Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors? | Hacker News Reader

Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors?

frontiersin.org

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There is a sort of confusion when people read about aphantasia, they tend to imagine (pun intended) that most people have vivid pictures when they close their eyes, coming to conclusion that they must have aphantasia, because it isn't what happens with them.

But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)!

Nonetheless, most people can "visualize" when they imagine objects, people's faces, places from memory — but it is totally not like AR (i.e. actually overlaying images on top of light perception). Nope, it feels more like you see it with some mysterious "mind's eye", disconnected from real eyes. It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels". And it doesn't require having eyes closed, people often can do it as easily with their eyes open, as it doesn't interfere with the normal vision at all.

IME with ayahuasca (but probably other psychedelics too), there are different types of visions you might have. I've clearly experienced the typical CEVs but also have stark images coming through my mind's eye (much more akin to normal life visualizing). My tolerance is pretty high, it takes me an absurd amount to have the full-on technicolor visions, but I do seem to get a lot of color through my mind's eye still (usually related to the master plant diets and their spirits). There is another type of vision I've experienced that is somewhere in between that I have a lot of trouble describing, it pops out in a different way on top of normal vision.

Most of my family actually see things. One or two of them would qualify as hyperphantasiac, presumably.

I see absolutely nothing. When you say “it” is “faint and tacit”, you are describing an “it” that simply does not exist for me. I see a whole lot of people who don’t have aphantasia get hung up on this. They keep describing an “it” without accepting that for some of us there is no “it”.

The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor.

I then ask them to answer, from memory, simple things like what color was the ball, what kind of table was it, what material was the floor, was there a sound when the ball fell to the floor, what else happened, etc.

No one I’ve known with aphantasia (including myself) has answers for any such questions when asked to recall what they just imagined, but almost all can answer such questions “while imagining”.

It is an interesting test (I tried it once I read your sentence). Turns out I can imagine a ball rolling off a table without detailing the imaginary scene to have a specific material, texture or sound (and if I wasn't specifically asked, I won't likely picture it).

My imaginary scene clearly had some "spatial sense" though — I saw (but more like "felt") the flat surface of the table, the edges of it, how it is positioned relative to myself, the roundness of the ball rolling, and how it falls off.

The people I've talked to who can visualize say they can consciously see the objects in mind, confirming it looks as if they are looking at it on a phone (as a rough analogy). There is apparently a wide range of ability regarding this, and the abilities seem to be about as common as the limitations, such as not visualizing faces, and seeing historic data in black and white or blocks like Minecraft. Some people can't do motion, some can't do high detail. My mom can do detailed trees with leaves and see landscapes from anywhere she has been, but no creative ones. She also doesn't do faces, nor does she have echoic recall. A recent conversation with a visualizer confirmed they were doing creative rendering of scenes (mesh + texture + lighting) but had low detail on things like tree leaves. They said they were for sure "seeing" the imagery, as if it were a type of "screen" in mind.

I've questioned maybe 200 people about this over the years and when someone starts talking about spatial understanding and not seeing pixels, they aren't really talking about seeing anything in mind, but more understanding it. I can do the "feeling" thing, which I reference as "I have the mesh, not the map". People with Aphantasia appear to hold facts about objects, but not actually generate the imagery where they are conscious of seeing it. It would be a little like having Dalle3 generate an image from a Claude Opus 3 prompt, then uploading it to Claude to look at. It can't do generative images, but can look at them and inference.

Maybe someone that visualizes strongly here can confirm that what you are indeed seeing has aspects of light, shadows, color and the things we consider attributes of "pixels"?

It's interesting that people have a variety of mental capabilities (or styles of internal processing or whatever you call it) but we all seem to be able to solve the same problems.

I wonder if being good at a specific internal style (e.g. visual, verbal, etc.) translates to being good at specific types of problems, or is the core capability an abstract foundational capability and the different styles are really just a method of presentation.

> The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor.

Note that it's possible to visualize motion of an object without visualizing the object itself. This is me. I can't hold any imagery in my head, but I can easily imagine the movement of a kickflip or a pirouette, or I can see the bouncing of three balls without seeing the balls themselves.

> I can see the bouncing of three balls without seeing the balls themselves.

I know that we can’t get inside each other’s heads to truly understand their perception (yet), so I feel like these conversations can’t possibly go anywhere, but I feel compelled to say that, to me, what you are saying makes no sense whatsoever.

I’m not denying your experience. I’m just saying I can’t begin to comprehend it.

I resonate with their description of it, the way I'd describe it is something like:

Close your eyes and imagine the month March (just the idea of the month). Walk forward 2 months.

That's what a ball rolling off a table is like for some of us.

When I read your words, I got an image of a calendar month, scaled big enough for a person to be walking on it. "Forward two months" got me that person walking near an edge, where next month was, and on that edge, the month after that.

It took only a small amount of time and steps for the person to leave "the month."

All that just happened. Popped into my thoughts. I don't really control it very well.

Given the month is roughly square with some room for the month name, and then the days in a grid, week by week, the person was about 4 days tall.

Our internal representations are so damn weird. It would be amazing to somehow share them.

Rando thought Sidebar:

Whales have this incredible song language. We really don't understand much yet. And they have those huge brains.

Maybe they can send this stuff to one another. Maybe being under water means a more robust sharing makes sense.

I can imagine them living rich lives, sharing with one another in a more direct way than we are capable of.

End Sidebar

That's interesting that you'd instantly turn it into a visual representation.

If you were to remove those visual pieces and were only left with the abstract concept of a month and the fact that they're ordered then that's as best as I can really describe at least how I personally "visualise" something. It's more about ideas and the "feeling" of how different concepts relate to one another - e.g. March is a month and it is followed by April.

Perception is definitely subjective!

Yup!

I can describe it as: I see the motion vectors but not the objects. Imagine a dancer in a fog, you don’t see the dancer but see their imprint as they move…

Do you self-identify the movement through personal proprioception? Or is it completely disconnected from yourself, like a set of poltergeists dorking about in a nebula?

Interesting either way.

I can "visualize" motion with proprioception (e.g., imagining the motion of fingers opening and closing, but I don't actually see a hand) but also without any proprioception. Like, seeing the motion of a non-specific object bouncing around a box.

Try it!

I can visualize the ball without color, so while having aphantasia implies no color, the converse is not true. It's sort of like an autostereogram, but with only the depth effect and no color at all.

That is an excellent way to describe the qualia of abstract visual perception.

I wonder if people with aphantasia have trouble with them.

FWIW, @a_cardboard_box's description doesn't sound like anything I personally experience.

Not that we should expect immediate agreement on any of these things: words can only gain meaning by shared experience, and it's really hard to share the experiences that are confined to the inside our own skulls.

Aphantasia doesn't lack color, it lacks a place to put the color and therefore color has no relevance other than descriptive. The ball is just an imaginary object, like an uninitialized variable. I can imagine that one exists, I can imagine that it would have traits like red or blue, big or small, bouncy or not, but I don't visualize it, and those fields need to be filled in one-by-one, they aren't defaulted when I imagine a ball, and nothing changes other than the description if I change them. A ball rolling off a table is more like the lead into a physics question to me than an exercise in imagination.

> The ball is just an imaginary object, like an uninitialized variable.

As someone who has been coding for 45 years, this is absolutely the best analogy describing aphantasia I've ever read. Obviously, it works only when talking to another coder, but that is better than nothing.

> I can visualize the ball without color

Right now I can only visualise with a colour… unless "transparent" counts as "without". But even then, there's a full-colour environment for the transparency to be meaningful, and it can't be total transparency because then it isn't present. Even if I imagine a wireframe grid to show where it is, the grid has a colour.

What if I asked you to visualize a wogembibobble rolling off a table, would you be able to visualize it, and if so would you say it has a color? And if you're curious what a wogembibobble is, all that you need to know is precisely what can be inferred from the question: it's something that's cabable of rolling, and all other variables are free. When I do this exercise, I visualize a bulbous-tentacled blobby sort of slime rolling off the table, but although I can't imagine it without giving it a shape (and even a texture, apparently), I can imagine it without giving it a color. I don't pretend to know how this works, and I assume other people will have different experiences.

A wogembibobble is definitely going to look blobby, because the word is firmly on the bouba side of the kiki/bouba distinction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

I imagined something about the size of a duck made up of hundreds of little brass pistons and cam shafts, and as all the little pieces move it makes the whole thing move sort of like an amoeba. So when it rolls off the table it’s kind of like if you rolled a blob of mercury off a table - but it rolls itself, and there’s more clicky clockwork sounds.

I visualised a steel gömböc rolling on a dark wooden table, lit from above by a spotlight in an otherwise dark room.

A fun test for me, is if you know how tall a character from a book is. Or color. Or really anything.

Outside of "notable features" for some characters, I have no concept of what they look like. And by feature, I mean Harry Potter has a scar. I couldn't tell you much about its size or orientation. Just generally lightning shaped.

This also helped solidify to me why some folks are so hung up on casting choices.

I actually experience CEVs easily without any drugs at all, something that’s happened all my life. I can even influence it to some extent. IE if I close my eyes and focus I can create more and more intense closed eye visuals without falling asleep. When I was a child I used to do this for fun when I was bored.

So yeah, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule about CEVs.

I used to when I was younger, these day I seems to have lost that ability even my dreams are not vivid and I rarely have a dream (that I remember)

I've had the audio equivalent of that at least once, and I think (can't prove it) a few other times. But it was scary so I never tried again.

I suspect I had the visual once, thanks to one time as a teenager I tried a magic spell and the explanation of "I'm capable of self-hypnosis" is much more plausible than the spell having had even the slightest effect.

I can easily create intense overrides for sensory experience whenever I like for my sense of which way down is, and mild overrides for the various kinds of touch.

This might seem like a weird question, but have you ever had distortions in your sense of the size of features of your face? I remember a very strange feeling as a child about my sense of scale when I was dreaming or asleep. Feeling like I was minuscule while in the presence of something very big. Later in adult life I found I distort my sensory perception of my facial features, ie make my lips or cheeks feel gigantic, by pressing a very particular part of my face into the pillow at the correct angle. This sensation seemed to feel similar to one I experienced as a child.

I also have or have had the ability to do other sensory overrides like distorting my sense of physical space, ie warp the bounds of my room while I stare at ceiling in bed. It’s not really a visual thing, but it makes me think of the spoon bending scene in the matrix.

Not my face specifically, but as a teenager my whole body sometimes suddenly had a different sense of size.

For my body as a whole, I also don't have an inner sense of a permanent body morphology that is "mine", so with one exception[0] I can't even imagine what it's like to be body-dysmorphic — even if we lived in a world of magic gender/species transformations that might happen with no ill effect, if I woke up and found that had happened, the only concern is if society can cope with it, not one of my own inner psyche.

The one exception is forked tongue. That is a sticky morphology to imagine, and one I don't like at all. It's also something a friend got done surgically. Good for them, they seem to be enjoying it, it makes me go "aaaa".

[0] I assume there are limits beyond my imagination, but my imagination does at least include tails, wings, gender flipping, and I've listened to the We Are Legion (We Are Bob) series.

Wait... You mean images of concrete things or just shapes or something? I can do what you describe (always have and can influence it) but it's just moving shapes with colors. Kind of similar to those you get when you watch bright lights and then go to a dark room. Isn't that common?

For me it starts with moving shapes and colors, then fractals, and I can eventually get it to be concrete things. Takes some focus, though.

Yes! This is exactly what happens to me if I close my eyes and focus. I can literally turn it into full dream like sequences that are incredibly real but it's easy to lose focus and then you lose the visual. It's actually something I do for fun sometimes, it's like seeing the inner workings of my brain in action.

It starts off as colors moving around, shapes, like rainbows flying across my vision, or blobs of transmuting colors, basically simular to Itunes visualizations. If I keep focusing on those blobs and colors, I can start seeing more complex shapes emerge like fractions but also faces, silhouettes of people, or other more "real" visuals, then if I focus more the images become much more life-like, like people walking by the river in high fidelity and I am totally conscious the whole time. It does require focus though, if I lose focus I can quickly lose the life-like visual and i'm back to blobs of color.

Is that just hypnagogia? Many people experience that before falling asleep, I could also do this while awake but with eyes closed, it is usually colors and shapes but not anything concrete.

It sounds similar, but it happens very easily with me and isn't so tied to sleep. That is, I can have full dream like experiences while still being awake and conscious of everything that's happening to me. Almost as soon as I close my eyes, even while awake and sat at a desk I see visualizations which can easily turn into complex fractals, many colors, I've always thought it was so cool.

Interesting, that only happens to me on certain drugs, usually not without their effects.

I’m so curious about this. It’s only ever happened to me when I woke up in the middle of a vivid dream, and lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It also happened when I was on oxycodone after a surgery. Do you feel like you are in a dreamlike state or slightly high all the time? Have you ever experienced depression?

People who have aphantasia know right away something must be off for them when others enjoy things they don’t, such overly descriptive prose and so on. It is indeed very difficult to compare one’s internal experience with others’ and that’s one reason aphantasia flies under the radar.

I personally believe that people just answer the question “do you visualize?” differently. I used to think I had “aphantasia” but like you said, you see it without seeing it. If your eyes and brain are functioning at all, your brain is perfectly capable of creating colorful images. Just look around. Those colors you see? That’s your brain.

No. There’s more to this. My wife has hyperphantasia. She can imagine an apple in front of my face, with her eyes open, and she will see occlusion.

I've personally always had closed eye visuals, that are very vivid. Quite a few people have those without hallucinogens.

That is pretty surprising to me. I’ve only experienced that when waking up in the middle of a very vivid dream, and sometimes will see geometric shapes with my eyes closed for 10 or 20 seconds. Then it goes away. I chalked it up to the brain being flooded with weird chemicals during sleep. I’ve also seen this while on oxycodone after a surgery. Personally, I kinda envy you, you must live in a very exciting world if your brain is loaded with those chemicals all the time! Serotonin, maybe?

>But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)!

I can attest you, this is wrong. When I close my eyes I do see stuff... At the very least some geometric fractals, usually some sort of boiling visual association soup, where random images emerge from fractal Eigengrau liquid. I, willfully, got little influence on the stuff coming up. It feels like watching my brain do brain things. It's rather annoying/exhausting by the way.

I think this experience is a spectrum. It's not like you have it or you don't.

> I think this experience is a spectrum.

Yes, a thousand times yes.

I always imagine there is some sort of threshold for conscious impressions, which varies between people, but also during the day in a single individual. Like islands sticking out of the sea. The more engaged/synchronized the brain processes something, the more "mass" gets build up forming these landscapes. If you lower the water level the islands become wider, if the sea is turbulent the edges become less defined.

Worth to mention that there is a condition called HPPD (hallucinogen-induced perception disorder), causing people to see CEVs/OEVs while not on drugs. The condition persists for a while (for some people, months or even years) after a drug use, as the name would imply, causing annoyance and anxiety.

Surely its a spectrum, but seeing closed eye visuals isn't considered "being in a normal part of the spectrum" though.

>Surely its a spectrum, but seeing closed eye visuals isn't considered "being in a normal part of the spectrum" though.

Source?

Otherwise it wouldn't be labeled a "disorder"?

Not how that works....

> It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels".

Some people see details, some see colors, some see black and white, some see a misty fog, some see nothing.

It sounds to me like you're somewhere towards the aphantasic end of the spectrum, but I couldn't give you the exact percentile.

I slowly realized I have aphantasia by reading an HN comment about it last December. That day I started asking my daughter questions about visualizing things and daydreams and she ended up giving me a perfect description of aphantasia with minimal prompting. It's very interesting to have gone through life not realizing I have this difference. A few people I asked the same questions of who do not seem to have aphantasia thought the topic was a little crazy, as if it's weird to perceive this way.

I tend to process a lot of things through sound, and go around the world recognizing people by voice or unwillingly trying to place people's accents when they talk. I think it might be related somehow.

I remember reading once somewhere on the Internet someone baffled to learn that people weren't in control when dreaming. It's amusing how inner-experiences can unknowingly be so wildly different from person to person.

I was pretty intrigued by Aphantasia a while ago, as I can’t picture anything at all with my eyes closed. Then I asked all my friends and none of them could either, apparently. So I’m wondering what “picturing” means in the definition of aphantasia? With my eyes closed all I see is pitch black, but I can “imagine” myself seeing a red apple even with my eyes open, I don’t actually see anything though.

Actually seeing with your eyes would (I think) be a form of synesthesia. Being able to imagine a red apple is "normal". Not being able to imagine a red apple is aphantasia ("imagine" in the sense of a "visual" imagination, not in the sense of being able to conjecture the existence of an apple with particular qualities).

Does it follow that people with aphantasia (edit: "aphantasics", per the article) would be unable to draw a realistic-looking apple from scratch? If not, then how do scientists show someone has aphantasia? Is it falsifiable?

Not at all - you can still see the paper and know what an apple is supposed to look like. Describing a face or drawing a scene from memory is very hard though.

That doesn't really make sense to me. What does it mean to "know what an apple looks like" without being unable to imagine it? How would that be any different from knowing what a face looks like without being able to imagine it? Do note I said realistic apple [1], not just a cartoonish drawing, so I don't just mean "a squished circle"...

[1] Example: https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic...

Why would I have to visualize to know whether or not something is an apple? I can recognize one on sight without having to match it up with a visualization in my head, so I can start from the right shape and add details until it becomes an apple. No visualization required at all. Obviously it's quicker and easier to use a model or reference picture, but not required.

I guess I don't see how that's be different from drawing a face? Start with the right shape an add details until it becomes a face?

I can draw a generic face, but not a specific one unless I have a model or picture. If I had to give a description of someone, even family members or close friends, I would be hopeless other than very basic things like relative height, hair and skin color.

That's so fascinating, thanks. Does aphantasia give you any trouble in your daily life? Or does it end up being a non-issue?

It's a non-issue. I never even realized that it was a thing until I several years ago I was listening to a podcast that involved discussing mental monologues and imagery and thinking "WTF are these people talking about?!", and then doing some research. I had previously always understood things like "mind's eye" and inner voice/conscience as metaphors or some kind of mystical superstition.

Same here. I never realized until I read an article about it well in my fourties. I read the late Wittgenstein when I was twenty, and I also thought that thing with "the meaning of a dog is a mental image of a dog" was a metaphor. He quotes this somewhere to criticize it iirc.

> I was listening to a podcast that involved discussing mental monologues and imagery and thinking "WTF are these people talking about?!"

But you claim to not have an inner voice?

Boys, I think we've got one.

I don't think in words unless I'm reading or writing and "thinking "WTF are these people talking about?!"" is just a metaphor for incredulity (how else am I supposed to that feeling across the internet, through text?). I especially don't have an independent, always-on commentator talking to me in my head all the time, which is what I gather "inner monologue" is.

Inner monologue is pretty much exactly that. The ability to internalize sound and voice that is not hallucinatory or accusatory. It's literally at a very simple level being able to just think of yourself saying something and you thinking it you hear it. On the other end of the spectrum you can basically make any sound or voice at will audible in your head.

I am on that far end of the spectrum where I could just make anything happen in my head visually or auditorily.

Aphantasia and face blindness are correlated it seems like.

In my experience with aphantasia, I struggle with the ability to describe people based on their physical attributes (my parents for example) but I think it's distinct from face blindness. I can easily recognize people that I know purely based on their faces, but I don't believe that people with face blindness could. I just can't visualize what they look like mentally.

Prof Joel Pearson has developed three distinct objective tests to measure aphantasia. Here is a talk about it: https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0

Interesting, thanks. I'll have to watch it when I find the chance.

In addition to the other replies: No, aphantastics (nice word!) aren't unable to do it, much like almost anyone can become amateur-level competent at almost anything if they put in enough effort.

But it's a matter of talent, and you're missing a big component. That can be made up for in other ways, though I think it'd be hard to reach the peak.

I don't think you have it if you can imagine something.

I don't think it's meant to be in that dark space / visual eye space.

Consider another sense, like hearing. Many people experience "earworms" where a song gets stuck in their head and plays repeatedly. They know it's not actually playing since there's no "external" sound but they can hear it "internally".

"Picturing" something in your head is the same, just with the sense of vision instead of the sense of hearing.

ask this questionnaire to a range of people, including some visual artists / designers:

close your eyes, think of a family member, who is it, where are they, what are they wearing, can you see details about the clothing, can you see details in the background, is there motion, if you open your eyes can you still see it

there will be some very strong yeses in there if you sample people in visual professions

Even designers who can visualize report different representations and experiences: https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-in...

It's definitely not a black and white thing but a (flexible) scale: a noticeable variation of intensity can be felt when practicing an activity demanding an intense visual focus on a specific object (e.g. painting): an stronger-than-usual visual image can be recalled effortlessly, at least during a few days.

The problem is asking people to close their eyes. Most visualizers don't need to close their eyes to visualize, and many state that they can visualize even better with them open. Everyone sees some form of black/Eigengrau when they close their eyes.

I don't think it has anything to do with your eyes being open/closed, or even to do with your eyes at all, unless it's describing something different to what I assume. It's about mental images and visualization, not your field of vision itself.

Then you don't have Aphantasia. Very few people are claiming they literally see things, they can just conjure up a mental model of something by thinking about it. The weirdness is that some people (those with Aphantasia) are claiming that they can't even do that...

I also have no visual at all, no inner monologue and I don't have ability to hear sounds or music or bring up tastes or smells. I've accepted that about me, but there are two dishes my grandmothers used to make that I'm desperately trying to hang on to a memory of their taste profile,but I only remember it as an abstract description of the taste or as my reaction to eating it. I know I'll recognize it if eaten again but I can't bring that taste back otherwise.

It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either.

By my rough count of Figure 2 tests, where Derek is at 0 to Loren at 6 (ignoring F), I have about 3.5 atypical responses.

My experience with Figure 2:

A) I can flip between cone and weird triangle, saw the cone first

B) I see it as if someone placed identical cat stickers on the drawing. I can intellectually understand the perspective, how the upper-right one is supposed to be bigger, but don't experience it that way.

C) I see that there is an implicit rectangle (to me it looks slightly wider than tall). But the color doesn't "spread" to the middle, it's just like 2A -- a boundary in the surrounding shapes implicitly extends into the empty space to form a rectangle shape.

D) It takes minimal, but non-zero effort to see the vase

E) It's trivial to flip between the two orientations of the cube

F) skipped

G) I don't understand what I'm looking for here. I see clouds, sky, and a silhouette with a tree. Is there a face in it somewhere? I can see the smiley face on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

> It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either.

I believe you’re correct, since I commonly see it presented as a spectrum. https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/

For G) I'm seeing something akin to the Moon falling in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

Basically a face staring at the tree from above.

Fascinating. Thanks for the clue. It's the most complete blank for me of all the tests. I looked up the reference image, but still cannot see it in figure 2G. I can't even guess at where the eyes/nose/mouth are in the clouds.

The two dark splotches above the tree are the eyes. The nose is to the right of the lower splotch, below the higher splotch. The forehead to the left.

Ahah! I see it now, thanks.

yeah, I think some of their example stimuli aren't the greatest in that figure. There are definitely some better perspective illusions online. I'm not sure if I really see the Neon Spreading Illusion in C either; maybe it's spreading a bit, haha.

For whatever it’s worth, I have Aphantasia, and share your experiences exactly.

I also have aphantasia and ALSO share these experiences exactly. That seems a bit beyond coincidence.

Some months, maybe a couple of years ago I realised that I have no "mind's eye". For example I know I have grandchildren but I cannot visualise them. I cannot visualise a neighbour, or food, or a location. That this happens is odd but I can live with it.

More recently I was thinking about gaming, and more specifically Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, City Skylines (all of which I own but get nowhere with) and other games where you play, you fail, you plan, you repeat. Even Minecraft.

Someone else - I presume - plays, fails, learns, repeats and so gain a step toward mastery of the game. (I accept from reading that mastery of DF isn't happening soon). I presume that players visualise mistakes and visualise workrounds. I cannot do that, I do not know how.

I have thousands of hours in gaming but I cannot recall them visually, so I respond in-game to what is happening in-game. That may not make sense. There will be some learning but in a non-visual way.

Is this aphantasia? I have no idea and I'm not about to be diagnosed.

I do have vivid and lucid dreaming but ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.

> ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.

That's definitely aphantasia as I understand (and suffer from) it.

I've never really considered the "visual learning from failure" aspect of it. I know that in, e.g., Minecraft, I have tremendous trouble with building things because I can't visualise them beforehand and thus things get hodgepodged into these hideous homunculi of buildings or redstone contraptions.

One way that scientists test is to use modality agnostic language. For example something like "imagine going to a store to shop for a new sofa. You find one and imagine where it would go in your room."

Then you change or introduce things "make the sofa 50% smaller" then a bit more "change the colour of it to deep yellow" etc

Or imagine getting on a bus and their is only one seat left.

I am definitely not a doctor. However, I have a friend diagnosed with aphantasia and this is almost exactly how she described it to me.

Not exactly the same but recently I realised that I can visualize the face of most of the people I know, my parents, my family, my friends, however I'm unable to visualize my own face

Can you draw things without a reference? What happens if you try to play pictionary?

If I cannot see - with my eyes there and then - a scribble happens.

To sort of expand: I'm old enough that a diagnosis makes zero difference. But it does explain so much.

When misophonia became a thing it explained so much of my reactions to certain noises, that I was not alone.

Just knowing that others are experiencing the same removes some of that aloneness.

I'm aphantasic but I've drawn my whole life. In Pictionary I show off and draw exactly the thing being described, meanwhile others struggle with their stick figures. It's hilarious.

So on the one hand I can draw an excellent random generic man or a generic face. If you pose for me I'll do an uncanny portrait. But I can't draw my wife of 30 years -- I can't even see her in my mind. I can't draw an actor I've seen 200 times unless I were to sit with photographs and ingrain their face by deliberate practice

Using Prison Architect as an example, when playing can you 'remember' the dimensions of the different rooms you've built? Or would you have to zoom out to plan an extension of your prison? It definitely sounds like aphantasia.

I would have to zoom out / pan around. I am unable to have any sort of vision of what I want/need.

When I saw the title I thought it's about current state of AI. That's what currently AI is missing. Imagination.

plugging https://www.reddit.com/r/cureaphantasia , started by a dev who claims to have cured his aphantasia

A good introduction to aphantasia (I'm a total, multi-sensory aphant): https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Cool! I think I'd be classed as deep Aphant like Loren (one of the paper's authors) but I also have an internal monologue.

Why does aphantasia come up so often on Hacker News?

I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again.

It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished.

Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)

I have a conjecture that aphantasia may be overrepresented in software disciplines. It seems sensible to me that a field which is almost wholly abstract would select a higher proportion of aphantasic people than average, as it would be of no hindrance. (I would expect the same from mathematics and maybe some sciences, but I'm not a member of any such community so I wouldn't know firsthand.)

Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.

There's research that people with aphantasia are over-represented in STEM fields: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are...

Thanks for sharing that link.

It's risky business to infer anything from job preferences though. Consider that (as far as I know) an extraordinarily large proportion of professional programmers are male -- obviously a cultural phenomenon. We certainly cannot infer that a talent for programming is located on the y-chromosome.

Edit after reading the paper associated with that link:

> Our aphantasic and hyperphantasic samples were opportunistic, in the sense that our participants had approached us spontaneously following publicity triggered by our original publication

This suggests that many of the participants actually read scientific publications (or reporting thereof). That's an obviously biased set of people who indeed are way more likely to work in STEM (and have an abundance of time to spend browsing the web), rather than as hairdressers.

That seems wrong to me. I personally use visualization frequently during development and not having that ability seems to me a massive hinderance.

I don't even understand how you can begin to plan a user interface without the power of visualisation. I suppose you just have to produce drafts? I can just lie there in bed and iterate for hours, imaging how the user will move through processes, etc. It seems a huge disadvantage to only be able to develop such an idea while actually having the interface in front of you. Maybe this is the real reason some developers never want to leave the back end :)

I feel like even planning architectural code is somewhat visual for me, like I have a mental model of the folder structures and how different components of the system relate to each other.

It's interesting because it should be very easy to put a test in action. Are there true capability differences between people who think in different ways? Feynman[0] goes through a particular version of such a test in his Ways of Thinking series.

It should be trivial to write up a puzzle game such that, much like those color blind tests where you need to find numbers, will very quickly eliminate people who think in different ways while being a piece of cake for others. And yet I don't think I've ever encountered one.

Are there no capabilities that can not be overcome? Would that puzzle game just be terrible entertainment? Why doesn't it exist?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbwLkuxORdY

The mass recoginition of Aphantasia and the rise of screentime seems somewhat correlated. They might be reinforcing one another, multiple avenues of cognition could be warping in unprecedented ways.

Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.

Isn’t this essentially the same concern that Socrates had about writing according to Plato:

“… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

Nope. Not even remotely.

Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.

Screen time correlates with:

• Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-...

• Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global...

• Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula...

Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.

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