What happens in the brain while daydreaming?
hms.harvard.edu
hms.harvard.edu
I didn't even realize that aphantasia was a thing until a couple of years ago when a YouTube video popped up on my feed about it.
When people ask what I "see" in my mind when told to "picture" something, is basically auditory database of descriptions in my inner voice.
"Edinburgh: “I can remember visual details,” he commented, “but I can’t see them”."
In this one, they show step by step how the artist does it: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/visual-artist-with-ap...
When I dream there's only a faint visual component, there's no color or detail.
Also, when reading fiction, I never have any use for the long-winded descriptions of a place and a character. I don't picture the scene or character, but I create my own "space" where I can place the characters and the action, and I can feel beeing there. This "space" can have details, but usually not a lot.
Recalling memories are similar. I can vividly feel the moment, and I can remember a lot of non-visual details, and often some distinct visual details. But I can't really picture it.
Same, and oh my goodness did my teachers in High School chastise me for not wanting to produce those same strings of adjectives in my own works. I fundamentally could not understand why someone would want to read that much description about the appearance of something.
My guess is that kind of "untrained intuitions" about drawing require two preconditions:
1. Having seen lighthouses or buildings and paid attention to how rust/marks/decay and the interplay of light and shadow looks like.
2. Being able to visualize this when drawing.
Otherwise, how can the drawing (without a photo reference) be anything but idealized and abstract?
As I am drawing the lighthouse the part that I'm working on will have more descriptors popup in my inner voice. Like say I'm drawing the door, I will hear: "vertical slats, arched top, dark weathered wood" and as I drill into each of those, I will hear more words in my head.
Maybe I trained myself to do that over many many years of art classes, but I can't remember that not being the case.
Looked it up, and turns out the ones in Oregon are. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=oregon+lighthouses&form...
Etc.
I never fully visualize it instantly. It's like my mind is creating the details over time. A minute later if you ask me to visualize it again, I still don't see it instantly, I need to remind myself "Oh yeah the door was wooden, the walls were white" etc.
I feel like a lot of differences in people's experience of this is less to do with their actual abilities of visualization and more to do with not being able to describe what is happening and observing yourself as a third party while you're thinking.
To be fair: most folks don't really remember as many details as you think. Definitely not photo-level. I generally tell folks that you'll be able to draw a bird, sure. Even different kinds of birds - but they will be fairly generic and simple. You'll know it is a duck or goose or little bird or owl. But unless you've studied birds and drawn a lot of them, it won't be a blue jay, an exotic duck, a snowy owl, and so on. Not without a reference picture, of course.
Those reference photos are important enough that I had an art teacher that tasked us with taking reference photos with disposable cameras. This was mid-90s, before phones were everywhere and there were so many resources for such things.
I'll also add that I keep a dialog in my head as I draw. I can visualize well enough, but the 'thinking voice' come along and narrates the things I'm drawing. "Put that line there and go down and across the page...." "Just add that little window down there and remember the handle!"
When I've asked a room full of people "close your eyes. Think of an elephant. What do you see?", 80% of the people say "I see a rough elephant". I've asked "do you really see it? Like, there are proportions, colors, etc.?" Most people say yes.
When I close my eyes and I do this, I see... nothing but dark eyelids with sparkles.
Are the other people I've asked this of lying? Or are you mistaken that normal people don't have a mind's eye which actually reproduces images?
EDIT: OK, I'm curious. I've created an HN poll. Obviously our readership isn't an unbiased sample, but I'm very interested to learn how different people experience this experiment.
Edit: I didn't make my point clear. I think that people who claim to have aphantasia expect to see a hallucinated overlay over their vision, which is obviously not what someone means when they say "imagine what an apple looks like".
Speak for yourself. Just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it doesn't to others. This is a skill you might be able to develop, if you can visualize already. If you lack resources, you might visit various occult groups for tips. Visualisation is a big part of practice for some people.
An MRI will not "diagnose" you.
"Yet, there is no consensus on whether aphantasia should really be described as a 'condition', and there is no battery of psychometric instruments to detect or 'diagnose' aphantasia. Instead, researchers currently rely on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) to 'diagnose' aphantasia." [1]
There is not a test that can realistically be relied on. At least one of the top results was someone getting an MRI because of sudden aphantasia. At least one of them was about mouse studies.
And I'll just go back to what I've said: You can't get diagnosed with an MRI, and honestly it'd probably be irresponsible to do so since folks with actual issues need the MRI (aphantasia generally seems to be a simple difference in the way one thinks rather than an actual condition. More akin to which hand is dominant than to anything physically wrong).
And sometimes, yeah, they might - especially with the way some folks describe it. It is very difficult to describe such things to other people who do not experience them.
I’m really not a visual learner for the most part, and maybe that’s why? On the other hand I’m quite good at shape rotation and other such problems. That and there are times where I find the visual interpretation to clarify my understanding of the abstract concept. The standout example of that is the marvelous Visual Complex Analysis.
It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pretty wildly.
I myself don't have aphantasia I think but I feel like I really have to work on "drawing things up" when I try to picture something with my eyes closed. Or maybe that's just the normal amount of effort for the complexity and detail I'm trying to capture? Actually it's easier to "imagine" things with my eyes open which I always thought was weird before I read this comment about daydreaming blocking out vision. Which still sounds extreme to me, but maybe not more extreme than all those other reports that claim they can procure fully detailed houses / places / system architectures / electrical diagrams / etc on a whim.
This makes me wonder two things:
1. Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation?
2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.
Yes, many reports suggest that most do. But I haven’t seen any rate comparisons with people who don’t have it.
Yes, I do. As it goes, I think it is some neurological thing, a receptor that is misfiring, or something. I've been testing it for the past decade and I only found three conditions where I can see images:
1. Dreams
2. Transition between awake and asleep during classical music concerts (This one is very interesting, cause one of my most vivid experiences was actually seeing different seasons during a Four Seasons (by Mozart I think?) piano concert, based purely on the music, without knowing which one was actually playing).
3. Psychedelics. Or, at least, mushrooms. Haven't tried others.
It seems when some neurological inhibitor is turned off, the images come back, but I don't know if there was any research on that, or whether it is even true.
The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'.
But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.
Picture a dog in your head. It’s such an fuzzy, imprecise action that you can skew the definition of “seeing it” from nothing (you are mostly reasoning about what this dog looks like) all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision.
Depending on what they think "seeing it" means, 100 different people can have 100 different explanations for the same phenomenon.
Yeah, this is exactly the issue, and it's really just impossible to know. There's this popular 'apple test' image that gets posted a lot, where you're supposed to self-diagnose your level of aphantasia/visual imagery prowess based on which 'tier' of apple you can visualize, and people will always say: yeah, I can see [extremely vivid, realistic image of an apple] in my mind perfectly well. And that seems impossible to me, but then, how are we supposed to know what other people can actually see in their mind? It's in their mind, after all.
The one thing for me that does make me believe there is some major difference is murder mysteries; I have friends who can visualize scenes and solve mysteries that would be impossible for me.
Many years ago, I drew the opposite conclusion: that people that cannot draw also cannot picture the image of what they want to draw. My informal quiz confirmed my suspicions, but it has one serious flaw that completely undermines it:
I am a decent (if untrained) artist. I can say I draw well. I can also picture things in my mind very vividly.
However, I cannot draw horses. I can see them in my mind clearly -- as I type this, a realistic brown horse popped in my mind -- but if I try to draw it, it will look like a badly drawn dog. Drawing horses requires a theoretical understanding of their anatomy, it would seem.
I still think most people who cannot draw also cannot imagine the subject. With exceptions.
Sorry for the long explanation below. I’d write less but many people have had questions and I’m trying to answer some of those here.
I’m able to vividly experience a virtual world including smells and tactile sensations. But it goes even further, I can simulate experiencing it through a different mind, sort of like a virtual machine. I can literally put myself “in someone else’s shoes”. (I’ve called it my mental holodeck.)
I think part of the reason I developed this is because the emotional hardware in my brain is broken and I have has spent my entire life interpreting all human behavior through logic. The other part is intentional practice through lucid dreaming and manic episodes rewiring my brain to support additional channels.
You think with all this I would be able to draw pretty well. I can’t. Just like emotions, my brain isn’t able to translate vision to motor control or spoken language. (I believe this is also due to broken hardware.) Fortunately, I am much better at translating to written language.
In my youth I practiced lucid dreaming and astral projection techniques, as well as lots of experiences with psychedelics. I have recently started undergoing Ketamine treatments for anxiety, and while under the effects, I experience very vivid images similar to lucid dreams, while also being aware of what is going on around me such as my guide walking down the hallway to check on me periodically.
I didn't do it on purpose, it just did.
They were all barking, and had a collar... That probably says something about me.
For some people faces, especially familiar ones, I can see their faces in high detail (flaps of their noses, even pockmarks and other texture). The "picture" doesn’t stay still and it sometimes requires effort; though some imagery comes unbidden and effortlessly.
Other topics I have a harder time with and are more abstracted.
The problem with discourse at this level, however, is how subjective it is: when I say I can picture in my head the beautiful outdoors scenery of my last vacation, how accurate is it? If you could download a hardcopy from my brain, would you tell me "this doesn't look like a photo at all"? But what if I'm actually there, watching with my eyes -- is the image that forms in my brain accurate? Maybe someone would also scoff at it if they could download it, "this isn't what the scenery looks at all!".
I fear we will never be able to solve this riddle.
There must be some sort of spectrum of ability with this stuff. But I agree that it's difficult to prove and measure. I do think that great artists must be on the more "gifted" side of this spectrum.
right there are spectrums applying to for every other human ability, so obviously also for this. The idea that the people on the low or high end of the spectrum are just miscommunicating their experience is a weird idea to hold, as it implies that there isn't a low or high end to the spectrum.
If you are like me, you get incredible detail so long as you don’t linger. Is the detail really there, or an illusion? And why does attention destroy the detail, like the waking within a dream?
No, I understand what visualization of something in your head is. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I can still see part of my dream in my mind's eye, but it fades quickly. I can't do it consciously. Never have been able to.
If you tell me to visualize a dog and describe it to you, I can't do it. I can describe what a dog looks like in general, but I won't be able to tell you what the specific dog that I've conjured up looks like because it doesn't look like anything. I'm not looking at an image in my mind's eye of a dog.
That does sound like it would put an upper bound on what "seeing with your minds eye" means, but then what about this line from GP above:
> daydreaming has a weird effect of completely blocking out my vision.
This was claimed by a person who also self-reports aphantasia, and I (as a person that claims to NOT have aphantasia) just can't imagine (pun intended) how this would work.
Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures.
Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).
Thanks for mentioning this... did an extremely quick Google and I suddenly understand everything about my memory.
...
Most people say red or green.
If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.
Wouldn't a better test be one of "visual reasoning"? I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well.
Yeah. I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but the big thing that made me understand (some of) the gulf in terms of visual rendering abilities was murder mysteries. I read a lot of them with friends and oftentimes mysteries rely on an ability to construct an image of the scene in your head. Not being able to solve such a mystery doesn't mean you have aphantasia, of course, but there's this feeling for me in these that they're literally impossible, and yet other people can definitely solve them.
I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new.
This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).
The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.
I'm about a 2-3 when I'm just idly thinking about things, and can get to about a 1-2 if I really concentrate on an image. Subjectively, the images I'm experiencing in my mind aren't exactly the same as actually seeing things, but they're pretty similar.
A good analogy is that the human mind can have it’s own internal stable diffusion or Midjourney, complete with the ability to give it a “prompt” i.e. thinking about what you want to imagine.
I was surprised to learn a while ago that not everyone can visualize things in their mind. As far testing for it, I don’t really know how that would work. I don’t think you really need to test for it, I assume most people who can visualize things in their mind know that they can.
I think fMRI combined with machine learning will get to the point of being able to very accurately test one's "mind's eye" abilities. I take with a grain of salt anyone's claimed ability to do this until proven by the fMRI test. Self-assessment has a very poor record in most domains.
I have those indeed. That's not what the discussion is about.
I can pull up an image of any place real or "imaginary" at a moments notice, see myself walking around in first or third person view and imagine any number of people or entities in the space. If I'm working on a physical object like a home project or building a piece of furniture or wiring a circuit, I usually start by visualizing it much like 3D modelling software, spinning it around in my mind, looking at it from all angles and modifying as needed before putting my ideas down on paper. Interestingly, this makes using actual 3D modeling software incredibly frustrating because I'm very much a novice and the speed and fidelity of the software in my hands is so much slower than my imagination.
I also have a habit of playing around with imaginary worlds and stories in my head and I pretty much visualize whole scenes and sequences in as much detail as possible. I wouldn't be able to do that with aphantasia.
I really wish I could change that. The machinery is clearly there.
For example, if I'm trying to see if a piece of furniture would fit, I can use this technique. I might still need a reference like a tape measure since I can't just see on a spec sheet that the bookcase is 2 meters tall and 1 meter wide and know it will fit but I do have a pretty good conception of physical space. I often set my table saw fence by eye and when checking it with a tape measure it's within 2-3mm.
Now I'm trying to imagine what either of your internal thought processes are like.
funny this reminds me of when trying to sleep when my brain is still active, i try to focus on what i "see" in 100% darkness; i try to set my brain to visualize "complete darkness" - and then i try to "hear nothing" until i eventually fall asleep; sometimes its hard as hell, but something ive "practiced" for some years. Otherwise my brain is jamming to whatever song i was listening to and scheming some plan in whatever game i was playing last..
It's always in the way of what I'm trying to imagine, and it's so hard to "see past" the darkness. The only way for me to really imagine something is to actually have my eyes open and stare at words describing what it is that I'm imagining. I can vividly imagine stories that I'm reading, or writing. Or roleplay. But if I want to daydream, it's just not happening.
I am nearly always a lucid dreamer. The only difference between daydreaming and night-dreaming for me is focus. I play along with my dreams, and laugh at how absurd and illogical they are.
There was one time that I was dreaming so deeply that I could actually see. It was incredible. I decided to fly, and nearly woke myself up from the imagined (but realistically experienced) change of balance.
Outside of that one experience, my inner eye is nearly blind. Consider the experience of walking down the street: you can see what is in front of you, and you can remember what is behind you. My dreams are much more like an invented memory than something seen.
But what about audio? If I could pull the data of my inner (metaphorical) ear, and plug it into a speaker, I could play you a reasonably high-fidelity copy of Metallica's black album (good luck suing this nap-ster) from front to back. Honestly, it's a bit frustrating that I can't. Playing a musical instrument requires a lot of patience: I can hear any sound I want to at a moment's notice, but making you hear it takes hard work and years of practice.
I have been nearsighted since I was a child. I wonder if living that way - without corrective lenses - played a part in my development.
Edit: I'll bet my next paycheck they are self-diagnosed.
I occasionally remember dreams. Once, for a few months, I kept a dream diary and started to remember more and more of my dreams. From a few flashes to pages and pages of stuff. It was mostly really boring and nonsense.
Other than that, no don't remember anything at all.
* Attention and working memory: Two sides of the same neural coin? — https://research.princeton.edu/news/attention-and-working-me...
* Professor Wayne Wu (CMU) on 'Intending as practical remembering' — https://youtu.be/okk-fpwcdbY
However, this is about Working Memory. Autobiographical memory is also related to the experience of emotions:
“Much evidence indicates that emotional arousal enhances the storage of memories, thus serving to create, selectively, lasting memories of our most important experiences.”. From: Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant [pdf] — https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1301209110
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz
It was discussed on hacker news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
> It is interesting that those who do a lot of mediation have been seen to be less reactive to norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter associated to stress).
But from your older comment, that applies to me.
I sometimes have dreams that any normal person would probably consider a nightmare, but I don't experience a nightmare. I'll wake up, and then realize that the dream I just woke up from probably should've been extremely scary, but I wasn't scared. Maybe it's the autism.
It has changed my perception on children's "time management"
Children should be allowed to get bored so they can develop their innate ability to be creative, an education expert says.
EDIT: just noticed that article is from 2013 - damn I am old - so are some of my bookmarks.
EDIT2: I like one of the comments made: Our children (generally) are drowning in communication media and internet trivia. Reading, such a nutrient for the imagination because you have to build mental worlds, is a minority pursuit in teenagers. I'm a teacher and trying to get kids to read is like pulling teeth. Yes, an image = 1000 words. So give the kids the words and let them do the mental exercise to build the images, or find the time to read TO your kids if they are too young to read (so they can ask questions - "mum/dad what is XYZ?")
The drifting off to sleep on the comedown phase of MDMA made me have incredible minds eye pictures each morphing into the next in a kind of word association.
I am capable of minds eye pictures when sober too but this was next level.
I’ve always wanted to try legit LSD but never has it found me. I wonder if people with aphantasia respond differently to empathogenic and hallucinogenic drugs.
I used to take mushrooms pretty regularly. It usually just alters what I physically see, like fish swimming out of the TV into free air or objects moving. I did once have a very intense trip where my senses were entirely blocked out by the hallucination. I was totally unaware of my surroundings.
The experience had a visual component, but it was very similar to the way I visualize ideas normally.
I 'see' outlines and shapes, everything is fuzzy and abstract. Sort of like remembering something from when you were very drunk. The details are missing, but you have a clear impression of what it is. Except for me the details exist in an abstract form attached to the image. Like metadata on a jpeg.
The images I saw had very little information in them, just impressions of ideas. But behind the images was a great depth of conceptual information. I understand perfectly what the images represent, but there's so little visual information that another person would understand the image if I could show them.
Anyway, Vishnu revealed to me the secret structure of the universe. At the quantum level, little spiders hold together the fabric of reality and they are very tired of their job.
It was actually a really fun ride.
The best description I have of my thought structure is a 4D graph of interrelated concepts. Each node is an abstract object that somehow represents all available information at once.
And uh, this sounds suspiciously similar to the linked psychedelic states. I'm really not sure what to make of that.
Same as me. Except I typically have a vivid minds eye so it was turned up to 11. I still remember the barn and farm path leading to it that was built from mind association freewheeling from an Apple to a tree to an orchard to a barn it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life.
I’m too old to move in circles that would sell me mdma now, I’ve got ‘narc’ written all over me, but I’d love to do it again and still hold out hope LSD will find me!
One old hippy once told me ‘it will find you my friend when you need it most’. Then he disappeared in a puff of (pot) smoke wizard style.
https://theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/28/i-just-go-into-m...
I guess that just means that the "reading department" of brain goes to sleep when sleeping and does not interact with the rest of the dreaming.
Has anyone experienced reading something in their dreams?
The blog post is much easier to comprehend both in format and in writing style than the actual paper, which also is, in fact, paywalled.
I'm absolutely certain that the blog post is the better link here for both understanding and for a better Hacker News discussion here.
I suppose I'm a bit confused as to what you mean by 'quiet attention'. Does that mean when by one's self or in other similarly externally quiet situations, or by 'quiet attention' do you mean attention that seems quiet to all other because of its nature being inward, inside the individual exclusively?
I'm not sure why you're discussing enlightenment here, as I haven't mentioned it. I like to imagine and hope that I do feel better than other people in general, yes. For these and many other reasons, I can most assuredly assure you that I do not consider myself to be 'enlightened', whatever it is that you mean by that word.
I use the Buddhist term 'being aware' to denote that one is sensing and feeling and turning a part of one's attention inward. I freely admit that I don't know a terrible great deal about Buddishm, nor study it any longer and nor do I formally meditate, in the case that it may soothe your nerves. Rest easy knowing I am but a simple heathen.
All other activity of the mind that involves discarding this most energy preserving and growing mechanism (being aware) that is built into us all, these activities which result only in expended energy, are specifically excrement of thought by comparison. They come of their own volition and without us asking or trying, just like the shit out of our asses.