I can imagine what something looks like, and I guess I sort of 'see' it, but closing my eyes doesn't make it any more real. It doesn't seem to involve the eyes or any part of the visual system at all - it's somewhere else in my head.
If you've ever had a dream with vivid first person eyesight (like most people during dreams) then it's easy to see that we should be very capable of producing high quality visuals without external stimuli.
I've been practicing on this kind of thing as it's a technique for dropping into a lucid dream. In my case, I manage to find some kind of repeat pattern in the visual random noise of my closed eyes. Slowly and consciously I manage to see clouds or waves on an open sea, maybe add color. Then I can try something more advanced. If going to sleep, these images get more vivid and might classify for something called hypnagogic hallucinations[0], but then it's not quite the same level of conscious involvement steering what to see. In any case, it's nowhere near what I'd imagine as useful for an on-site photo session, more like a high effort meditation.
I have a few dreams that are like a long running TV show, suddenly I'm in this certain universe and the plot continues, even though it's been a few years. In a single sleeping session it's often the rule that dreams continue even if I wake up in the middle. It's so consistent that waking up from a nice dream doesn't mean it's lost but gives me something to look forward to.
Lucid dreaming in my experience is very much an Inception-like (the film) experience. Once you have "woken", there's a fine line between controlling the dream, and the dream noticing what you're up to, eventually booting you from the matrix.
For something more on topic and for anyone that will be experiencing a lucid dream in the future: Take a moment to really appreciate the extreme level of graphics, and other senses the mind can render.
Yeah I found that when I start losing the ability to recall that if I just try to remember. That's the point of the journal anyways. But yeah, it is crazy the dreams I had and how real they were. Entire lives. And even the lessons you learn from choices you make. The emotions and how things even feel real to the though.
> and the dream noticing what you're up to, eventually booting you from the matrix.
This kept happening to me! The first time I did it started to fly but then just kept going up and up and it got brighter and I woke up haha.
> Take a moment to really appreciate the extreme level of graphics, and other senses the mind can render.
It really is insane and makes me think of the computation that the brain can do so efficiently. Like it doesn't get everything right -- which is why you're really able to get lucid (e.g. you can read something 2 times and it'll be different) -- but it is very real regardless. I'm sure there is a lot of compression going on and some tricks being played but it is often convincing. But what is also insane is that we know even pretty small animals dream in at least some realistic way. My cat tries to run in her sleep, meows, chirps like she does at birds, and wakes up with different emotions. I've had a pet rat do some similar things, at least the feet. It begs the question why this evolved, how important it is (essentially simulating your environment. Like learning from synthetic data, but shower thoughts on steroids), and how this relates to consciousness. And I wonder if we'll push harder to make machines do these incredible feats in much smaller packages and without nearly the same training or energy requirements. And I wonder how convincing these simulations are to the smaller creatures.
Now I write it out like this, it almost seems that the more interesting questions lie not in “can they do it” and more in “why do people have variations of ability; why does it stay active during sleep?
Try your meditation routine while sitting in a warm shower with a visual focus. That for me gives me the same intensity as the true hypnagogic level visualizations while still having close to full mental faculties.
Some people report being able to use audio patterns as an alternative to visual patterns. I've had mixed success personally but ymmv.
In a dream, I saw a friend. The images in the dream were very vivid, and I could have easily mistaken the dream for reality. However, when I woke up, I could not tell whether I had seen my friend from the front, or from the back.
This suggests that the property "feels very realistic" can be produced separately from a dream actually being realistic. I highly doubt that dreams are indeed producing high quality visuals.
I have also tried to draw faces from people that I have seen in my dreams. I am fairly proficient at hyperrealistic portraits, but with the dream recall -- no luck so far.
It was a revelation when I found out that most people can actually see things visually in their minds eye.
A friend of mine can actually place imagined objects into their field of view, like AR.
I think it’s more likely that others describe this abstract visualization as “seeing” although they don’t really see it, as opposed to them really seeing it as if it were real. As you say, it’s difficult to describe. It’s like a memory of having seen something, and people might describe that as really seeing (because it’s like a memory of really seeing), but in fact it’s not.
It’s like hearing a song or other piece of music in your head that you know well, and you can hum or sing along it, but it’s not like you’re actually hearing it.
Like you describe I can visualize a lot of things, with fidelity, but it's still in my mind's eye (that is, a 'sense' rather than a physically represented image that's as apparent as other IRL objects). I can also hone in on details with my eyes open while doing other things. However I can't trace such things merely from this sense since they're not actually there for me. I can however leverage my draftsmanship skills to be able to focus on the mental visualization/sense and progressively draw from memory and for various familiar things visualize them on the paper but not as an optical manifestation.
I can't conjure up smell/taste experiences the same way, but I do have a sort of hollow visualization ability.
Edit: I read a few more comments, and it seems I'm not alone! Now I wonder whether this is common in the general population or just HN.
My impression is that individual differences lie much less in the actual mental abilities than in how people interpret and describe those abilities.
I used this often to recall if I did tasks. Just yesterday I forgot if I had washed my body when showering because I was thinking about something technical. I had to pause and thing, and I recalled seeing putting the soap in my hand. Not just some vague thing, more like a movie. Still no recollection of doing the motion though.
However when reading books or hearing tales, I've always struggled with the authors description of a place. Like I'll pick up on some early key words, and then construct the scene or location in my mind. Further description by the author hardly matters.
The weird part is I can get a really strong sense of being there, yet at the same time not really seeing it. It's really weird and the best I can describe it is that it feels like seeing or visualizing something. If there's an office with a red door, I know it's there, I can feel it's part of the location and it feels immersive, but I don't actually see or visualize a red door.
I think I'm the same. It's as if I can imagine a geometry, but it doesn't have any texture or colour. It's not black, not grey, not brown... It's a shape in its pure form, maybe like a wireframe, without a physical manifestation.
However, I can imagine music and actually hear it. I had this a couple of times where I "replay" a song in a foreign language I've heard a long time ago, and this time I can parse out more lyrics than before. All inside my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot#/media/File:Utah_t... Play with the Utah teapot and then try to do the same thing mentally. Like imagine where the shadows are supposed to go and then see if you are right.
For colors imagine something corny like like a laser scan passing over, and then try to imagine different colors or laser.
But a geometry, or set of relations between objects (whether that's connections or just relative positioning, like a map) is pretty easy, and I can move around, rotate and focus on the geometry with less effort than it takes to imagine, say, an apple.
But familiar music can be played back in my head with only a little effort, or a slight reminder. Not just the lyrics, or the melody, but the full audio as I heard it, missing only background parts that my mind didn't "catch". Rarely (a couple times a year), I'll get a partial song "stuck" and won't be able to get it out of my head until I track it down and listen to it until the end. I can't "invent" a tune though, just replay ones I've heard several times.
I also feel like songs I replay in my head (which I do constantly, and without a choice in the song) have very high fidelity.
Once I was on an exam and I could not understand my own writing in the page I was remembering because I had written it too small on the corner. It was frustrating to not be able to answer the question. Afterwards, when I went to my real notes and I struggled to understand what was written there. I was happy that my memory image was accurate although frustrated for not managing the space in the page properly.
I thought everyone could remember things in this way.
Sometimes I have to write things down to see them and remember them, because mental speeches are harder (and less efficient) for me to remember.
I guess there are many ways to learn and remember stuff we just have to find the one that works better for us.
Being a teacher should require knowing about all this learning diversity I guess.
With digital this seems to not be active and instead I have to guess the likely words and jump around the search results.
Also I will project words in my mind to inspect them visually to see how to spell them, and if they look ok. And when studying I recall pages of books with the info in the place where it is printed, much like zeehio describes. This is super helpful when memorizing entire books ie when I studied biology.
But from this thread I still get the idea there are people that really really see things, whereas for me it stops at “visualizing”. Which does help when composing a picture but perhaps there is more? I think I’ll try this exercise.
One weird thing I often did (or try to do, doesn’t always work) as a kid is stare into the blackness of my closed eyes until I sort of got convinced there was a massive boulder looming over me. It would feel quite real and I’d really feel the massiveness and it would make me feel very small and even make me feel adrift. Strange, this thread actually made me remember, didn’t really do that for a long time now.
When I meditate, one of the practices is to label thoughts as they arise. When you do this, you realize that a huge amount of thoughts pass by subconsciously. You notice them more and more as you label them, but it feels like a deep rabbit hole of thought that I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet.
edit: just looked at the article and realized that the technique is essentially thought labeling. This is one of the most common practices in Buddhist meditation.
But yes, wth is that thing?
I'm so jealous.
I wonder if that's something that can be trained, just like 'fixing' aphantasia can be trained [1]:
- Sit in front of a table, with a large vase of flowers on it.
- Remove the vase and put it behind you.
- Looking at the now empty table, try to remember the look of the vase on it.
This is how it 'feels' being able to put imagined objects into your FOV. You don't get to actually see it, but you can imagine what it's like to do it.
[1] https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
Yes, I can imagine everything about what it would be like to see it. But I cannot actually see it.
1 - Wash
2 - Rinse
3 - Repeat
Most people are like this, with variation in the degree of vividness and control. Some people can make realistic detailed scenes, for other people it's harder and their images are often blotchy or lacking in detail and colour. I'm in the latter group.
If you don't have any of this at all and you're surprised by the whole idea, you are probably aphantasic.
One interesting effect of psychedelics that I've noticed is that they can cause the framebuffer behind my head and the framebuffer in front of my head (i.e. on the insides of my eyelids) merge into one framebuffer. It's quite an odd and fascinating state to be in!
It’s incredibly fascinating to learn about nuances between humans.
I apparently have excellent spatial awareness and reasoning. I can imagine shapes and scenes. Rotate a shape and have a good crack at sketching it from my mind.
But I would never describe this as similar to actually seeing in any way. If I had to describe what I experience after reading through a lot of these descriptions it would be "knowing". When I visualize something it's like I'm "knowing" it's shape, size, position, and etc. But it's nowhere and I'm certainly not seeing it in any way that's meaningfully similar to actual sight.
I'd be interested to see more quantitative descriptions of "duration" and "field of view" of what they see.
My dad told me about monk’s who meditate on imagining that their thoughts exist behind their belly button. As you noted, your mind’s eye is not located in the same physical space as your actual eyes. Similarly, there is no reason the thoughts you hear couldn’t be happening in your belly button.
But I’ve found it remarkably difficult to convince my mind that it exist anywhere other than my head. I don’t think this difficulty is based on biology. I think it’s just conditioning. But damn, it’s hard.
It really is hard. I just know the conscious effort of meditating and centering my consciousness in the center of my body (above the belly button) as opposed to my head, really helps my focus and mental abilities and general wellbeing. And everytime I use my mobile .. it helps me if I do it afterwards, to not get lost again. I wonder if the jogis would have advanced much, if they would have had a mobile close to them ..
For example, you can ask "most people" to imagine a car, and then follow up by asking "what color did you imagine it?". For me and you this question would not make any sense, but you'll find out that "most people" find it completely normal and answer it without questioning you.
The second way would be to abstractly build a car in my mind. Start with four tires, put a rough shape of a frame on it — lets make it a sedan. If I proceed this way, I probably would not choose a color, at least not early on. Like many in this thread, this is how I usually imagine things, as "wireframes". The color/texture is not there because I have not assigned it. I can't vividly see the things I imagine, but they can still have color just like they can have shape.
If I imagine a car, I can imagine its features, and of course color being a quite salient feature I would probably assign it a color (e.g. I could imagine a red Ferrari, or a black limo). It's just that I wouldn't see it, there wouldn't be anything in my mind similar to the actual experience of seeing a red object, I would just think about the "concept" of the car being red (hard to explain).
So far I've never found a way in which aphantasia really manifests externally or can be measured externally in a more or less reliable way. Which is why I'm still not 100% sure that people who claim not to be aphantasiacs aren't just exaggerating or taking metaphors too literally...
I can't recall anything I didn't actively notice while looking. If you stop me when I'm leaving a grocery store and ask me questions about the cashier, I won't be able to tell you their hair color or what kind of clothes they were wearing. Sometimes I won't even be able to tell you if they were tall or fat or any other physical adjectives.
Several years ago a Facebook recruiter invited me to interview with them. It mostly went well, except I bombed the leetcode algorithm quiz.
The next day, as I expected, they sent me a polite note thanking me for interviewing but they would be moving on with other candidates.
The morning after that, I woke up and before I opened my eyes I saw the complete solution on the back of my eyelids, about 20 lines of code.
I stepped through the code mentally and thought, "Yes! This will work!"
So I ran to my computer and typed the code in to test it. Other than one bug - this was old-school JavaScript and I'd forgotten one var statement, so there was an inadvertent global - it worked perfectly.
I personally consider naps an essential part of studying because of this.
I'd never had this happen before, nor since. I wish it were a skill I could develop and cultivate!
And what I 'see' is affected by light over closed eyelid as well as inner blood vessel, minor debris and micro organism floating over the cornea, meaning input from the eyes does play a role even with eyes closed.
While I have very vivid imaginations, I don't think I have photographic memory because what I can recall is rather too creative.
No.
>I can imagine what something looks like, and I guess I sort of 'see' it, but closing my eyes doesn't make it any more real. It doesn't seem to involve the eyes or any part of the visual system at all - it's somewhere else in my head.
Yes. That's all it is. Although it does seem to be indirectly related to the visual system, likely whatever part of it lets people "see" things when they dream, despite not actually processing visual stimuli through the eyes. It's just dreaming while awake.
They are saying like how you see golden dots after gently rubbing your eyes. They are saying they see images like that. Definitely seems like more than just imagining seeing something.
When I rub my eyes I definitely see some dots that are way more real than not rubbing my eyes and just imagining dots.
ahem. yes we do. we really, really do.
How do you function? How do you manage to drive, without your thoughts blocking your view? How can you even tell if anything you see is real or a product of your imagination?
I feel like if that's what is actually happening you should see a professional.
They don't block the view, in the same way that the image from your left eye doesn't block the image from your right eye, even though they're overlaid on the same "mental space". Hold up your finger in front of your eyes, and focus on a distant object. You can see two images of the finger, but also see straight through them simultaneously. It's kinda like that.
And it usually doesn't manifest when I'm intensely concentrating on one task (unless deliberately imagining something is part of how I solve the task). At any rate, driving is mostly a system 1 activity, carried out autonomically. In real life, people's thoughts drift all the time when they drive. It's unavoidable and mostly not a big deal.
>How can you even tell if anything you see is real or a product of your imagination?
Because they're on different channels. Like stdout vs stderr.
>I feel like if that's what is actually happening you should see a professional.
Again, most people are like this. You are the one who is unusual. You probably have aphantasia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
It's common for aphantasics to be initially completely incredulous at the concept of mental imagery, so you're not alone here. See this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
>Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images
But I do also know what familiar things look like more or less, and I can easily imagine layouts of buildings I know really well. I can explain those things verbally fine.
But it registers more in the way you might expect if you were encountering the object in darkness, or became blind after thoroughly learning the object as a sighted person. I imagine aspects of the object or scene in relationship to each other, sort of feeling over it with my mind, and cross-referencing with facts I remember about it. I'm wondering if that's what you're talking about--being able to conceptualize it rather than visualize it.
I did manage to imagine "blue" once during meditation, though, and that was pretty cool. I really saw it when I did--my whole visual field behind my closed eyes seemed sky blue. Normally I just see clouds of purplish dots on a black field, if there's no light shining through my eyelids, and it's been that way all my life. That experience, more than anything, convinced me people who say they "see" stuff in their mind's eye really do see stuff.
I'm definitely going to check out the linked technique. Maybe it's snake oil but doesn't seem likely to hurt to try. That blue experience was pretty compelling.
I describe my "internal" sensory experience as being similar to proprioception. In the same way you can "feel" where your left hand is relative to the rest of your body, that's how my relates to most objects/spaces.
I'm curious: have you noticed any effect on your memory? My autobiographical memory is poor--I remember facts about what I've experienced, but I struggle to recall the experiences themselves. I can't "mentally time travel" back to a moment to recall what it was like to be there or note new details about those recollections. I only retain whatever I notice at the time, and in a disconnected fashion as if I were remembering an incident in a book or movie.
I've read that people with similar deficiencies (such as SDAM) frequently also report aphantasia. I've often wondered if the ability to visualize might play a major role in encoding and recalling our experiences.
>can you not do it with your eyes open? I can. I just don't actually, physically see it in front of me.
I can imagine a red apple, and I can imagine it's shape and color and the spots on its skin and I can even mentally feel it, smooth or bruised, I can even taste it, but just in my mind.
I was also confused when I first heard of aphantasia, so talked about it with a few people. Enough people to come to the conclusion that a loot of it comes down to some people using crude language for the "minds eye". But that some people use the minds eye more than others.
Like if you imagine a 1950's spaceship, yellow with red stripes and long curving fins resting on a cratered moonscape with astronauts in shiny puffy silver suits holding their glass helmets in their hands as if they can breathe in the vacuum of space smiling brightly with a sign above that reads, "buy astrogum! It's astrolicious!" in the coca-cola font.
You won't see that the same way you see the words on the page in front of you, but in that same way that you "see" the hazy memories of your childhood playing with friends, running around, parks and blue skies in the ever-lasting summer of your youth.
There seems to be no external measurable manifestation or consequence (contrary to what some people might think, I can answer questions about hypothetical spatial rotations, etc. just fine. I don't visualize and rotate the object, but I sort of imagine the "concept" of the object and can rotate such "concept". It's just that the process for me doesn't involve "seeing" anything). So it's hard to know to what extent the difference is real.
I think about other senses like smell, sound, touch, and taste. I can imagine sounds very clearly in my mind. I can also imagine very well how something would feel to touch, to the point where the imagination is almost as clear as the real thing.
However, what I can do for images, touch, and sounds, I cannot do for taste and smell. And this helps me to appreciate something of what 'aphantasia' might be like, though with different sensations.
I have a question I like to ask people, that I think helps show some external measurable consequence of this. I ask people to tell me how many doors there are going off the hall in their house (it may help you to take a moment to try answering before reading the next part).
For myself, and many others, we imagine a picture in our mind of us standing in the hall, and in the picture we just 'look' around and count off the doors. However, I made an error and missed a door when I did the counting, I forgot to count the door that was behind where I imagined myself standing in the hall, because I couldn't "see" it.
I asked someone with aphantasia this same question, because I couldn't understand how they could answer it (I'm a very visual thinker). He told me (if I understand right) that he does something like tell a story via words, and uses that to somehow enumerate the doors and answer the question. Perhaps his strategy is prone to analogous mistakes like mine, but presumably not the same mistake.
After several days the images would fade and i would return to not seeing anything.
So i also wonder if those realistic images i could see in those few occasions are the norm for other people, or if they have not seen such images and describe something else as seeing.
Also somewhat related i have similar experience with sound, while normally i can imagine music as my inner voice singing, but on some occasions i could hear the whole orchestra. And here as well, people describe different experience from hearing to not having an inner voice at all.
Back of the eyelid visuals are a whole different thing, and it's good to know there's so much room to work with them.
This article is saying the effect is like that, so it seems to be different than just imagining something with your eyes closed.
When I imagine something I don't "see" it at all the way I "see" the yellow dots after rubbing my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
I only know that terms like 'mental imagery' or 'daydreaming' aren't metaphorical because of another HN thread about it years ago. Turns out (to varying degrees) the vast majority of people have a TV in their minds they can switch on.
It’s not exactly the same as watching a movie. But I think if I was doing this and you moved something in front of me, I wouldn’t see it. It would be an interesting scientific experiment. Certainly people have told me that when I was staring into space that they waved to me and I didn’t respond.
One way this is really useful is if I’m packing for, say, a camping trip. I can put myself in the campsite, and I first want to gather firewood, but it’s too thick to break, so I pick up a saw. -ok write that down, a saw. At night we climb into the tent and when we get inside it’s very dark -write down flashlight- and then after unrolling my sleeping back I notice that it’s uncomfortable without a pillow -write down pillow. That kind of thing.
I can do this with music too. Sometimes that’s how I write songs. I’ll work the parts, hearing them all together while I’m taking a shower, then later ill go to the music room and play the whole song one instrument at a time.
A disembodied mental image is located somewhere else in my head; a first-person one moves behind my eyes. It’s not like a projection in the sense that it would replace what I actually see, but like a secondary feed that overrides some processing in the same place just after the eyes.
I always assumed this was completely normal for most people, but apparently it really is difficult for some.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/minds-eye-mental-...
The downside is it’s hard for her to shut it off.
I have the opposite problem and see nothing. Only learned about aphantasia a few years ago - made so much sense when I realised.
I am super excited to try image streaming!
I can remember dreams, although they're pretty abstract. I take a picture of my kids before I take them out so if they get lost I can tell people what they are wearing. (learned that the hard way)
1. One way is the "behind the eyelids" technique, where the imagery seems to be coming from the retina, or at least I experience it that way. I cannot currently generate the high quality photographic imagery of the OP, and even the experience of colour is pretty sketchy. That's today, awake, although sometimes it gets better when I'm in bed and about to fall asleep. Either way, this only works if my eyes are closed, or it's pitch dark. With my eyes open, the signal from my retina washes out the image, which is very dim. One person I met who experiences this calls the experience "phosphenes". The experience doesn't look real, and I have no sense of depth or spatial location, like I do with vision. It is only partially under conscious control. I get images, then I "make suggestions" about what I want to see, and then it kind of drifts in the direction of what I want.
2. The other way works with my eyes open. I can do 3D objects, even set up a wire frame cube spinning around my head. The object can be "inside my mind" with no defined location, or I can locate it in space. I barely have any colour available in this subsystem, but that could be lack of practice. This is under full conscious control. I have no difficulty distinguishing these images from what I am seeing, I experience eyesight and these images as two different mental domains.
I just ran a test, and I can do both things at the same time, but it requires a lot of concentration and I'm not good at it.
I know from talking to people that there is a lot of variation in how people experience mental imagery.
Based on what I've read, LSD and psilocybin hallucinations may be be a more powerful version of "system 1" imagery as described above. That's because: at low doses, you can only see the hallucinations with your eyes closed, and they are only partially under conscious control. (There are instructions on the web on how to influence the imagery.)
UPDATE: I wondered whether my system 1 imagery is "in the retina" or "in the visual cortex". As an experiment, I stared at a bright light, then closed my eyes to see the retinal afterimage of the bright light. Everybody gets these afterimages. Then, I was able to modify the afterimage! After some work, I eventually changed the colour of the afterimage and made it into the centre of a flower. To my delight, the flower had an almost photographic quality. This doesn't really prove anything about retina vs visual cortex. But this is a better result than I've had in the past, before I read the ideas in this post.
Finally, the OP and video describes "image streaming", which seems to be a more advanced version of what I do when I try to shape a system 1 "retinal" image. Afterimages are one way to produce a seed image. In the past I've just created images starting from a black visual field, but I guess it's easier if you start with a seed. Apparently if you get really good then you can have full conscious control over system 1 mental imagery! I had not previously considered talking out loud to influence the image.
Now I'm wondering whether "microdosing", a Silicon valley practice that has been discussed on HN before, would improve your ability to perform "image streaming". Maybe other people with more knowledge of this can comment.
I thought for a long time that’s how it was for everyone.
Anyone else have that?
My dreams can feel more real than reality too. Like full senses lucid dreams. Looking at things like clocks and books worked in my dreams. My dreams are just a reality inside the reality everyone else shares.
Also, In my teens and early 20s I had dreams I could levitate. If you could imagine being able to follow magnetic fields just under your skin would be about the best way to describe it. It was disappointing to wake up and realize that I couldn't do this.
If you can't, that's schizophrenia.