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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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!

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.

>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.

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....

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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 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'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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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 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 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?