Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The paradigm proposed in that paper is more or less that there’s a bell curve of varying vividness of mental imagery, all the way from a few percent who almost completely lack it, up to a few percent with hyper-real “more detailed than reality” mental visualization, with most clustered in between. This new paper fits neatly into that paradigm; they chose a high threshold and (inevitably) discovered that most of the bell curve falls below that high threshold.
The paper is Sir Francis Galton’s Statistics of Mental Imagery https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm (incidentally interesting: it was so long ago that the paper notes “There are many who deny to statistics the title of a science”, which is a bemusing thing to read today.)
Given I can replay music in my head on demand (called audiation according to a comment below!) with reasonable fidelity even for songs I don't have strong memories of, it seems likely my aphantasia is the developmental deficit of the connection between visual memory and my executive function due to ADHD in both stability and throughput.
On average, aphantasics report a reduced imagery in all other sensory modalities [1]. About 26 % report a complete lack of multi-sensory imagery (total aphantasia).
I have total aphantasia, but my inner experience is worded thinking [2], which Hurlburt defines as follows: “Worded thinking is the experience of thinking in particular distinct words, but those words are not being (innerly or externally) spoken, heard, seen, or voiced in any other way.” [2]
For me, this is an inner monologue, but it’s just silent.
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-cognitive-profile-of... [2] https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html#target4
Just for a little insight into my internal thoughts, most of my thought processes are highly object oriented. Conjuring up a picture of a chair isn't really neccessary when you have an understanding of the chair object and its properties. I understand how it would work with an image of a chair, and it does seem like it might have some advantages at times, but I don't think it is necessary for me to "see" the chair to know how it functions and its basic spacial properties. Nor do I think that it's neccessary someone with a very vivid pictorial imagination.
What I do have a hard time understanding is that people can conjure up smells and taste in their imagination. I do neither of those, but it sounds really quite intriguing to me. I've often wondered what it would be like to try to imagine a new recipe and get an imaginary sampling before the attempt.
To circle back to your original question, I don't think the absence of one of the modes of imagination necessarily enhances another. I don't even think there are complimentary modes of imagination as you put it. Nor do I think the fidelity of those modes are indicators of intelligence, ability, or personality. I also don't think they are indicative of actualizing particular thoughts into the real world, or is really a measure of anything other than the somewhat uniqueness of the individual human experience.
Lastly I don't think this short list if 5 senses begins to describe how humans actually think. Consider that there's probably more hidden subprocess that our brain is doing for thought then using these particular 5 sense modes of imagination. We obviously are not as aware of them because they don't have a real world translation in most cases. For instance, the way people memorize stuff isn't exactly a relational database, but it's kind of close. What exactly is that process called and why don't assign that a value on the imagination scale. As another example, large tree structure can somewhat represent, "a good sense of direction" but again we don't assign that an imagination scale either. Limiting the reaearch to the 5 senses is great for understanding how those processes work, but it is only a tiny baby step to further understanding how human thought works on the whole.
Anecdotally, I gave this chart to my friends in my school's band (N=6), and none of them had aphantasia (excluding me), and two of them reported hyperphantasia, and intensely vivid audiovisual imagination. I also gave this chart to my friends in software engineering and cybersecurity (N=4), and two of them also had aphantasia.
I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, given a small sample size, but I'd hypothesize that there is a larger proportion of aphantasic individuals in STEM than in the arts.
[1] https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20
I've often wondered if artists can naturally get into that state much more easily.
https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-...
If you do some contour drawing exercises, you'll notice right away how much you can fill in just by getting a decent silhouette: a lot of systems of figure drawing simply go into more detail with that and aim to codify rules for what lines are necessary.
I wasted years trying constructional drawing (3d boxes etc) without results.
Whenever I try, I only get the blobs and don't have great control of even the blobs: barely recognizable if at all. I have on rare occasion have moments of lucid dreaming where it starts as a regular vivid dream, but then I realize that I may be dreaming and have some control of myself or the scene. I could will myself to fly around, but not very high off the ground. Maybe the realism of the vision was forcing an unconscious (even within a dream?) safety measure.
[0] https://mindtasting.medium.com/the-mind-of-nikola-tesla-4305...
I think mental imagery is always sharp, it’s just your perception and/or your memory of it that sucks. Perhaps a bit like dreams.
I’m somewhat of a lucid dreamer and those are incredibly realistic, way, way beyond what I can conjure up consciously. It opened me up to the idea that your mind might be capable of more than you have conscious control over and the role memory plays in this.
This style of drawing doesn't have that feedback loop of looking at what you already have on the paper. Everything is planned in advance and you can't go back to change stuff.
I don't know how much of this applies to visual artists, but there's probably some overlap there.
This is a real, normal thing?? I can hear snippets of music, usually orchestral or opera, as vividly as if they were actually playing, but all I'm listening to is the white noise of a fan, and I'm just remembering them from before. When I was young, it was often a radio announcer because we listened to the radio in the car a lot. I always thought this was very bizarre and was not supposed to happen to normal people.
I believe I have aphantasia, and the idea of being able to visualize things on demand seem so strange to me that it’s hard for me to even imagine (isn’t it distracting?).
When I heard things like “count sheep to fall asleep” or “imagine yourself on a beach” to relax, I had assumed this was a figure of speech, but apparently people are doing this literally!
I’ve spent some time trying to practice visualizing things mentally and sometimes if I relax and try not to think about it I’ll get a glimpse of something (last time I tried I got something like looking at a forest from the sky) but the moment I try and focus it disappears in a snap, so I feel like it’s closer to dreaming than visualizing something mentally.
Related to this, I have plenty of audible conversations in my mind (either with myself or other people) and I’ll often have a song playing in the background of my mind (although music seems to be limited to just remembering things I’ve already heard) apparently some people can’t imagine sounds or voices which also seems equally bizarre to me.
I can conjure up images in my mind, but they’re usually not vivid and can be quite fragile. I’m not sure how normal this is.
For me, reality utterly disappears. I have a clear image of whatever it is that blots out what is coming through my eyes. the image doesn't have photographic detail, but it's what the seeing bit of my brain is processing instead of what my eyes are getting.
I have aphantasia. There’s no great mystery here, it’s probably the same way you ‘think’ just without the pictures. I think about abstract algebra and car engines in the same way.
Those same subtle differences in physical structures are responsible for so much of the variation in human personality/intelligence that we experience, and yet we perceive it totally different than physical beauty because we can't physically see it.
A big part of dating is about sussing out whether or not someone has a sexy medulla oblongata, or a girthy corpus callosum.
I'm reminded of this old thread, about kids on road trips imagining some little figure running/driving alongside, leaping over obstacles (I definitely did the same): https://old.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/2te8jz/dae...
I'm sure there are more like that which people just haven't thought to mention to one another.
A funny habit of mine is sometimes I'll go for a walk with my ear buds in (not playing anything) to give myself an 'excuse' to be having a conversation with myself
I finally pushed myself and took the test tonight. Of the 5 choices:
1. No image at all, I only “know” I am thinking of the object 2. Dim and vague image 3. Moderately realistic and vivid 4. Realistic and reasonably vivid 5. Perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing
I am either a 1 or 2 across the board. I can't decide which. But absolutely never a 3. And this is making me a bit wistful. Particularly because I can't remember my Dad's face. His scent. My Mom. Mom's been gone 3 years. Dad left us in 2013. I'm so jealous of people who have vivid memories of loved ones who are gone.
Been looking at subreddit /aphantasia a bit too tonight, and blown away that people actually see sheep when counting sheep. Or that reading a book means literally seeing the action. WTH? I still don't get it. That can't be real.
Whew what a night.
hahahaha... yeah, I 100% relate to the feeling. When I learned about aphantasia as an adult, so much of what I've heard people say throughout my life suddenly made so much more sense from the perspective of, "oh, wow, people really mean something so different than what I experience when they say that."
> Or that reading a book means literally seeing the action.
Yeah. People say things like "I don't like the movie because it's not what I pictured in my mind" or "the character doesn't look like what I pictured while reading the book." I always assumed they just meant what I would mean if I said something like that... based on the literal description on the page, the character in the movie doesn't match the described hair color, height, etc. But no... I have more recently realized they mean they literally have an almost photographic picture in their mind of the character as they imagine it when they are reading the book. So wild.
As for the VVIQ test, there was never any doubt in my mind -- I'm 1's across all questions without hesitation.
But yeah, that first night I really started looking into it a few years ago... wild. But so much all of a sudden made sense.
Yeah it's a weird experience recontextualising something that's such a qualitative difference from the norm and that crops up so frequently yet so subtly throughout your life. I read books voraciously and incredibly quickly and I'm pretty sure not having to engage in visualisation helps with that speed. And also why I found Tolkien and his endless descriptions of the scenery incredibly tedious :)
What test is this? An online one?
> Or that reading a book means literally seeing the action. WTH? I still don't get it. That can't be real.
I assure you it is real, and why I prefer reading fiction to watching the same story as a movie.
I find that with scifi especially, the book tends to be much more visually satisfying than the movie.
Personally, I don't find the test particularly enlightening... it's a test to assess how vivid your mental visualizations are, but it does so by just asking how vivid your mental visualizations are. I can't tell how it's any different from an IQ test that just asks you "what do you think your IQ is?"
But I also believe I have aphantasia, so it's blindingly (hah...pun not intended) obvious to me that I don't visualize anything mentally. Any result of the test was a forgone conclusion for me. Maybe if you do visualize things to some degree it's helpful to tease out various aspects of the vividness of your visualizations. I don't know, it's not something I can relate to.
The same way a song can get stick in your head an image can get stuck in your head. I'd rather be able to visualize than not but it comes with negatives.
When people spoke of “daydreaming” I always assumed it was just a metaphor for being deep in thought, as it would be clearly impossible for people to visualize things without dreaming or hallucinating… boy was I wrong!
Apparently some folk can even look at a wall and imagine a scene playing out like a movie. Blows my mind every time I think about it!
With that said, this report came from a close relative who had no idea that aphantasia was a thing. We started with the experiment: “imagine a barn, what color is it and how many windows does it have?” and then proceeded to dive into the limits of their capabilities (e.g. detail is often absent or brushed over, while some things are quite vivid like people’s faces).
Her report was quite different from others I’ve spoken with, so it certainly seems like there’s a spectrum to the experience of phantasia.
As an example, many people believed for some time that dreams were in black and white, which is obviously not true for everyone. However, this does not imply that dreams are in color. It seems more likely that dreams and their visual response are separate processes.
It may well be that some people actually have some form of aphantasia, but all the self reporting of amazing visual powers or the lack thereof seems more indicative of peoples' egos than the actual differences in what they are capable of.
Happy to learn that I am wrong here!
I have it, and I struggle to understand your skepticism. What’s the ego here? I’m proud of not being able to do something?
My assumption is that the visual processing layer is still used, I just don’t get to experience that part, so I’m interacting at the lower layer. Kind of the like the “code” in the matrix. You see the woman in the red dress, I see the code. We can still work with the substrate effectively, just in different ways.
One thing that does suck is that it seems to be associated with lack of episodic memory. I lack all episodic memory, other than facts about things that have happened. I also don’t have the ability to imagine myself in the future (this is different to not having an imagination, I imagine plenty, just not visually). It makes me a little sad sometimes to think that when I’m old, I won’t have memories like others do, and I do think the lack of episodic style imagination has made it harder to make intentional changes to my life for the better.
On the other hand, I think it’s been a great benefit for abstract reasoning. As all my reasoning is necessarily non-visual, problems that don’t naturally have a visual representation are no harder for me. I think it’s useful as a programmer, although I have learned how to draw representations as it’s of benefit for communication. Swings and roundabouts!
When I think of an abstract idea, the sense of imagination is exactly the same as if I was imagining a picture: there is an impression, but it is not one of the sense but one of mind.
The difference can be clearly seen with the use of psychedelics that do create real inner seeing: tryptamines like LSD only strengthen the internal knowing of mental imaginery (plus of course visual artifacts, warping etc. in the actual visual field), yet the combination of LSD and ketamine creates the famous "free-wheeling hallucinations" in which you enter a perfectly lucid photorealistic 3D dream which you can shape in any way you desire. Tropane alkaloids create real hallucinations which you experience instead of reality, but I have no experience with this. Classical psychedelics do not create hallucinations but only mental imaginery and visual morphing.
This is a widespread phenomenon; no shortage of examples. It has happened to me, too.
There are some people in this thread who claim they haven't experienced that, and had a hard time understanding what that would even mean. These seem like pretty different mental/visual experiences, so it seems reasonable to have a word to describe it.
I agree it's hard to measure such internal things exactly, and it's full of self-reporting problems, but the core concept doesn't seem like purely a semantics issue.
----
Aside: I once had a conversation about thinking, and my friends were surprised at the idea of thinking without using words. But that is very much my experience! It is something I semi-trained myself to do (I felt that translating into words slowed me down), but I think it was a natural tendency, too. But it can be likewise difficult to convince someone it's a real thing without resorting to brain scans (:
With "ego" I meant to refer to people boasting about their abilities to visualize everything to the greatest amount of detail in their heads, which to me seems likely untrue except for very rare cases.
I think reported phantasia (as opposed to aphantasia, and if there is such a word) is in a way similar to clairvoyancy or having a sixth sense. Some people report having such a gift, but it is very hard to test if that really exists, and up to what level. The end result may be that a lot of people consider themselves aphantasic, because they lack an internal Unity engine.
As a simple proof that visual phantasy has its limits, consider artists who paint fantasy with oil paint and put in lighting and shadows. This is typically either very bad, or based on photographic reference images. Artists who are, by exception, fairly good at this, require insane amounts of training. There are always strange exceptions, but these seem to be one in a million. (Stephen Wiltshire and Kim Jung Gi come to mind, but even they do not perform accurate shading).
Obviously all misunderstanding is probably based on me not knowing a clear definition for aphantasia, and I should read more about it. Does it mean that a person is unable, even with a lot of training, to form any visual images in their heads? This would seem either unlikely, or related to memory problems, such as you describe. In the latter case, is aphantasia simply a symptom or result of the memory problem, or is it a phenomenon by itself?
Again, I am skeptical, I am not denying that it exists (but perhaps not as much as self-reported on HN and Reddit). And I most certainly would not want to hurt anyone's feelings if they suffer from it! My apologies if that is the case, and please point out if I'm continuing to do so.
(For reference: I am a trained visual artist and mathematician -- I can visualize and draw pretty decent images, and read and write code. I know there's a difference in working with these, but I doubt it's as big as some people make me want to believe.)
Joel Pearson, one of the top researches, speculates it could be possible to “start” the visualisation by training and electrical impulses. Electric impulses on the prefrontal cortex and visual cortex are known to make visual imagination less or more vivid. But how well and whether this works at all, is unknown.
Maybe it only works with acquired aphantasia, only for people with weak aphantasia or for people whose aphantasia has a specific cause. (These are my thoughts on this, not Joel Pearson’s).
I realised my brain worked differently when I was about 21 and went to see a psychologist. He asked me to close my eyes and picture my mothers face. I couldn’t do it, and he then asked me to picture some other things and I couldn’t do any of it. There was no name for this condition back then, and both he and I were surprised. I was surprised he was asking me to do things that were obviously impossible, and he was surprised I couldn’t do something that everyone can obviously do. Since then I’ve talked to many people about the “minds eye” and how they perceive things. I’ve never met another like me, but there seems to be a large degree of variance in how detailed or vivid this mental imagery is for individuals.
I married very young (25), and my wife is the other extreme. It turned out that she has ASD, and thinks mostly in pictures. She always had auditory processing delay, and part of the reason for that is that words all create images in her head. The delay is partly because there is an automatic translation between words to images going on. She can see images in her head with incredible vividness and detail, and can dial up the detail as needed. She also can’t do algebra to save her life; if she can’t picture it she can’t think about it. We watched a talk from Temple Grandin a few years ago (an autistic PHD), and she described a very similar experience. I really do think there is wide variance in how brains work.
The lack of auto-biographical memory is something that seems to be commonly associated with my condition, and this part is clearly mostly downside. I still have semantic memory, so I can remember all the facts about things that have happened. They just don’t have visual or emotional content. But semantic memory needs to be consciously created, by which I mean that I have to be trying to remember as I go if anything is to be committed to long term memory. So most of what has happened in my life is irretrievably lost to me. I’m fortunate that I married young, because my wife remembers everything in vivid detail, and I love to hear the stories about things we’ve done together. Answering some of your questions:
> Does it mean that a person is unable, even with a lot of training, to form any visual images in their heads?
I have tried the training designed to help with forming mental imagery. This involves doing things like looking at something bright and then closing your eyes so that you have the “after image” and then trying to keep it around. So far I haven’t had any luck, but I do hope that I might still have success one day. I’ve read of other people with my condition being able to learn mental imagery this way, so it must work for some people at least.
> This would seem either unlikely, or related to memory problems, such as you describe.
I’m not sure why you think this is unlikely, to me this is obviously as normal as can be. As I said before, there is a clear association with the lack of auto-biographical memory based on what I read online. It could be some form of brain-damage I experience, but I don’t think this is the case. I think there is just a huge amount of variation in how peoples minds work!
I read that most people with aphantasia do have visual dreams [1], which I found interesting.
In some period of my life I used to have nightmares about my grandmother (who had died many years before), and I remember seeing here face very vividly, as if the entire dream was real. Based on those experiences, I tried to draw her portrait, but try as I might, I failed miserably. I could just not access that imagery while awake.
> I’m not sure why you think this is unlikely
Now you got me doubting that as well :)
I think that most of the misunderstanding stems from an unclear definition of what "forming visual images in ones head" means. I guess it means different things to different persons. For me, as referred to in the dream example, I cannot keep a sharp visual image in my head at will. But there is some vague access to certain visual memories and visual planning, so I would not call my self aphantasic.
I agree that there is a great variation in how peoples minds work, that's what makes life so very interesting!
There are some objective ways to measure visual imagination, for example binocular rivalry, skin conductance response (influence of imagery on emotions) and pupil responses during visualisation. Differences can be seen in fMRI. Also, the VVIQ (Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) is considered statistically reliable.
> It may well be that some people actually have some form of aphantasia, but all the self reporting of amazing visual powers or the lack thereof seems more indicative of peoples' egos than the actual differences in what they are capable of.
Over 10% of people are hyperphantasic (“Phantasia – The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes”), and the average visual vividness is quite high.
I guess especially in the Internet you find more people from the extreme ranges of the spectrum who search actively about the topic. But whether someone rates himself with 4 or 5 (simplified) does not have much significance individually anyway.
> Also, it is near impossible to report objectively about your inner processes in a useful way.
I agree that discussing our mental/inner processes is difficult due to a lack of a common frame of reference on which to base descriptions. (I'm reminded of McCoy and Spock's conversation in Star Trek IV... "Are you telling me I'd have to die to discuss your experience of death with you?")
I (approx. 40 years old) became aware of the concept of aphantasia about three years ago. I immediately identified with it... or rather, I immediately found it mind-boggling that other people claim to experience anything close to "seeing" something by closing their eyes and thinking about it. That's such a foreign concept to me I had always assumed people's descriptions of visualizing things in their mind, daydreaming, etc were extremely metaphorical, not describing a process that is anything like "seeing" something.
I have talked to many friends at length about how they describe their "mind's eye" after realizing I was probably different. And even how it extends, in the case of some of my friends with particularly visual mind's eyes, to the "mind's ears" and "mind's nose" in music and scent recall.
Based on my friends' descriptions to me of how they try to describe how they experience mental visualization, it's clear the capability is a spectrum... some describe it as blurry gray image of what they're thinking about, some describe it as being a picture as real as a photograph that they can literally see and smell.
I agree with you that it's hard to tell how reliable the descriptions are relative to each other, but I can tell you this: hearing all of themselves describe it, even down at the "it's just a blurry gray 'image' in my mind" end of the spectrum, none of them sounded familiar to me or like any kind of "visualization" I've ever experienced while awake (specifically: none at all). If it were simply a matter of being able to accurately report objectively on our inner processes in a useful way, I feel like there wouldn't be such a clear divide between the way a minority of people (allegedly with aphantasia) describe it and the way the majority of people describe it. Whether it's aphantasia or not, it's clear to me at this point that there is definitely a "group A" and "group B" in terms of how people describe their "mind's eye" when asked.
Related, I also have a friend who says she has no internal monologue, another phenomenon I've read about. She thinks entirely visually. Not having an inner monologue is such an incomprehensible concept to me; literally the only way I can think is with my inner monologue.
Brains are weird.
Since you asked specifically about my residence to the first stop, which is obviously the portion of driving I perform more than anything else, I would say there's something almost... "Pavlovian" about it, in that the route and actions to get from my house to the first intersection are "burned in" to my brain, but not at all in a way I'd describe as being able to "visualize" it versus "describe it verbally," which is what I have to do in my mind if asked about it.
Whether it's significant or not (related to aphantasia), I have a horrible sense of direction, get lost while driving incredibly easily, and am entirely reliant on step-by-step directions to get somewhere (now that GPS in the car is a thing it's not too terrifying to try to drive somewhere I've never driven before, but I've been driving since before GPS was a thing available in cars and getting to new places was not fun back then!)
It's less instructions and more a full understanding of the structure at play.
we encountered this when we learned about the difference between autistic and non-autistic minds. one of the reasons why autistics behave the way they do is because the connection structure in their brain is different enough that they literally, actually, do not experience "thought" in the same way that neurotypical people do. the same is true in reverse - for autistics, neurotypical people experience thought in such a fundamentally different manner that it's basically impossible for one to imagine what metacognition might feel like from within a non-autistic brain. it's just not something you can really fathom at all
source: we are the autistic, hehe
Not just between different people. What about a single individual. Is a single individual's mind the same over time? Is your mind the same now as it was yesterday? Is it the same before your nap and after you awake? Everyone is separated from each other by their own personal subjective reality. But does that also apply to the individual?
For example, if someone asks you "what color is the ball?" even if it is in a room in front of you you might not necessarily process it unless asked, in which case you visually search to find out.
In this sense, imagined worlds could be really vivid, because even the most vivid reality is only incompletely processed in the moment (reality will always be more vivid for lots of reasons nonetheless).
This also made me wonder about dreams, in that many similar issues related to details and certain kinds of processes seem to surface there. It's pretty common, for example, for my dreams to kind of "short circuit" and for me to wake up when someone in my dream asks me a question like "what color was that ball?" It becomes evident that that detail wasn't there, and I'm sort of filling it in after the fact.
When I imagine a scenario like the one the paper talks about, the person coming into the room and knocking a ball off a table, I feel like I can see it happening from all angles all at once; if I try to repeat the scene in my mind, my perspective keeps jumping around. I can force myself to watch it from a single angle but it's trippy being able to watch something from multiple angles.
I don't generally visualize colors, but for some reason it's easy for me to imagine textures. Maybe this is in line with how early empiricist philosophers described vision as being a combination of sight and touch?
Now consider what's going on under the covers when each individual contemplates "the (simulation of the) events of January 6" or various other culture war issues, without having any knowledge of the magic that's going on under the covers, a state of mind for which there seems to be no way out of, for most (including "standard" intellectuals).
To me, this is highly similar to cultural beliefs before and after the first enlightenment and rise of science, hopefully the second one gets here before we destroy ourselves with our delusions of understanding due to insufficient fundamentalist cognitive ideologies.
I'd love to see one of those. Google is returning useless results for a video search on "video of sketches done by an artist with different time constraints."
This is simply because the person's characteristics are not described, and a person is more complex to visualize than a simple shape like a ball. After all, why waste mental energy picturing a non-existent person knocking of a ball? It has no relevance to anything you need to do in life. But, the ball is easy to visualize given you can have a generic picture of a ball, and the object might be more important than the person interacting with it.
does this mean that when asked to visualize something you exert conscious effort to do the visualization, choosing to not focus on the visualization of the complex person and focusing on the simple ball.