Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I also stopped dreaming in images for a long time, which was weird. It's still very dim (not so vivid), but at least that part came back.
Indeed many of my childhood memories are mostly sequences of pictures, the emotional content kind of "floats" on the imagery. It must be very frustrating, being forced to reinvent how you experience your inner life and memories.
Edit, after reading some more comments: are you musically inclined? Did your ability to hear melodies in your "inner ear" suffer similarly?
As you mention, the most sad part about it is actually the childhood memories, but I still have the memories of course, they're just a bit more "facts based" than re-living experiences.
Luckily, I didn't lose my inner ear or even inner monologue like in another reported case [0]. I do play instruments, so I guess I was/is musically inclined to some degree. I still have ability to imagine music exactly like I would hear it, unlike a friend with aphantasia who can't.
Another interesting detail is that I regained the ability before losing it again (Covid re-infection), and during this time of recovery I could gradually see grey, blurry images that got better and better. It's like the image generator in my head didn't have capacity to create full blown images, but only low res ones. Which makes me believe that in my case the "image generator" was damaged as I couldn't even dream in pictures, while for most people with aphantasia that's not the case, as they can dream normally.
On the bright side, I don't get horrible, lifelike images popping up in my head anytime I hear about something disturbing. Not that that was a big problem, but it's something you notice. It makes me believe that people with aphantasia might be better at coping with disturbing events, as they don't have to re-live the experience visually. But that's just a theory.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-stopped-having-dreams-...
It's such a weird disease, covid. Makes you wonder what we'll eventually find out about all these long-tail symptoms in 20 years.
True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.
I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.
You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.
Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.
It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.
I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).
If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.
Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?
Can't hurt to try, right?
It's so weird, as I know exactly which "muscle" to trigger to make it happen, which I guess someone having aphantasia wouldn't instinctly know, but it just doesn't do much.
-edit- Oh, forgot to mention, in the beginning when I trained on visualizing again (back when it did work), I got _so_ exhausted in my brain afterwards, it was like really trying to used some damaged "muscle". I find that really fascinating. I'm not able to invoke such exhaustion in other ways, that quickly.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-lost-t...
Covid was/is a weird one. Hope you get your visuals back. I've never had them but if I did I wouldn't want to miss them.
SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes.
Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ
This explains why I lose every argument with my wife about things that happened in the past.
My wife (and particularly my daughter), have vivid imaginations that can make memories up at times. If I’ve “fact-committed” a memory, it’s not wrong.
Granted, this only helps in the 0.1% of cases when you have done the fact memory committal and can thus have any argument at all. For the rest it’s “I don’t remember that, and your memory is unreliable, so…”. Ahh the comforting couch, I should just take my pillow there now ;-)
I have many vivid dreams a night, and often wake feeling exhausted. I have been thinking this might be my brain overcompensating for aphantasia. First time I have heard of SDAM, and that certainly applies to me, along with face/name memory, especially people out of context.
I speculated the other day that it could be 40 years programming has rewired my brain. Great at making logical connections, mapping/route memory is amazing, along with logical analysis.
Probably SDAM is related to depression too. If we are not able to recall the happy times/memories in the same way as other people do, not counting those technical solution wins!
Also as bad as my memory is, SDAM or old age ;) it actually feels worse since Covid and plenty of fuzzy/foggy brain days.
'Sleep deprivation disrupts memory' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681345
[edit] tried to explain it better.
Unless it is a day to forget... If you have too many of those, you know something needs to change.
what the fuck
(I also have aphantasia and find it extremely difficult to believe that the entire thing isn't just a misunderstanding of language.)
Why wouldn't you lol
FWIW, I’m also very much aphantasic (I’d be a 4.5/5.0 on the test in Guardian article).
When I try to visualize an object, I can in some sense visualize it but it feels very indistinct. It's like I can't see the object as a whole only the specific details I focus on. For example, I have a friend who wears circular glasses and has a handlebar mustache. I can bring up a general image of "circular glasses" or "handlebar mustache" in my mind. However, I cannot imaging his face with glasses and a mustache. It almost feels like the way that you "see" things when you are only half watching a TV show or are partially zoned out while driving. In some sense you are seeing them but it's difficult to pull up details.
When I visualize a scene, I'm not sure I "see" it so much as I form a spatial map of the scene.
I also find that the "images" that do get stored in my memory are more like impressions. Maybe in some sense I can "visualize" them, but they are really more like impressions of how they make me feel or the "vibe" that I get from them.
I experience basically the same thing with sounds, which I've never heard anyone talk about. If you ask me to imagine the guitar solo from "sweet child of mine", I'm not going to hear the actual song in my head, I'm going to hear essentially the same thing as if you asked me to describe it (with lots of beedly dee type sounds). I can recognize a person's voice, but I can't will it into existence without hearing it, instead I would hear my own imitation of them, however bad that is. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but media tells me it's not.
I can think very clearly in text however, so I can imagine vivid descriptions of a physical environment and with descriptions of fine detail. But it's stored as text, and only blurrily rendered to images.
Recently, I've gradually realized that I struggle to recognize faces and some significant chunk of my social anxiety comes from this. If I see a face often enough or in large enough doses I can recognize it, but if I see it only occasionally and for brief encounters, I really struggle. I think it may be related to my inability visualize.
Why I cannot say.
Sometimes when I get a lot of sleep and relaxation I think I can visualize in ny head.
Oh, and I can visualize at least one relative, but only a certain passport image of that person.
And I can draw to some degree, so I clearly know roughly what things look like even if I cannot visualize it internally.
Source: can draw pretty well myself, do not use this method.
People who draw out of thin air usually have these trained references in mind, so when they draw a pose they're not so much simply copying from their imagination, but from facts and past experience, about knowing about anatomy, light, and proportion. You draw as you go and see what's on the page, and you can build out a world that didn't exist, but not so much from mind's eye, but somewhere in-between the page and prior experience.
None of the above training or sketching would be needed by someone with a photographic memory or an imagination that can hold that level of mass detail (they'd only need to know practical techniques their medium depends on). There have been people like that such as Austin Osman Spare, but in the main the vast development in art has to do with learning about anatomy, proportion, light, color, and technique as taught by all the great masters.
Cartoons are a good example how a style comes not so much from the imagination, but how one very naively and simply draws characters and then builds off that natural style into something refined. This comes from playing on the page, not imagining what one wants. If you copy other people's cartoons you can also learn different lessons, and that has to do with training the eye and technique.
The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that is already pushing it.
These kind of "mind-travels" are sometimes done at end of yoga classes. For me, they are complete pointless, and I usually fall asleep.
I have also great problems identifying faces, don't know if there is a connection.
On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk alongside a wood, but every time I try to picture it, my mind balks. Also, combining a wood with a mountain I find tough, other that a mountain covered by trees. I think it is because of their genealogical dissimilarity.
Areas of the American west, with mountains above treeline and meadows, can have exactly this topography.
Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.051055,-121.796685,3a,75y,30...
I guess the larger point is that vusualisation is as much fiction as it is recal.
By the way, I love the gmap link image, but I don't see it as an effective responce to the hint. I see it instead as a classic vista (I.e framed window-form).
Far to the left, you can see more mountains, but trees and hill block your view on the right. It's really common to see while hiking, though usually you turn to the downhill side to take a picture
I also can vividly "hear" music, not really voices, but I can put a track on in my head almost as if listening to the radio. For people that can't do this, it might sound great - and it is quite cool except for waking up many mornings with a random track stuck in your head or hearing a particular riff over and over again.
I don't tend to remember faces of people I've recently met - there are times when someone says hi, starts chatting and I think "who the hell is that?"
I can imagine this, but if someone just says "you're walking down a winding path", I visualize something much more like the original parent. It takes nonzero effort to bother to mentally render a scene like that, so it doesn't just happen when someone says something; I have to actively want to be imagining it. I don't have some scene ready-to-go that I can drop myself into.
The above changes if a specific place is named, somewhere I've been. Then I'll generate some scene based on my memory.
Your second two paragraphs could have been written by me.
>>If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".
>>The image I see in my mind...
I don't have a problem identifying faces. I'm not great at putting names with faces, but that may be separate.
> On the other hand, I can vividly imagine sounds, including voices and music.
I'm the same way. I can almost replay entire songs in my head, and if I hear a repeated sound I can replay it slowed down in my head to count it, but in college I discovered that I had trouble recognizing faces of people when I'd meet them a second time. This hasn't happened much in other parts of my life, so I attribute it to the large volume of new people I'd meet regularly in college compared to the other parts of my life, but it's still something that I think I struggle with more than average.
We are very good at remembering and recognizing small details. You may have a trouble with faces yet you may have no trouble with a minor details what makes you recognize the person even if you actually struggle to recognize their face.
Anecdata: I always had not such a good eyesight, which, of course, only got worse with the age. Recently I stood at the bar entrance and recognized a friend from ~30 meters, despite what:
- he was in an unfamiliar to me clothing
- he wasn't with a cane like our previous couple of meetings (broken leg)
- I can't see shit at ~2 meters
Just a combination of his height, walking pattern and ~hair colour (and what he definitely headed to that bar and was not passing by) made me recognize him despite what I, quite literally, barely could see him.
It’s almost like I’m actually hearing music (or I can imagine people speaking in basically any accent) - even full orchestral. But it’s subtly different in a way I can’t really describe.
My image visualisation is much weaker, I can imagine moving images, in colour and everything but it’s much more vague.
I can visualize in a sense, but I would never talk of an image. In fact closing my eyes makes it harder for me to imagine anything.
I can recall my dream from last night for example, I can describe it quite well. If you now would ask me to in my mind modify for example the color of the floor, I couldn’t. Because in “dream reality” I very much remember it wasn’t.
I can daydream, I can imagine vividly. But the moment anyone tells me, “modify what you’re imagining like this”, it all falls apart.
Also what is interesting is the quality of detail between me describing the imaginary situation and reconstructing it in real life. A lot of aspects are lost under a haze when describing it, but when reconstructing it I can tell you if an aspect is right or wrong, not what it should be.
That’s of course my personal experience. Just I feel like Aphantasia is this buzzfeed like diagnosis illness, where you really have a lot of interpretation.
I can picture things in my mind's eye, can remember what people look like, walk through the recent past, etc., but I don't see them painted as images on my closed eyelids as though I was seeing them with my actual eyes. When I remember I "see" them but not in a literal visual sense.
Like if you asked me, "When you came to my house yesterday, did you see a green apple on the table?" I would scan back through my memory "visually" and if I encountered a memory of a green apple I would say yes, but I would only see that apple in my "mind's eye". Does that qualify as an image? Because I wouldn't really call it that, it's just a flash of mental objects and sure some imagery.
So am I aphantasic? I still have no idea.
This feels way more like "people not really grasping how brains work" than some condition.
What I find strange is that so many people actually believe that their brains have a built-in raytracer. Why did, say, Boris Vallejo need real-life models and photography if there are so many people out there who can simply visualize everything in an instant?
One way to measure scientifically is to ask somebody to picture a room. The the experimenter keeps describing adding items to the room until the experimentee can no longer recall. By defining positions for all these items one could verify it is indeed visual memory by asking location questions.
I don't know if other people have thought of this and started doing it yet, but they should.
Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogramming our visual hardware to form abstract concepts in the minds eye rather than visualizing concrete objects.
But you're probably only reading about aphantasia in tech forums like this one.
I was always good at abstract sciences, like math and theoretical physics. Partially because I could operate in my mind with my very own abstractions.
But I'm for example very bad at chess and tetris, because I can't visualize.
This has been true for me at least since I was 5.
For example, if I’m asked to think of an apple, I don’t see an apple (with no color etc.), but I can “feel” an apple in the sense that I can abstractly reason about the 3D space of an apple.
Again, there’s nothing visual about it. It’s almost as if I’m blind, and can form and reason about an apple as if I had only ever been able to hold one.
Other quirks:
- I am also always aware of which direction "home" is. I can't remember ever being lost.
- I have an automatic annoyingly good memory for songs and sounds
- "Remembering" feels more like a bundle of sense impressions being re-expressed than it does recall. This is nice because I get much more "complete" impression of what my mind remembers happening. Not sure when this changed for me but it was after definitely after a few years of meditating.
None of this is ever visual though.
If not it would be easy to explain the result of the “visualize an apple” test. It’s just like visualizing a “for loop”. You’ve got a good idea of what’s it like and yet visualize absolutely nothing.
And whenever some niche topic comes up that relates to some group, they all come out of the woodwork to congregate. I certainly do whenever this topic comes up.
I see functions I wrote hours ago, maybe not every line of code but pseudocode at least. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve solved bugs just visualizing code before falling asleep.
After all, everything we experience is our brains' interpretation of our sensory inputs. And if we can visually experience things that don't exist, whether through dreams or hallucinations (drug induced or otherwise), it stands to reason that if your mind knows how to control those same pathways you could create images in your mind.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is.
For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no color because it’s just an abstract concept. For me it is a white outline on a black background, very vividly.
Consider a turing test of sorts: I want to convince you I am phantastic, you are tasked with determining whether I am faking it. Could such a test be realized?
Consider, for example, the “draw a bicycle” phenomenon. Many alleged phantists are wholly unable to correctly render a bicycle onto paper, and furthermore they are often unable to self-evaluate that their renders are bogus. Many aphants on the other hand have no issue depicting a well formed bicycle onto a paper, and furthermore would be able to identify faulty ones.
Of course this test does not have perfect recall/accuracy, it’s just an example of how the results can be counterintuitive.
As one, I don't draw, I construct. A set of rules make a bicycle a bicycle, so pick a part, draw it, then sequentially continue attaching parts per the rules, and at the end, it's a valid bicycle that functions. The resultant drawing is considered good, though I couldn't "see" any part of the bicycle before or while drawing.
This isn't from an image, but it is arguably a mapping.
Similarly, I've observed those who can mentally organize concepts but can't visualize pictures are often better able to render frameworks onto whiteboards than those who picture scenes.
It's made me wonder if the same parts of the mind are used for the one or the other, as if remembering everything visually uses up circuitry that could support semantic-space-time.
> For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless.
If you are not an aphantasiac, how do you know what meaning this question has for one? I am pretty sure aphantasiacs can "imagine" a triangle with some color in it. It is just that this imagine manifests differently than it does for you, but how can we measure that objectively?
To elaborate, even for an aphantasiac, a triangle or a color is not something abstract. You can draw it on a paper, and it is right there. If you close your eyes, you can remember what you have drawn on the paper, aphantasiac or not. So how exactly do you distinguish the quality of memories here? Certainly not with vague internet questionnaires. Research like that makes me really angry.
I confirm.
I would have probably picked up a color at random to play along with the whole “mind’s eye metaphor” before I realized people can actually “see” for real and it’s not a metaphor.
One method to possibly tell the difference is visual analogizing. Like, "picture" the Sydney Opera House, and then (without thinking in words) name some other objects it resembles. Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our version of this “visualization” or “image” or … looks or even feels.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbq8w/how-pupil-size-can-re...
If someone with normal mental visualization ability pictures a "bright" scene, the pupils contract just as they would in response to a bright visual stimulation. Aphants' pupils show no physical response to this test.
I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section except that one... where I scored 1st percentile. If that's not a strong sign of aphantasia I don't know what is!
I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning are mostly (but not entirely) orthogonal spectra, and it's completely possible for people to fall anywhere on either, just based on how their brain developed its internal strategies throughout normal life.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26792259_Loss_of_im...
But:
1. "Imagine a table. There is a ball on the table. The ball rolls off the table onto the floor."
2. "From memory, what color was the ball? The table? The floor? What did you see under the table?"
Neither I nor any other, uh, aphants, that I have known have answers to those questions. Imagination still works, and answers to those questions can be produced interactively if handled appropriately, but, ex: we weren't imagining colors and we didn't see anything at all much less "under the table".
Alternative:
1. "What do you think people do, specifically, when they "count sheep" to go to sleep?"
Our answers to that should just be hilarious for you. Hi-larious.
Understand that we thought you folks "visualizing in your minds eye" were speaking metaphorically. Entirely metaphorically.
If you are actually drawing on a larger amount of data, specifically pertaining to the mechanisms of people's internal experiences, that'd be useful to know. If you are not, I'd gently suggest that you're working from a flawed statistical assumption, and that looking at the numerous interactions in this thread where people describe materially different internal experiences ("I can only recall tastes in terms of descriptors" - "I can experience a taste by imagining it"[0]) may be more informative without presuming universal consistency.
"Mind's eye" and "visualization" refer to actual experiences. Those of us with aphantasia (no exceptions that I've encountered so far) did not realize these words referred to actual experiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland#Society_and_cultu...
I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia.
For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.
> Do you think that's accurate?
I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap.
With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it.
[0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
Rewatching a movie is the same, I remember seeing the movie and I also remember all the scenes (the ones I remember); you might remember a scene by color and "images", I remember it by description or concept. But the result is the same: I remember having seen it.
A really nice perk (for me) is that I don't remember the individual actors. I remember the role played, but not who has played it. It's not like I cannot distinguish actors from another, but I just don't remember actor X played this and that role. I really don't understand the problems with changing actors in sequels, it's the same role; maybe played a little bit different, but still the same role.
I know a total of maybe 5 to 10 actors which I recognize among different movies.
> "People with tetrachromacy have a fourth cone in their retinas, called a tetrachromat, that allows them to see up to 100 million colors, compared to the average person's 1 million. This extra cone gives them access to new color ranges within the yellow and green spectrum, which can create millions of new color variations. "
I can only imagine how much more vibrant the world looks to them in terms of sunrise and sunset, walking in a forest, etc.
I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
Most people can't draw (at all) and I think that supports your point.
Example: https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
But something happened to me a few years ago, I can't really say what. Basically my dreamscape when I was asleep changed. I went from sort of greyscale dreams with 1-2 people at a time, very little audio to basically full-blown movie quality with up to thousands of people in the scene. Long ago I achieved a lucid dreaming state but it was always a bit boring somehow, there wasn't much happening. Now I can do the same and there's a whole storyline going on for me to experience.
Also when waking up I could now just turn around and immediately go back to sleep and resume the dream.
My point in all of that is that somehow when my full conscious mind isn't present it's as if in computer terms I just have a lot more CPU power available for creating the scenery, up to the point where it's as real as real life. I'm sure it's not a "CPU" issue, the brain should easily be powerful enough to do it while conscious, but maybe it's more of a survival thing.
Is there any analogy between reasoning about relationships and paths through complicated source code code vs paths through a street map? I don't think I visualize either, I just kind of absorb knowledge and piece together plans.
I don't have an inner monologue either, and I find that I've not infrequently found myself having to pronounce a word I've only ever read before. Ihhave to invent a spoken pronunciation for the first time ever and get self-conscious. It's not the same as aphantasia, but kind of similar. Well, maybe: when I see a movie about a book I've read, I never say, "oh, that actor looks different than what I thought the character looked like".
I don't mean to argue that aphantasia is "real", but I do feel there is evidence for it.
It's not only about what is visualizable, but also what form of representation is comparable. I can read a map in a matter of seconds and find my way. I can find a car plate within my line of sight instantly. The way to the parking lot behind the <insert picture of something> and finding the blue <insert car brand> there is basically impossible for me. Of course I'm able to concentrate, but it doesn't come naturally.
How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
> I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation
I find the utter disbelief expressed by people who don't have aphantasia exhausting. It would be similar to encountering someone who has been deaf from birth and trying to convince them that they're not really deaf, they just don't understand what it means when other people say that they hear things. They could also hear things if they just try harder.
Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery).
So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.
For example if you were asked to draw and color a basketball, how would you approach the task without 'seeing' something in your mind?
All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture".
OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".
Do you picture name tags on people? It just comes out of nothing in my head.
Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.
Instead of a picture of a forest and some cracking of wood, I just have these words in my head and not the real picture/sound.
Same for every other sense.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book. There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
I dunno how often you guys dream but a standard night for me is it's dark out and then it's light out without a dream in between.
I don't have full blown aphantasia I think but mental images are always very hazy and dark to me and calling them up takes immense effort. Seems like I'm a 4 on the VVIQ scale.
On the other hand, imaginations in psychotherapy, be it for exposure it for revisiting childhood places and moments, still work for me. They are just not very visual. They contain emotions and haptic aspects, sometimes sounds and smells, but the visual is kind of like really old polaroid pictures. They frizzle out at the edges really quickly, they never move, the colors are muted and sometimes off.
At least now I know that people who claim that books evoke vibrant mental images in them are not bullshitting me. And I can stop sitting there with Lord of the Rings in hand, staring at a wall for 10 minutes and wondering why I still don't manage to "see" what Moria looks like.
What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.
Just look at art history. Only very few people managed to render things somewhat accurately before the invention of photography. And the consensus is that these exceptions (such as Holbein or Vermeer) used technological tricks to aid them.
My hypothesis is that people have an internal imagery that is extremely realistic and detailed, because they perceive the actual world in exactly the same way, using the same processes. One does not "see" the image on the retina in their mind's eye, one "sees", if I'm allowed to use the metaphor, the vector embedding somewhat further down the line.
Now, if people train their mind to actually see more detail, they find out that the brain is actually rather limited in comparison to a camera.
It’s actually really annoying because when I’m stuck on a problem I essentially solve the whole thing in my head. I just see all the issues with possible solutions and back them out.
I wonder if it drives my boss nuts because I can go a whole day basically committing nothing, and then bang out the solution very quickly.
I actually have been actively trying to “just start writing, see what pops out” and it isn’t coming very naturally, which is kind of obnoxious.
I do believe a subset of humans can rotate a mental image in their head. I know an accomplished UI / UX artist who would do just this. He'd create an image in his head, observe and critique it from angles and then create in "reality"
I can listen to a song 100 times, and not tell you more than 5 words in a song, nor the beat. My early teen son (a sensor) can sing the entire song after a few listens.
I used to think the only intelligence sign was being highly logical or able to solve complex problems. Because that is what I know. However, I've come to learn there are large swath of intelligences I don't have, and have not personally valued in the past, but others have them and can do great things with them.
This awareness has even allowed me to believe in a wider growth of intelligences at the spectrums, even to a type of supernatural gifts.
Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951990] 105 points|negativelambda|3 months ago|114 comments
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887661] 86 points|bookofjoe|3 months ago|89 comments
More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Contextual conversations are ok, such as business or academic conversations, because the language is generally a closed set and visualisations are well practiced. But social situations can be without context, and difficult to navigate.
When someone asks me to imagine a scene, I don't really do that. That scene with mountains, trees and a lake? It's like three labels just kinda being there... waiting to be updated based on what comes next.
But if I make a focused effort, I can sorta do it. I can recall seeing something which might look like that, and recall some visual aspects. Not super vividly, but something I could at least use as a basis to draw a sketch for example.
But just by default, those images from my memory seldom come up just reading something. I have to focus and spend time recollecting. But they never ever become vivid as in real life, not remotely close.
but I can at least hear sounds in my mind :) I read that this is a similar spectrum thing where some people hear nothing and others can replay everything
I can imagine anyone, anywhere, without even closing my eyes. In many situations, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had this ability since early childhood. It has not made me a sex-craving maniac, though; I’m quite stable.
I can't visualize the faces of any of my exes but I can vividly "feel" the memory how we felt being next to each other, sometimes if I focus this starts to include smells and sounds as well but no visuals.
To explain the not-joke: the things you see are not "out there" they are in your mind. Now of course the things you see through your eyes are there, but the images are imaginary, the eye and brain do all kinds of things between the retina and the mind to make the imagery you see. Your visual perception is constructive.
Metaphorically speaking, the camera works, these folks just don't know how to hit "play" on the tape. They have the neural "circuitry" to visualize in their minds (or they would be blind!) they just aren't using it.
> Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
Learn to use your brain folks. It's the most sophisticated computer in the known Universe and you can learn to operate it.
I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures into your mind and superimpose an apple onto them, like adding a layer in Photoshop, perhaps with 90% opacity or a bit of inconsistent flickering. That's probably the best way I could describe the experience. Those edits I create are on another visual layer, inside my mind, which requires an active effort to have a consistent visual experience, but of course sometimes it can passively activate and you're just daydreaming without any effort. Personally, I have a hard time imagining faces. They change, they melt, sometimes they become inhuman. I only have consistent faces in my dreams.
The places I know well, I can fully navigate inside my mind, just flying around a town, going down streets and such. I, of course, don't believe neither the scaling or the distance is accurate, but it's convincing and consistent enough for me at the level of abstract thought.
I fully get immersed in the books I'm reading or listening to. It's the best part of reading a book.
I can imagine smell, taste, sound, touch, sight and even other senses like balance and whatever else. Sound would be the most vivid part of my imagination. High consistency and fidelity. I also have an inner monologue which I use in second person communication, addressing myself from the perspective of another entity.
I have anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and problems with rumination. I experience memories with a lot of emotion. Whenever I look at art or listen to music, I also tend to have a deep and powerful emotional reaction.
- "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..."
- counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.
But I don't feel like I am impacted in imagining simple algorithms. I also construct them of very simple forms and rearrange them in my mind. I also feel like it is a lot easier for me to imagine things „automatically“ due to it being memories or being a byproduct of thinking about something. But my mind struggles constructing these images at will.
Also taking a pen and drawing these things up can replace some of the missing imaginary power :)
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head.
The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely.
(I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice.
I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is.
The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people.
I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
So you can visualize a graph, as if it were drawn out on a sheet of paper?
I can only visualize involuntarily as I'm drifting off to sleep, so I know what it is and what it's like. But I can't consciously do it, never have been able to, even with decades of deliberate practice.
Where do we get this idea that there's a "normal", and everything outside of that requires some special diagnosis?
I tried visualizing some images now -- and it seems harder than I expected, seems harder with eyes closed (makes eveyrthing feel too dark and low contrast). But I think my dreams are more vivid than that.
Also I relized that when actively trying to imagine things, the "resolution" or sharpness/focus of the mental picture is very narrow -- I can only imagine the "details" of texture/surface of things when focussing attention on a very small and narrow field of "vision".
When I was a child I remember dreams occurred but they did not contain any vivid representations of anything. Just abstract images. Nothing you could classify as vivid, let alone a representation of reality in any sense.
The whole concept that you can actually “see” something that is not real and happening in the moment is non sensical to me.
Vivid dreams are just mysterious to me as the minds eye.
I always figured daydreaming was just a metaphor, and had no idea most people could use visual faculties outside of an actual dream state!
When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas. But I have no problems drawing an imaginary bike.
https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...
Yes. For most people it's more like a "schema" or a lossy compression. It can be placed in space, left or right or above or below other image-fragments, there can be colouring, shading, motion, sound. But it's not a faithful bike-image, although it's hard to notice that unless you try to draw it.
There are also other reasons why mental visualization doesn't necessarily mean one can draw it faithfully. For me, mental imagery has a kind of unstable three-dimensional quality, where I see the image from multiple overlapping, shifting perspectives, kinda like a Cubist painting. Different parts of the image have more or less detail over time; I can't hold fine detail about the whole thing simultaneously. If I wanted to draw it, I'd have to pin it to one perspective for long enough, and I can't make my mind do that.
This shouldn't be so surprising -- perspective and realistic representational art took a long time to develop in human history. It's a skill that has to be learned, and I haven't learned it.
Some people really can imagine a photorealistic picture of the bike though. They're usually either savants or trained artists.
Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like.
The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'. So i can understand how - some people - can 'see' what they think a bike looks like but then draw a mechanical mess.
Of course there are people with perfect recall, and others who design bikes for a living and so on. I'm really just describing how it could happen for some group of people.
And I don't believe for a second they "see" in the real sense, again, because I don't see anything. Only time I really see is in my dreams. So rather, ask people "do you see the apple just like you see it in your dreams?" I bet they don't.
Or funk knows, again I repeat, I only have my sensory experience to relate to and there's no visual element in it when I close my eyes.
2023: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544909v4 2021: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/ 2017: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521...
> do you see the apple just like you see it in your dreams?
Yes, pretty much.
I was reading the other day on HN that some people don't have an internal monologue and think very differently than I do (like thoughts just "appear" somehow?)
Now I'm wondering if there are any mind capabilities people possess that I don't? Humans are truly fascinating.
“Imagine a ball falling of the table.”
Asking questions of what was under the table or the color of the ball is useless (imo). Let me explain: Recall a dream of yours. What is out there in the dream world? Can you tell me what the retail tax is in that dream world? What house number the door of your dream world neighbor has? No? For me the answer is no. Because I only create answers to these questions if they are relevant to the dream or asked.
I forgot the study, but it claimed that people often retrospectively imagine detail based on the question asked. (Citation needed)
I like to believe that dreams and imagination share aspects. And one aspect I see in both of them is that, similarly to video games, any detail is kept to the necessary minimum.
It doesn’t matter what is under the table, it is about a ball falling off the table. Its color doesn’t matter, the color has no effect on the story.
If you retrospectively ask me those questions, you’re just testing if I’m going to make one up in the spot, make one up on the spot and tell myself I didn’t or not make one up on the spot.
I think of my imagination as an abstract realm I can control, that is limited by my ability to comprehend. It’s less vivid than a dream, but a dream gives me no control. Anything I imagine is a feeling, there is no incoming physical aspect.
And the reason why it’s so hard to measure or quantify is because it is best described as a feeling.
Does anybody have the link, I've been searching for it for like a year since I forgot to backup my bookmarks before a resinstall.
I can traumatize myself with what I can see in my mind's eye it's so strong, but for her, she has absolutely no ability to visualize whatsoever.
I also found this study asking a similar question about many different types of mental illnesses, though some of it is about making people that have aphantasia better able to visualize to treat things like PTSD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9614338/
from all i read about things like this, the more it become apparent that we all experience things in a unique way.
That doesn't mean I can't recognise people when I see them, though that can sometimes be a struggle. It's just that I can't (or don't) "picture" them later.
I've never considered it a problem. For a start, because I've no clear idea of what I look like, either, I've never had to worry much about that. Slightly more strangely, and it took me a long while to realise this, I've never taken or collected family photographs; I've managed to remember who my relatives are perfectly well without having to get them to pose, yet it's my relatives who think that's odd.
If there is a downside, it's that I'd make a terrible witness. But I have a feeling that most witnesses are fairly terrible, it's just that most of them don't know it. As you said, we all experience things in unique ways, and that's only a problem if we forget it.
Which is largely why I don't care for "aphantasia" as a label. It's like having a word for people who don't dream in music or visualise mathematical functions; it'd include so many, that it'd serve no purpose.
As a simple example. Do you picture the letters you are going to write before writing a note? I don't know the mechanic, but I can write notes without effort. In the same vein, simple objects like geometric shapes are very easy for me to draw, no visualization needed. I suspect it's the same for most.
However, I did give up on drawing because I recognized I couldn't visualize a scene and place it on paper easily. It felt like I was drawing with poor planning which resulted in lots of mistakes, corrections and ultimately frustration.
However, I'm not sure if I qualify as someone with true aphantasia or not. I can visualize things, but I can't hold them in my mind. I see it briefly, like a flash, but can't hold onto it. I've tried to practice holding an image in my mind without success.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.
But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.
And my audio/music recall is excellent.
Imagine a table with a ball on it. A person is approaching the table, pushes the ball gently, and the balls starts to roll.
Questions:
(1) What color has the ball?
(2) Is the person male or female?
(3) What material is the table made of?
(4) When you answered questions (1)-(3), did you know the answer beforehand, or did you think about when you were reading the questions?
Depending on your answer to question (4) you can assume if you have it or not.
His replies were short, but he managed to pack into them not only a comprehensible answer to my question, but also hinted at something I really hadn't expected in his two-word final reply: "Pseudo- mostly..."
To clarify, a pseudohallucination is a "hallucination" that you know isn't real. A hallucination, strictly speaking, is imaginary sensory input that you don't realize is imaginary. So, his reply seems to suggest that he's encountered people whose hyperphantasic pseudohallucinations (being able to overlay vivid visualizations onto the field of stuff they're actually seeing with their actual eyes) sometimes cross the line into bona fide hallucinations; i.e., they lose track, even if only temporarily, of what's real and what's imagined. Which is just endlessly fascinating.
Readers/commenters on this topic may find it interesting -- sorry, most of it is me going on about what my visualization is like, but I guess it forms the necessary backdrop for some of his answer to be useful anyway.
This topic, or the comments diverging from it, also seems to overlap with the topic of "unsymbolized thinking"; I've dumped some more stuff of possible interest on that: https://www.pastery.net/vvapdr/ with a bit of context in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40774163
======== Me: ========
Hi,
I'm looking for some clarification on the exact nature of visualization as I'm not sure what it's meant to be like.
The Wikipedia article on aphantasia mentions activation of the visual cortex. So am I supposed to be generating an actual visual input that I feel like I can see with my eyes?
When I visualize something, it's not really there on that literal visual level. I physically see the inside of my eyelids and the visualized image is not projected such that I feel like my eyes are actually seeing it. Instead it's somewhere else; sometimes it feels as if it's somewhere behind my eyes. Nonetheless, the image can be vivid in its own way, precise and consistent. I can rotate and manipulate it. I can move a light source around the object and "see" the shadow change, or place my point of quasi-view within a scene. This comes along with mental impressions of other sensory inputs that, similarly, are "vivid" but clearly not actually being sensed from the outside world.
Is this what it's supposed to be? What point on the scale would reflect this in the visualization quiz?
Thanks
======== Adam: ========
…it sounds to me as if you are in the 3-4/5 territory…seeing imagery as if you were ‘really’ seeing is the exception, but for most of us visual imagery has a visual ‘feel’, which sounds to be the case for you…
======== Me: ========
Thanks for the reply. To clarify, the "really seeing" exception is akin to a visual hallucination, or rather pseudohallucination?
======== Adam: ========
Pseudo- mostly…
And apparently they can prove differences with MRIs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/