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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

As a person with aphantasia, the only time I'm able to "see" pictures is while dreaming (including day dreaming), but daydreaming has a weird effect of completely blocking out my vision. My mind is still actively processing cues from my vision, but I am unable to see anything but the daydream.

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.

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I feel like we are only scratching the surface of what "aphantasia" means.

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.

Hey, that's interesting, it would be very cool with a study to look for correlation between nearsightedness and aphantasia.

Anecdotal, obviously, but I have 20/10 vision and aphantasia.

I don't have aphantasia, quite the opposite, I see things constantly in my head and have to work hard on my environment and myself to be able to focus on the present moment or what's in front of me. I also learned about it from some random internet content (possibly here) and have a hard time imagining what it would be like to NOT picture things in my head. Much like you probably have a hard time imagining the reverse.

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 think I am pretty similar to you. When I was younger I used to build all sorts of things with paper and cardboard and used to imagine the whole thing in 3D and design its cutout template all in my head. I learned about aphantasia a few years back and it sounds very inconvenient to me.

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.

You’re right; it’s very inconvenient. Especially frustrating because I’m in the same boat as OP: I can absolutely hallucinate, but only if I’m on the edge of dreaming, or actually asleep.

I really wish I could change that. The machinery is clearly there.

Nikola Tesla was that way

I’m this way as well. Though I wonder to what degree this type of mental imagery ranges from person to person. To use a simple example, like placing something somewhere in my house and imagining how it would look. It’s not like I can actually see it at that location when I look there. It’s more like I am superimposing my imagination on the visual input from my eyes to create a composite representation of what it might look like. So it’s two systems working together, not like a full real image, if that makes sense. I see it in my “mind’s eye”. Curious to know what other people experience in this situation.

Yes, it's all in my mind. I don't actively hallucinate. But I can put the image in my mind I to the real world. I still don't see it but I can "put it there" and trace the outline, add or remove elements and see how the imaginary object would interact with the real world.

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.

I can't relate to any of this nor OP's description. I can definitely remember imagery (animated or static) and imagine new imagery. But it's all very vague and "bursted". So, for example, if I want to remember a moment in time, it'll just be short vignettes like a chaotic movie scene. Or, if I want to remember a specific tree, it's just a fairly indistinct object.

Now I'm trying to imagine what either of your internal thought processes are like.

> "and have a hard time imagining what it would be like to NOT picture things in my head"

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..

Are there tests for aphantasia?

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.

When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them.

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?

1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things.

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.

> 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

Yes, many reports suggest that most do. But I haven’t seen any rate comparisons with people who don’t have it.

>2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

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.

Conversations around this kind of thing are so fascinating to me, because they seem to present this fundamental breakdown in human communication - how impossible it is to convey what 'really is going on' inside your mind.

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not.

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.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not.

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.

One interesting thing to consider is the "draw a bicycle" test. When presented to a population of phantastics, many will produce severely flawed bikes that could never exist in real life, yet they will claim that it matches the "image" they have in their head of one. However in my own experience despite being aphantasic I can very easily draw a physically accurate bike, not by rendering to paper the "picture" in my head, but rather by working from first principles about how the components of a bike have to interact.

Interesting!

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.

I would be one of the exceptions. Or an example of an incomplete theory. The ability to visualize may be one of several prerequisites to have an innate drawing ability. Another possible prerequisite is the ability to translate image to paper. An ability I lack.

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.

That is very interesting! Perhaps there is some kind of disconnect happening between different parts of your brain, and physiologically you have created new pathways that work around that in some way.

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 am also an untrained artist, and can picture things with great detail in my mind. When it comes to putting them down on paper or canvas, I'm unable to get physical aspects down, such as perspective and proper lighting. Most of my art is very abstract and pattern based, and when I paint people or objects, they often come out similar to a Picasso painting (but unintentionally). I've learned to work with the way my mind works, and have adapted my art style to it, but it would be fascinating if there were some way for me to "break through" my difficulties and gain a grasp of 3 dimensional objects, in 3 dimensional space.

There are objective tests for visualization that show that aphantasia isn't just a miscommunication about internal processes. You can learn more here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

while reading this, my mind started trying to imagine dogs...

I didn't do it on purpose, it just did.

They were all barking, and had a collar... That probably says something about me.

It can also vary depending on the subject to be imagined.

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.

For what it's worth, I spoke to my friend who professes to be able to visualise things very vividly. I think there is something to it because she was able to confirm that she can literally see the thing she is visualising as if it's there, I asked her many questions about it so I don't think there is much room for miscommunication. She confirmed that it is as if that thing is there and that she can hold that imaginary thing in her field of vision for long periods of time. She can do this with her eyes open.

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.

>There must be some sort of spectrum of ability with this stuff.

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.

I’m skeptical about these testimonies because peoples drawing ability does not match. “ I can see this right in front of me and it is detailed as a photograph.” OK, trace it. (They can’t)

I can't picture things in my mind like that, but I also can't do a very good job of reproducing a photograph that I am directly looking at. If I can trace it that's one thing, but if I can see the photo but not hold my tracing paper directly up against it then it's a skill I haven't developed well.

Picture Dorothy’s dog Toto from the Wizard of Oz. Now look at her shoes. Don’t look too close!

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?

It's this kind of casual dismissal that makes the aphantasia so frustrating to talk about. The people who are able to visualize find it so fundamental and easy that they literally cannot conceive that someone else might be lacking this ability. They tell aphantasiacs that what they've experienced their whole lives isn't real, they just misunderstand what visualization actually is.

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.

It's not just aphantasia, it's about all diabilities. Especially but not limited to anything mind-connected. It's much easier to not say "Well if it's so hard to walk, why don't you just get out of that wheelchair?". That is obvious. But understanding something that is so fundamental to your being is not possible for someone else is causing so much misunderstandings and problems. Things like "I can do this so why don't you just try that?" to someone that is totally incapable to do it is so sad. And this even from people whos job it is to help handicapped people live a normal life?

I mean I definitely see flashes of images of a dog. Isn’t one of the tests to see if you can seamlessly rotate a yellow star in your head? I can do it in flashes but I know people that can pause it midway through a rotation and draw the exact image they are seeing.

> all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision.

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.

> Are there tests for aphantasia?

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).

> 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.

Also useful: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Picture an apple in your mind. What colour is it?

...

Most people say red or green.

If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.

Wait, but, I know apples are red. I mean, picture "2 + 2 = " in your head and fill out the scene. What comes after the equals sign? It's 4, obviously. Nobody needs to hold anything in their visual field to know that.

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.

> 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.

Without spoilers, could you just list one or two such murder mysteries for me to read both for enjoyment and as a bit of a self-test?

My memory is really bad for this kind of thing, sorry. I think some of Keigo Higashino's recent translated works have this kind of physicality in their mysteries, but I'd have to reread them to remember ahahaha. (But on the enjoyment angle, I do really like Higashino's works, so I do recommend them if you like mysteries)

You can learn a lot more about aphantasia here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Yes there are tests, an MRI. Anyone claiming to have it is probably self-diagnosed and full of it. I'm tired of the self-diagnoses of everything trend over the last 5 or so years, sorry if my tone isn't the best.

I'm tired of all the gatekeeping by the health industry telling us that we need to use their absurd rube goldberg processes, which often tell us "no", to know anything about ourselves.

Gatekeeping != Rigor. Set the bar higher.

Doesn’t apply. Aphantasia is not recognized as a medical issue and there are no official diagnoses being conducted.

This is my conclusion as well although I did find a paper that said you could use an MRI of the vision region to tell.

For myself, I don't think I have aphantasia, unless it is something that can come and go. There are times where I daydream and experience vivid visions akin to psychedelic closed eye visuals (except actual visions, and not geometric patterns). Most of the time when I daydream, I can picture something in my head, but it doesn't have the depth and detail of what I experience when deep in thought.

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).

Yes. My partner was tested for it once by a psychiatrist. From what I remember it's a lot of visual pattern and recall questions.

I think it might be a literacy that can be honed. A 100 years ago a curriculum was devised to develop commercial art skills. Part of the curriculum I went through required 6 hours of life drawing a week for 2 semesters. The likely result is a strong visualization skill that can be expressed on paper

The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.

I just assumed that everyone has "aphantasia". What does it mean to "picture things in your mind"? How would one explain to another what that meant? How would one be tested to determine if one could do that?

A person without aphantasia can experience thoughts as though they were literally seeing the things being thought about. There are varying degrees to it, and this, or something like it, makes the rounds on social media from time to time: https://i.imgur.com/gpN7EcP.jpeg

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.

I'm 3.5. It's crazy to me that people can see vivid imagery or rotate 3d objects in their minds eye.

I'm a 4. But I still score off the charts on 3D object manipulation. But I don't see those objects. It's more a symbolic representation.

My wife doesn't have it, so when we discovered I had it, she was gobsmacked by the fact that I don't see a green apple when told to picture it. I always though when someone would say "picture it" it was just describe it in as much detail as possible, like reading about it in a book.

Some people like it to call it the “Mind’s eye” - Basically you can create images in your mind by just thinking about them. Like if I wanted to “see” a golden retriever, I can just imagine one because I’ve seen them before, so my mind knows what to do. You can also manipulate those images; so for example instead of the golden retriever being gold, I can imagine it in a purple or green color, etc.

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'm the opposite - I assume that most people cannot.

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.

What I imagine it's like is if you can "replay" a song in your head, you don't literally hear it, but it's a very similar feeling as actually listening to the song.

Why would you assume that everyone has the same mental capacities as yourself just because you can't imagine having an ability you lack? Have you never hallucinated, day dreamed or become aware that you're dreaming? How about visual memories? Because even if you can't will yourself to imagine a visual object, you can see them in those other cases. It means the same thing as seeing an external object, except without the external source. Your brain creates a visual experience independent of a visual sensation/input from the eyes. There's also ways to induce this with electrodes and magnetic resonance applied to the visual cortex.

> Have you never hallucinated, day dreamed or become aware that you're dreaming? How about visual memories?

I have those indeed. That's not what the discussion is about.

Sure it is. They all involve visual experience. Why would imagination be different, other than in the capacity of the individual to voluntarily visualize?

It looks like your GPU memory is barely enough to fit video stream from your eyes.

my buffer runneth over :(

It's fascinating how different minds can process information. I myself have a photographic memory - only one of my kids has it as well. The two of us are constantly being asked where this and that is lying around, and we can always tell while the others in the family wouldn't be able to guess even if they just saw whatever they were looking for. It's simply amazing.

I see flashes of images. I’m so jealous of people that can perfectly replicate 3D images in their head. What a superpower that would be.

I can fairly easily picture “something,” but it’s always extremely protean. During meditation for example I sometimes picture Calvary, but the forms are just constantly shifting around that theme. I certainly can’t just picture an apple and just hold it still in my mind’s eye. Although I do suspect if I spent around 10,000 hours at it I could get considerably better. The point of all that is I rather suspect aphantasia is very much a spectrum.

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.

I wish I could block out my vision. Whenever I try to imagine something, even if my eyes are closed and I'm in pitch darkness, I still see the darkness. It's distracting. How is darkness distracting? How is it that the color black, no light at all, is still so obnoxious?

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 also have aphantasia. I'm hoping that if they start running these tests on humans that they make sure they bring in people with aphantasia. Something like 1 in 20 of us have it. For example, when I daydream, I lose myself and come back to myself a short time later. It's kind of like highway hypnosis, but I do know what I was thinking about, it just happened "off-screen" so to speak and I become aware of it all at once. It would be interesting to know if the same regions of the brain are lighting up. Maybe we can figure out what aphantasia is, from an anatomical perspective.

Yes, they certainly should for the sake of their own research. Considering aphantasia could increase the effect size in their studies.

Damn, I can't even daydream with aphantasia :/

What about night dream?

That's the only case when I can see visual images eyes closed.

When I close my eyes, I see my eye lids.

I can night dream. But up until now I didn't even know a daydream existed and this is the first time I hear such a term (well, I'm not native English anyway)

I rarely remember them. But they are visual and often of places I have been together with persons I know. So the information is in my head. I just cannot access it while being awake. Which sucks.

Yeah, I can't do it, as well.

I (think, not formally diagnosed) have aphantasia, and I also don't remember my dreams. So I have not "seen" pictures ever. Or I think so, it is so hard to know what others are "seeing".

You've never remembered any dreams, never one bit? I find that interesting.

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.

Not really, I had some I was remembering but it was from the paralyzed state in between sleep and awake.

Other than that, no don't remember anything at all.

thats interesting. So if someone asks you to draw a picture of a lighthouse, are you able to draw it without looking at an actual lighthouse or a picture of it? if yes, then how?

There's actually a few interesting articles out there about this: https://theconversation.com/the-art-of-aphantasia-how-mind-b...

"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...

I also have it, I can draw a lighthouse because I know what it should look like. But if I close my eyes and try to visualize it, I don't have any sense that I'm seeing something, in the same way that I have a sense that I'm listening to a song when I play it back from memory.

When I dream there's only a faint visual component, there's no color or detail.

Same.

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.

> I never have any use for the long-winded descriptions of a place and a character.

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.

now that I think of it, in my dreams colors are not something I recall, but I definitely can say that I don't dream in greyscale..

Would you be able to go beyond the abstract notion of a lighthouse (basic geometric shape, white with red stripes, etc) and without a reference know where to paint shadows, how to dither them, how to achieve some "weathering effects", marks left by the water, etc?

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?

It's stored conceptually and I don't need to recall it visually to copy it to paper.

Yeah, I can draw one. I actually took a lot of art classes, so it is kind of hardwired into me how to draw. That said, my lighthouse will not have details in it that someone who can recall a photograph of one might. Here is kind of how my brain describes a lighthouse for me to draw it: cone-shaped, white brick, wooden door at base, a platform on top without walls, a small shingled roof, large rotating light.

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.

hmm that's weird, you forgot that they're usually painted in stripes (red/white?)

It probably depends on which ones they have encountered in real life. From a Google image search, it seems that less than half are.

That's funny - I also have aphantasia and described it in much the same as the parent. But your comment threw me, I think of them as plain.

Looked it up, and turns out the ones in Oregon are. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=oregon+lighthouses&form...

That is not something I have encountered (I don't think), or if I did, I didn't absorb that detail. The words don't exist in my brain.

That seems to be the way I see objects in my mind. It starts as a basic formless "idea" of a lighthouse. Vague images come to mind: Tall, pointy, seaside, seagulls, looming. Then I sort of focus on one part of the lighthouse instantly to figure out the details. Like the walls: Brick, painted over with white paint, moss and lichen growing on them. Then the door: Wooden, one handle, thick, dark wood, little peep hole.

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.

my lighthouse will not have details in it that someone who can recall a photograph of one might.

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!"

I am 100% convinced people who self-diagnose with aphantasia think normal people hallucinate images in their mind. They are just being dense. Unless they've had a MRI, they are just shockingly confused.

Umm... Are you sure you don't have aphantasia?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660632

The problem is what you mean by "see". It's not using your vision so there's no "overlay" as I'm assuming people expect. Unless someone has been diagnosed with an MRI, I'm not buying it.

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".

It's not using your vision so there's no "overlay" as I'm assuming people expect.

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.

Google aphantasia MRI.

Ok. I did.

"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).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/

I completely agree and think it's nonsense.

The visual experience happens in your brain, not your eyes. There's multiple ways to have a visual experience. It doesn't have to come from the optic nerve.

Seriously: How is someone else going to diagnose you with it? If not self-diagnosed, how is it done? Do you think there is a test? And MRI generally isn't going to tell you this (this article was research on mice, after all) and even if it did, it would be fairly irresponsible to use up medical resources on something like this.

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 mean, how is someone else able to diagnose any mental condition? Why do you ask this as if it can't be done?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/

That sounds like a superpower.

When were you diagnosed by a professional?

Edit: I'll bet my next paycheck they are self-diagnosed.

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