My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things | Hacker News Reader

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

nautil.us

48 pointsbookofjoe50 comments

I'm struggling to figure out if my mind's eye "sees" anything, or if I'm just imagining the concept of the item I'm thinking about. If I'm comparing this vision to having a dream, say, it's certainly not visual.

"...there is a simple and helpful test that can give you a clue into whether you may have it: Close your eyes and try to imagine an apple, seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you can see anything (anything at all—even a blurry outline), you do not have aphantasia. If you see a void of complete darkness, you might have aphantasia." (https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/aphantasia-test)

When I imagine an apple, I don't see anything that could be considered visual.. I can "see" it, but it's certainly not visual as this suggests.

Anyone here seeing an actual rendering with their eyes closed?

I've talked extensively to friends about this because I see nothing. I can picture nothing. It's just a void. Interestingly, it hasn't always been this way for me. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school, I could take exams and see the page the answer was on in the textbook in my mind. I'm not sure when or how I lost it, but it's gone. I do sometimes dream in video, though.

For me, most of what happens in my mind is sound. I always "hear" music in my head, though my inner monologue doesn't have a voice. It's more like I just "know" what I'm thinking. I don't hear anything in my head when I read, which allows me to read pretty quickly. I'm not saying that I don't subvocalize or whatever, but if I do it it isn't producing any sounds in my brain.

Some people can apparently picture the scenes they read in books. See the beach, see the characters, etc. I have talked extensively with friends about this stuff and some of them say it's ultra vivid, like watching a movie in their mind. I find that wild. There is an anecdote about Richard Feynman and another scientist or mathematician and how they kept time differently. If I remember, one saw the clock in their mind and the other relied on counting aloud mentally. I'm not sure where I read it, sorry.

I'm pretty much the same.

However, one thing that throws me off is that when I see my parents or other people I don't see often, they look markedly different than I remember (aging). But I can't picture them in my head. So why is said disconnect occurring?

I also was able to see stuff in middle school, like in a movie. Now I can't see anything, like you. And I also have a lot of music in my head

The Feynman anecdote was pretty cool. Feynman counted 'verbally' in his mind, so he was able to keep a steady and consistent count while reading and writing, but not while speaking or listening. His friend kept count by visualizing the numbers in sequence (like a clock, kind of) so he could keep steady and accurate count while holding conversations but not at all while reading.

I think I'm with you, but I'm not sure if you're putting too much emphasis on visual.

It certainly doesn't seem to come from the same place as regular vision does, but they do say "mind's eye". I can imagine an apple, and even slice it up, spin it around, pour water on it. It has a colour, and can have any colour.

I always wondered how memories seemed (TFA touches on this but not in detail) to people who claimed to be minds-eye-blind. Can you not put yourself back on that beach when you were in your mid twenties? Can you not remember his/her eyes/hair/smile/etc at all? Isn't it kind of an image?

As an aside, the apple thing is actually slightly easier if I dedicate only part of my attention to it, like casually rotating it while writing this text, than if I close my eyes and focus. But I've been working all day so clear focus in general is hard to attain right now.

When I think of a black and white apple in the context you described, vs. a red or green one, there's a difference. The way you've explained it makes me feel like we're similar, and I'm definitely putting too much emphasis on visual.

My sister, though, said when she thinks of something in her mind it's "blurry like [she doesn't] have glasses on", which sounds highly visual.

I'm wondering if it's more about semantics and a tomato/tomato like thing -- technically anything we visualize is calling up a memory, or at made up of various components from memory.

> I always wondered how memories seemed (TFA touches on this but not in detail) to people who claimed to be minds-eye-blind. Can you not put yourself back on that beach when you were in your mid twenties? Can you not remember his/her eyes/hair/smile/etc at all? Isn't it kind of an image?

The short answer is no. No to all of that.

The longer answer is that the condition tends to be correlated with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). So, yeah, can’t remember things like I was there, or with any emotion attached. Which is sad I guess, but comes with the upside that I can’t remember bad things that happened in that way either.

Also can’t really imagine the future in a daydream kind of way, which I suspect is a downside for goal motivation.

Yes, I see it in the mind but not with my eyes. In a way, all vision is in the mind, but the origin of the image is like a different channel of information. I'm aware of the blackness behind my closed eyelids, but it's easy to let that go, switch focus to a different channel of information. There is a perfect image of an apple in a white space.

This is a very interesting way of describing it, and worded this way I think I'm the same way.

It does feel like paying attention to a different input stream -- just like that -- although it's still not a visual that replaces the darkness, but I'm getting, what I would say, the effects of seeing the apple.

Yeah, I think there are two distinct types of visual spaces in the mind. When I'm tired, meditating long (rare), or otherwise in an unusual state I can sometimes access the one that feels much more eyeball derived. Very rarely I have been able to access it just by trying in a quiet place with the right kind of mindset.

This kind of visual feels like it is coming from my eyes, as opposed to the more common and controllable (but less compelling) kind of visualization. This 'channel' is in the grainy blackness space of closed eyes, in front of the face, like where you see color blotches when you press on your eyes or look from very bright conditions to darkness with eyes closed. Except that it can become no longer very dark at all and even sometimes have rich, vivid colors when I get a good session going.

I can't lucid dream btw, and this state is exclusively around the boundary between sleep and wake, and it's distinct from a dream IMO because every dream I have ever remembered I am a subject experiencing the dream, whereas this is pure visual like watching a scene TV (except I can sometimes decide what happens, though it's much easier to morph what comes on automatically than shift to an entirely new scene without breaking the spell).

But usually I just visualize things in the channel well behind my eyeballs, in brain-space. I can do this second kind with eyes open (though with better clarity with eyes closed). The first kind is only eyes closed. For me the background can be dark, white, or complex scenes(abstract or real-world). I have very fine control over detail in the objects if I want, but they feel much less real especially in the sense that they disappear the instant I stop focusing entirely on them, unlike the first channel which persists since I am in some sense in an unfocussed state already.

> Anyone here seeing an actual rendering with their eyes closed?

At times. Outside dreams, it's most vivid during hypnagogic states, where anything I try to picture manifests with full clarity.

During regular waking hours, it's much less intense, usually somewhere right in the middle of the various aphantasia tests I've come across. Colors are sometimes there. But I can rotate and examine 3d objects in my mind quite well, and when I'm painting, it's always better when I can paint a subject in my head first. I can also see words and visualize numbers.

When I try to see an apple, I see absolutely nothing. I can pretend that there is an apple in front of me and that it's spinning or whatever, but all I've really done is remember what attributes I've given it and roughly what size it is.

There are some odd things I've paid attention to since I became aware I had aphantasia and that it was a thing. I know for a fact that my dreams are visual because I've had lucid dreams before and was aware of them being visual and at a higher fidelity than my eyes can normally see. I do see images when I'm almost asleep or not quite awake yet. I've seen some images after meditating for a long while, but I suspect I was just starting to fall asleep. Other than that, eerily enough, the only thing I've been able to see that doesn't involve photons hitting my retinas when completely awake is the ghost of a young woman that shyly watches me from the hallway when I'm sometimes watching TV that I've seen on a few occasions. Make of that what you will because I have no idea what to make of it.

Minus the last couple sentences, I would describe things the same way you did in terms of visualizing, and have experienced all those things.

Along the same lines as the young woman you're experiencing, I used to get out of body experiences/sleep paralysis/waking dreams (pick a label) nightly when I was in my 20s, and I would see shadows and outlines of what would seem like energies. That was mostly non-visual and interpretive, which feels more like my minds-eye than a dream.

Not to go off topic, but ever try communicating with the shy woman?

I stil (occasionally) get sleep paralysis in the form of a person descending a rope from the ceiling or trying to enter from the window. Over time I learned to recognise it for what it is and control my reaction, saving a few bedside lamps in the process

No, I never tried and she hasn't come around for a few months that I've noticed. I don't know if she's a ghost or whatever, but if it is something that's self-aware I didn't want to give it the impression that I was inviting it into my home.

The first time I saw her I did go search around the house in case I had a "homeless person living in a cupboard" scenario.

I've never experienced sleep paralysis, thankfully, even when working on being able to dream lucidly.

On the topic of aphantasia, I would expect sleep paralysis and any visual hallucinations to be on the dreaming/near to dreaming side of the fence since that circuitry seems to work for people with aphantasia as far as I can determine. If I try to think of specific memories involving people I am very close to I can get a flash of something that goes away before I'm even really aware of it that seems to be in the side channel people talk of. It doesn't seem to work for anything not emotionally connected, and only rarely.

The lady that has visited me was felt completely different. Thinking back, I have also been able to see auras, and just proved to myself that I still have that ability. It might be a visual abnormality or something, though. If I was actually visualizing, it was an overlay and not on a side channel.

No, I somehow get the impression that outside of dreams my internal life consists mostly of words

I see a rendering of a vague apple in front of me, slightly up and to the right of my center vision toward my peripheral. The alpha is almost 0, but if I focus on it, the alpha turns up to maybe 0.02 and I can see low-resolution details. I can change it's color, scale it, rotate it, slice it in half with an imaginary knife, etc.

I think I see detailed renderings, eg, of a person's face. But if I try to focus on the face and really examine its details I can't. It's like that experience of trying to read a book in a dream but when you go to read the lines, they're blurry.

I suspect when we see what appear to be detailed renderings in our imagination, we are really seeing a compressed "essence" of the thing and our brains trick us into thinking we could focus on the details if we wanted to, when we really can't. It's basically a conservation of energy thing.

Or you make up the details on the fly as you focus in

Or fill in from memory, up to the detail you do remember.

Which may be a variable skill too? It’s clear all our minds are tuned differently.

A basic understanding of our individual wirings, uncovered by tests of these internal capabilities, would be enlightening to ourselves and for communicating with each other.

I took the https://aphantasia.com/vviq test which said that I'm a Hypophantasic:

> A thinking style that relies less on visualization and more on other sense modalities or other imaginative processes to perceive and understand the world.

I agree with this assessment. I had no idea that I was near one end of this scale. I can only focus on characteristics of the imagined thing rather than its image--like conceptual fragments. I can focus on a specific thing, like a specific facial proportion and can conjure up an estimate but it's not much more than a couple blobs with relative size/spacing.

An interesting thing that I had noticed earlier in life is that I can often recognize things instantly from such a fragment, like the gait of a person off in the distance, or even the make/model of cars by the shape of headlamps at dusk.

An opposing/complementary thing is that I have on occasion experienced lucid dreaming where I had loose control of the scene.

I think I am very much like that myself. I notice it most when I think about a certain logo in my head for example and while I have the characteristics of it,i.e. that its heart shape and I can somewhat visualise that, when I check out the real logo I notice that the heart was lopsided. And from there on I always “see” it lopsided. So while it sure feels like I can see something, in practice maybe I don’t?

When I visualize something, most often I cannot literally see it, but it's as if my brain is processing the information like Im looking at it. It also applies to feel and touch. If I try to see a dice I can "see" it, zoom in, and even feel the indent for each black dot. But I don't literally see a dice.

When it comes to doing math, it is a similar story. When working with matrices I can see the array and transformations in my mind, and when working with 3d trig and calc I can visualize each vector and how they interact with the world.

I can visualize two colored planes perpendicular to each other, but I can't render it.

I think when I take cannabis edibles, it improves these abilities slightly but noticably. I don't usually take big doses of THC, but a lower dose of THC with a higher dose of CBD.

Anyone with Aphantasia or are curious about it might like this fairly recent article that eventually gets into a theory of the mechanics of different cases of Aphantasia and what might be happening behind the scenes.

Aphantasia: In search of a theory https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mila.12432

I find it incredibly surreal to read current research on how my own mind might be working and finding parts of it quite relatable and insightful.

"I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally. What’s wrong with me?"

How can you draw a thing without visualizing it? Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about how to move your hand? Or is it like you wake up and suddenly you have a finished painting in front of you with no idea how it got there?

This is an absolutely correct question to ask. It's also a good question to ask people who claim they can visualize things well, but can't draw.

I think people vastly, vastly overstate how well they can actually visualize something in their mind. Most people can't visualize a circle of a solid color and change the color in their mind, let alone visualize a face or anything significant.

Humans seem optimized for detailed recognition of visuals, not reproduction of them. Makes evolutionary sense because you can easily see the utility of detailed recognition, but what justifies the additional burden of detailed reproduction?

People who can draw detailed reproductions are either oddballs with photographic memory, or they've perfected the skill of adjusting their drawings as they develop gradient descent style using detailed recognition as the judge of where to stop.

I can definitely visualise those things in a way that sort of feels like seeing it but when I do that my brain really works with abstract concepts where if you focus on something in particular you make up the finer detail on the fly

Yes, I can visualize almost anything, but there is a huge fovea aspect where my focus has to zoom around to check/see all the details.

But if the details are unconstrained conceptually, or not tied to a remembered object, then details won’t be consistent as I move around.

The memory palace thing works for me too, if I am not constantly moving things around.

Memory palace works just fine without CLEAR visualization. CLEAR visualization is when you can do what was claimed of Tesla - move around complex systems and actually see them to scale / detail. There is no way in hell most people can take a transmission and put it together in their head and re-arrange it. Working memory doesn't allow for that, unless it's some entirely different system of processing in the brain.

I can draw sort of ok, but only because I've practiced a bit. I can visualize quite well, I assume because of some innate ability + I practiced extensively as a child for fun.

It is definitely a skill that requires focused training, at least in my experience, so it makes some sense that the average person wouldn't spend too much time going out of their way to practice. If I get out of the habit for whatever reason, I'll slowly lose proficiency at quickly and easily picturing objects in near life-like detail, manipulating them skillfully, rendering complex scenes, holding images with eyes open or under distraction / activity, etc.

Objects will start off grainy/foggy by default and only clarify if I really can focus. Scenes and large complex objects will be much harder to hold together as a whole with distinct parts/areas. Changing an object results in more fog or losing the image temporarily. That kind of thing.

>How can you draw a thing without visualizing it?

Speaking personally: my hand just moves. A top hat is roughly an elliptical base with a smaller cylinder affixed to it on-center, maybe a colored band or a bow wrapped around the bottom. The band is another cylinder w/ less height circumscribed into the larger one. The bow is maybe two triangles connected w/ a circle. Add some squigglies and shading to make the bow look like fabric. All this has to be skewed by perspective, which is going to be some lines I lay down w/ a straight edge. I like pencil, because I make lots of mistakes. I hated art-class as a kid because markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc. were torture to me, I had no idea how someone could commit to permanence w/ the first stroke. (Obviously had no idea what aphantasia was, then, but I do remember thinking pretty early on how _weird_ guided meditation sessions were. The backs of my eyelids are pretty uninteresting.)

>Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about how to move your hand?

I don't see anything except what is on the paper. I probably use more guidelines than most, and my (admittedly amateurish) art looks very "sketch-y" _because it is._ I use lots of thin strokes or draw guidelines and erase ones that don't seem right. I'm very bad at "rendering" final scenes, I essentially have to just trace my own work very deliberately. (Though I'm slowly learning to lean on tracing via layers in digital tools to help with that.)

The facts of the "scene" are just present in my mind. My muscle memory acts on them. I am usually repulsed by what's on the paper and refine it. It's maybe akin to an internal monologue; closest thing I can think of is if someone was reading me a recipe over the phone: but instead of ingredients it was simple shapes "draw this, then that on top of it, but erase this line here at the bottom." Though it's not really a voice, exactly, unless I choose to vocalize or sub-vocalize it.

I don't really know how to describe it, I don't "see" the facts, or "hear" the facts, they're just _there._ If you ask me about my car, it's a blue Subaru. I didn't envision their emblem, or see the color blue, or the outline of the car, or anything like that. I just know it's a Subaru, and it's regal blue pearl - 35J. (Ironically I'm fucking terrible at trivia games.)

Also - if you ask me to draw with my eyes closed - you're probably going to get a bunch of disjoint strokes. It took a long time for me to figure out how to effectively use a digital tablet. (I'm still not sure I love it, but digital authoring fills too many other gaps for me to give up on it.)

I have the condition, as well (that is, I may have a short visual flash or broad impression, but I can't sustain this), still, part of my work is working as a designer and I'm considered proficient at drawing. It really comes down to classic poetics and relying on / trusting your gestures, while you are drawing. The amazing thing is that you can produce a stroke, you couldn't have thought of in a controlled way, and you're kind of surprising yourself. (I believed for a long time, it would be like this for everybody.)

BTW, this may be related or not, but I have learned to detest gesture based UIs in apps, and, since this has become the prevalent form of control, I've removed about all apps from my phone.

> How can you draw a thing without visualizing it?

This is a great question. I have an inability to draw things from memory (despite being able to recognize them immediately and form strong narrative memories of them). This realization is what lead to me to think I have aphantasia.

A few years ago, I decided to draw a face everyday from memory (of someone I knew well visually) to see if I could train myself to get better. After 6 months of daily practice, my faces still looked like cartoons. My technique got better from rote memorization, but importantly I never got to the point where I could recognize my subject from my own drawing. They all just looked like random people poorly drawn. I can recognize the mistakes as soon as they're on paper but during the initial creation I feel like I'm guessing where the lines go based on some verbal/narrative structure ("I know she has long hair, how about this..."), then saying "hmm that's not right". I have no reference image in my mind to work off of.

But I can immediately pattern match against my drawing to see how far off I am, which means the visual information is encoded in my brain somewhere. Still no clue on how to voluntarily access that memory - it's as if my visual systems only fire when photons hit my eyeballs. Which only helps after I've made my shitty drawing, not while I'm drawing.

It's hard! There are some professional artists who are aphantasic, e.g. this YouTube video talks about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI

IIRC, the artist does lots of sketches, and looks at them to see what looks right. And also uses computer models to get angles of what she's drawing which she struggles with otherwise.

"In my head, the way it happens is..." Okay, sure, man. Whatever you say.

Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further.

Personally, I don't believe for a second that there are a significant number of sighted, otherwise typical human beings out there who have zero ability to visualize anything. Of course, people get better at things with practice, so I buy that some people might be better at it than others. I couldn't recall melodies very well before studying music for several years. But if you know what an apple looks like, and you can describe that or draw it, even crudely, then you have some inner representation of what an apple looks like. Whatever words you use to convey your internal experience of recalling or assembling the relevant information are inconsequential.

I tend to agree. I think we just vary somewhat in how aware we are of our internal processes, with most of those processes being unconscious.

For example, I am very adept at art, particularly color and shading, yet I struggle to consciously imagine color or shading. I can consciously imagine 3-dimensional shapes and rotate them, but I struggle with any other visual data.

And yet I demonstrably CAN generate other visual data because I can draw and paint things, even things I have never seen before.

Clearly my brain is actually doing that work, even if I am just not conscious of it, thus I don't ascribe aphantasia to myself. My brain is perfectly functional in this area.

Here's a recent study which provides physiological evidence of aphantasia: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

Sorry, that is how it is. I am a meditator, and recently taking a class on tantra, I can't visualize for shit. Other people are seeing fucking Avalokiteshvara dressed in silk and jewels, I just see a fuzzy void.

I've also had lucid dreams where I am flying around in a gray void. Interestingly, I have had some hypnogogic states where I could see a page of writing, but I have no ability to summon any image at will.

If you stop listening to arguably the best autonomous systems around describe how they work you lose hope to find out how they're working. Provable and true are two separate things.

When I decide to see things in my mind, if I don't focus enough to keep them still they never cease to become something else than they represent. If I imagine a luxurious green field with an apple tree, immediately if I don't control the scene mentally to conserve it, some apple will fall producing a noise, some mad cow will run into the fov, trying to hit the apple with its horn, yelling and distracting me or whatever event that seems to happen naturally in the weird world that is my mind.

Example : I imagine a table > the legs of the table become rubber and bend, the table seems to be a live and jumps like if it was alive, some marbles fall onto it like raindrops on a bad day of autumn, the table falls because of the marbles on the ground ...

Very funny, but also quite frustrating because it really is HARD to stop stuff to happen.

I’m currently not sure if I have aphantasia or not.

I don’t remember the number of windows in my house, and I’m currently not in or near my house, but no problem — I simply wander through my house in my mind, and count the windows: 9.

So I cannot have aphantasia, right? How can I “visually” count the windows in my house without the capability to “see” in my mind?

But all those tests? I never really “see” that darn apple, at least not in the way that “awake-plus-photons” seeing works for me. Not even close. It’s more like seeing conceptually, or in the abstract.

Plus, I can relate to your comment. Maybe I have a focus problem, not an aphantasia problem?

But I can plan, design, and implement really complex software systems, so I cannot have a focus problem, right?

Wow, you don't have very many windows.

Yeah, I’m more of a macOS and Linux guy these days.

I would describe my mental vision as working the same way as you, and have always tested highly in my ability to mentally manipulate 3D objects. I don't think this is aphantasia so much as a language issue when describing mental processes. I am a little surprised that some comments here reference people who claim to be able to generate mental images as if they see them, that's certainly a different level of visualization.

Funny enough my son can't dream. It took him awhile to figure out something was different, and he was jealous that other people got to experience something 'like VR' when they sleep. I tried testing him for aphantasia by asking him to describe mental pictures and he seemed not to have it. Personally I have very vivid dreams. The brain is an interesting thing, and it's funny how hard it is to communicate the internal workings.

Honestly, that's hard to explain; I truly see colors, shading, lighting, can touch textures, feel weight of objects and etc... It's just that my body isn't truly performing these things. How do you remember a scene from your childhood ?

For the software part it's weird because most of the time ideas happens instantaneously.

I think solutions appears once I understand something about the problem. Solutions are then explored by my own mental compiler or interpreter, I can run them mentally and see where it fails or not. Problems are mostly a language problem, if I can describe the problem then it's not a problem anymore but almost the recipe to bake a solution. Complex problems appears when the sentence to describe them becomes too long (That's what it feels to me).

Having a focus problem doesn't make you unable to solve complex problems, but rather forces you to break down complex problems into blocks, or to use abstractions to describe solved parts of a complex problems, or something else of that type (again, that's what it feels to me).

Having a focus problem is like having too few RAM.

If I count the numbers of windows in my house, I can do it mentally, by flying through my house, but I can also fill my house mentally with water and swim around to count them (and I would almost feel the cold water on my face and body and hear what you usually hear when you are underwater and etc...). I can also go outside and count the windows of my neighbors, and take a walk in some place I saw one time in my life. I can visit Roma if I want and all of that stuff.

It's like I can trick my brain into thinking I am really in the situation I am thinking about.

It's different from reality, but I don't know how to explain why and how it is different.

This happens to me only if I'm particularly underslept.

https://archive.ph/ZRIeD

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