it makes me want to learn more about them.

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if someone has aphantasia, it doesn't mean their life is going to get turned upside down. But I think sometimes it's just fun to learn about things and to think about how experiences shape people.

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