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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a popular topic on HN but I wonder how much of this is due to semantics. Before I read a story about this I didn't stop to think that people couldn't picture things in their mind. But now that I've read a few and seen numerous comments on it, I've started to second guess myself. I can imagine a couple gears turning and I would normally have said, "yes I can see it in my mind" but it isn't really like seeing but it seems visual in some way.

So maybe what I consider "seeing" in my mind doesn't really count as "seeing" for some because that isn't 100% what it is like?

Maybe I'm just so locked into "seeing" things in my mind that I can't imagine how it would work if I didn't.

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I am on the side that this isn’t semantics and is a real phenomenon. For me, I can hear in my mind very well. I can hear so well that I can occasionally confuse things I’ve hear in my mind’s ear for a real sound (did you just say something?). It very slightly crosses the line into an auditory hallucination. I can hear music so well that I don’t need a radio to listen, just think of the first few seconds of a song and off it goes on the jukebox.

My mental images are nowhere near this clear, but they are a kind of “darksight” a seeing and a not seeing, ephemeral but also real and useful for visualization and problem solving.

I can relate. I'll also get songs viscerally stuck in my head that will play nonstop for several days straight. And not only music, I'll occasionally get stuck images as well, pictures that will sit in my peripheral thoughts for days.

That's the first I've heard of eyeworms. Interesting!

I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the author. Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if I try to recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can "fill in" detail by recalling facts about that person (hair/eye colour, wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and details fade quickly.

I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice.

One test for aphantasia goes something like this:

> Imagine a ball sitting on a table. You reach forward and push the ball and it rolls off the table. Now without changing the scene, what colour was the ball? What about the table?

For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin to stainless steel. My wife will describe a colourful beach ball on a wooden table with lighting and shadow and describe the room it's in in detail. My scene was in a void as no room was mentioned.

This comment is very interesting to me, thank you for sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you said, and I feel the phrasing "normal imagination lacking detail" is perfect. And, (why I decided to respond ->)

> For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin to stainless steel.

my scene was similar but opposite: Steel/metallic ball on smooth white table, ball falls into a colorless void. The table doesn't even have dimensions really, just has an edge the ball can fall off.

I must read more on aphantasia. If you don't mind me asking: did you decide that this is your condition through learning about it, or were you "diagnosed" somehow?

Not the person you're responding to, but for me it was an AskReddit thread with the prompt of "When you hear an X walked into a bar joke, do you always imagine the same bar?". The idea that someone could imagine a bar (rather than just think about the concept of a bar) was what convinced me that "visualizing" is a real thing and I can't do it.

For me the ball test is equally meaningless... I don't understand the premise.

Not diagnosed, but it seems to just fit my experience so well.

> I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the author. Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if I try to recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can "fill in" detail by recalling facts about that person (hair/eye colour, wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and details fade quickly.

> I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice.

Interesting! I relate quite heavily to first part; I also can visualize abstract things but have a lot of trouble with faces. I'm sometimes not able to recognize whether two photos are of the same person or different people, and I always seem to think that other people don't look similar when others do think they do, and think people look similar that no one else seems to. However, I dream _very_ vividly almost every night, and I find it so engrossing that it interferes with my ability to get up in the morning sometimes because in my half-awake state I'm convinced that the "story" in my dream is interesting enough that I need to see where it goes. By the time I'm fully awake, it generally turns out that the dream didn't make much sense, but often it contained enough absurdity that telling my friends or family about it is entertaining for them.

> Imagine a ball sitting on a table. You reach forward and push the ball and it rolls off the table. Now without changing the scene, what colour was the ball? What about the table?

So that is interesting. I struggle with that test, I couldn't tell you after reading that what color the ball was or what material the table was, but I did still feel that I was picturing it, I wasn't just registering the color or filling it in.

I will say that if you did this test with me in real life with a real ball I also might not pass it; I struggle a lot with not registering certain visual details unless I'm trying very hard to pay attention to them. I can work next to someone for a month, and then if you ask me off-the-cuff what their hair looks like or whether they wear glasses, I won't be able to tell you. But it's not that I can't see details, it's just not necessarily something that happens by default.

If anything, I thought the fuzziness of how I'm picturing things in my head as further evidence against aphantasia, because the way I'm picturing the ball in my head is very similar to the way I would see it in real life. I can't tell you the color of the ball or the table, but I can tell you about what sound it made while rolling, I can tell you about the speed it rolled and how far it rolled, I can tell you how big the ball was roughly (about palm-sized), I can tell you it was a solid ball, not squishy. My room was also a void.

But that's very, very similar to what would happen in real life; if you brought me into a room and showed me that scene and then later asked me to describe the room, I wouldn't have noticed that part of it unless something stuck out. And it's not that I can't picture the ball with color or imagine the table being wooden or something, it's just like with normal vision, it doesn't register until I think about it and I can't go back and just remember it, I need to re-visualize it with colors/context.

:shrug: Very cool if there are people who default to picking up on and imagine more exact/precise details than that.

For me, the ball and table had no color - they were almost wireframes. I think the task reminded me of studying physics in university so much, that I imagined a diagram of them, not the objects.

Yeah, the more I think about it, what I "saw" looked really like a blackboard drawing of ball and table, including the shading on the ball and everything being from the "default isometric angle".

Weird.

But for the usual "imagine a beach" aphantasia test, I do imagine real beach with sand-colored sand, trees, people, sea, sound of waves and screeching of seagulls. Which makes me think two things - some aphantasia might be learned by teaching people abstract thinking, and that the artificialness of the example might be biasing.

I think to say they had any colour at all in my mind might be pushing it. The way I imagine it is more like the concept of a ball and table. The imagery, while clear to me, seems fuzzy somehow if I try to resolve details. Yet I know the objects themselves are not fuzzy.

I can imagine the things you describe in a beach scene, and on the surface I feel like it's an accurate depiction of the scene. But if I try to describe it in detail it starts to fall apart and the description would be vague compared to my wife.

I don't think semantics explains cortical excitability and skin conductance differences.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research

It's not just semantics, but it seems like a hard concept to grasp for those who are not affected. And even those who have it, when they first learn about it.

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