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.
For what it's worth, I can't conjure anything other than a few fleeting details for something visual. When I manage to surface a distinct image, it vanishes pretty fast. But (if I can remember it) I can "imagine" the taste of a specific chocolate bar, a sound (particularly voices) or how something feels to touch very distinctly. I'd say "accurately" as well, but that's hard to gauge.
I imagine that's the same for "both sides".
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.
I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue.
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-th...
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.
I assume they create a mental model of space. To me, this is basically what I’m describing as visualisation. In ones mind one can arbitrarily place themselves in space and move around it. I guess this is slightly different to conjuring up an image, but to me it feels very similar. If you can “see” space in your minds eye, it seems like you could see other arbitrary things.
I’m not saying I don’t think this is a real phenomena, just that it’s hard to empathise and understand it.
If you could describe your experience of navigation from memory I would appreciate it. When someone asks you for directions somewhere, what goes through your mind?
its really weird to me, and most everyone that you could be looking at a cup and trying to commit its visual properties to memory, and then close your eyes and be complete incapable of re-constructing even a vague visual representation of it.
You can see references to this geospatial sense in ancient Roman times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
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.
Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
Someone with the condition you describe (zero mental imagery) would, constantly, feel like they are seeing basic objects for the very first time, you wouldn't recognize anything at all, this would be a highly debilitating condition just like severe amnesia.
I totally get that you, having lived a life where mental imagery is such an integral part of your baseline experience, assume that many of the things you rely on it for require it. However, the human brain is impressively adaptable, and it turns out many, many aspects that people assume are linked (and may well be for them as individuals) are not globally so.
This thread is full of such realizations - people assuming ability at chess, art, tetris, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, architectural design, conceptualizing of DB schemas, etc. must be correlated with facets of thought like strength of mental imagery, presence of an inner monologue, ability to dream, etc. In all of those cases, people have chimed in with (anecdotal, to be sure) counterexamples. It turns out brains are generally capable of doing a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.
“I’m sitting in a room with a dog and a TV. Then someone says ‘visualize a stop sign.’ And, so then I’m sitting in a room with a dog, a TV and a stop sign. I’m know the stop sign isn’t real. It might be fuzzy or even black & white. But, I can see it between the dog and the TV.”
Well… I know exactly what a stop sign looks like. But, there’s no stop sign in the room with me and my dog. It’s not there at all.
So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the hash of a picture, and performing comparisons using the hash, not the picture itself.
I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes are closed, my guess is everyone would fail.
In the 1-5 guide, I'd probabably rate myself a 99 or something silly. I feel like the equipment is capable of visualising, but I just don't know how to operate it.
However, I do have involuntary visualizations. My dreams are images, very unlike thought. And in the last 5 or so years I can recall 2 occasions where I was in a relaxed state and pictured things without really trying, so I know it's possible to have dream like images when awake.
My wife says she can just perfect recall stuff. I entirly believe she can visualise, but I believe she confuses what happened with what she can see. She also states she can visualise the apple, or pretty much anything else she wants.
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.
I'm absolutely terrible with faces and names, though, but I think that's mostly due to poor social conditioning.
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.
Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
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.
The difference is that a book is already in a format I don't need to convert (to images) anymore.
About the 3x: if I need to show someone something to read on a screen and need to wait to scroll to the next page, I just read it 3 times and scroll then, it normally fits a "normal" reading speed.
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.
It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.