Hacker News Reader

Comment by lo_zamoyski | Hacker News Reader

Mental images in everyone are hazy and fuzzy and undetermined compared to what we perceive via sense perception.

I have doubts about the existence of aphantasia in the strict sense. While I can agree that different people indulge in greater or lesser day dreaming or imagination or pay greater or lesser attention to mental imagery or remember and recall images better or with greater precision than others, I don't think aphantasia as the total absence of images (where "image" is understood as a hazy sense impression) is real. I suspect that whose who claim to have this condition falsely believe that others have images that are of the same "resolution" and vividness of sense experience, but this is not the case, certainly not in most people.

View on HN

That could be the case to a degree -- it's likely very hard to rule out simple miscommunication in general as a part of the equation here. But I have a friend who administered this test (to be spoken to its subject):

Close your eyes. Imagine a ball resting on a table. The ball begins to roll, quicker now, and it goes over the edge of the table. It bounces, once, twice, three times, and rolls along the floor, then comes to a stop again.

What color was the ball?

Did you have to make that detail up just now when I asked you, or was that what you saw?

This last question is the decider: a visual detail like that is very difficult to omit while _picturing_ the situation, but is very easy to leave out if your brain doesn't work that way. If you had to choose a color at the end, you may have the true "no picture at all" form of aphantasia, as opposed to just failing to understand that other people don't see a real, solid image.

I just tried this - even after reading your comment - and my ball was more of an empty space with no color, if that makes sense. So I can see how someone when picturing the scene can still “see” a ball and “see” it rolling, falling, and bouncing but since the prompt never asked about color they simply didn’t choose one and focused on the shape itself.

Exactly. I was more focused on visualizing accurate physics about the object. In that sense it was "vivid". Color simply didn't factor in since it wasn't in the prompt. I can, at this moment visualize complex scenes with color without much issue. Especially after looking up aphantasia more closely, I'm highly skeptical of this test. With that said, I do think I tend to think _without_ color for practical purposes--most of the time I'm just interested in the kinetics of things I'm working through. Otherwise I'm very apt to feel like things have colors about them (my daughter, for instance, has a burnt orange personality; "cosmic" is a yellow word; serene is blue; 118 is red)--so it's not simply having a propensity for not thinking or, more importantly, _feeling_ in color.

My experience exactly.

See: "The pupillary light response as a physiological index of aphantasia, sensory and phenomenological imagery strength."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9018072/

This study had participants imagine a bright scene, which triggers a physiological pupil response similar to the response of actually walking out into the bright sun. Those who self-reported aphantasia had no physiological pupil response.

Aphantasia is not a "false belief", and I assure you that those with aphantasia find it just as hard to understand mental visual imagery as you find it hard to understand a lack of mental visual imagery.

Why do you doubt it? When you talk to someone with aphantasia, one of most people's first questions is something like "sometimes my mental images are pretty fleeting and indistinct, is that what you mean?" and they'll say "no, I don't even understand what 'mental image' means". It's possible they're all lying or very confused but it seems unlikely.

A friend with this condition also told me that growing up, people would often say "picture x in your mind" and he always assumed it was a figure of speech for "think about a description of x" because he couldn't imagine what else "picturing" could mean.

Couldn’t disagree more. I have aphantasia and can’t conjure up a mental image of any sort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com