Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes
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Of course on the other hand I can't think of any way to build a stronger case for or against so I'm excited for more research into the subject
I do have imagery when I dream, but in my waking hours, I __cannot__ picture things in my head. I can reason about objects based on experiences I have with them (i.e. describe them), but there is no "illusory" reference image. There's just nothing. It's difficult to articulate my method of internal processing, other than saying I have a constant internal monologue that is used to bring to mind whatever it is I'm trying to imagine, but imagery is completely non-existent.
Additionally, I've never heard these described as possible symptoms of aphantasia until this article, but "Aphantasia is associated variably with a reduction in both autobiographical memory and face recognition" really resonates with my experience. I don't have many memories from childhood, my adult memories are often vague and more based on feelings that I have of a period in my life rather than concrete details, and I have a difficult time with recognizing actors even if I've seen them in a lot of films.
I also have an exceptionally strong musical memory (borderline encyclopedic). I can quickly memorize music and have near perfect recall even when years go by without listening to it.
I'm with you in excitement towards further studies of these phenomena, but just wanted to chip in with my personal experiences with aphantasia!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
I can see the way the sunlight reflects on the sand in the shallow water and off the oars in the boat (and what their flaking varnish feels like in my hands). The smell of the reeds, grass, and lake water is very clear to me, as is the voice of my grandmother telling me to be careful to not fall into the water. I can also hear a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, kids splashing around by the beach, and rustling of the reeds as they're caught by the wind.
It makes me happy, but also nostalgic. Most of the things from this memory are gone now. I believe the English word that best describes this is "wistful".
I know memories are peculiar and that parts of this memory are probably borrowed from other memories, or even made up, but it doesn't make it feel less vivid to me.
Unfortunately I can't seem to decide what sticks and what doesn't. I don't have perfect recall (far from it). I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday, but if I do I can probably still taste it.
Anxiety is kicked in to overdrive when you can vividly imagine adverse outcomes to such a degree that they are indistinguishable from things that have happened.
My lived experience is that I can remember key life events to some extent, but there is no visual experience with it. I don't remember what the last house I lived in looked like (less than 2 years ago) but if I were to visit it, I'd clearly recognize it.
One that kind of gets me is that I can't even picture my parent's faces. I can describe them, I have a ton of positive memories associated with them, and feel very strong feelings of love and affection for them, but despite having seen them yesterday for Easter, I can't picture them in my head. In some ways, that's strangely disorienting. It's frustrating to me to feel such a disconnect from things that are __very__ important to me.
But in some ways, it's freeing. I think I have a pretty strong resistance to traumatic imagery, because once it's gone, it's just gone. If I see something disturbing, it doesn't haunt me. I can't imagine terrifying things (at least visually), so when I compare my experience to friends who have hyperphantasia (or at least a decent ability to picture things), there's a lot that can get stuck in their heads that I just can't.
I try not to view the aphantasia as a good or bad thing. It's just part of how I am.
If the characters are all humans, I think it's difficult to remember who's who because they're just random collections of syllables (names) tied to a set of facts — "Kirk, a human man, is a captain", etc. I think, though, that this may be more of an aphantasia/faceblindness thing (I have no "theater of the mind" and can't picture characters to distinguish them) than an autobiographical memory thing.
On the subject of memory, I will say, though, that perhaps I lack an interest in fiction books nowadays because no fond memories of reading them stick with me; even though I can recount the plot in excruciating detail, the most I might be able to say after the fact is "I liked/disliked that book" in a general sense, and that's just a memorized fact about my immediate feeling at the time. With a nonfiction book on the other hand I acquire information that can be useful to me afterwards.
What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!
In fact if anything I might blame reading a lot at a young age for my aphantasia.
... the brain is weird.
> What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
That's interesting! I don't have aphantasia but I think I meet the criteria for hypophantasia, and I find it's a major obstacle to enjoying some, but by no means all, novels. Scenes that are heavy on literal visual description are a tedious slog, but plenty of novels focus more on characters, ideas, and/or plot. And I don't find that my lacking a sense of what the characters look like, or failing to see the action in more than a vague and patchy way, is a big problem in those cases.
(I can even get something out of visual description if it's very impressionistic -- the book that comes to mind is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr -- but of course that could be entirely down to the gap between aphantasia and hypophantasia.)
I wonder if you could enjoy a very dialogue-heavy novel, or a literary novel that focuses mainly on the inner lives of the characters. If you can remember, which ones did you start and give up on, before you gave up on novels completely?
It's funny though, listening to Snow Crash last year was the first fiction audio book I've ever listened to, and that was interesting. Especially because I only listened while running, while listening it was like I was retrieving memories - so still not "imagining with my mind's eye" but still picturing but with audio.
I do tend to skip overly disruptive paragraphs that don't advance a story.
I've had some pretty extensive conversations with a buddy in one of the book clubs about this specific subject when we were talking about the ways we interpret a particular series (Malazan: Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson).
When he reads, he sees things as if they were a movie in his head. He has hyper clear visualization of all of the characters, and visual descriptors are very important to his reading because they help clarify the mental imagery that he sees.
For me, I barely remember visual descriptors at all. I have to relate the way certain characters act in a series based on their personalities and relationships to others and visual descriptions of story elements (from character to setting design) don't really matter much to me aside from importance to the narrative or theme.
As a result, I tend to focus a lot more on the meta-narrative, themes, and motifs in a story. That's not to say that he doesn't (we often discuss those things), but we have drastically different experiences when reading. It really enhances the book club, because our perspectives and the things that resonate with us are so different!
For example, combat scenes can be incredibly visceral for him, whereas for me it's more or less a means to an end when it comes to narrative impact. I think in terms of the implications of the results, but he enjoys the fights themselves. I also tend to focus a lot more on the philosophical musings in the text, whereas he finds that dialogue heavy scenes can be a bit boring or less impactful.
Hope that provides some clarity on what reading for someone with aphantasia can be like! Happy to answer any further questions if you have any!
It's good to be able to think, regardless of the need for words to do so, but even wordy thinkers do lots of things without word thinking.
Like juggling. Or playing an instrument.
Just because something is done in a way that they don't do it doesn't mean it's weird to be done that way.
I'm not great at articulating directions to people due to the lack of visualization, and if someone asks me if I know where the x on y road is, I can't ever imagine it, but my general spatial orientation is totally fine and I can pretty competently navigate in both urban and wilderness spaces.
There's like a abstract idea of where I am in relation to other things at any given point, but I don't really know street names or things like that because they're just not that helpful for my ability to get around.
It's strange that I find it so difficult to explain—our brains are just good at compensating for shortcomings I suppose!
What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau?
Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...?
Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures?
As someone with a sometimes annoyingly wild inner scenery, I would really love for a moment of peace closing my eyes, but I am always visually engaged as long as I am awake. There is no pause "seeing". Incidentally, I am very bad at memorizing music/lyrics. And funnily enough, I don't engage my fantasy much when reading, of all things.
When I'm tired, my inner dialogue is usually less active than normal, though it's never quite silent. It's more of a difficulty focusing on the streams of consciousness that slowly fades over time until sleep takes me. Sometimes, if I'm fading in and out of consciousness, I will have some imagery, but as far as I can tell, only when actually sleeping.
This can result in moments where something vivid happens in a dream, like a car crash, where I suddenly jolt awake with my heart pounding rapidly. However, I can't continue to imagine the visuals of what happened. I just know that I dreamed I was in a car crash.
>What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau?
If I'm in total darkness, only Eigengrau (thanks for the new word btw!) but if I'm in light, I see kind of a reddish hue that is from the light passing through my eyelids I assume. There are no visuals associated with the eyes closing in a conventional sense. The whole "counting sheep" method of falling asleep never made any sense to me because I didn't realize that people could literally visualize sheep jumping.
>Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...?
Unfortunately, no. I'd love to try some, but in my field of work I have to maintain a security clearance so taking drugs could compromise my job security. In the past, I have been on a cocktail of anti-depressants + anti-anxiety medication that caused me to have vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, but those were with my eyes open, so it just seemed real to me. As soon as I mentioned those symptoms to my psychologist, I was immediately taken off the medications they put me on.
>Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures?
I can't picture memories at all, but I can describe things from my memories. The way I process them is very strangely abstract. There is no visual portion to the memories at all. For example, as I mentioned in another comment, I can't picture what my parents look like, despite having had lunch with them yesterday for Easter. I can describe certain details about them, and have very pleasant associations with them, but I simply can't picture them. The descriptions I could offer up would be particular details I've explicitly observed and remembered about them.
I can't picture pictures either. If someone were to ask me to visualize an "apple" no picture appears, even if I spend a decent amount of time and effort trying to construct a visual. However, I can describe elements of what an apple is. It's sort of like the concept of a platonic ideal of a thing. I know attributes that are associated with the platonic ideal of apple, so by extension I can describe an apple. I just can't picture it. There's no visual reference in my processing for any element of internal thought.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with your visualizations! I'm kind of the opposite. My mind is constantly yapping and I find it hard to fall asleep at times due to the persistent monologue in my head. I tend to listen to podcasts or Youtube while I fall asleep because it lets my mind be quiet and get ready for sleep.
I find your case especially interesting, since you are somewhat able to generate images in some situation. So, you know the difference, which is important for semantics.
It's honestly crazy to me how vastly different people experience base reality... and yet these things only recently became a wider conversation. Apparently we are still very much able to find agreement through these differences :)
Nevertheless, I really can't imagine (hehe) what it's like for you, especially with the memory business. For example, right now I am thinking about a random photograph of a chair and there is no descriptive narrative going on, it's all visual. My inner monologue really is only there for, well, talking to myself - the way I would do out loud. Our experiences are fundamentally different, it seems. I wonder which one of us would be more prone to false memories, is the less reliable witness.
It's funny, descriptions of close-eye hallucinations, I always think "Well, that's just a lazy Tuesday for me". I never did psychedelics, either, but I am really curious how they would affect me. But also I am a bit worried, if it's wise to add more fuel to my boiling mind soup.
Ha! And it's kinda assuring you still struggle to fall asleep, because of a non-stop talking mind. Guess I am not missing out.
If you don't mind a last question: Have you ever done an MRI? Like, is your brain certified alright? I wonder, because of your medication side effects, and because some maybe related conditions like face blindness (inability to recognize faces at all) have a discernible neuronal cause.
My internal monologue is very much like yours, where it's mostly talking to myself the way I would out loud, but there's a deeper layer of abstract... connections?
The analogy of a thought web seems to work well to describe it. It's like a massive web of interconnected thoughts where new patterns and connections are constantly being created to associate relationships between concepts in my head.
I think everyone more or less has that type of underlying mechanism behind consciousness, though that may be a big assumption. What's interesting about mine is that I can often come to conclusions based on lower level abstract reasoning, especially as it relates to visual descriptors, without necessarily being able to articulate how I arrived at those conclusions.
To answer your last question, I don't think I've ever had an MRI done. The reason I was put on so many medications was because in my early 20's I struggled a lot with Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. They were severe enough that I self-admitted to an in-patient care facility to get treatment. During that 2 week period, I went from 2 medications (Zoloft + Wellbutrin) to 14 medications. During the time, I didn't realize that it wasn't normal or okay to be put on that many drugs at once in such a short period of time because I trusted the medical professionals and was in a particularly bad state of mind. In hindsight, I view what they did as incredibly abusive of the trust and faith I had in them.
Fortunately, I didn't have a mental breakdown or anything—I just notified them of my symptoms and they removed a fair amount of the medications. I left the facility with about 7 medications prescribed, to which my normal psychiatrist immediately discontinued the usage of all but the original stuff I was on (which was clearly the right choice).
All that to say, I do have some mental health issues (though therapy and medication has helped alleviate them all), but I'm unsure of whether or not there's a discernible neuronal cause for the aphantasia in particular. I'm considering an appointment with my Primary Care Provider to discuss the worsening of my memory because I've become more and more concerned that the levels of memory loss I seem to experience seems far greater than normal. Maybe that will provide some more insight?
Appreciate your comments and thoughts! It's nice to hear the perspective from someone on the other side of the spectrum!
Please do. Memory loss is a serious symptom. May be nothing, may be stress, lack of sleep, maybe it's something preventable. Could be as simple as vitamin deficiency, e.g. B12. Also, do you have a potential carbon monoxide emitter around? Like gas boiler for warm water/heating? If so, definitely get a CO-alarm, if you haven't already!
Edit: Oh! And one other oddness that I often wonder if it's related - I get exploding head syndrome. You?
I haven't had any experiences with exploding head syndrome either, though I do suffer from insomnia sometimes. I've gotten better at managing it nowadays, but for a long time I was unable to get good sleep without medication like Ambien.
Fascinating that we have so much in common though! It's actually really cool to know that although I'm the odd one out when it comes to most of the people I know, there are other people out there with similar forms of neural processing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences :)
My experience with auditory imagination is definitely different to most people I have talked to about it, and on the other hand many people seem to be able to visualise images far more vividly than I can.
If it were all basically the same, why would one be so massively different to me?
The fact that you experience them at all is different than people with aphantasia. I don't have complete aphantasia, but it is extremely difficult for me to visualize anything or have any mental imagery. And even then, such imagery is very vague, and colorless. Mostly my thoughts are just words.
Recently someone asked what kind of tree I think of when I see the word tree. This was a very strange question for me, because I when I read or hear the word tree, I don't have any mental picture of a tree, just an idea of what a tree is.
If you could accurately form an image of a realistic face in your mind then barring some sort of motor issue you would I argue by definition be able to draw it on paper by using the image in your mind as a reference (obviously the technical skill of using a pencil to dutifully create lines which entirely match what is attempted might be lacking and it might be a poor picture in a technical sense but I think it would still be recognizable as a realistic face). The difficulty in drawing a realistic face is that you don't actually know what one looks like, or, more accurately, you have the ability to recognize what a realistic face in general should look like (perhaps due to some inbuilt neural circuitry) but you don't have the ability to recall it in all of its detail. Because you can't recall it you can't form that image in your mind. Anyone who can't draw a realistic face doesn't actually know what a realistic face actually looks like, they can only recognize it. I don't think this would be a controversial view among talented artists for instance because many well regarded treatises on the subject of drawing essentially put forward this idea.
I guess what I am trying to say is that your ability to visualize a face is probably not much better or worse than your ability to visualize any other object of similar complexity except that you would be much better at recognizing that the face you visualize isn't very accurate. If you weren't able to recognize that it wasn't accurate you wouldn't have critiqued it and if you did you wouldn't have remembered the critique anyways.
To close by detracting from everything I have just written: You can also draw a very convincing face by memorizing a complex set of rules that doesn't rely at all on visualizing anything so who is to say that isn't the thing that happens when someone draws a realistic face which puts this whole business of visualization into some doubt
The original paper is quite readable: https://galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1880-mind-statist...
Anyone reading this who has strong mental imagery (video like): Do you remember ever not having it? consciously or unconsciously, did you ever have to work to develop it?
I don't.
I can imagine sounds so intensely that it has on at least one occasion become indistinguishable from real. I can also easily do this overriding of real sensation with imagination, with my sense of which way down is.
I can't imagine a smell at all, even though I can recognise them upon experience — if I want to decide which herb or spice to add when cooking, I need to open the container and sample some in order to decide.
In my opinion it's quite logical that someone who's not able to visualize things instead uses numbers and logical/mathematical constructs to describe them. It's one way to describe items by their core properties and attributes when image isn't available.
Can you clarify what that means? It seems like that would be an extreme amnesia, but perhaps I'm not understanding.
The best way I can explain the latter, at least in my own experience, is that I have no first-person memory of events I've experienced, but I still know the "bullet points" of what happened: the raw facts, if you will. It's like if another person experienced my life on my behalf and gave me a daily summary; I know that a set of events happened, but I feel no personal connection to them and don't recall them in any more detail than e.g. information I've read out of a textbook (often less). I can easily recall other information, not associated with time/place/experience, with higher-than-average accuracy, but accessing personal-history-type memories takes a lot of conscious thought. There seem to be some rare exceptions for memories that are tied to extremely intense emotional or physical experiences, both positive and negative, but even then the memories are fairly weak/fuzzy.
This has some funny side effects, for instance, innocuous small-talk questions like "what did you have for dinner yesterday" basically cause me to segfault because recalling information like that (plus the autistic compulsion to answer accurately) requires extreme cognitive effort. I also lack the ability to "miss" people because I have little to no personal memory of what it was like to have them around.
In short, it can be socially inconvenient, but doesn't affect daily functioning.
> Is losing autobiographical memory immediate, or could you remember a few seconds of what you see?
It's hard to describe this precisely. The visual memory is not lost; it is never formed in the first place. For example, immediately after talking to a person I wouldn't be able to tell the colour of their eyes unless I specifically noted and remembered it as a fact (articulated in my head using language).
> Can you think in other languages?
Yes, I speak multiple languages and do think and dream[1] in most of them. I love learning languages and have been told on many occasions that I'm pretty good at it. It's hard to say to what exent it's due to intrinsic motivation (to me, learning a language is like solving a good puzzle, and I love puzzles) and to what extent it's about aptitude (e.g. the ability to spot patterns, both within a language and across languages).
[1] Based on the literature, it seems that some people with aphantasia have visual dreams and some do not. I do, and very occasionally have fleeing visual imagery when I'm sort-of awake but am either falling asleep or waking up.
> Can you learn patterns like chess moves?
Yes, easily. My brain is very good at spotting and remembering patterns (it just can't visualise them, in the sense that I'm guessing you mean when you talk about chess).
> What is your oldest memory?
I remember a handful of disjoint bits from my childhood, though as facts rather than as images.
> Can you suppose future events, like an accident about to happen?
Yeah, sure. In fact, I have a natural tendency to calculate everything a few steps ahead, probably more than is healthy. At the same time, I have had more than my fair share of personal accidents, but that probably has mostly to do with the fact that I do lots of sports and really like to push my physical boundaries.
> Do you have olfactory memory?
Not really. I can't even describe tastes or smells, except when they strongly remind me of something specific, e.g. some other thing that has a very distinctive smell. I can't even imagine what remembering tastes or smells would be like. After all, it took me more than 40 years to figure out that, when people spoke of visualising stuff, it wasn't just some figure of speech. :)
> Do you like any kind of puzzles?
LOVE puzzles. All sorts. Bring 'em on! :)
> Can you follow or find thing with a map?
Yes, easily. I use topo maps in the mountains all the time, have done a bit of orienteering etc. Correlating the two things that are in front of me -- the map and the terrain -- doesn't seem to require me to visualise anything.
If you're curious to learn more about SDAM, here are some links that I found interesting. The first author's account reasonates a great deal with my experience (though some aspects do differ a fair bit).
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/90427/1/Watkins_%28A%29phantasia%2...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839321...
> Is losing autobiographical memory inmediate, or could you remember a few seconds of what you see?
It's not that I "lose" memories per se, I think I just don't store them in terms of personal experience in the first place. There's no "buffer" in which I have normal autobiographical memory even in the short term.
I have very good short term memory. So for instance I have taken one of those kinds of tests where I'm shown an increasingly long sequence of things and I have to recall them in order — I perform extremely well on that — but the only data I "store" is the fact of what the sequence is, not anything about what it felt like sitting in the room being shown the cards, what emotional state I was in at the time, etc.
> Can you think in other languages?
Yes. My native language is English and I am fluent in Chinese. My husband speaks only Chinese, so between home/work/friends I speak about 50/50 of each regularly. My internal monologue switches between the two languages based on who I'm talking to and what topic I'm thinking about (usually related to which language I encountered it in first).
> Can you learn patterns like chess moves?
Yes, but I tend to recall patterns like that as a verbal description of the sequence, not a visualization. I think I am not fully aphantasic, but 95% or so. If I concentrate, I can imagine something as simple as "two squares up, one to the side" for a knight move for example; the very rough shape of a pawn, rook, etc., but I can only "summon" tiny pieces of each such thing into my mind at a time, almost like looking through a very blurry spyglass at maximum magnification. E.g. trying to imagine a pawn from top to bottom goes "circle, horizontally flat trapezoid, long vertical trapezoid, roundish base of some kind?".
> What is your oldest memory?
If by "memory" you mean something approximating a regular person's sensory-memory and not just a fact about a thing that happened, probably two days, and it's only an extremely vague/blurry still-frame or two from a moment that just so happened to be among the most emotionally charged I've experienced within the last ~year.
I have literally zero memories of being a child, for instance.
> Can you foresee events, like an accident about to happen?
I can anticipate them by logical inference, if that's what you mean, but I can't "see" them in my mind's eye or anything like that.
> Do you have olfactory memory?
None whatsoever. None for taste either. I do however have extremely good recall for music — e.g. I can "replay" an orchestral piece with multiple parts with reasonably high fidelity in my head — but not for non-musical sounds.
> Do you like any kind of puzzles?
I've never had any interest in visual puzzles, but I like verbal/logic related ones.
> Can you follow or find things with a map?
Only so long as (a) I'm pretty much constantly looking at the map and (b) the map's orientation is aligned with the terrain around me. For instance if I'm a passenger in a car looking at a standard "north-is-up" oriented road map, but the car is driving east and I'm trying to navigate, it is quite exhausting, figuring out each turn takes at least several seconds of full concentration, and I am likely to make many errors.
I was moved to tears when I used Google Street View to explore streets of a city that I know factually my father and I had walked through extensively, but I couldn't recognize a single thing or feel any personal familiarity with it. It's hard to explain why that upset me so much.
As a random example, a co-worker showed me his very expensive fountain pen. That prompted a memory -- after having completely forgotten for at least twenty years -- that in high school I exclusively used cartridge-based fountain pens! That aspect of my life just *poof* vanished from my memory when I switched to felt-tip pens, and was suddenly swapped back in from an archive tape when I saw a fountain pen in front of me.
This wasn't a small detail of my life! My father got me those pens. They were German-made and he was very proud that he found them at absurdly low prices at a garage sale compared to their real value. I had to buy the cartridges, and they were hard to find. I had a special resealable container to contain leaks. I was proud of the dramatic improvement in penmanship this enabled. Etc, etc...
Just gone. Absolutely vanished. If you had asked me randomly if I ever used fountain pens, I would have said "no". It wasn't until I physically picked one up that it all came flooding back.
PS: I remember maybe a dozen things about my childhood apartment and its surrounds that I grew up in. Don't feel bad!
Generally, the past doesn't exist. Or rather it exists in the same sort of hazy uncertainty that the future does. I do remember certain facts and events that my brain deemed important enough to commit to memory, but only as an abstract concept. My brain doesn't store past events in the same way that I experience them. There's no visual or sensory component, just raw facts and abstract ideas. There's usually no emotional component either.
> Is losing autobiographical memory inmediate, or could you remember a few seconds of what you see?
There's multiple levels to it. During some task or event, everything is available in working memory for up to a couple of hours. Basically it depends on mental focus keeping things in a single coherent state. Events not receiving active attention drop into a medium-term memory. They can last a few days depending on how impactful the events were, but generally things get cleared out during sleep.
Essentially it's the same way most people's memory works, it's just that the way the information is formatted is very different.
> Can you think in other languages?
My thinking doesn't really involve language unless I'm thinking about speech or writing specifically. But yes, other languages work the same way in my head.
It's one step removed from language. I tend to deal directly with the concept that a word represents. Ideas get converted to words as a post-processing step. Switching languages is pretty much just picking the word out of my French vocabulary instead of English. Formatting grammar works the same way, it's just rules and heuristics used to format data.
> Can you learn patterns like chess moves?
Yes, but not easily. Straight up memorizing an arbitrary sequence is pretty difficult. At one point I was actually really good at Rubik's cube solving, but it only took a few months of no practice for the rotation sequences to just evaporate from my brain. Games like Simon Says aren't any more or less difficult for me, as it's an isolated event trivially stored in working memory.
> What is your oldest memory?
Pretty typical, around 4 years old. I have very few memories of my childhood, but they're exceptionally vivid. They come closest to how I assume normal people experience memory. I remember seeing my mother at the stove and watching the pot boil, I remember what I was thinking and feeling.
> Can you suppose future events, like an accident about to happen?
I'd say I'm a bit above average at predicting events in the short term. I also tend to have pretty accurate gut instinct about the medium term.
> Do you have olfactory memory?
I recognize a smell if I've encountered it before, but I generally can't conjure a scent in my head. Memories almost never have scent included. However, the usual phenomenon of scent triggering a strong memory does work. Generally I'll remember qualities of a scent, it was harsh and acrid, soft and flowery. Same way other memories are reduced to a set of facts.
> Do you like any kind of puzzles? Can you follow or find thing with a map?
I like puzzles about as much as the average nerd.
I've always had a very good sense of direction. There's a little corner of my brain that's always aware of where I am relative to landmarks, or checks the sun to find north. To a pretty good approximation, I always know where north is. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually felt lost. Though that specifically I think is just a habit I developed at a young age.
The problem with aphantasia/hyperpahantasia is that you are born with it, and in your mind things have always worked the same way. Many people might never found out that there are people on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I have reached a simple way to test if people have aphantasia. I ask them to imagine a car. Then I ask them what color it was. In my mind there is no car, so the question what color it was makes no sense. People who can imagine things, immediately reply with a color.
This seems to use the same misguided approach as dream researchers who thought that dreams were in black and white, even though it is trivial to find someone who reports dreaming in or about color. People can perfectly well remember a dream without coloring it in.
The simple resolution is: dreams and internal images are not necessarily associated with color. Memories most likely have (or even are) strong associations with other parts of the brain. For some, it is impossible to separate one part from the other. So some people hear sounds when they remember something, some people have visual images, others have emotions, yet others have fear and anxiety, all associated with a trigger or memory.
This differs from memory to memory, from person to person, and even over time in the same individual.
Yes, there probably are some people with aphantasia, but it is most definitely not the 50% of Hacker News who self-reports it every time this comes up.
Edit: anecdotal evidence that may require people who think they have aphantasia to reconsider: I once had a dream about a close friend. When I woke up, I remember seeing the friend in my dream, standing. However, I could not remember from the dream whether I could see my friend's face, or whether I viewed him from the back. Those specific details were simply not filled in at dream-time.
My hypothesis is: dreams fire concepts, not actual pixel imagery. Makes perfect sense from a neurological point of view. Same probably goes for internal phantasia.
Most dreams I have are that dark, hazy abstract kind of thing, but if I enter into a lucid dream it not only becomes ‘pixel perfect’, it somehow appears more visually detailed than reality.
I’ve also discovered that I can produce extremely vivid, temporary images if consciously focus on visualization just before or after sleep, or during meditation, but I don’t really have any control over what these images actually entail. I would say these images are closer to what you might be referring by to as pixel perfect, even if they are images formed from clouds in the minds eye.
I've oftentimes tried to recreate such a vivid image, either in a drawing, or simply in my mind, and I've always failed. The vivid image always fades away upon closer scrutiny.
as a result i never forget a face. in fact one time a person mistook me for somebody else and when it hit him that I wasn't that person but that I recognized him from 15 years ago on a train once astounded him.
it gets to the point where i have to constantly pretend to not recognize the person because it freaks them out.
The first time it was someone a year or two behind me in high school who I never recalled interacted with but must have known of me through someone else in school.
The second time my first year chem lab partner said hi to me while I was at work. She had gone through a complete makeover. Lost weight, switched to contacts, clothes that actually fit and complemented her, bleached and straightened her hair. It took me half an hour to figure that one out.
I am still the guy who can point out the boyfriend in the movie was so and so who hasn’t been in a major dip for twenty years, but in last few years I’ve started to confuse actors with each other, and suspecting family connections between people that have none. Which is both bothering me and giving me some sympathy for old people saying “they all look the same”. Maybe it’s not being racist it’s just having an old brain.
I can still pick out voices accurately though. Molly Ringwald was in season 2 of The Bear. After 40 years (yes, 40 years this summer!) she looks completely different from The Breakfast Club, but her voice, while much older now, is exactly the same tempo.
I constantly got feedback on essays, "show -- don't tell". I remember a unit in school where they made us close our eyes while they told us a story and we had to visualize being in the story. I didn't realize that other kids didn't think the same way as me, so I just remember feeling like these exercises were pointless.
In a recent interview, I was collaborating with my interviewer who was visually imagining things in his head and explaining them to me. The interview was going rarher poorly and, once I explained that I didnt have the ability to visualize things and needed to write it down on paper, our conversation shifted and the interview went phenomenally better.
Being more open about my aphantasia has actually helped significantly, and I wish I had known about it as a kid.
founder of this sub (also a dev) claims to have self-cured his aphantasia. documented his process / exercise suggestions. Not sure if anyone successfully cured themselves after his steps but I think they are worth checking out.
I understand why this is getting downvotes, but I'd like to float the possibility that perhaps the author is on the right track.
Would be interested in knowing what other folks with or without aphantasia think.
I think this is where you're supposed to start:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/z0clpt/how_...
Coaches also often say “see yourself from your opponents POV and be in an unexpected place”. eg royalG valorant guide. That’s just a figure of speech for aphant folks.
Crosshair placement for things like leading shots? Or more for building a mental map of where the enemy is likely to poke their head up? I would think these things involve spatial imagery/memory. I do remember putting a tiny piece of post-it note on my monitor to act as a red dot sight in Killing Floor, but my guess is that'd help anyone headshot zombies better, not just us aphantasics.
I'm decent at it. Struggle more when there's verticality (im sure everybody does though.)
In Valorant, there's often objects to use as guides. But when there's not, I imagine someone with good visual memory could pull up the post-it note of their last fight and reposition off of it. Whereas I'd have to reason my way through it or use muscle memory through lots of practice.
My kid moved recently, and I looked at his backpack, said this will fit behind the driver’s seat. It did, with about the thickness of a magazine to spare.
I have ADHD, which most people will tell you generally comes with a slight reduction in working memory. Up until ten years ago I would have sworn in court that I had an excellent working memory. Early in my career I was known for tackling big architectural shifts and managing to complete them with only one or two regressions. That’s a hell of a lot of plates to keep spinning, even if you can enter flow state practically on demand like I could.
I know now that I have normal ADHD brain, so how the hell was I doing this? It was a watching of Sherlock Holmes that finally cracked the code. I finally realized that I build mind palaces every time I work a difficult problem - but without pictures, which is why I didn’t know I was doing them. I build them the way a person who was blind from birth would do it. The same way I avoid bumping into walls going through my house in the dark. The same way I know there’s a truck in my blind spot. Each “object” occupies space that I can recall or turn around in my head.
And that’s how I used to shred code into pieces and then reassemble them like making the second build in a set of LEGO.
To generalize, it may be useful to find a hobby that makes you visualize things frequently and allows for a quick feedback loop.
(I also tried different games, but didn't derive any benefit from them.)
Is it possible to have hyperphantasia separately?
I am curious whether individuals with both schizophrenia and severe aphantasia experience hallucinations.
I am not schizophrenic, but if I meditate and hover on the edge of sleep, I can visualize scenery so real that my brain reacts as though I am actually seeing it with my physical eyes.
My favorites are a flame floating the the dark, a beautiful red apple rotating in space, and an endless green field of tall grass to run through.
I can also intentionally hallucinate audible sounds, but that is less fun and more creepy because every time I do it I immediately follow up with, "My God, I am hearing sounds that don't exist. Am I going crazy?"
Either way, both of these things freaked me out, because I went from being in the headspace of wondering if I could do it to actually doing in within minutes.
There's a certain sensation that comes along with it for me, very hard to describe, but it's almost like my head is buzzing or my ears pop, and a small wave of euphoria hits as well.
After looking into it, apparently, the right kinds of meditation and thoughtful practice can induce realistic hallucinations and simultaneously release DMT, a powerful psychoactive agent that your brain can produce on its own, but is also a substance found in ritual hallucinogens like ayahuasca, and I am already very visually/spatially facile and have excellent sonic memory, so much so that I have figured out the words in a song by replaying it in my mind.
Thinking back on it, this is ironic because I had an audio processing disorder as a kid, I could never tell most of the words singers were saying and had difficulty with the letter R. I specifically remember not being able to spell "iron" from being told the word because it is pronounced "i earn" instead of "i ron", and according to my evil grandmother I pronounced "car" in a funny way, but I don't remember this and she was unable to explain to me exactly how I used to mispronounce it or why she thought it was funny.