Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination
neurosciencenews.com
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I feel like you describe a functional one.
I was just discussing this in terms of "sages" which know things, they recall and store "stateful data"
and "seers" (like in the verb to see); them who don't know things but perceive them and observe them.
I can kind of feel shapes and directions in my mind. When it comes to colours, though, I have to "paint" "manually" over this mental sonar image.
Can you "see" motion? I can. I can easily visualize a ballerina doing a pirouette and a plié and gracefully moving her arms... but I'm seeing actual imagery. It's more like I see the gradient of an image. Frankly, it's like "seeing" pure motion itself, devoid of the image itself of the thing moving. This was quite a surprising realization when I first noticed this ability. I think, by the way, for dancers and sports and others involved in motion activities, this ability is probably natural for them and they don't think about it.
When I was a kid I would spend hours constructing elaborate daydream worlds and plot lines. They were so vivid that I could have drawn them if asked.
While my mind is VERY visual, I have horrible music recall and music doesn't come naturally to me at all.
I can actually draw really well, better than most people. But not super elaborate scenes. And I know that if I could actually visualize, it would be helping me a lot.
I also have excellent musical/audio memory. I can hear back songs almost perfectly in my head, in the right key and in full detail.
Like I'm not seeing anything. I'm just sort of writing a novel where I'm the main character if that makes sense?
It's similar to how I remember things.
Short-term memory "size" seems fairly consistent between people. It wouldn't surprise me if those with aphantasia have a concomitant awareness of some other mental process that isn't normally consciously accessible. Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.
Is that logical? I think the most logical thing would be to ask: does it impair the individual's ability to reproduce, or the health of their children? I don't think it does - people with aphantasia seem to function relatively normally in that respect. Thus I don't think it would be that heavily selected for or against.
Sometimes things evolution produces are bad but not that bad, so they stick around because there's not enough pressure to make them go away.
edit: Also consider "impaired" vs "less fit". The absence of the trait might not be actively harmful to the individual, and yet enhance reproductive success of those who have it. Not having it among a population who do is a kind of cost.
Lack of a facility seems like it can only be a net negative, almost no matter what the facility is, but life is not simple like that and there could be any number of processes by which an ability creates a net liability in some context or environment.
A crude and not to be taken literally please example would be something like the ability to imagine comes attached to an increased level of distraction or inattention. Maybe the insights and creativity from the imagination pays enough dividends to be worth more than the occasional accident costs, or maybe in some environment the accidents or missed observations cost more.
And the effects from posessing or not posessing any given trait, including an ability, could be something like 600 different positive effects and 600 different negative effects, and they all weigh differently, and most of them no one can even guess at let alone quantify, making it as good as pointless to try to talk about.
This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.
I have a handful of dreams that I can recall from the entirety of my life and a couple from childhood, a couple from adulthood. I know that 1 of them is a recurring dream. 3 of them are actually nightmares.
I mean how do you do a dream log when you wake up and it is just like I have no idea if I dreamt or not.
I decided then to keep a journal and a pen next to my bed so that recording additional dreams would be easier. I soon found that I had collected multiple volumes of recorded dreams and auxiliary notes about them.
I don't know whether writing my dreams down made it more likely that I would dream, or more likely to remember my dreams--I know that some people say that it makes you more likely to remember your dreams, but I don't know whether that's true. I just know that the number of dreams I ended up writing down was much greater than I expected based on the number of dreams that I had previously remembered.
Also, I needed to write them down very quickly after waking or I'd forget them. Every minute I waited caused me to lose more details.
That still seems to be true years later. I don't keep a dream journal anymore, but I notice that if I wake from a dream, and I want to remember it, I need to write it down or tell someone about it pretty much right away. If I don't, it'll be lost within a few minutes. I might remember that I had a dream, and I might remember what I felt like when I was having it, but most often nothing more than that.
If I write it down or otherwise communicate it, though, I usually remember the parts that I managed to communicate before the rest disappeared.
Maybe if you keep a journal close to your bed as I once did, you'll get lucky one night and wake up from a dream to write it down. Maybe it will then turn out that those people are right: that writing down dreams makes you more likely to remember additional ones.
I don't know if that's true, but maybe.
It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts.
That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
Relationships is a word to explain it that I hadn't thought of before. I think a lot of engineers are probably similar.
When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
A lot of engineering/software stuff is abstract.
Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation
I also have essentially no geo-spatial awareness. I constantly get lost and have no sense of cardinal directions.
Anyone else out there have a brain like this?
(I'm still a bit "excited" from your original comment. I could have written it word for word.)
What about you?
I can if I consciously put effort towards it, but when thinking or reading I don't notice any sort of voice/sound
The one plus of seeing in concepts is that I can hold complex software systems in my head pretty easily and code always clicked with me very naturally. But I still am a bit jealous of those with special fx vision
I'm not sure what voice it is - but when I read or type I hear it, and I can ask questions internally and kind of look up things to recall a bit. No visualization it it's like a key value lookup.
It's a bit hard to explain but I was bummed when I found people can actually visualize things internally
Oddly, while I totally get the emphasis on "relationships", I definitely orient those relationships spatially. I used to play a text-only game (a MUD) where the world was laid out as a graph of rooms; the graph was only approximately metric. I initially learned to navigate by drawing my own (roughly Cartesian) maps as ASCII art, giving me a kind of global perspective in my mind's eye, but over time I "learned" the topological structure directly and relied on a less graphical (but no less spatial) local perspective.
I tend to "navigate" codebases in much the same way. Different parts of the codebase cluster more or less closely, and I perceive information flows in essentially the same way that I perceived paths through the MUD's world. I learn a codebase in much the same way, although it's much more local from the beginning (codebases tend to be even less Cartesian than the MUD's world is).
Interesting that you feel this way. I definitely do imagine a codebase spatially, and constantly draw diagrams on paper to orient myself. I find those note taking tools like Dendron that do nothing except make a nice graph of your knowledge very useful.
If you make a graph with services or classes as nodes, and edges as calls between them, you can absolutely get a sense of when a codebase or system architecture is spaghetti, and when it's a neatly organised tree with neatly distinguished layers and no cycles.
In fact, surely that's why people call spaghetti code spaghetti - because the call graph looks like a plate of spaghetti and is impossible to untangle.
Yes. If I ever had to do this for an interview, I am failing. I try to rotate my hand in a similar fashion you might have done if you've ever done physics magnetism calculations.
To solve these I develop a set of rules about the relationship between sides. Like if there is an X on one side then there must be a T adjacent to it and so on. Then I try to eliminate as many answers as possible and then when I'm down to 2 just look for something that is "wrong" (i.e X side cannot be next to V side)
There 100% is a picture of it. Code itself is a 2D picture of logic. The picture for code is arranged in a specific way with huge limitations that don't take full advantage of 2D space.
3D space is infinite and if logical decisions can map onto 2D space (which is essentially what code is) it can also map onto 3D space.
The "language" of this mapping from logical decisions to some sort of spatial diagram can become more and more complex. Instead of linear lines of symbols (which again is what code is) it can be become a graph, or a literal pipeline of logic in 3D space. Analog computers are essentially 3D "pictures" of "code."
Additionally how the logic is represented in your brain must take up space. Logic itself is not so abstract that it takes up zero space. How ever it is stored in your brain there IS a 3D structure or "picture" of that logic that exists. If you are aware of some logical step of operations then it FOR SURE exists as a picture in your brain. I'm not saying it's a picture you can visualize... But the locations of where and how that information is connected in your brain forms a 3D structure. The essence of all logic starts as geometry in 3D space; taking away that space is the abstraction.
Code doesn't have to be visualized. Many times I don't visualize it at all. I remember it, like you... via relationships. But I have the Option of visualizing it as a picture.
If you have aphantasia it just means your brain lacks the ability to assign spatial coordinates to concepts. So you are aware of "relationships" but you can't arrange those concepts into a 3D grid and see how they are all interconnected. It's more of a disability the a brain type IMO, because people who don't have aphantasia can certainly see relationships without having the need to "picture" it.
If it does lend you advantages, I would say it's similar to how certain blind people can use echo location to navigate the world. It may lend you advantages that arise out of necessity to utilizes other tools to make up for a disability, but oftentimes it may not.
Perhaps a mechanism like this could identify aphantasia in early childhood and use this to provide a more optimized academic pipeline.
When programming, I have the code "mapped out" around me but likewise not optically but more "intuitively". I might be able to tell you in which direction a given piece of logic exists relative to me but it's more like how you can gauge what direction a sound comes from than having an image in my head that would allow me to tell you a specific place or distance. Note that I use sound to describe this but I don't have particularly exceptional hearing as far as I'm aware (e.g. no musical skills whatsoever).
I suppose I should also add that I don't have an "inner monologue". In fact I always thought references to the "voice in your head" were entirely metaphorical. This often makes it hard for me to explain my thoughts as I first need to try to find the right words to put them in language.
Trickier problems involving several shapes like a puzzle might be harder, though that's not usually curriculum.
But in general I think it would be like optimizing academic pipelines for being left-handed.
So that seems to suggest that about 0% of "normal people" have "visual imagination".
What proportion of people can disassemble a mechanical device and remember how to reassemble it without taking photos? If it is substantial, why do most people who can afford it have professional mechanics do even simple things?
What about people who have vivid visual dreams, but cannot retrieve details of things seen on awakening? Are they "aphantasic" or not?
Surely the vast majority of people cannot draw or paint a familiar object in detail from memory, if put to the test.
It's utterly useless to do "science" that starts with assuming everybody has a clear and consistent definition of a word denoting the subjective experience being investigated.
I love reading fiction, but books that rely on extensive visual imagery tend to fall flat for me (most recently The Night Circus, but there have been others).
I sometimes skip description of the characters physique because I know that I won't remember it a few page later, and it usually do not matter in the story anyway (and if it matters, it is usually reminded to the reader because aphantasia is not the only reason a reader may not remember how a character is dressed or looks like).
edit/ I'm also entertaining the idea of getting into graphic novels and seeing how I respond to them.
I said yeah, but they're talking about something really cool! Would those books have really been improved if Asimov described the smoke or the room or whatever? Like who cares?
I don't even have aphantasia, but man, sometimes there's a really long description of something in a book and I can barely get through it.
> IA: "I have no talent whatsoever for writing movie scripts."
> Interviewer:"How can this be."
> IA: "Easy. The requirements are different."
> Interviewer: "Writing character or..."
> IA: "Well you have to have a picture in your mind. You can't just tell a story. You have to at all times know what's on the screen."
> Interviewer: "Visual medium."
> IA: "And it's useless to ask me to do that. I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so "talky". One of the reviews of Nemesis says it's talky (oh what do they know) but it's true. It's great talk but he wouldn't know that."
> Interviewer: "But what you talk about is visualizable."
> IA: "I suppose, but that's purely accidental."
From this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparent... although the video linked appears to be dead.
Since learning of aphantasia I've had several moments when I am at the edge of falling asleep where I can see clear visual images. I do not have control over the images and they usually relate to something that happened during the day. It's fascinating to see as I usually can't visualize almost anything - the way I would describe it is that I can "talk" about what I see in my mind, kind of like I have a text-based game in my mind and when I am visualizing, I am describing what I want to see, not what I am seeing. There are no details that I notice without consciously bringing in.
Even while reading, for me the joy is not about picturing any specific image or scene. It’s about the feeling of immersion in a world. I love stories where I can a idea of what living in that context would feel like. This is an abstract notion without any specific visualisation.
Not everyone can do this, and I think they’re missing out. I can “step into” the shoes of someone and look at the world through their eyes, see their perspective, and feel what they feel. My partner can’t, for example. She just stares blankly at the news about the war in Ukraine. It means nothing to her past the visuals. Burnt out cars, damaged buildings, etc…
I instead “see” the terror, the sleepless nights, the unmaking of everything you have built and the destruction of your children’s future. I imagine hiding in a dark tunnel clutching a heavy gun cold from the winter air, listening to your own breathing — too loud — and hoping you’ll hear the Russians’ footsteps before they hear you. But there’s too many of them, and there’s just you and this antique weapon defending you neighbours.
But I find myself being drawn in to movies and TV shows as they can render entirely new visual worlds that are unlike anything I can experience on my own. I guess this is also why I don’t mind movie and TV adaptations so much.
a few people have told me "yes, i still feel something when i read that scene. it's more that i can't imagine any of the character's faces". i haven't met anyone who says they feel literally no emotions when reading any scene, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean the emotional response isn't attenuated.
Some fiction is more poetic and dialogue-y or emotional so it's fine. I loved Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
I never understood the descriptions of environment or anything. I'm just reading the words aloud to myself in my head and not seeing it so it's kinda a waste.
I love reading fiction, but I realized a long time ago that I consume books differently than other people. People around me would describe people in scenes in the book as if they'd seen them, and I've never experienced that. I consume the facts, but I don't visualize them.
I also often can't remember if I read a book or watched a movie when someone asks about something. To me, afterwards, they're largely the same thing. I remember what happened, but video or text makes no real difference.
And finally... I think I've got a fair helping of face blindness. I sometimes can't recognize people if they change some major part of themselves, like hairstyle/color or grow a beard. I remember at work, walking by someone's desk and asking myself, 'Who is sitting at X's desk?' Then like 10 steps later, I realized that X is sitting at her desk, she just had a wildly different hair style. That wasn't my first instance of it, but it's a fairly vivid one.
And for fun: When I remember that scene, the outline of the cubical is pretty clear, but what X looked like then is completely missing and so is all of the stuff in her cubicle. I remember what direction I was walking, but I get no visuals of the actual walk. I know she had things like a calendar and a computer, but I don't picture them at all. When I think about that calendar, I see the outline of it approximately where it was in relation to the cubical's outline, but that's it.
For touch to me it seems impossible? Like I could never remember what touch feels like. I would be genuinely more baffled than visualization if someone could tell me they could remember what it felt like to be touched.
But I can remember what touch feels like. Like I can re-imagine it and re-feel it from memory. Its like other memories in that it isn't exact or anything, but I can definitely somewhat recreate the sensations.
We can see the world in our mind and conjure whatever we want, spatially manipulate objects (rotation, translation, scaling) and imagine their interactions with other objects (a ball hitting another in mid air and how it'd bounce off). It's like having a VR environment inside your own mind that you can use at any time and take wherever you want.
I'm not sure about other people, but I can also conjure smells, sounds and tastes as clearly as if I'd experienced them in reality. This might however be more than what most people can do, I suspect I'm on the hyperphantasia part of the spectrum.
People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia.
I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.
Your eyes dilate when you concentrate.
Stare at your eyes in the mirror and start doing simple arithmetic in your head. Adding numbers, multiplication of multi digit numbers. Your eyes will dilate noticeably.
Had some interesting visual imagination one time while meditating on LSD. Wasn't much in control of what I saw, but it was interesting to imagine colorful stuff for the first time ever.
Normal LSD trip isn't very imaginative (I don't do psychedelics for years mind you.) mostly visual with my eyes. Same with shrooms.
Marijuana for me never really created visual imagination (used to smoke a lot years ago).
But I have powerful visuals in dreams and on psychedelics. On LSD I once spent 15 minutes flying through a Henry Rousseau jungle on a toucan's back.
I can sometimes voluntarily summon images immediately before falling asleep.
Great question, by the way. I wonder if others have similar experiences.
Makes me think that phantasia might be improved through frequent practice in something visual like arts or design. I wonder if any studies on aphantasics have been run that try to assess improvement. If pupillary contraction mentioned in this article is a good enough measure of aphantasia, that may serve as a way to measure improvements through practice.
I'm somewhat on the other end of the phantasic spectrum, I close my eyes and can design things, though the images don't hold super long or can't get too complex. I'm better at it later in the evening and on edibles. I've also been practicing design for ~30 years, and I can say it's definitely gotten easier to visualize some things over time and I attribute it to practice.
'Practice' here perhaps could also be 'noticing'. I remember I used to be really into Magic:TG and spent a lot of time admiring the artwork and design of cards, like being really obsessed with all the details. After doing all this noticing for some time I realized I could sometimes visualize new cards, so I would close my eyes and thumb through a deck, trying to visualize cards as fast as possible as a kind of test. My sense is I wouldn't be able to do that without all the practice I had training my brain on the features of the cards.
My dreams I think I can visualize? It's sort of hard to say?
THC nothing notable.
One interesting thing I noticed is when I actually got into math at the university level and engaged with professors there were multiple times where I got the feedback along the lines of "Well yes that is right but kind of weird way to think about or answer the question."
I think for higher dimensional problems it's actually an advantage? Like I have no idea how to visualize something in r^n. Not sure how much people "visualize" functions in r2/r3? To me the difference between r3->r4 is similar to the difference for r2->r3. It's more complex but the way I'd "visualize" something is largely the same.
I don't visualize it at all. It's simply facts that happen.
When people told me they visualize code, I simply assumed they meant they organized it in their head somehow. I don't do any of that. My mental model of code happens automatically and it's just relations between things, no visual at all.
I do get distracted with thoughts (even ignoring other people sometimes) most likely same as you or anyone.
Aphantasia (and how not to do math in your head) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments)
Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment)
Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments)
Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments)
Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments)
The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments)
What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments)
Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments)
Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
I think the confusing nd somewhat ambiguous description of aphantasia, and the highly literal nature of many HN folks makes it more common for people to either think they may have it, or so question how others see stuff, so are more curious about it.
I can still remember things like layout of a room, complicated directions etc, but it comes with no visual imagery. I also like to close my eyes when I am trying to think what some complicated code is doing, still nothing visual though.
as far as i can tell, most people say "yes". for me, when i imagine my dad's face, i get a brief flash of a grin, where the wrinkles are (but certainly not how many, or in any definition), and the rough cut of his hair. there's no eye color in the imagery, for example. stronger than any visual experience when i imagine his face is something of an emotional/empathetic experience -- what it feels like to be in his presence.
from what i gather, for people like me (and maybe you) who experience "some" visual imagery but not "lots", it's just a skill like any other and there are exercises you can do if you care enough about it to strengthen it.
That would suggest that it depends on your state of consciousness.
And state of consciousness may be more or less constant for any given person. But it can be altered.
Evolution is a bitch.