What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images | Hacker News Reader

What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

quantamagazine.org

242 pointsVHRanger432 comments

I've never understood how people talk so objectively and confidently about this. There are subjective things we'll never able to compare, like whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped. Then there are other things like face blindness that have testable effects in the real world. When one person says they see 80% clear mental pictures and another person says 10%, how can we be so sure they aren't just describing the same experience differently? I have no idea how I could accurately report my experience of the apple test. I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing.

EDIT: It also reminds me of the "inner monologue". I'm skeptical when people confidently claim they have no inner monologue, as if it's as easy to verify as being right-handed or left-handed. In the context of meditation, it's common for people to confuse "having no thoughts" with "thinking nonstop" -- it's not an easy thing to understand about yourself, let alone claim how it relates to other people's subjective experience.

I think that means that you have aphantasia? I just asked my wife if she can see the apple and she can, no doubts, she pointed to it and asked what I meant, of course she could see it, she was imagining it and that is what imagining means. I feel like I'm missing out now, I kind of wish I hadn't read the story now.

If it means being able to hallucinate on command, i.e. superimpose the apple in your view as if you were wearing AR glasses, indistinguishable from a real apple apart from your knowledge that it's fake -- then that's a much sharper test and I can confidently say I can't do that. I'd be very surprised if anyone told me they could do that. If it's more of a separate mental plane rather than really seeing it, that's where I think it gets tricky to agree we're describing the same thing.

People can absolutely do that. I'm very close to that myself. I can "see" through walls, for example. If I'm familiar with a room I can describe to you what it would look like from the angle I'm looking at, with the wall deleted.

Do you find drawing easy then, since you could trace around a visualization? That seems like it could be a useful test. I would expect those without aphantasia to be better at contour drawings (e.g. cartoon characters) if it really feels superimposed on normal vision.

I can not see a thing with my minds eye most times (it has happened once) but I can easily sketch out the rooms in my house from a specific vantage point.

All the information is there, not just a visual, so I don't think it'd be a viable test at all.

I think it should work in the other direction though. You might draw well even without mental pictures, but if someone has AR-glasses-style superimposed images but can't trace them on paper, that would seem strange to me.

The limiting factor is the sketching skill, I'm afraid!

No, what you are stating is not what he asked.

> indistinguishable from a real apple

This is like saying what you perceive in your head through the wall is exactly as real, vibrant and tangible as if that wall was actually replaced by a window. Most everybody can describe, or "picture," a familiar room in their head - even from long ago like walking through the house you grew up in - but it is not the same as saying it is indistinguishable from actually being in the room and your eyeballs actually looking at it.

at least in my mind, it feels like there are two different systems for "imagine something" and "see it from this angle". Imagining something sets it into a sort of virtual space, and seeing it from this angle overlays reality with it. It's not a fully realized tangible experience but it's a lot closer than people with less vivid visualization think it is.

My point is not "I can do this", but rather, "I'm close to that, and it's foolish to think the continuum ends where I am."

> I have no idea how I could accurately report my experience of the apple test. I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing.

Same on my end. As far as I'm concerned, I don't see an apple, but basically just in the sense that I'm not hallucinating—with my eyes open, there is no apple before me, and with my eyes closed, there is no apple on the insides of my eyelids, and I don't think that there is. I feel like I could answer questions about the appearance of my imagined apple, but I don't literally see it. But does that mean that I have aphantasia? Since this seems to be the main diagnostic instrument for a casual Googler, and since, as you say, there's no way for me to understand whether or not other people "really" see an apple, I have no idea.

(If people think that your point about never really knowing what other people are seeing is merely academic or philosophical, I'll mention that my mother went a long time before getting her amblyopia treated because she assumed that's what things looked like for everybody. Nothing in ordinary conversation told her, or anyone else, that her vision was different, and so no-one ever thought to test her for it.)

Similar to colour blindness, someone with amblyopia cannot fake not having it, and it’s actually difficult for someone without it to fake having it.

The same cannot be said of aphantasia, which is trivial to fake and almost as trivial to mask. Combine this with some social desirability bias, and you have a perfect recipe for a complete non-condition.

Right?

I literally don't believe that aphantasia meaningfully "exists" given what we've learned about brains. I'm reminded of the great article I saw about how "Your mind is not a computer?" No one remembers "images" in the way a computer does, we (re)construct them via association.

So I think our brains "remember" enough to do what it needs to do and no more, and so called aphantasia people are perhaps doing what subjectively feels like less reconstruction based on what they read.

I’d say this is pretty accurate as someone who considers themselves to have aphantasia. When I remember what apples look like there’s no feeling of reconstruction. It’s just a list of facts. The idea that reconstruction would even be necessary, or part of, remembering things seems surprising to me.

What it practically means? I have no idea. I’m absolutely worse at remembering things like clothes someone left the house in but that could also just be me paying less attention to things like that.

When I realized I have aphantasia and told my wife, she said that makes total sense. For example, when imagining how a piece of clothing looks on someone, she can take it, put it on someone, change the color even. All those things sound ridiculous to me.

I'm using "reconstruction" loosely here. What I'm trying to describe is the process that our brains use to think about ANYTHING and why it's nothing at all like how computers reread a series of ones and zeros.

I have once seen clear mental images, but consider myself to have aphantasia because I've only experienced that once.

I also have mental images while dreaming, but not so clear, that persist for short periods as I'm aware I'm waking up.

The three experiences are nothing remotely alike.

> how people talk so objectively and confidently about this

I can visualise things in my head exactly the same as someone with their eyeballs removed can see real things.

I think that's relatively objective.

And I say this with confidence.

There are billions of people who have claimed with absolute confidence that they can talk to the disembodied spirit of a man who was nailed to a tree two thousand years ago, and that this is objective fact.

The thing that finally made me very confident that I had aphantasia (back in 1998, before it was A Thing) is that I realized that my ability to "hallucinate" sounds is excellent. I can re-hear songs in my head, I can compose music and hear it as I think about it, I can hear my friends and family talking with their particular cadences and accents. I can't do anything remotely like that with visual images. Before I had that realization, I thought it was pretty possible that I was "just describing the same experience differently".

Conversely, I discovered I had anauralia (finally got a name for my inability to "hallucinate" sounds). I found it when I was hosting a weekly event and meeting lots of people. And we talked about senses and memory, etc. And one day I realized I have no sounds in my memory, nor do I get songs stuck in my head. I asked others and it was instantly clear they had a different experience than mine.

We have algorithms that can hallucinate now.

LLMs basically are examples of how humans visualize things. With a few differences. Humans have more fine grained control over the result and understanding of a query. LLMs have greater detail in the sense that the LLMs knows the location of every wrinkle on a face while our imagination delivers an approximation with detail only being rendered if we decide to focus on the details.

This is interesting - if you think of a popular tune, say, the opening chords to Hells Bells, (or whatever is popular for you) doesn't it make an impression in your head from chord to chord? I'm not saying it's identical to hearing a sound, but loud enough to kind of crowd out everything else in your head (to the point of actually being annoying?)

The thing I never got with the "Close your eyes, can you visualize a Red Star" - is that I can "conceive" what a red-star is like but I can't even imagine what "visualizing" a red star would be - do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head? Or are there people who can actually pick up the actual image in exactly the same way they hear a sound? (I'm presuming not)

There is zero difficulty in my mind distinguishing between the sound I hear and the sound in my "head" - but at least I have an ability to hear sounds.

On the flip side while I have absolutely no ability to view images in my head 99.9% of the time, about 0.1% of the time, usually just in the 5 or so minutes before I fall asleep - I do see thinks in my head - to the point of being fascinated by them - but in this case - I'm actually seeing things, even though I have no control over it. It's different from when I'm hearing things - because that is mentally hearing things, whereas when I'm seeing things as I fall asleep - it's not mental at all - I actually see them (albeit with my eyes closed). It's a real image - not a mental one.

You are the first person to have given me a sense of what it means to "visualize" if it means something similar to "hearing" a song in your head.

It's also different from the inner monologue, btw. That's identical to my ability to hear sounds. Clearly there. Clearly mental. Sometimes chatty to the point of being distracting - but there is no doubt whatsoever that it's a mental dialogue - nothing whatsoever like actual sounds.

I see a 5 point star with a red glow and sharp edges, with two points in the middle of each side of the centre of star illustrating depth. I can "twist" it in my mental space and see the gradients shift.

The imagination spectrum applies to all senses, so we all have varying degrees of it. Some can visualize every sense very well, others only vague faint unclear versions, some a mix!

What other senses can one imagine or not? Never considered it.

I can recall/imagine taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch (texture and temperature), body movement, spacial awareness, and maybe more.

I can vividly imagine doing a physical feat, all the imaginary senses and sensations. Same as hearing a song in my head or imagining a red star.

It follows that there are others who can't imagine the other senses. What super imaginary powers might someone else have that is equally beyond my own? I heard of a guy with synesthesia who imagined numbers as complex 3d shapes and he could multiply large numbers in his head by, lego style, combining the shapes. The mind is wild.

obviously not at all an expert or even qualified in the fields of neuroscience or psychology, so speaking as a layman, but I think it's all a continuum, from your external sense organs like ears and eyes via the connecting nerves to the inner reaches of the brain.

I think the initial stimulus can originate at any part of this circuit.

So I do not think there is much difference between external so-called real stimuli and internal ones.

it's all just vibrations, processing, and reverberations :)

> I'm not saying it's identical to hearing a sound, but loud enough to kind of crowd out everything else in your head (to the point of actually being annoying?)

I'm the same way and my impression is that, no, most people don't have an auditory imagination anywhere near that strong. I actually work hard to avoid songs that are notoriously catchy and annoying because I know I won't get the earworm out of my head if it gets in.

I basically always have a loop of music playing in my head. Which piece of song is stuck playing in a loop varies over time, but it's very rarely silence. Often, it will be a sort of jumble of a couple of different things. (Right now it's a line from some annoying meme song my daughter just sang and a bit of the bassline from Basement Jaxx's "Red Alert".)

I'll often wake up with a different song stuck in my head because there's music in my dreams too.

> about 0.1% of the time, usually just in the 5 or so minutes before I fall asleep - I do see thinks in my head - to the point of being fascinated by them - but in this case - I'm actually seeing things, even though I have no control over it.

This is called a "hypnagogic hallucination" and is pretty common for all people to experience.

Hypnagogic hallucinations for me aren't in my head -- the objects (always lots of spiders) are as real as reality, but instantly disappear when I put the light on, leaving my brain trying to figure out where they went (it takes time to realise it has been tricked).

I can't really see objects in my head, but music I can play perfectly like it's an iPod. Usually just gets stuck on one track all day, though.

I know I've heard Hells Bells before because the name is recognizable, but I have literally nothing coming up when trying to imagine what it sounds like.

Another fun story. I did improv comedy for a few years. One of the warm up games we played was someone would start singing a song, then another person would tag you out and sing a different song. I was bad at this game. But I have a few simple things in my back pocket to "play". Somewhere over the rainbow is one of them. The last person was doing some sort of rap, and what came out from me was a rap version, until the crowd helped correct it. I just have no idea what it sounds like other than trying to memorize if it's a high pitch or a low pitch, etc.

Regarding the inner monologue, I do have one. And it feels similar to my ability to visualize. I can control it, give it emotion per say, (not sound for me), but it isn't as strong as a memory of a dream.

Are you saying you can't remember any songs?

I can hum Jingle Bells (or 1000+ other songs, the Star Spangled Banner, Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, any pop song from the last few decades, etc...). The experience of imagining the song is the same as humming it except I don't actually hum it.

It sounds like you're saying you can't hum a song or even remember one? Can't remember anyone's voice? Can't rememeber the sound of fireworks? Of cars going by?

Not the guy you’re replying to, but his description matches my experience.

I can’t hum songs anymore complicated than the “Happy Birthday” song (but if it plays, I’ll recognize it).

I can’t remember people’s voices in my head (but if I hear them speaking, I’ll recognize it is them).

The bang of a fireworks or a car going by is simple enough to recall. It is also generic. I might not remember the hum of the engine of a specific car, or be able to play back a specific fireworks display.

Same here. Plus aphantasia.

Explains why I had such difficulty singing my whole life. It must be way easier if you can just recall a song in your head and match its pitch!

I cannot sing but I can create songs in my head including multiple instruments and vocalists. Admittedly, I have given singing very little effort past age 8.

Yes, this is essentially my experience. I can't recall sound, but if I may "tag" features to a sound so that I can somewhat imagine it.

Like the idea of a firework bang, being low intense vibrations, or a car horn being a high pitched short startling sound. Still can't really imagine it like I can picture things in my head, but I have an idea of the what the experience would be like.

> do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head?

Yes, that's a very good description of what the experience is like.

When you're auralizing(?) a song, you can choose which memory of the song you're listening to, and you can tap along with the beat, whistle along with the melody, sing along with the words, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually hearing the song, right?

Visualizing something is the same, you can manipulate the image in your mind, rotate, choose different memories of the thing - or imagine new ways the thing could look, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually seeing the thing in front of you.

When you said "red star", I imagined a red giant star, protuberances and sunspots and all, floating in space. Then someone else commented about a "five-pointed star", so I shifted my imaginary image to a stylized five-pointed red star icon instead. Same as you would imagine listening to one song, and then swapping to a completely different one with the same title.

With visual memories - so it’s something like that interface from Minority Report?

Can be. It's easier to project it on inner "canvas" than as overlay on top of ambient, but that's still possible.

Hell's Bells start with a loud pulsating synth percussion and fanfare playing the theme, not chords. Great choice though, as it's extremely memorable, but, unfortunately, hardly popular.

To the rest of your comment, it's fascinating how it's all a spectrum. I can't visualize a star, can hear sounds but have no inner monologue.

I'm not sure what "Hell's Bells" you're thinking of, but the GP is plainly describing the song by AC/DC from 1980. It most definitely does not contain pulsating synth percussion, but is extremely popular.

Right, blanked on that one. I immediately thought of Bruford's one, a real earworm.

Trying to imagine that it does is quite fun, though.

To communicate to others my experience with imagination versus hallucination in discussions like this, I've used the device of seeing differently from either eye at the same time.

If I put my hand a couple inches away from my face, in front of one eye only, I can still 'see' aspects of that hand with the uncovered eye.

Analogously, when I imagine a 'red star', it is visible in a different medium / realm (like my covered eye) than the rest of the things I see around me (with my uncovered eye). I can 'insist on' or 'overlay' the imagined image, like the red star situated in a particular spot on my desk, but I do not feel that they 'become the same visual stream', ever, such that I would think that the star could be physically present in the room.

I'm also a more auditory person in that I can imagine a whole orchestra playing in my 'minds ear', among other things.

I've recently been wondering about the fact that I am pretty sensitive to sounds and may have trouble concentrating in a very noisy environment (especially if the sounds are not constant/predictable.)

My hypothesis is that this inability to concentrate well in a noisy environment is a trait that mostly affects people who are more 'auditory'. Thoughts/experiences?

I get songs stuck in my head but only as if I am humming them to myself, never sounding like instruments or the voices of other people. And I'm not a good singer, so it's infuriating.

I'm so glad there are conversations about this. I'm the same way here - in fact, part of the way I keep track of time passing is to listen to a song in my head. I've had really strong aural hallucinations here and there in my life. A doorbell, clear as clear gets, except I know it didn't happen.

And so many things I read about aphantasia are spot-on aligned with my own experience, but put into a comparative context I hadn't really thought about until the word was more or less invented a decade ago, and the idea leaked out into the internet. The line about "weaker autobiographical memories" in this article really hit home for me. I take so many photos now - thank goodness for digital photography - and in the context of this topic, it's no wonder.

I've also struggled to remember dreams, all my life - and also thought the 'counting sheep' thing never made sense, at all.

Do people with aphantasia do badly at Pictionary?

I often get really detailed mental imagery. Often unbidden, when daydreaming. My drawing skills are ok too.

When I partner with my brother it's almost telepathy. I can draw a single curved line and he'll correctly guess 'elephant' before any players have even put pencil to paper.

From the two studies I saw, the difference would be in drawing details and colors, but not in spatial or high-level features. So, I'd guess it could be a small difference in Pictionary.

I can visualize zero but I dominate at pictionary. Different part of brain

I’ve always wondered about this too.

I can’t imagine/see mental images the same as having a real screen in front of me.

I can imagine a triangle. I can’t “see” it, it has no color and no brightness/darkness. Can’t really even describe the size. More like feeling around in a dark room. But the triangle is gone the instant I stop thinking about it. I wouldn’t be able to imagine a game of Tic Tac Toe.

Some people call this normal, some don’t. I have no idea.

I can imagine music too — and find it takes far less effort. (But can’t remember exactly what I imagined — more like just enjoying as it happens)

I have higher than average ability to visualize mental images. It's not like a screen but more like wearing augmented reality glasses with very low brightness/opacity to the point where the images have only 1% solidity. Also, the detail level of the images is low, similar to an impressionist painting. However, properties of color, size, and 3D spatial location and orientation are all well-defined, so for example I can imagine a (very low opacity, very rough, impressionist style) picture of Mario or Luigi standing upon this line of text on my screen and being 1 inch tall. It's my understanding that this level of capability is higher than average, but less than talented artists like painters or sculptors. Despite not being good enough for a career in art, this mildly better than average ability level, combined with being able to code, allowed me to be quite successful as an augmented reality prototyper in the first half of my career.

It looks roughly like the detail level of picture "C" in this picture: https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2014... But with much less brightness/opacity/solidity than that, maybe 20x less (i.e., only 5% of the brightness/opacity/solidity of the tie fighter image - but same level of lack of detail)

You can improve this ability through practice. If you spend 10 minutes every day concentrating on visualizing that triangle with more detail & specificity, like an art student would, you'll gradually improve.

There's little to indicate ability to visualize correlates all that strongly to art skills. E.g. Ed Catmull of Pixar fame has aphantasia, and on learning about it surveyed Pixar's artists and whole I think he found some correlation, some of their most talented artists also had aphantasia.

I have it, but could draw pretty well when younger (not practiced in decades). What I found, though, was that my style was very different depending on if I drew from a model or from memory.

There was research into this and you’re right that it doesn’t correlate necessarily.

People with aphantasia are absolutely crap though with drawing anything from memory, but they can draw if something is in front of them.

As I pointed out, I could draw just fine from memory, despite aphantasia. So could many of Pixars animators.

How clear are images in your dreams? Clearer than picture "C"?

Mine are clearer than picture "C" though when I try to focus on something they tend to fade to black. Sometimes though I have dreams in HD where when I focus on something the details reveal themselves and everything is clear and sharp.

I don't think internal audio and visual imagery are comparable. Things you see have no time dimension (like a photo is just one instant). A song, on the other hand, is a "stream" of audio, a sequence of sounds, and therefore has a time dimension - but no height or width or shape whether you are hearing it live, listening to a recording, or playing it back in your head. It's not tangible, there is less to remember (like an audio file is just a tiny percentage of a video file).

All I'm saying is plenty of people can play back songs in their head, or replay a conversation (or practice a future one) - it's why having a song stuck in your head is a universal experience - but not be able to internally "view" or "picture" objects with anywhere near similar fidelity, and therfore being good with sounds but bad with imagery is quite common, and not indicative of a condition (which is being called "aphantasia" here.)

When another poster described a red star with sun spots I started forming a moving image in my mind of a sun with swirling in motion sun spots

It sounds like you're talking more about memory than ability to imagine? As a child I used to watch cartoons in my head when lying in bed at night waiting to go to sleep - they weren't remembered though; excepting they were abstracted from actual cartoons.

I have very poor ability to imagine/remember music. Though curiously I'm good at "intros" (guessing songs from the first few notes); I couldn't hum you the first few notes of anything.

Or maybe you just have some aphantasia?

My visual imagination absolutely can have a time dimension just like my audio imagination. I can remember sequences of film from movies I have seen many times with high level of detail, and then if I so choose change what happens in that sequence to whatever I want.

I think it's more that as humans our audio fidelity in general is less detailed than our visual fidelity so it is easier for us to notice limitations in our ability to imagine visuals than in our ability to imagine audio.

Hmm. Me too; you're describing me. But I'm a skeptic on this subject. I can't help but think this is just too prone to fantastical and placebo-like thinking. I can't help but suspect that the vast majority of people experience the same thing---they just describe it differently. It's also unscientific, and that has to mean something.

(I don't mean to be dismissive; I do think this is an awesome topic to debate and talk about though, it's a great path for us to maybe understand qualia a bit deeper, if that's possible at all.)

The difference is dreams and imagination for me. Ask me about an apple while awake and I’ll close my eyes and it’s dark blackness of a void.Extreme aphantasia (I also am face blind)

Ask me about it while dreaming and it’s a full on 3D movie/VR experience.

Music too I can play that in my head no problem like my own radio (unless it has words then I can’t imagine it at all) - so I suck at karaoke. Even trying to sing with songs I can’t process it correctly unless it’s tonal sounds from the words.

For a neuroscience background we are certainly not all wired the same. You are correct though that aligning those descriptions and untangling social meanings and words from experience is tricky.

> Ask me about an apple while awake and I’ll close my eyes and it’s dark blackness of a void.Extreme aphantasia

Uhhhhhhhh.......I don't think that's extreme at all. Isn't that normal?? I just asked several people today to close their eyes and imagine an apple (or anything else) and everyone just sees black.

If you could see objects with your eyes closed, I think that's called having a photographic memory? (Which is...rare?)

This is where the confusion stems from.

I can have very vivid mental imagery, I can imagine all sorts of fantastical things in detail in my mind on command. But that doesn't mean I don't see black when I close my eyes. It doesn't mean the mental imagery blocks what I can see normally with my eyes open. It is in your "mind's eye", so it is still triggering the vision parts of the brain, but almost like its on a different screen.

Similarly with imagining sound or music. I can almost perfectly recall some of my favorite music, I can compose a new piece (poorly) in my head based on music and sounds I have heard, but none of it will drown out an actual sound I hear around me.

That being said, if I am very mentally focused on some mental imagery it can still distract me from my real vision and or even sort of "replace it" without my closing my eyes. Sort of like the feeling you get when driving and zoning out thinking about something (but you are still safely driving).

Do you have dreams?

If so do you see things in these dreams?

I have aphantasia, and what makes me very certain is 1) that I have dreams and see things in them, and I experience nothing like that in a waking state, 2) except one time when I experienced something far clearer while meditating. It felt like walking around a movie-set in that I was 100% aware it was not real, but it looked entirely real; at the same time I knew that I was sitting and meditating and was still aware of my breath and the sensations of my body. It's possible it was a lucid dream, but I've also never had a dream that clear before or after.

Either way, I've experienced a range, where my normal day to day experience is no sign whatsoever of seeing anything except maybe occasionally sub-second vague flashes, and the best I've experienced was as if I was looking straight at a real scene. So my day to day experience stands out very, very starkly against both my regular dreams and that one experience.

The frustrating part about that experience is that it suggests I can see things in the right frame of mind, but I don't know how to bring it out.

Thanks for your insights.

I suspect the mind is just like a body in the sense that the more you engage a particular muscle the easier it gets.

When I’m struggling with something I find it helpful to reframe statements into questions to activate creativity and clear any unconscious barriers that the mind is enforcing.

I'd put myself into a similar category. Songs I can hear instruments in my head, my "inner voice" is very clear and I'm able to have conversations with myself (for example when coding).

But when I close my eyes I describe it best as a black-and-orange static. I'll occasionally get residual images. Ask me to describe something in detail I struggle - but I can conceptually describe a space for example.

These are very different to what I "see" when I meditate for example, which is more dream-like (and I assume similar processes kicking in)

Same. My mental image is like an after image from staring too long into the sun. I think it‘s best described like being similar to how echolocation in a sense. Just traces of objects and their positions.

I've gone back and forth trying to decide whether or not I have aphantasia, mainly because like you internal sounds are so vivid for me and it's not at all the same for my visual phenomena. But after doing visualization practices as part of my meditation practice I think it's something I've gotten a lot better at. Often in vajrayana buddhism you'll be given some visual object to meditate on (a buddha, mandala, a river flowing, fire, etc) and at first there is a lot of discursiveness to it while you're meditating: the trees look like this, the river is flowing this way, the shadows are here, etc. Then that sort of dies down until (for me) a very vague image starts to appear. It's in a different space than where my eyes would produce an image, it's more dream like, and you sort of just let go of paying attention of visual phenomena that arise at your closed eye space and go to a more immersive dream space where you're sort of in the scene itself.

But maybe I have aphantasia and am totally wrong!

I think there's a profound difference in the aural vs. visual experience. For me, imaginging songs, "hearing" an earworm, even for songs in other languages, I think I'm using my inner monolouge system. Instead of thinking, I'm "inner humming". The profound difference being, we can produce sounds, we can sing, hum, go "ba-doom-tish!" in our heads. But we can't (at least I can't) produce visions at will. I must be able to in some sense because I remember things I "saw" in dreams. And I can get a sense of places I know - usually the best remembered are from my childhood. Things that I've remembered a hundred times. But if you ask me to imagine an apple, there's nothing to be seen even though I can think of its shape, and details and draw what I'm thinking of, which is basically a memory of an apple. However, at night, with eyes closed when drifting off to sleep, if I think about what my closed eyes are "seeing" I can get very vague impressions of random things. On occasion I've been able to influence what pops in there to an extent but I can't do it on command. What I think is happening here is there's enough noise in my visual processing that lines up to remind me of something - a house, a tree and my brain fillsin the rest. But even this is like a looking at a photographic negative with candlelight that goes out after 250 ms.

Memories are also highly fallible, there are many experiments that prove people will rewrite what they did and why they did it and believe the new version of reality fully.

I remember reading somewhere that consciousness is like a public relations manager. It makes sense that highly social creatures that will die if shunned by their tribe would have a complex system for explaining their actions in the most positive light possible.

Every once in a while, before falling asleep I enter a "mellow" state in which I can conjure mental images dramatically more vividly than normally. I would say that normally it varies between 10-50% of vividness (also depends on the state of mind, the day, whether I'm under the influence of different chemicals), and in this state of mind it's 90%+ vivid.

And I don't confuse this state of mind with lucid dreaming: I had spontaneous lucid dreams a few times. They were not very vivid, just as my normal dreams (I dream in images, and they are maybe around 50% vivid).

So, there is definitely a way to experience variation of vividness of mental imagery, by a single observer.

I have this too, especially when I’m really tired. It’s such a surreal yet refreshing experience. I can hear the most beautiful melodies my ears have ever heard, even though I don’t have a musical bone in my body. And I jump in and out of various vague visual scenes (like staring into deep space) during this.

It always makes me question if I’m dreaming or not - and often, it’s the last thought I remember before I actually drift off to sleep. All of this seems to happen during the span of 60 seconds max (judging from my heartbeats), but this has categorically been debunked when my wife once told me I was actually snoring for a couple of minutes.

The melody thing I assume I have not suddenly become a master composer, rather the part of my mind capable of judging whether the music is any good has become impaired.

I don't consume chemicals but do meditate.

As I drift off to sleep sometimes it's fun to shift the inner eye to observe the mind and watch images float across my "viewport".

> They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

This is the line in the article that gets confusing for me. Like, are some people actually seeing an actual image of an apple, as if they were wearing VR goggles or something?

Where you fall on the imagination spectrum depends on how clear the object you are asked to visualize is in your mind.

For example if asked to visualize a green banana, and you can only see vague, unclear, faint outlines of a banana, that's hypophantasia. If you cannot see an image at all, it's aphantasia. Some might see vivid details of the banana, like the matte skin and subtle green gradient, they fall under hyperphantasia. Others who lack the details but are still clear considered phantasia.

This also applies to all other senses, like being able to imagine a sound or smell.

But surely nobody sees the fruit rendered into their actual vision as if all mental imagery appears as a literal hallucination in their vision.

Visual hallucinations due to mental illness are uncommon but not unknown. I'd be reluctant to dismiss the idea that someone on earth can and does do that. I'm pretty far down the visualization direction myself.

I've done a meditation where you sit open eyed and visualize something within the space.

It was cool. Sort of like a hazy projection over the visual field. Normally when I visualize something with my minds eye it is on a black background. When the visualization ends my visual field snaps back to reality.

Yes.

The imaginary apple doesn't seem fully comparable to a real apple unless I'm in a very focused and compelling daydream, and even then real but not real at the same time, if that makes sense. But even now if I was to conjure an image of a faint, ethereal apple in front of this computer screen, I can do it easily.

The major difference is VR goggles are fully vivid, and remain so when I'm not willing them to be, and tangible in some sense I'm sure is indefinable with people to aphantasia. The VR goggles are real in the same way things that aren't dreams are real.

Does the imaginary apple block you from seeing the comouter screen behind it? If you can honestly say it blocks your vision, like a real tangible apple, I'd give some credence to the idea (and also suggest that you not be permitted to drive, as it would be incredibly dangerous if simple thoughts could block you from seeing an actual car or stoplight in front of you).

It's perhaps a little like holding your hand up in front of one of your eyes but not the other. It "blocks" your vision, but you can still see behind it.

I don't personally have such a vivid visual imagination, but there are moments when it can feel like that — I won't know what I was physically looking at because I was so concentrated on a visual(-ish) mental image that obscured my awareness of the real world, to a degree.

> I won't know what I was physically looking at because I was so concentrated on a visual(-ish) mental image

Like the guy above, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle.

Alternatively, if I am physically able to close my eyes during driving then I should not be allowed to drive?

If you are unable to prevent your eyes from closing, yes, absolutely

No blinking allowed while driving?

You seem really angry that people are able to do this.

> I won't know what I was physically looking at

> obscured my awareness of the real world

Yes - because these are the same symptoms as someone who drives drunk and kills someone - "didn't see anybody walking there" (= unable to tell what you're looking at) "just a little buzzed" (= obscured awareness of reality) "I don't know what happened" (same)

You seem to have left out "because I was so concentrated on a visual(-ish) mental image" which is very convenient for your strawman argument. As noted, it takes a lot of concentration to maintain these visuals and it's not something you can do while multitasking. Imagine you are day dreaming and a friend waves at you but you didn't notice because you were lost in the dream. Maybe you don't get it because you are incapable of visualization but saying it's like being drunk is incredibly stupid and ignorant.

He doesn't say anything about it being voluntary or not. Day-dreaming isn't voluntary, that's why your friend can awkwardly interrupt you with a wave (as opposed to turning out the lights and closing the door which would be indicative of purposely napping/sleeping). In any case, people often get into heavy conversations while driving, especially on cell phones. Work-related, family-related (also, audiobooks), whether or not you choose to acknowledge it, people do get into "deep concentration" mode while driving, the difference is that most of us don't claim to actually see images in front of us while thinking of them.

Bit of a thread since my initial comment (:

Just to clear some things up, in case anyone cares:

(1) It is largely voluntary, what I tried to describe. Just like choosing to focus on your phone or the kids in the back seat while driving is voluntary. All of those are, of course, bad things to do. A good driver controls themselves — imagination included.

I wouldn't especially trust a driver's reaction time in "deep concentration" mode whether or not they were making pictures in their head, so I guess I don't see (ha) a big distinction.

Though actually, for me I find it harder to do mental visualization when there's a lot of real eyball visuals going on, as when driving. I have an easier time with a static background. Perhaps other people are different.

(2) I find that day-dreaming is somewhat voluntary, too. It can happen on its own, but it can also be a choice, like choosing to meditate. I don't understand your point about how someone else's ability to interrupt you makes it non-voluntary.

(3) I didn't mean to say I "see images in front of me." They are actually distinctly not in front of me — not outside my body. They live in a different space, if you will.

99% of people have this ability to visualise. And yeah, it’s crazy that they are allowed to drive!

Isn’t it distracting? Seeing stuff in front of you when you should be looking at the road?

No, because it doesn't happen randomly, it requires concentration and focus. Having random hallucinations is called schizophrenia. Mental visualization is not like that at all.

I thought everyone did. I mean I can just picture whatever I want. A big purple monster with 20 arms? Done. You want him running towards me or away? Now he is upside down. It's as natural as any other thought, to the point I'm sure others either just never taught themselves how to do it or they just interpret their thoughts in a different way from me, or are lying in order to be quirky and "not neurotypical" which is trendy.

Another fun thing is imagining things but not fully. The brain will fill in the spots but not throw you all the info at once. For example I didn't really think of the monsters nose, but now that I did, it has a huge nose piercing like a cow ring. This is great for creation because instead of creating with your foreground brain, you can create for free with your background brain. I'm pretty sure every person can do this (barring <0.01% population health issues).

I'm like this too, and if I want to consider variations I can instantly see rows and columns of whatever I'm considering with variances left, right, up, down, back and in.

I use this extensively when I code too. I can see the lines of code, to the degree I can read them, and I've not found a limit to how much code I can have in my head and visualize at a reading level. I can do this with every single line of code from an animated ray tracer I wrote in C back in '85. Any code that I personally felt proud to have created, given about 5 minutes to recall the details, I can write the code out from memory.

Beyond seeing the lines of code, I see functions and objects and data structures as geometric shapes, and their interactions vary between images of little machines, like airplanes, traveling between them to complex bridge structures like freeways with lot's of traffic.

I'm also a lucid dreamer. I can tell when I'm dreaming with a test: if I say "apple" with my hand held on front of me, palms up and an apple appears which I can then grasp and hold, then I'm dreaming. I'll often wake at that moment, but when I don't I start taking advantage and fly like Neo. Often I'll fly into something, and the jolt wakes me. I wake laughing too.

You had me until the sweeping generalisation. I can picture things clearly but only deep inside my head. I never (awake) see anything in front of my eyes that isn’t physically there.

In normal mode I also do this all in my head, dark background, nothing around it, but if I'm looking at something and want to picture it in a sort of augmented reality you can can just use what you see as the background, but it's still in my mind. I don't think anyone is inducing actual visual hallucinations if they are sober.

that's the point many are making. in your first comment you described exactly a visual hallucination and now you clarify it's nothing like it. it's too subjective that self-reporting becomes useless

You have fallen into the trap of believing that everyone's brain works the same, in that if you have an ability, everyone else must have it or they're lying.

It's funny for me, because I can "visualize" something in a non-visual way. I can transform it and imagine it fitting together with another object, or whatever. However, this is entirely non-visual. I see zero of this in my visual field, it's purely a sensation of seeing it without actually seeing it.

I also have nearly zero dream recall. I know I do dream, because occasionally I will wake up in the right part of my sleep cycle to literally feel the dream dissipating. Sometimes I can remember parts of it as it dissipates, but most of the time I have no clue what I dream after the fact.

> When one person says they see 80% clear mental pictures and another person says 10%, how can we be so sure they aren't just describing the same experience differently?

Who uses raw abstract percents? Even the meme version is much more competent than that: https://preview.redd.it/o1lktd5no9t61.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...

I was imagining people saying this in reference to a diagram like that (labelled with percentages instead of 1-5).

It's possible that two people would say numbers like this despite having the same experience and referencing the same diagram, but I would bet that very few people are that bad at interpreting the diagram.

Maybe I am one of those few people :) I don't know how to interpret that diagram. Based on some of the comments here I would put myself at #1, and based on others at #5.

A simpler test. Imagine a ball on a desk.

What color is the ball?

People who are #1 respond immediately, just as if you asked them about a real object in front of them. #4/#5 will ask “what do you mean what’s the color? I can imagine it to be a certain color” - in their head the ball is just an abstract concept labelled “ball”, it doesn’t have a color by itself.

You doubt that people can talk objectively and confidently about this, but then it seems like you conclude (implicitly or not) that we should therefore stick to the default of assuming everyone's experience is the same (and therefore the same as yours, btw). Alternatively you could take the difficulty of communication as a sign that we have at least just that much leeway concerning the difference between each others' experience.

You are skeptical when people say they have an internal monologue. Those without internal monologue would be skeptical when you say you do have an internal monologue. Your confidence is also based on nothing more than your personal experience + bias.

PS I firmly doubt those "swapped colour experience" ideas make any sense at all. Probably the thing that is assumed to be flipped is just that part of the experience that only seems to exist as an absolute, yet is actually not defined at all beyond its relations to other experiences.

I wasn't trying to convey that conclusion. I'm skeptical at people's confidence; I'm not confident that they're wrong. I think they discount how big a factor the difficulty in communication is.

On internal monologue, I said the opposite. I'm skeptical when people say things like "I also don't have an internal monologue. I don't passively think thoughts. I have to actively think everything."[1] I have a reason for this beyond personal experience and bias: that it's easy to be shockingly wrong in this direction. For example, many people will think they can count 60 breaths without being distracted by thoughts, only to find it impossible when they try and pay close attention.

Maybe the swapped color was a bad example. I just mean any direct comparison of qualia in different minds which is impossible to do, and therefore pointless to talk about.

[1] The first Reddit post I found searching for "no inner monologue"

Apt comment. I was sitting here thinking to myself, "Do I see mental images often? At all? Yes I think I do... But is it less than others? Or about normal? How would I know?"

Also, I think people who say they have no inner monologue think an inner monologue is like JD on Scrubs thinking to himself.

To me, my inner monologue is like that, and it is constant, every waking moment unless I make conscious efforts to suppress it, like while meditating.

As for mental images, I have them all the time while dreaming, but I've only experienced them once in my life while fully awake, and profoundly clearer than any dream. I can remember what some of the images in a few dreams looked like, but once I start waking up, the visuals fade within 30 seconds or so of being aware.

> There are subjective things we'll never able to compare

It's certainly difficult to perfectly compare qualia in absolute terms across minds. It's less difficult to compare qualia within the same mind. And if one person reports they experience two things equivalently, and another person reports they experience two things incredibly differently... it's hard to claim the two people must be experiencing the world equivallently.

Some people hallucinate through drugs or mental illness, and find themselves unable to distinguish said hallucinations from reality. If only one of us sees the pink elephant tap dancing in the middle of the room... it's likely that one person is hallucinating.

Some people dream vividly, to the point where they can't always immediately discern if a memory was from when they were awake or when they were asleep. I have had such dreams. Others are able to identify specific diminished senses that they were able to use to immediately distinguish the dream from reality. I have had such dreams.

Some people are able to visualize scenes and describe them in far greater detail than I ever could from mere imagination, which helps back up their claims to being able to effectively vividly hallucinate/dream at-will in ways I've never accomplished.

> I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing.

I can see an apple in reality.

I can see an apple in vivid dreams.

I could presumably see an apple if I ever hallucinated one.

I cannot in good conscious say I can "see" an apple through visualization alone without a great deal of effort to get an incredibly mediocre result that even a toddler's enthusiastic and proud parents would have qualms about pinning to the fridge.

Some people will be able to go into immediate detail about the color and texture of the apple they have a specific concrete memory of imagining years ago. Others, such as myself, will readily admit they completely forgot to even consider that the apple they're trying to imagine might have colors, even as they try to imagine it. Red? Green? A rainbow mac apple logo with a bite out of it? ...and you say this thing is supposed to have lighting from a direction and cast shadows?!? I can barely imagine a circle! Give me a break! And maybe some dice, so I can decide on a color to attempt to imagine! ...I think it's fairly safe to say that those two experiences are at least marginally different.

It is not at all difficult to understand that I’m “hearing” my thoughts and imagined sounds

It would be unfathomable for me to have this experience and not acknowledge that my mind is simulating sound

whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped.

God this is a tired argument. Your visual cortex is not special. Your red isn't any more different from my red than my "circular" is different from your "circular".

It's a well known thought experiment: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/. I'm not arguing for or against it being true.

>God this is a tired argument.

We literally can't know, and never will. The fact that you assert that assert otherwise (as far as I can tell) with such staunch confidence seems to be exactly the kind of thing OP is calling into question.

What is somewhat objective, in a sense, is someone's report of how closely their imagination matches what they see with their eyes.

If you can close your eyes and get your mind to produce something like a photo of an apple, you know it. If you can't even remotely obtain anything like that you know that too.

Apparently, you can know by how you recall a memory. Do you "see" it as a film? Or, do you recall it as a list of facts?

There's more than that going on. There's recall, but there's also constructing counterfactuals and extrapolating from existing detail.

"where did I leave my keys", "what would it look like if I moved that couch", and "how big is the room I can only see one wall of", are decent examples.

Although not truly the point... we do know that people don't seen red and green flipped because color's don't work in isolation. It's also how they work together. If a person with flipped red/green mixed what they saw as red (actually green) with blue, they wouldn't get purple.

We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.

The point he's making is that colors do not "really" exist - they're simply different levels of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum. How we perceive those colors is exclusively a product of our brain using input filtering from our eyes and then converting this into signals that we then perceive. But there's no reason to think that this processing and filtering eventually results in the exact same perceived color for every person. My red, blue, and purple could all be perceived simply differently than yours - even though every physical law interacting with what we perceive as color would behave identically.

And the even more interesting thing is that this nuance of reality extends to everything. The world as we perceive is only after extensive processing and filtering by our brain, driven by millennia of evolution. And it's very safe to say that our perception of the world has changed over those millennia and will continue to change in the future. So it seems essentially illogical to then assume that everybody at the current time shares the exact same 'experience' of perception.

Yeah by "my red" I'm talking about qualia as in the knowledge argument https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

You're just introducing more and compound things that we don't know if we have the same experience of.

Consider an enum type: we agree on labels (colour names) for different stimuli; as those stimuli combine they correspond to some other enum variant, and we interpret them as the same label. But we don't know, and I agree with the top-level comment that we can't know, whether our perception of the stimuli with that label is the same.

This is distinct from colourblindness, which is inability to distinguish stimuli for some of the enum variants, and so the labels get merged/boundaries between labels move. (Ok fine we also need a hashmap from stimuli to the enum..)

We agree to call the rose pink, and it's the same pink we see when we look at a colour card and agree it's the colour of the rose, but we don't know that what our brains reconstruct from the light when we look at 'pink'-labelled things is the same.

You've put into words how I've always felt about this as well.

Comparing subjective experience is ultimately futile. That said, humans can be very similar beings to each other, and perhaps similar enough that we can communicate a enough for a useful (if very lossy) comparison.

The key here is to remember that what makes us capable of sharing a world view and understanding each other is not just speaking the same language, there is also a degree of required shared cultural background—and it is not shared by all humans or even just speakers of a language.

In order to make sure a question about inner experience yields a useful answer at all from person on Earth who has a sufficiently different life from yours, you may first need to establish a common world view basis of sorts (unlikely to happen in, for example, a mass survey, but perhaps possible in a long-form discussion on an online forum).

Of course, even after all that, any comparison will still necessarily be very low fidelity.

Low fidelity information transmission is not "ultimately futile" but instead something to build on. Or what do you measure it against?

It is ultimately futile for the reasons outlined in the top-level comment. What one person experiences cannot be precisely conveyed to another person without round-tripping very lossy means of communication, such as language.

If you have an example of some existing means of lossless communication between two humans, bring it forth. If you believe it is a technical possibility, then be my guest—however, I do not see such a way (that would also maintain humans as a set of diverse individual conscious agents, so homogenizing society to reduce everyone to a shared baseline does not count).

Absolutely everything we have achieved as a civilization, depended on lossy communication between humans. And all experience is inherently subjective. Why is all that somehow ultimately futile and requires counterexample not to be? I don't get it. We don't have to totally understand each other to achieve something together.

What is futile is to fully communicate experience. You seem to be talking about something else. Yes, individuals having or not having aphantasia, me being unable to communicate whether my blue feels the same as your blue, etc., does not prevent us from achieving certain goals together.

Not to be that guy, but the article discusses this at some length. Find this bit:

> However, such tests rely on introspection and self-reported experience, which made some neuroscientists doubt that aphantasia was real. Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds? “It could be the case that we’re all actually experiencing the exact same apple, we’re just describing it differently,” said Rebecca Keogh, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience...

The following ~8 paragraphs discuss the evidence for it beyond subjective reports.

I'm not entirely convinced by it. But even if I was, I'd still stand by my claim that many people speak about this with unwarranted confidence. This comment thread has lots of people who seem to know for sure that they do/don't have it, and also several definitions such that I could easily self-diagnose in either direction by picking the right one.

I can not see images in my inner eye most of the time, but I do while dreaming, and I have had a single experience of doing so while meditating, which was clearer than anything I've experienced.

So I have basis for comparison. The difference is sharp and unmistakable.

What is frustrating is that my one experience suggests it ought to be possible for me to train my ability to, but no attempts have succeeded (I've not made that many - it was an interesting experience, and I'd enjoy having it again, but it wasn't earthshattering enough to spend a lot of time on)

Mental Images (of things) 1/10, Inner Voice 9/10 (reading)

So these are be relative to what i see with my open eyes and hear with my ears. I think this is the only way you can measure.

(What i see vividly with eyes shut is more like something random a kalidescope.)

I remember reading that some inventors could form mental images accurate / with enough fidelity to visualize complex machinery interacting. In architecture school there was gradient in how well people could mentally visualize spatial relationships including measurements. I remember a project on a fairly narrow site and during initial sketch exercises, people were coming up with (to me), obviously unworkable solutions because the programming (i.e. rooms) they'd need to fit into certain volumes, couldn't. Spectrum in spatial visualization becomes very obvious when you see tacticle / visual learners iterate through a bunch of designs, whether with modelling or with CAD, and after a few lines, I (and some others) knew immediately the proportions / scale was wrong. Became very obvious when projects started incorporating building codes and designs needed to account for required # egress (fire exists etc) XYZ meters from any point in floor plan. Some people can mentally iterate through designs/measurements in their heads, some people have to draw things out to figure out.

For what it's worth this is believed to be a measurable skill sometimes referred to as "spatial reasoning"

fMRI is mentioned in the article several times.

There are some surprisingly objective tests for aphantasia - fmri shows it pretty clearly, but also imagining bright things causes iris to change in normal people but not in people with aphantasia.

You could say that aphants just may not be trying enough - there are tests for that as well. But there is hope that in many people aphantasia is something that can be overcome, because it’s just a matter of a lack of a proper skill, or some sort of childhood trauma.

I agree completely. No one has access to another's mental state.

When you think of linguistics, and commonly misunderstood terms even though we have an objective way to convey the meaning (dictionaries, words) eg 'emigrate', how many more misunderstandings are possible when there is no objective access?

Some people can play chess blindfolded. There is a popular method of memorizing which has one visualize the placement of objects in a familiar space. Both of these seem absurd to me, as I can at best conjure a fleeting glimpse of an object in greyscale. When I calculate chess tactics I do so in a manner which seems almost kinesthetic, as if I’m feeling the movements of the pieces, and I have to look at the board while I do it. When I memorize things, like poems or the digits of pi, I just repeat them until each element of the sequence magically evokes the next. There is no visualization.

Some can play the piano blindfolded. Is it also connected?

No, that is muscle memory. If I play the piano with my eyes closed, I'm not visualising the piano, I'm focusing on the feel and positions of my fingers

This is my experience as well. I would also say that when improvising I’m not really thinking consciously about the movements, but rather the notes I want to hear.

Those two example skills are probably unrelated, like two aspects of the same what-are-your-brain-interconnects problem.

I can place symbols and move them, but I can't imagine a realistic flower; if I tried hard enough I could memorize a chess boards, but the pieces wouldn't have exact shapes as such, everything would be just a representation of a thing, not comparable to a visual memory of seeing the layout. In programmer speak, I think in nodes, graphs, connections. I can imagine people moving in a room to great detail, but not at all their faces or clothing.

I'm strongly spatial but not photographic at all. You're probably strongly tactile, and you learn a poem as if it was muscle memory of a movement.

The difference between "10% clear and 80% clear" may be subjective, but when people assert with complete conviction they cannot see anything in their mind and cannot even picture their own parents, I can be confident that their experience is not like mine.

I suspect it probably could be if they practiced, maybe picked up an artistic hobby or two, but if they're insist they're not visualizing presently then I'll believe them.

I dunno. I can hear music, it is muted in my brain but I basically have a audiographic memory. I can't visualize anything though. It is so weird. Basically my internal DNN can record and playback but not yet generate new things like stable diffusion either.. I suspect my musical training at a young age played a role in this as well as listening to lots of classical music.

Psychologists and neuroscientists can tease these things apart.. in the article they talk about it. But aphantasia is only recently being understood so methods to quantify the degree will improve.

Yeah, I have the same feelings when I read these articles. For example:

"Behind her eyes, it was completely black” "They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly"

This seems weird, but both of these describe my subjective experience of imagining an apple equally well.

Misconceptions about subjective experiences often stem from a narrow view of what constitutes internal perception. The very nature of subjectivity means that each person's internal process is unique to them. It's erroneous to insist that we must "see" something as if it's physically present for it to count as a subjective experience.

From the article: "but somehow they cannot integrate this information in a subjective experience".

Consider a conversation with a blind person. Claiming they aren't having a subjective experience because they can't visually perceive you would be fundamentally biased. Clearly, one doesn't need visual input to engage in meaningful interaction or to have rich internal experiences.

Over time, it's become clear that people have a wide range of internal experiences. While individuals often try to compare their experiences to some imagined baseline, this baseline itself is subjective and variable. Many mistakenly assume that their own subjective experience is universal or "correct," failing to recognize the vast diversity of internal processes across different people.

Recognizing this diversity is crucial. It helps us understand that subjective experiences can vary greatly between individuals, yet all are equally valid. This broader understanding moves us away from judging others' internal experiences based on our own limited perspective, and towards appreciating the rich tapestry of human cognition and perception.

Pretty much this. For further consideration it may be worth looking into Daniel Dennett's writing on qualia (notably that they're ineffable and private).

I have aphantasia and similarly didn't realize it until a few years ago, at 22, when someone asked me that "Apple" test.

Since then, I've noticed a few interesting things:

1) I remember things by association. I'm great with maps, physics, economics, and topics where things are inter-related, but terrible at memorization and obviously can't visualize anything.

2) I'm relatively unburdened by trauma. A lot of my friends will have a visual memory of things that have happened to them, but for me, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. It's sort of sad to not remember all the good times, though.

3) It's not really related to taste (I think my taste visually is better than most of my friends and they ask me for fashion advice), but I have to see something to know how it will look and make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or designer.

100% visual aphant here, but have a very strong musical "minds-ear". So not full-sense aphantasic.

Best self-described mental model for how my brains feels internally is as objects (in the programming sense) with properties and relations. As I "imagine" something, I'm recalling the object "living room couch", and then enumerating properties of that object "leather, brown, L shape."

If I think of something on the couch e.g. "cushion", then it starts off being just a relationship "cushion is on the couch" without any location component. If I then inspect the "location" property of the cushion, then I think "the cushion sitting upright in the L-shaped bend of the couch."

I'm pretty damn good at spatial reasoning in my head, e.g. I can "design" a component in my head, and then sit with Fusion 360 and create it as a 3D CAD model... but I'm not actually seeing anything in my head at all. It still remains in that abstract object <> properties <> relations head-space.

In some ways, when I'm imagining a 3D object in my head, I'm actually thinking "this sketch" with "this shape" extruded by 10mm. So the actual constructive process by which an object is realized in my mind IS the actual process by which I'd design it.

I'm like you. I have good spacial intelligence, but I never realized until reading this headline that some people actually see what they are imagining? That seems insane.

Likewise, I think it seems insane to them that we don’t automatically form a mental picture of everything we think about! Did you see the apple test linked in a comment? Time I’ve seen the test and I am a four not totally aphantasic but close.

Every single time an article about aphantasia gets posted, there's always people like you in the comments going "wait, what, when people say they see things they're imagining, they actually do that?"

Yes. Most people do.

> That seems insane.

Think of a song you like. Play it in your head. Can you hear it? Can you tap the beat? Can you whistle along with the melody? Can you join in and sing the chorus when it comes? But you know you're not actually hearing the song, right?

Visualization is just like that, but for your vision, not your hearing. In the same way you can replay a sound you've heard in your head, most people can replay a thing they saw in their heads.

I relate, fun to see other people operate this way

Literally the same for me. Both the object + relation part and the 3D construction.

I can't see anything in my mind yet I can construct the full geometry of my living room very detailed just from memory or can easily trace a route between locations I know, even if I didn't visit them a lot. It's like being a 3D printing nozzle and being able to trace whatever I need in my head without seeing.

That's probably the reason why I really like digital/web design and CAD because the length and geometry is very well defined based on basic shapes. It's like the visualization of what I would do in my brain?

It's weird for me as I have absolutely no visual component to it, but I can still "visualize" objects in a non-visual way. I can "manifest" an object, and I can "feel" it is there, and transform it within reason (rotation, movement, scale). There is a subconscious "feeling" that the object is there, and what its current state is. However, there is no visual image. I cannot visualize an object and have any representation of it appear in my visual field, no matter how weak. I don't explicitly enumerate the properties of an object I'm "looking" at in the way that you do, though. It's just... "there", and I know it's "there" and what its properties are.

I'm curious:

1) But how do you navigate when you're not looking at the map? I'm placing myself mentally "in it" as a dot and can then know that I need to go two streets more etc. Or any game I've ever played I can recount now in my head, for instance I could explain to you how to get to a star in Super Mario 64. Can you do that without "visualizing"? What if I ask what level is to the immediate right when entering the castle? I can see it, but I wouldn't have memorized it any other way I think?

Also 1), when I do maths I also visualize it. Like I can mentally integrate a formula, and then I see it in my head as if it was on a piece of paper. How do you keep track if you can't see it? Or programming, it's like things that align in my vision when I design some piece of code, I can see the different parts and how they will fit together, how is that for you?

Not OP but aphant: the information is there, we just can't "see" it. So we can know how to navigate because the map is stored, it's just that we can't access it in a visual way. Note that for me the access is less detailed and also fades quicker.

As for maths: I actually have a physics PhD and am now a C++ dev. I couldn't mentally integrate anything complex. Never needed to, someone invented paper at some point ;) I'm a decent programmer I'd say, it seems to be common among aphants to be good at abstract reasoning, which I think really helps with coming up with good programming solutions to concrete problems.

Not OP, but another visual aphant.

Navigation - I'm doing the same thing, but without "seeing" it. I know Georgetown is N-NE of Austin, Liberty Hill is due W from Georgetown, IH-35 runs N-S but actually slightly NE-SW through Austin for example. I can draw pretty good maps on command (if not to scale), but I don't "see" that until I put it on paper. I think I actually have a much better recall of spatial relations than my wife, who has a vivid mind's eye.

Regarding math: again a similar process, but I don't "see"the equations. Coding is interesting because when I'm really in the zone I feel like I can sit, think, and come up with a holistic design for some problem. Then as I start to write the code I can "feel" the congruence or discongruence between the code I've written and the design I conceptualized. But it's not, for example, a visualized graph in my head. It's more of a physical graph, like holding a carved statue and feeling the curves, edges, and features. Except it's not the same physical sensation as touch, but a mental analog.

Edit: another commentator called it "imaginary proprioception" which I find very apt.

In order to navigate after I put down the map, I have learned I have to literally translate it into words. Like, “turn left, go two streets, and turn right”. Especially if I’m heading south — if I don’t reinforce that I need to turn “right”, rather than “west” I can easily do it wrong.

I have no trouble drawing a map of a place I know. But I’m not drawing it from an imagined map. There must be some spatial representation in there somewhere, but it’s not an image that I can see before I draw it.

So - as one who still has a tough time understanding how anybody can “see anything” in their head - you just connected that to something I have known is different about myself - I get lost instantly (google maps was a godsend). And when I mean instantly - I mean if I am in a new place, I can go a block away to a Mcdonalds and have no idea how to find my way back - I have zero ability to store any visual routes for something as simple as just a block away. Once I walk that block - can’t find my way back even though it’s literally just one block ways - everything looks the same to me. But - over time, I eventually memorize paths back and forth, and after a really long time I can mentally (but not visually) - start to place myself in context - just as long as I don’t ever turn a corner I haven’t before - at which point I’m totally lost - even if I’ve lived in the place for 5 years - one random street or corner is all it takes.

It used to be really annoying prior to smartphones - but now I just love that first time in a new place that I move to - everything is completely and absolutely a mystery for a few days - but I realize after a week or so I’ll be able to find my way back down the block without a smartphone.

It’s important to note you’ve captured something different than poor spatial perception (which I have as well - I am unable to navigate with a map.) - There isn’t a lot of spatial perception involved in walking one block down a street and then finding your way back a couple 100’ based on obvious landmarks. Though - presumably if you had good spatial perception (but no visual memory) - you could do it simply by remembering precisely what your spatial relationship to your origin was, without reference to anything visual - it’s the lack of either which results in me getting lost instantly.

Spatial imagination and visual are two different things it seems.

I am a visual aphant, but I can imagine objects in virtual 3d space - kind of like a blind person navigating through touch. It’s just that objects are points/lines and I remember what label a given point is.

Also, I can map things to a feelings - a feeling of going left/right etc.

Navigation is a non issue to me, whereas I have friends who have perfect visual imagination but they cannot connect it to spacial/physical imagination. E.g. a friend of mine can imagine various plants, but she couldn’t buy a container for them because she cannot imagine their volumes. I can imagine volumes, but cannot imagine visualy.

>I have to see something to know how it will look and make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or designer.

When I became aware of the concept of aphantasia, it gave context to how I work in the visual arts. I was never really great at coming up with an idea and creating it - I always preferred to work off something pre-existing, whether that was painting from a photograph, or doing collage work. This transferred especially well into working in Photoshop, although I never latched on to Illustrator.

Sketchup was a revelation to me, once I got the hang of it. I was thinking about repainting my study, and ended up modeling my whole goddamn house. Sketchup's 3D warehouse is full of Ikea furniture, and I could rearrange my room virtually, try different colors, it was so great.

In trying to imagine what my 18th century home looked like when it was built, I again struggled because of the absence of photography, but ended up building the surrounding blocks in Sketchup and Twinmotion.

So, I think there's a path to the visual arts, to graphic design... it's just a different path, and one that, for me, means I have to lay my own foundations before I start getting 'creative'

Same, no minds eye pictures and I also remember things by association and brute force learning takes many repetitions, deriving from some principles is how my mind is most comfortable working

Interesting, I would say I have a strong inner eye and I remember things by association as well and I'm bad at memorization, as a fallback sometimes I try to visualize the page I saw something at with random amounts of success.

I would say trauma is an issue with me because my brain likes replaying awful/painful accidents in my mind, especially one particular bicycle accident. Funny thing is the playback is in 3rd person.

Visualization comes naturally, if some one describes something I start building it in my head. However I think you could be an artist or designer in some fields but drawing might be really hard for you.

Do you day dream?

Do you have dreams, sometimes lucid?

How does your memory work, are you able to replay a scene in your head?

When you read a fiction book does your brain not try to construct the scene in your head?

Like when you seen a movie/show based on a book you've read and are surprised at how differently the show runners imagined everything compared to you?

Same. I’ve adopted the “write it twice” (a play on WET/DRY) methodology to software & electronics development. Write v0 (formally called a “proof of concept” I suppose but perhaps a bit more developed), or protoboard a circuit, learn the problem domain, throw it out and write v1, or layout the PCB. That’s my compensation for being unable to visualise.

I experience the same things.

With the remember by association I realised I think I can recall the layout of any building I’ve ever been in. I don’t get lost once I’ve explored once.

I did a thought exercise and it’s not validated - but I could “imagine” walking through my pre primary school. But in darkness. So when I have a memory from long ago I now try walk the area I was in when it happened.

It brings up other surprising memories I had forgotten about that were like geo specially tied to the location.

Yes, I too have insane memory for the layout of buildings, which i've only realised over the past couple of years. Super weird.

I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's estimated to be 1-4% of the population.

I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.

When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.

It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.

Corroborating this anecdata.

There is some research into visuals that seems elucidating.[0]

[0] https://zugzology.com/blogs/myceliums-gambit/exploring-psych...

TL;DR This is what you're looking for https://firekasina.org/

> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.

On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations

On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it.

Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)

Jinx.

Very interesting. Thank you. I might try this.

Have you considered explicitly using weed or shrooms as an on-ramp to exercising this ability? You could devote some time and slowly build up your ability.

Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same amount of effort.

I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire kasina".

I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1 week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too intense and immersive.

It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.

I have definitely gotten it back from intense meditation. I went to an intense meditation retreat which had us meditating all day (a vipassana 10 day course). For unrelated reasons I left after a few days, but my aphantasia was replaced with something very different after like a day and a half and I couldn't stop seeing things everywhere

Still a bit weird, health-wise, but a lot more in your control than drugs.

I remain fairly convinced that the ability to visualise things in your imagination is a skill like any other and people don’t so much have aphantasia as an inherent condition that they probably started with little innate capacity and lost most of it through disuse.

If that’s the case, you can probably improve it simply by repeatedly using what you have. I say that because my ability to think visually improved greatly when I started drawing. Also I’m still not very good at conjuring well proportioned and shaded objects from nothing but I can pull them out of my memories.

I think most people literally can't imagine the range of difference here. As far as I can tell, "what I have" is zero for visual imagination, and I have no recollection of that ever being different. You might as well be telling me that I need to lift weights with my third arm.

I’m fairly sure you can try drawing something, eventually directly from what you see to the paper (that’s how you learn to draw). I’m actually curious to know what would happen if you stuck at it.

My hypothesis is that you would get some ability to visualise at some point. That’s an experience which would be cool to carry actually.

They imagine a simulation of themselves, but this simulation isn't necessarily realistic. They run the simulation, and the words the simulation uses to describe itself "visualzing" they just repeat verbatim. Human consciousness and self-awareness are so dim that they mistake this for themselves being able to do the same.

If someone didn't have this "skill", they could prompt an LLM to "visualize", then repeat the words off the screen, and but for the clues that they're cheating bystanders wouldn't be able to tell much difference. I assert that there is no additional insight gained by the "visualization" that isn't available from the verbalization because these are, in fact, essentially the same thing.

> When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.

> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.

I experienced exactly this! It turned out that, for me, the root cause was multiple B vitamin deficiencies; correcting them caused my internal vision to become INCREDIBLY vivid. B vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production (ex. [0]) -- particularly serotonin, which is known to interact with vision[1] -- and it's been amazing realising what I've been missing out on. Psychedelics[2] and cannabis[3] "improving" the condition makes sense since both have serotonergic activity (5HT2A specifically).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Neurological_disorders "[...] the bioactive folate, methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), a direct target of methyl donors such as S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe), recycles the inactive dihydrobiopterin (BH2) into tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), the necessary cofactor in various steps of monoamine synthesis, including that of dopamine and serotonin."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Effects

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Ligands

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3552103/

hmm.. interesting.

I take a Vitamin B Complex every day from Nootropics Depot

Huh.. what specifically do you take?

I’ve experienced this too (only twice!) with strong weed (sativa) and it really took me by surprise. It was nothing like hallucinating - seeing objects in front of me morph / appear - but rather when I closed my eyes I could _imagine_ things.

I could picture myself on a beach or walking through a forest, something I’ve always felt frustrated I could never create in my mind. I’ll admit it was a slightly scary experience…

By contrast I have a friend with a wonderfully vivid imagination. He’s a photographer by trade and spontaneously captures moments / scenes on his phone while we’re walking along. We’re always asking questions about the other’s brain :)

It’s different when you sober. Weed not only helps with imagining, it makes a mind hyperfocused and forgetful, so to say. As this can bring you far away from where you are, the visions are also more stable-ish because you don’t remember what was there a minute ago (unless you’re trying to) and live in a moment.

+1, shrooms doesn't do it for me, but if I do a high dose of THC (20-30mg) and then listen to music, I can close my eyes and get some kind of visualization. It's still fleeting, but I can feel my mind react to it as super novel stimulus (otherwise 100% visual aphant).

I did get pretty strong visual experiences from Ketamine therapy, but it's completely different from mental images. I felt transported to a different "head space" where there was abstract visual imagery that felt "real" but completely disembodied and not related to day-to-day experience.

I really can't comprehend what it's like to have normal visual imagery or be a hyper-visualizer.

As a possibly interesting data point I also have no visual imagination, and I did a lot of mind-altering substances in a past era of my life. However the only interior mental imagery I ever saw was seemingly random and intense fractal patterns. Never could relate it to any conscious thought like imagining an apple. I also ~never experienced much in the way of eyes-open visual hallucinations, even on rather high doses of LSD. One exception to this was DMT but it was still just a “fractal tunnel”, similar to what I could see with my eyes closed on other chemicals.

It wasn’t until much later (after I stopped tripping) that I learned about aphantasia as a name for my daily experience and I’ve always assumed that it was why my experience on hallucinogens varied so much from more common descriptions. It’s interesting to hear that they might “unlock” the experience of imagination for others.

I experienced this recently for the first time (in 44 years) while in the hospital. Probably caused by the strong antibiotics I was on or the high fever I had a few hours earlier.

It was interesting! Didn't sleep all night, how do you phantasts do that? :-)

Use it as a strength you are not bound by preconceived imagery of what should be. Use the way you recall and collect information to be creative, solve problems and bring a different perspective to things.

Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play chess?

When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they do so by visualizing the board and pieces and them moving those visualized pieces around on that visualized board. They pretty much do with the visualized board what they would do if they had access to a physical or computer analysis board that they could actually move pieces around on.

I once wondered if top players do it that way too, or if maybe the see the position in some more abstract way like a graph with pieces as vertices and colored directed edges encoding relationships such as "The rook is attacking that night" and "that knight is defended by that bishop" and moves are then operations that shift edges.

I asked GM Nakamura about it on an AMA he did on Reddit, and he said he sees the board just like nearly everybody else does.

For what it's worth, there's a study (N=123) on recall for people with aphantansia [0]. One of the tests was to take a look at a picture, of a living room with furniture in it, say, and then have the subject try to redraw the room in as much detail as they can. People with aphantansia have better spatial accuracy and fewer memory errors.

The basic hypothesis is, I guess, that people with aphantansia develop scaffolding to help them memorize so they're better at some of the details that other folks that rely too heavily on their mental imagery.

I don't know of any studies on chess in particular (though I haven't looked) but I would imagine that something similar could be at play here, where it might not be obvious that people with aphantasia are worse for these types of games.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/

I have aphantasia and I play chess (albeit not very well...)

Honestly, I think that aphantasia is a bit overhyped; I can do virtually all the things that people with normal mental imagery can do, except I suppose actually visualize the thing in my mind. The way that it works feels akin to a blind man groping in a dark room. If I try to visualize a chess board, of course I only "see" blackness (or nothing), but if you ask me what square is at e2, I can kind of mentally "feel" in that area and know that there's a king pawn there. And I can kind of "feel" below it that there's a king, and a queen, etc.

Normal people see things in their visual imagery by directing their attention at a spot in their mind, seeing it, and then registering what they saw. I just skip the middle step.

Interesting. As an aphant I can perhaps do what you describe, what I can absolutely not do is e.g. calculate moves with my eyes closed. I can calculate a couple of moves in, but then it gets hard, and I'm not sure if this is something solveable with practice or just a hard stop.

Similarly, the top chess players can remember a lot of the matches they played, and others they studied. This is not something my brain is able to do, period. Similar to how I have less personal memories than a lot of other people.

I'm about 1800-2000 on lichess and have almost complete aphantasia and I do feel like it really hurts me, especially in very sharp middlegame positions. When calculating I have to explicitly list out what squares are attacked by what pieces, which is inevitably very slow.

Long term positional planning isn't a problem as I can feel my way around a position pretty well and can imagine positions I want to reach, but detail heavy calculation is much harder.

Doing a lot of deep puzzles is the best antidote I've found.(And blind chess, but that's really hard)

Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.

IM David Pruess has aphantasia and can play multiple simultaneous blindfold games.

Pretty much everyone at my level (2000 USCF) can play blindfold. I always assumed that I was completely unable to because of my aphantasia, but when I heard about Pruess's story, I decided to work on it, and I now can, although with difficulty and very slowly.

Basically I still keep around all the information about where all the pieces are; it's just not on a virtual board that I "look" at, it's stored more abstractly. I keep track of clusters of pieces and relations between them. The fact that I have an excellent sense of the board itself (I know how all the squares relate instinctively) helps. But I still have to stop all the time and confirm where all the pieces are (or, conversely, what's on every square).

As an addendum, when I calculate variations in chess or Go I sometimes close my eyes because my "board database access" can be easier to operate when everything is purely in my head, as opposed to performing mental diffs on the physical board in front of me, which requires me to keep track of both real and virtual pieces.

I'm reasonably decent at chess, around 2500 Lichess blitz, and I also started chess as an adult.

And in my experience visualization was 100% a trained/learned skill. Like all players when I was weaker I had no board visualization, and would have difficulty visualizing even simple variations. And then at some point I began to be able to see the board easily. The counter-intuitive thing is that there was no progress, it was like a stair-step. At some point in my 'career' I couldn't see the board at all, then suddenly I could. I think it has something to do with trained pattern recognition, because now when doing things like tactics problems I can generally look at the position for a few seconds and then close my eyes and get to solving it in my head. But I can't do this in weird positions where there's a bunch of pieces in random locations. So my visualization is clearly impacted by some association with familiar patterns.

I also think my experience is the rule based on coaching I've done with players of all ages and skill levels. I suspect most strong players aren't familiar with this, because they started playing as children. Nakamura, for instance, hit national master level at 10 years old. I don't trust his recollection of introspective astract/perceptual detail, as a 6 year old, to be particularly accurate. And if visualization is a trained skill with exponential step style progress, then it's completely unsurprising that people would report radically different abilities to visualize things.

Curious - how does the board look like in your head? Is it a specific 3d board? Or a 2d image of a board? Does it have colour, texture, etc? Does it always look the same?

As an aphant I always wondered how can people play chess by just mentioning moves and not get lost - it makes sense if they have a stable picture of their board in their head!

For me, it is not like a crystal clear image or anything. It's hazy, but clear enough to work with and think clearly. The image tends to be a sort of abstract snap shot of whatever I'm playing on. So over the board it tends to be in 3d, and online it tends to be in 2d. Colors tend to be muddier/darker versions of whatever scheme I happen to be playing/studying with.

An interesting thing is that your eyes tend to move while navigating this board - an interesting sort of connection between the physical and mental even when it's entirely mental. I noticed when Magnus did his blindfold sim in Vienna [1] he'd often tilt his head in a certain direction for each board, so I imagine it was the same thing for him with him having them all kind of setup in his mind, and simply moving his head to look at each board in turn.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmzadHNSLs

I've always struggled with descriptions of aphantasia and I don't know if I have it myself because I don't know what's "normal". This article also didn't clarify it.

When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual vision stays completely black.

> It's like a dim picture

You don't have aphantasia. In people with aphantasia, there is no "it" to describe.

As far as I understand yes, most people actually see something.

At some point I figured out this "test" to explain aphantasia to people: ask someone to imagine a car. After that, ask them about visual details of the car: what color is it? what type of car is it? (Other objects might work better than a car; In my experience color is the attribute that will be the most surprising, vwry clear for some completely absent for others.)

Most people are going to answer with whatever they "saw". For me these follow-up questions don't make sense.

Not see, but visualize. It's like a different sense. Can you recall what something you touched felt like, what something smelled like, what something tasted like, or sounded like? The recollection of the experience is different than the sensory experience itself, but there's still something of the original sensory experience to it. Visualization is like being able to recall what something looked like in this way, as if you had seen it even though you didn't.

Your vision can feed your visualization, but it doesn't go the other way, which would be a hallucination.

This is an excellent description, especially the “doesn’t make sense” part. Like ask me to “imagine an apple.”

I imagine the platonic idea of an apple and not a specific apple.

Asking “what color was the apple” is a category error for me!

Just wild how everyone is living such different internal lives.

The apple one is apparently one of the standard tests, but for me it's a really bad test. For example, using this scale: https://creativerevolution.io/aphantasia-a-blind-minds-eye/

By default I'm like you, roughly a 4 or 5 - a platonic ideal, no actual form, because I don't need to go further for being told that. But if I have any reason to go further, I have no trouble with being around a 1 or 2, depending on the object.

A lot of these simple tests don't seem to take into account "default" vs "capable of".

it would be a hallucination to see something appear in vision. it’s in that internal space that images appear. for some people, it’s not impossible for these two spaces to overlap, but i guess most of them we would consider psychotic.

notice how a person daydreaming looks spaced out. they’re not looking through their eyes then. no, people do not augment their reality, unless hallucinating.

I can see and then overlay visualizations on top of that, but it’s still not a hallucination. E.g. I’m in bed and a green apple lies to the left. This works by “capturing” reality and transferring it to the inner screen then visializing on it. Akin to switching between your primary/secondary eye and being stuck in between, you’re both there and spaced out.

I'm in the same boat. I can't see things as though they're physical objects but I can sense them in some other way.

I can also draw outlines with my eyes closed - e.g. I can point my finger out and trace the positions of my desk, table, windows, etc.

But when explaining the concept of aphantasia, my go to explanation is to look directly at a person, close my eyes, and say "I have no idea what you look like." I can still sense where they are - height, weight, - and I can state facts about their beard or hair colour, but I'm not seeing it in any way I'd normally use the word 'see'.

But with all that, I feel like it could be close enough that that might be how others sense things and we just lack the terminology to express it, so I tend not to say I'm aphantasic as a definite term.

Do you have an inner monologue? If you can hear your inner voice, you'll know that your inner voice is less of a voice and more of a speaker that can play anything you like. The only limits are my own knowledge, experience and creativity.

Sounds like you have hypophantasia.

Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:

* (1) Seeing inside your head. * (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else. * (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes) * (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.

People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)

Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).

When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.

There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.

EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.

It's a spectrum, so it's not whether or not you experience aphantasia but to what degree.

Also, my experience is that I can imagine very detailed objects and scenes, but the happen in a second mental space, not the current visual field. To imagine something, I have to stop paying attention to the sensory input of the world around me and mentally turn aside to the second space where imagination happens.

I struggle to impose imagined objects on the visual field. I end up imagining what it would look like if I could, but this happens in the second space, in an imagined copy of the visual field.

Okay, explaining personal experience is notoriously difficult - but here we go:

This is a story - this is not literally true, but is a roughly similar shape of things.

My experience is that I am a little thing piloting a giant thing (my body) - I sit in a seat and watch a screen. That screen shows me what my eyes see, and to the edges and beyond are empty. In front of me - between the screen and me - is an empty space. In that space I can draw lines, color things, move things, rotate things.

If I concentrate hard enough I can overlay (by seeing the space while I have my eyes open) an imagined thing in real space (The imagined item is still originating from that space - not the screen - but the screen and that space...mix). The screen from my eyes is an order of magnitude brighter - so I have to focus in order to do that. I can imagine things with my eyes open... but when I do, I am not facing the 'eye-screen' inside my head, I'm looking down and away from it and only at that space of imagination.

I recently starting drawing: It seems to solidify this space/ability more than any other mental exercise I've tried. I have noticed a distinct improvement when I started deconstructing what I was seeing in real live down to basic shapes (In that imagined space and overlaying it on what I was seeing).

When I was doing forms and rehearsing techniques in martial arts, I would imagine wireframe fighters coming at me. Normally they were yellow, but a successful strike against "hitboxes" in their limbs, torso, or head would turn the corresponding part red. I couldn't see them as such like a HUD, but I could visualize them, and it noticeably improved my technique.

I've adopted the "tiny pilot controlling a meat mech" perspective before, but the "screen" is wrap-around and very close, there's no space outside or between me and it.

> there's no space... between me and it.

Now consider that the idea that there is a "me" perceiving the screen is only an un-investigated assumption, and that this "me" is actually only implied by whatever object appears on the screen.

Can any such separate entity actually be found?

Or is the thinker implied by the thought, the listener implied by the sound, the feeler implied by the feeling, etc.

To kind of piggyback on here since you described your experience very well, I'll give my own as a contrast to yours:

Mine seems similar. Instead of piloting a body I just am my body, and I don't perceive any screen. Instead of an "area between me and the screen" I just have a completely separate workspace of sorts where I can visualize things. But - and this is where I differ from you the most I think - in my mind that workspace is quite separate from my field of real vision. If I concentrate I can kind of overlay them, but it feels very artificial.

Likewise, this mirrors my experiences near exactly. In a very real sense, I am/embody the contours of my senses.

On a possibly related note, when I was very young there was a moment I distinctly remember 'pulling away' from this sense-surface-of-self, and a bone deep certainty that if I did so I would be lost and/or have done something unrecoverable. Spooked me thoroughly at the time, but now I wonder if doing so would have formed that intermediary-type viewpoint.

I describe it as two separate screens because I can't really overlay them (imagine putting one monitor in front of the other and trying to see through the first one; not going to happen), but otherwise don't have much issue imagining things.

Another good comparison might be that my eyes are 4k but my imagination is like 480p.

Yeah, that pretty much lines up with my experience. If I had to place the image that I am "seeing" anywhere, it would be inside my forehead.

Weird that I don't see any links to this, supposedly the definitive test: https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/

It's probably not linked because it is just "do you have aphantasia" rephrased various ways. This test is very poorly designed and comes off like a facebook quiz.

    > No image at all, you only “know” that you are thinking of the object
    > Dim and vague; flat
    > Moderately clear and lively
    > Clear and lively
    > Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing

All of the examples are not necessary if they can all be answered with the same answers.

Not at all. Having taken it, despite also thinking that it looked absurdly simplistic, I was surprised my answers were different depending on the subject. Nor is the result a boolean "yes/no" at all, which should be obvious from the more-than-two answer choices to the questions - phantasia is a spectrum.

Thinking about it is not the same as seeing it. I can like 'see' e.g. my house in my imagination. But it is more like a fast glimpse or looking past it. There is nothing to focus on. I can't count the windows without remembering them one by one. I need to rethink about the door to 'zoom in' on it etc.

Do you see things when you have a dream or how about in the intermediary when you’re falling asleep? people claim they can visualize things like that at will.

I’m of the mind to think that people are unreliable narrators of their internal world and are not to be trusted on either side of the spectrum.

> It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity.

It's like having a second visual sense, but it's not strictly the same as standard vision. It often does lack clarity, but as with any other sense, you can sharpen specific details by focusing on it. Your real vision can feed into this secondary vision, but not the other way around, which would be a hallucination.

I don't actually "see" mental images, but I "feel" them. For example, I can remember a friend's or a celebrity's face — clearly recalling the "feel" of that face — the exact qualia I experience if I actually saw it — but there is no "overlay image", my eyes see pitch black that moment! It is a very high level qualia, totally decoupled from visual perception. But I swear it is the same as if I actually saw a certain face. It is so strange.

Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or more imagination than others.

Thats just called imagination. Do you think that when other people picture something it literally replaced their vision?

When I do mushrooms I like closing my eyes and watching my brain attempt to maintain the image as it swirls and contorts into analogous yet increasingly orthogonal forms

This is a smug non-reply to the parent post. People with imagination might not always “replace” vision, but they can summon images to the mind’s eye other than complete darkness. And personally, I feel I can obscure the world around me if focused on a particularly powerful daydream.

For me to do it for long periods of time in high fidelity, I need to either close my eyes or do this blurring/out of focus thing I don't know how to describe. So in a sense, it does have to replace my vision literally. I regularly lead high level strategy meetings with my eyes fully closed so I can use my memory and imagination fully, I've seen other people do this also so I presume I'm not alone.

It's a spectrum. Replacing their vision is called hallucination.

That is literally how it's presented in the article.

>Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

For me, that is the intermediary step before the drawing. I think the image is just my imagination of that feeling you discribe + some specific memory of aspects of the thing? I have very vivid mental imagery. I don't believe it's specifically drawn from memory, more generally drawn from that qualia you talk of + the attributes I know of the thing + situational memory.

Wow! Me too. When I go into apartments and think about how my furniture would fit inside, it's like it turns into a little dollhouse (or do I become giant?) and I'm physically running my hands over where the couch, table, TV, etc. will go, and I feel the couch juddering on the floor as I slide it into place, all without actually seeing the items. Like they've got an invisibility cloak on or something.

This. I’m convinced this should be one of the observable differences between aphant’s and others. I have this aphantasia, and I could always do great on those rotate the object style IQ puzzles, but get me to estimate whether a box can fit in a shelf; hopeless. Makes packing the boot (trunk) of a car difficult. My wife, who has hyperphantasia, is never wrong. I’m much better at looking at the things and arranging the group of items, but not being able to tell if things will fit.

Somehow I just won’t learn though. “It won’t fit”, “sure it will… Oh…”.

I have aphantasia. I relate to what you say about how "feel" a face when I remember it. I'd compare it to a neutral nets embedding. I'm not storing every "pixel" of an image but instead a "vector" that corresponds to the key features (although I'm not consciously aware what those features are). I couldn't describe on demand the faces of my colleagues I see every day but I know them when I see them.

> No matter how nascent the research is into these imaging extremes, the scientists all agree on one thing: Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the spectrum don’t have problems navigating the world.

I don't know about hyperphantasia, but aphantasia absolutely is a disorder. I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office wall, and I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them out mentally. They've been sitting in a pile for years because I have nowhere to even begin. I can't just start hanging things because I'm going to end up unhappy about where everything is placed. Decorating things in general is very difficult. Or any sort of arranging or laying out where I don't have a representation I can physically (or digitally) manipulate to explore ideas.

I also have really poor dreaming. For most of my life I'd say I didn't even have dreams. When I do have dreams, the visual quality is shockingly bad and largely abstract and indistinct.

I also have very little autobiographical memory, which I previously didn't think was connected to aphantasia until reading this article. I do know that looking at photos of the past helps with recall, very frequently when my wife tries to describe something to me I'll have no memory of it until I can see a photo.

The funny thing is I'm actually fairly visual-driven otherwise. I learn better when I can see things. Although maybe that's actually a consequence as well, maybe other people construct mental images when listening or reading?

It's funny because I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.

My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.

Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.

So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.

I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct.

Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.

Thinking of relationships is exactly how I conceptualize what I do too. I can manipulate geometric objects in my mind even though I'm not seeing them, because I'm manipulating the relationships between the objects (or between the vertices/edges within an object).

The downside of this is all this modeling of relationships is a lot to keep in my brain at once, so there is a limit to how far I can push this.

That said, I've yet to encounter a situation where this is actually any better than what my wife can do, who does have a mind's eye (and is frighteningly good at tetris / packing). The part you describe about seeing "boundary conditions" sounds to me like what I do with seeing edge cases and potential unwanted interactions in programming, which is completely non-visual.

> Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation.

From is a strong word. It sounds more likely you gain that from having a very high IQ. But in a poetical sense yeah, necessity begets use which begets development, and it's fascinating and inspiring that you were able to build your life around that.

You may gain it by simply having better intellect. Most things in maths are barely visualizable (properly by a human) or visualization doesn’t help much at least. But we visualizers still can float free in it by using abstract concepts. E.g. to me the whole “abstract” thing means that any mental image of it either doesn’t resemble truth or would be a “category error”.

> I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office wall, and I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them out mentally

You don't have to lay them out mentally to organize them. Just lay them out on the ground and rearrange until it's satisfactory. If aphantasia is linked to other issues, they're minor enough to have straightforward workarounds like this, and no worse than being mildly forgetful or something. That's below "disorder" threshold I'd say, which is why aphantasia has basically gone undetected for so long.

If I lay them out on the ground, I can't see how this interacts with the furniture that's by the wall.

So mark out the furniture outlines with masking tape on the floor.

As an aphant. I kinda think it made me better at physics/mathematics. I also really like not having traumatizing images stick around.

If I could choose I wouldn't get mental imagery, I'd rather like to be non-aphant for taste. I do have "sound imaging" btw. It's great to see more research into this, it can e.g. lead to teaching/learning techniques that are more tailored to how ones brain works.

Same here! I think whatever compensatory mechanisms I've come up with turn out to be real advantages in some ways.

One interesting thing that I've found is that my approach to physics and math problems is often extremely geometric. Even if I don't visually look at things, I'm constantly constructing objects in my head (e.g., graphs of functions) and playing with them, although it's in more of a tactile way. I'll immediately start thinking "what does this function look like?" when my peers are more likely to start by pushing symbols around.

Agree. I wonder if aphantasia forces you to construct a richer and more abstract “internal grammar” when you can’t rely on visual imagery.

For mathematicians that aren’t aphantasic I wonder what goes on in your mind when you imagine a “compact set.”

To me I have a distinct object that presents “compactness” in the mathematical sense in my brain. It’s not associated with any other sense (words, hearing) it just “is” the concept of compactness. It’s not even related to the formal definition of a compact set. It’s more like a “feeling” of convergence in the limit (if that makes sense).

For folks heavily reliant on visual imagery would they have instead a visual representation of “compactness” that’s constructed in the visual sense rather than an abstract idea.

tbh I think there's a pattern where people without mental images learn about the variance in mental imagery and then project everything they don't like about their lives onto that. I don't have mental imagery and yet my autobio memory is just fine, I can hang pictures on my wall, explore ideas about decoration, and my dreams are visual and nice too.

I agree that it's a disorder. I have aphantasia and wish I didn't. I have low resilience due to having no ability to go to a "happy place" or recall pleasant memories. I wonder if other aphantasiacs have a similar experience or have figured out other ways to keep their mental health up.

I'd love to see research into if self-reported aphantasia correlates to depression or anxiety.

Contrary to your experience, the article suggests that aphantasia could be correlated with less mental health issues. Doesn't seem impossible to me, but they don't offer anything to back that claim.

As an aphantasic, I tend to escape to entirely fantastical settings and situations when asked to go to my happy place. I don't see them, but I kind of tell myself stories, with elaborate descriptions of landscapes and situations.

My imagination is maybe all symbolic, but it hasn't felt like a disorder, more like a super power: imagining things, I'm not constrained so directly by my life experiences.

I think this side of things is more to do with severe autobiographical memory deficit, which not all aphants have. But I do.

The thing is; SAMD is often a symptom of depression also, so this is a little chicken and egg. For my own experience, there is definitely a pro in that negative past experiences may as well have never happened; I just don’t care (although I do think there can still be a visceral learning; aversions that don’t come with emotional memory). However, the big con is that a bad time feels like life has always been that way. Again, this is a depression symptom anyway, so chicken and egg. I’m old enough to ride out this roller-coaster of life with my intellectual memories. I know things can change, and what to do when current life experiences suck (sometimes just wait it out, sometime act), so that’s my way to get through the tough times without memories of better times.

You = me point for point

I have aphantasia, and so does my brother. Neither of our parents do.

Both of us are really good at three dimensional thinking, but have no “visual” aspect to said thoughts.

The best way for me to describe it, is that, when imagining an object (apple, barn, etc.) my mind thinks about the physical structure of the object. I can’t “rotate” it because there’s nothing to “rotate” however I can describe it in 3D space using my hands.

Again, there’s nothing “visual” about the way this works. My mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.

> Again, there’s nothing “visual” about the way this works. My mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.

It's hard to imagine (for us visual thinkers) how one could think spacially without also visualizing.

The best description I’ve come across (as someone with aphantasia myself, which I discovered after reading this article yesterday) is that it’s like describing the metadata and emotional sensations associated with an image in my mind. I really thought people talked about “seeing with the minds eye” as a metaphor, until yesterday.

I suppose it's all fundamentally just electrical and chemical impulses - presumably for most people those pulses pass through the visualisation part of the brain, and for others it takes another path - yet the end result of the processing is more or less the same, just mapped onto maybe smells or feelings or something instead of images

Yes, it’s hard to describe with words.

The spatial thinking is relational in concept, such that I can think about distances and angles in relationship to one another. I can describe (and build), with my hands, but I can’t “see” the object from a certain angle.

It’s as if there’s a bunch of points in virtual space, again not visualized, but accessible to my thinking process. I can imagine how they relate, and how they can fit together, without actually seeing it rendered. Not sure if that makes sense or I’m just muddying the waters.

Another example would be Legos, which I played with a ton as a kid. I can think about the exact piece I need, and think about the larger thing I’m building as a composite of said pieces. I keep mentioning my hands, because the way it’s expressed in my mind is more of a “feeling” than anything visual.

Another way to think about it would be like a 3d model of the world, where I can think about my route/position/etc. through it, without having any concrete view. It’s like a 3d file without the 2d renderer.

The article made me thinking if my way of "visualizing" things is limited. My kids do have a vivid imagination for visual things out of nowhere, I on the other hand need a spark or idea to get the flow going.

> Another way to think about it would be like a 3d model of the world, where I can think about my route/position/etc. through it, without having any concrete view. It’s like a 3d file without the 2d renderer.

That example just fits perfectly my perception of things. I habe a very good mental model of everything that fits well in my brain but it's sometimes hard to put them into words... yet I get better by describing "my view". Funny that I have a graphical memory but can't construct any new in my mind.

This is so interesting. As a test, I wonder if you could make something out of Legos without any issues if you blocked your vision so you couldn't see them or your hands. Guessing that that you could.

> It’s as if there’s a bunch of points in virtual space, again not visualized, but accessible to my thinking process. I can imagine how they relate, and how they can fit together, without actually seeing it rendered. Not sure if that makes sense or I’m just muddying the waters.

Would it be accurate to call it a wireframe? https://boingboing.net/2023/07/05/this-wireframe-car-looks-l...

If so, this isn't considered aphantasia, just a very weak visualization. A 4 on this scale rather than a 5: https://creativerevolution.io/aphantasia-a-blind-minds-eye/

I describe myself as similar to parent post.

There is no wireframe. There's no visual component for me in any capacity. I have no ability to perceive a visualization of something.

But I know what something would look like if I could see it. I know what an apple looks like. I can know that things are connected or related without seeing them. It is fairly easy for me to "conceptualize" a graph, but there's 0 visual component even if closing my eyes.

I would love if I could wireframe visualize like that post you sent. That would be actually awesome, but I cannot.

Just close your eyes and rely on your hands for a bit.

If you're saying to close my eyes and use my hands to manipulate some 3D shape, I'm going to be visualizing it while I do that.

it's like a lidar (I have aphantasia too)

Do you remember events visually? Does your memory work differently than imagination?

The way I imagine it works is like the weights of a machine learning network. The lower-level convolutional layers are discarded and only the higher-level feature extracted weights (latent space I believe it's called) are remembered. We can then 'think' in that feature space with no associated imagery but feel our way around in that space.

There was one time (before the web) where I was trying to solve a physical puzzle of balancing many long construction nails on the head of a standing one. I couldn't solve it, but must have thought about it because when I woke up, I knew the solution and demonstrated it (I already knew it would work) as soon as I got to the office where the nails were.

I also spend long periods pondering a problem staring into space and not thinking of anything specific but during that time my mind is mixing and matching and trying different arrangements of possible solutions. I can't see any of this happening, but every now and then I'll have an idea making connections I hadn't considered before. Often one of them will pan out well.

I’ve always suspected it makes it easier for me to think abstractly without having any images to tie concepts to in my mind.

our thoughts are not linear. This is why I prefer to express ideas and even take notes using a mind map (graph) structure. Like the one provided by https://nodeland.io

I'm kinda similar. Like 99%(?) aphantasic, but very good at 3D stuff.

Seeing the object has nothing to do with knowing something about it or being able to predict it. Plus, just look at how bad many phantasics are at drawing common stuff like a bicycle - that's easy for me. I can draw whole diagram teardowns of machines I've only seen once, and that isn't what I do normally. I don't practice it or use it day-to-day (or even yearly).

I really don't think these things are anywhere near as connected as many feel they should be. I completely understand why people feel that way, they really do feel like they should overlap heavily, but that doesn't mean it's reality.

I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice.

First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.

With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.

- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.

- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)

- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.

- When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus

- I can't mind palace really much at all.

- I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.

Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio.

Interested in other people's experiences.

> - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)

Interesting, I can reason how it should look and figure it out that way, but I never could just select one from seeing another version of it.

Do you ever talk to yourself silently? How fast do you read?

Yes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time. Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless). I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit. There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these thoughts though.

I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.

Sorry but, your list of examples feels like a list produced by an AI from a set of articles about aphantasia, or it's like you're too influenced by these articles. Rotating 3d objects, doing multiple visual operations on a rubik's cube or mental abacus are not operations that even people with hyperphantasia will be able to do naturaly. If you gave more examples of every day situations, or if you told us that you tried to train for thoses operations for 3 months and failed, we could conclude something else.

When you do mental object rotations, does the answer just come to you?

Like if I ask you to think of a car brand, one just jumped into your head. Does the correct rotation just come into your head too?

For me to do rotations I have to visualize the object in my "minds eye" and then I watch it rotate. I can't imagine doing it any other way.

Command line vs GUI. (Or, for most people, a combination)

In my case I'm approximately typical but there are things I'm better or worse at visualizing. I've never successfully worked a mind palace, I find myself too distracted and unable to hold the image, as if in a dream. But I'm quite good at mentally navigating routes and can build a pretty large visual model of roads I drive. (Oh. Maybe I should make a "mind city" instead.)

I haven't tried it but this person claims to have a technique you can practice as an aphantasic and learn to visualise: https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...

That's incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm not aphantasic but when deliberately picturing something the image starts correctly but changes to something else quickly. They are also not vivid at all.

However when I think or remember things (consciously or day dreaming) the images / video is better. But as soon as I focus on it directly it changes and I lose it so to speak.

Gonna give this a try.

I read about something a long time ago, maybe in a lucid dreaming context, but it was about a man who was sitting on a train in the early 20th century daydreaming, and the shadows from trees rapidly passing over his eyes basically kickstarted his ability to visualize with his mind's eye. I think he might have even gone on create a device with a spinning circle with slits on it and a lamp behind it in order to play with the effect.

Anyways, I tried it a long time ago, and it definitely enhanced my ability to truly "see" mental imagery. Give it a shot! All you need to do is close your eyes and relax in front of something that is generating a lot of bright/dark areas in motion. Even sitting in front of a TV in a dark room with the TV muted would probably work.

I've tried this for an extended period of time and it hasn't yielded a huge improvement.

When I'm laying in bed at night, close to falling asleep, if I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes get a little glimpse of mental imagery. Like a fleeting moment (perhaps ~500ms) of seeing a full scene (a forest, mountains, a city) but then it's gone.

I think a mistake people make is trying to "see" things in the blackness of their eyes. I've noticed when I get these fleeting images it's when I'm kind of not "looking" at the black, but kind of relaxing my eyes on turning off my attention to my "photon-based" visual system.

Trying that right now, when I rub my eyes I can see the phosphenes, but they never do anything more than just float around for a bit and then vanish. Sometimes when I stare at the back of my eyelids hard enough I get the impression of static, but that's it, the static doesn't ever turn into anything.

No article on this topic is complete without mentioning Galton, who described the phenomenon in 1880: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

(By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from almust fully auditory complete with specific voice characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully abstract)

Discussion pages like this one are constantly filled with people saying "Aphantasia doesn't exist, it's just differences in how people describe the same thing," when the science in this paper and others is clear.

Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.

The science isn't clear at all. The question "To what extent do you actually see an apple?" is completely unscientific. You can't simply ask people questions, that's not science.

It's also a question about qualia, which is notoriously a field of study resistant to science.

People who report as aphantasia light up differently in an fMRI than those who do not report as aphantasia, and do so in consistent ways. They also have predictable differences in autobiographical memory and a number of other areas.

Pretty sure that counts.

How many people have actually been studied in an fMRI aphantasia study? Like 10? I'll give you those people.

But meanwhile on the Internet we have endless people claiming to they have aphantasia because they "only see black when they close their eyes".

I don't think we should conflate these two.

I'm not sure I picture an apple if someone asks me to imagine one. I'm not sure it has a particular color neither.

If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a conscious process.

So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by default.

I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by definition.

I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something detailed, maybe it would come with training.

Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things to try guessing I'm dreaming xD

I cannot see mental images and it never occurred to me until my late 30s that things like "mental palace", "imagine yourself on a beach", even kind of Feynman ball mean literal picture that people kind of see in front of their eyes.

I was trying really hard to do mental imaginary techniques to remember things in games (e.g. "imagine ikea shelf and put number when the next item respawns in corresponding box") until I realized that there is something wrong with me and the entire premise.

For everyday life, I think that this is has some weight in the fact that the docs that I'm writing usually text heavy and don't have many illustrations/diagrams and I was/am solving spatial puzzles kind of "analytically" in my head.

I don't have aphantasia, my mind's eye is composited onto my senses. Obviously I'm aware of what I'm consciously imagining, but I've recently realized that I can't actually tell the difference between imaginary and real sensory inputs. I'm experiencing them the same way.

I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

> I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets my experience apart from others.

I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in my head quite well (with verification of this through being a musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.

Sounds like hyperphantasia, so also a bit rare and on the complete opposite side of the spectrum ;) Most people fall in between the two extremes.

I do have a vivid imagination, but I was specifically referring to the way it is subjectively experienced, not its objective quality.

If I decide to play a song in my head, I know that it's not real, but I don't hear that it's not real. Not because of the quality of the rendition, but because it would be indistinguishable to me from hearing an identical live reproduction [1]. If I'm really tired and start having sensory hallucinations, I don't know that they're not real and I don't hear that they're not real.

Personally, after experimenting with it, I believe that when I'm imagining sights or sounds, I'm actually self-inducing sensory hallucinations. I can do it with other senses too, but I have less practice with those. I don't have to visualize in order to think or conceptualize [2].

All of that is what makes me think that aphantasia is the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will. Depending on the person, it might be limited to one or more senses, the quality might be limited by available bandwidth, but if it's visualized then it would not be distinguishable from an equivalent sensory input. If it's conceptualized, then by definition it's not a sensory input. Of course, I only have my own subjective experience as a data point, so I don't expect this to be an authoritative answer.

[1] Excluding other correlated stimuli, like feeling my innards vibrating due to proximity to a speaker emitting a loud base.

[2] I'll have to think and experiment on my own to quantify this part. That being said, I haven't managed to read a sentence without having a voice speaking out the words in my head.

If I understand you correctly, then no, aphantasia is not the inability to induce sensory hallucinations. "Typical" visualizing is different from actually seeing/..., see other comments in this thread for descriptions. Not sure what you mean by conceptualized, but most people do "see" images, but thet don't "actually see" them. There is something between aphantasia and hyperphantasia, and it's where moet people are actually.

I became aware of aphantasia semi-recently and believe I have it, but have been wanting to asking someone who can see images a question ever since to try and comprehend something I’ve questioned my whole life. I haven’t seen a clear answer when reading articles.

When someone is giving talk and tells everyone (or asks you directly) to close your eyes and imagine you are on a beach with a cold drink next to you. Then they ask what color the drink is, or if there is anything in the distance… do you just look to see what’s there and answer, or do you need to create new information?

Every time I’ve been in this situation I just see black, and am simply trying to think about whatever I was told to think about. Any time a question is asked about what I’m seeing, I just have to make up an answer. I’m basically lying so I can answer, and I thought that’s what everyone was doing. Is this not your experience? If you imagine and apple, do you just look at it to know what kind you’re brain picked today, without having to make a decision about what kind of apple you want to see?

A follow up to that, if most people can see imagery like this, why on earth do people spend so much time with their nose in a phone? I think I’d be one of those problem daydreamers the article talked about. That sounds like a super power.

The only time I’ve ever seen anything was when I went to a place to learn a certain meditation practice. The first time I did it I saw what were kind of like the northern lights, but a vivid blue. I actually opened my eyes for a second to see if they were shining lights at me to make it seem more magical. It only happened that one time. If that happened every time I meditated, I would be doing it all the time. It was so cool.

> When someone is giving talk and tells everyone (or asks you directly) to close your eyes and imagine you are on a beach with a cold drink next to you. Then they ask what color the drink is, or if there is anything in the distance… do you just look to see what’s there and answer, or do you need to create new information?

It depends. In order to visualize something, I give constraints to my imagination.

If I decide to visualize a photo-realistic drink, the drink will have a color. If I don't constrain the color either directly ("yellow") or indirectly ("citrus drink"), my imagination will pick a color by default because it has to fill in the scene given by the constraints ("photo-realistic"). What color it picks at a given moment or why in that case is up to my subconscious I guess.

If I decide to visualize a black-and-white drawing of a drink on a sheet of paper, it doesn't have a color. It has a shade of gray that I either consciously or unconsciously choose as above.

If I decide to conceptualize a drink, the drink doesn't have a color unless I pick one. It's harder to describe what I experience then, but "feeling" a graph of concepts would be somewhat close. It's harder to conceptualize a purely non-abstract thing for me because my imagination will try to picture it given the chance, it works better as part of a reasoning process or on abstract things.

> A follow up to that, if most people can see imagery like this, why on earth do people spend so much time with their nose in a phone? I think I’d be one of those problem daydreamers the article talked about. That sounds like a super power.

Imagination isn't inspiration. Being uninspired applies equally to imagination and drawing. There's also only so many times you can draw or imagine a particular topic in a row before you get bored of it.

It's also a question of producing vs consuming. I can listen to music in my head with little effort, but I can hear music with my headphones with no effort. If you're mentally spent or depressed, you probably don't have the focus or willpower to visualize an epic D&D quest playing out in your head, because it takes effort and creativity to do so.

Thanks for helping to clarify how you’re able to see things. I appreciate having clarity, while also disappointed I’m not able to do this.

The inspiration vs imagination, and effort, makes sense. I suppose I’m thinking I’d do it all the time, because the idea of it is novel to me. Having it your whole life makes it a different story.

As someone with recently diagnosed aphantasia - it’s surreal that 99% population sees things that aren’t there / literally halucinates, and that it’s considered normal!

So you can't picture your mother's face in your mind's eye (which may or may not be there?)

It's not the same as hallucination.

Can only answer for myself, but yes—I am completely unable to picture my parents.

I'm not completely aphantasic, but the way you phrase the rhetorical contains exactly the massive divide that exists in experience. You believe that such an act is obviously easy, whereas for myself, it is difficult and less an image than a fleeting impression that is more conceptual than it is visual.

Yeah, it's quite peculiar how inaccurate the classic discourse around "seeing things" and "hearing voices" turned out to be. Rather than seeing/hearing vs. not seeing/hearing things the dichotomy should probably be something like "having the sense that what you're seeing/hearing is part of your own thoughts vs. externally imposed".

Questions, out of curiosity:

What is your experience of dreaming like?

What is your experience of recalling memories like?

What is your experience of recalling media you've watched like?

What is your experience of imagining like?

What is your experience of reading like?

I also have it.

Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal, but also why I thought I don’t have aphantasia. I even have lucid dreams.

Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having seen something.

Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to still describe parts of it, but I see nothing.

Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen a child’s water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun, roughly.

Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I can’t see any of it. Now descriptions of things happening, I can totally get into that. But I don’t see anything.

For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn’t realize anyone would actually see something.

There is also a fantasy writer, Mark Lawrence, who has aphantasia and wrote about it: http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/

For the record, I love Lord of the Rings. But yes, there is something about detailed description of objects in books that rarely lands for me. The words have to in and of themselves convey a kind of conceptual beauty, or call upon a great metaphor or the like, otherwise they will bore me since I see very little and will mostly just get annoyed trying to keep all the details in my head.

Not the person you're replying to, but I would call myself "near aphantasic" and the answer to all these is that they are almost entirely conceptual rather than visual. What little visual impression I can form is extremely fleeting, incomplete, low fidelity, and in short nothing like actually seeing something. At some level I can tell my visual system gets activated, but it's completely different from truly seeing something.

Not the OP but..

Recalling memories for me has the detail of a short journal entry. It's not first person, I don't relive the emotions I felt at the time, and compared to my others the detail isn't there.

For example, when discussing my graduation with my father, I could recall the building, the general layout of the room, and parts of the ceremony's sequence. However, I can't recall walking across the stage, even though I know it happened. In contrast, my father could describe where he was seated and even what people in front of him were wearing.

Media I remember the concepts of what was covered and images or videos are familiar when I see them again, but I can't rewatch a moment in my mind.

Likewise for reading, I remember as a child not understanding what people meant when they said Daniel Radcliffe didn't match up to the Harry Potter they imagined.

Imagining is all about the idea, best explainer would be: https://aphantasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Imagine-a-horse.pn...

I haven't been formally diagnosed but I'm definitely on the very low end of visualization. But I'll answer for myself:

While I'm dreaming and unaware that I'm dreaming, it's like I'm in real life. As soon as I start to wake up at all, everything fades to black almost instantly. I recall the experience as if I lived it though dreams are strange so it's far less consistent than a normal narrative.

What kind of memories? I often completely fail to encode and remember highly visual details - like what color hair someone has, what shirt they were wearing, and so on. But I could recall the name of the building in which my college showed the Matrix in the fall of 1999 because I could remember which way I walked there.

I recall audio strongly and can hear the voices of various characters in my head. I can do passable impressions of quite a few characters. I can tell you the story in detail, but if something hinges on a visual cue I will completely fail there.

I mostly talk to myself in my head. It's a running narrative. If you'd like a specific example, give me something more meaningful than "imagining".

If I want to read something and retain it well, I will hear it in my head in my internal voice as I'm reading.

> What is your experience of reading like?

This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.

The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.

I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.

I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.

I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.

I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.

I’m a prolific consumer of fiction. For me reading isn’t about the scenery so much as the ideas and messages within a work. I can appreciate character growth without the visual imagery involved. I hate fluffy details added to books. I don’t need an item by item run down of their entire wardrobe or the place settings on the table. That’s mostly just noise to me and books that feature those details prominently are a slog.

“He was all jowls and scowls”

Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean on.

It's always stuck with me reading reviews of Greg Egan's novels.

In many of his novels characters are either non-human, post-humans, or AIs.

Many folks criticize the character development, etc. My only assumption that that Greg's writing style strips out all the cruft that I find a slog.

Because it doesn't have the cruft and focuses on ideas and messages, I love it.

Not op, but I wouldn't call it boring.

It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-piece. I would characterize myself as having a running interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I gather it is for some.)

I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.

I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of characters because I have no strong sense of what they look or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)

A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the rest is about ~ideas and personalities.

Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around reading.

I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much more likely to retain some picky detail when it's integrated into my broader understanding than if it's effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like dates.

Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first resource I reach for.)

I read a lot and have aphantasia.

Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.

All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.

Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.

If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).

If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."

Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.

There's just no rich visual experience.

I will lightly defend a lot of this description in American Psycho.

I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense?

That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.

I'll add another data point as I believe I'm on the extreme end of complete aphantasia:

Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading. Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling," but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams.

Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly they remember the events of my own life. I really do not recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old. At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong. Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the motivating details of the plotline itself, and then subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course, none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not imagery.

Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense, but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even replaying video games unless there is something novel (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because there is a much higher amount of content from a logical plotline/story point of view.

Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings. Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do with my family, etc.

Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces, even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book, watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I tend not to remember details of an author's physical description of their characters. I can't tell you, even now, if Aragorn has blue or brown eyes in the books. I think Viggo M. haa blue eyes, but that's a fact I'm remembering, not a mental image I'm consulting.

Reading: not much to add I haven't touched on already.

It is very much a spectrum. People that literally halucinates things are just as rare. I am much closer to the aphatasia side of things. I can picture things in my mind but is extremely different from "seeing" things. It more like remembering how something looks. Also, all the stats on this are kind of bullshit because of how hard it is to describe. People just map on "picturing" to whatever they do.

"Seeing" something in your imagination isn't a literal hallucination. It's an altogether separate form of visualization that doesn't interfere optically.

How do you get diagnosed?

>Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say they "see" things, I want to say "with what?"

To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing?

I can imagine things and have vague visual imagery appear in my head, but I can't see them as "floating like holograms".

I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.

> I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.

When you say "understand", I want to say "with what?" The mind you're borrowing?

It makes me wonder how much of this is pseudoscience, especially internet discourse around it.

How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?

How much of this is just people having a normal human experience of not seeing literal visuals getting confused by people who are a much more figurative in the description of their own experience?

Kinda reminds me of smoking weed in high school and there was always the kid who roleplayed that he was seeing a bunch of green men in the room.

I address the "maybe we describe our experience differently" in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139321

>How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?

The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.

There is obviously a spectrum at work, as some people seem to be better at visualizing things in their mind than others. This does not surprise me at all.

What does surprise me is that most discussions on aphantasia are very similar to those on religious experiences. Some of us can talk to God, while others are pretty sure He does not exist, because they never get an answer.

Most scientists have given up on trying to prove that God does or does not exist. But quite a lot of ink had been spilled to get to that point. And it seems we still have some bytes to go in the phantasia discussion.

There are now three distinct methods to measure visual imagery objectively, without relying on someone's description of the vividness.

Here is a video in which prof Joel Pearson describes them: https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0 , IIRC Joel Pearson was involved in developing each of the methods, so I'm sure you can find his publications on the subject as well.

Aphantasia is one end of a spectrum, Hyperphantasia [0] is on the other end. You might simply have a more normal mind that can imagine things, but not have something akin to a manipulable hologram. As I have aphantasia, though, I can’t for sure say if that’s really on that end of it ;)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia

You've articulated how I'd describe my experience as well. I'd not ever describe something in my mind's eye as 'floating like holograms'.

"Vague visual imagery appear in my head" resonates with me.

Edit: typo

Seeing most likely takes place deeper in the brain, not in the eyes.

One hint for this is that we see the world upside-down by default. Another is the evidence that visual evidence cannot be trusted in a court case.

It then seems likely that the responsible brain areas can be activated by memory, as well as by the eye sensors.

The level of reality at which all this is possible in different individuals is obviously an open question. Whether one can train this is also not entirely clear to most.

No one has ever seen anything with anything but their brain. It hardly makes much difference how some info got to the part of the brain that creates what we call an image, delivered direct from a retina or fabricated from memory.

When I "see" an object what I'm doing is imagining a picture (or movie) of the object. That image that I imagine is remotely in my actual eyesight -- there's no object floating in front of me. But I do imagine it as if it was in front of me, "floating like a hologram" in a way. It's like recalling a memory of a photograph.

(Based on the rest of the comment I think you left out a word and meant "that I imagine is not remotely in my actual eyesight")

I suspect this is what's going on, and they're not describing it well.

There's a test used for perfect eidetic memory that as far as I remember no one has ever passed. The primary requirement for passing it is to be able to project what you've previously seen, "floating like a hologram", on top of a second image you're currently looking at. The two patterns combine to reveal a message or image.

But kids will often describe what they're imagining as if they're doing exactly that, because they don't yet have the words or context to be precise.

Yes, I left out that word, 'not'. Oops.

Just curious, doesn't it happen to everyone for certain abstractions? When we study maths, our teachers encourage us to "see" examples or geometric representations or simply some abstract representations in our mind. Some people couldn't do so at high-school level, some people couldn't do so at college level. Those who can no matter what have a high chance of becoming an accomplished mathematician or scientists, but even for them they can't "see" mental images for every concepts no matter how hard they try.

Similarly, someone couldn't see mental images for the things they wanted to draw, and they were miserable in their arts class. I certainly felt so.

As a coder who was reasonably good at math, I’ve always done mental work by tracking the motion of objects in my head. Can’t see them. But, I know where I put them and how I want to shuffle them around. Imaginary proprioception, I guess. Works better for data structures and algorithms than for math.

I don't think only 1% or even 1% to 4% of the population has this.

Most people do not know they are supposed to 'see' something when imagining something. Same goes for hearing.

I can't do both and discovered this when I was 45.

Like many others I do dream in full colour with sound and I never forget a face.

When doing a quick round at work asking people about it, because I was amazed, I've learned two things.

1. About 50% of the persons asked, confirmed they objectively only see black when closing their eyes and imagining something.

2. Most do not care at all about this subject and are not interested to explore this further.

Asking if they see black is a wrong test, because people with imagination also see black, just they can see other things on top.

A better test is:

Ask them to imagine a ball on a table, then ask what color is the ball. So far almost everyone I asked answered with a color, no hesitation.

Aphants will hesitate, and they will need to think of a color - in their minds a ball is just an abstract concept - it doesn't have a color unless you consciously specify it.

So far, from my tests - 1 in 10 people asked is possibly an aphant.

Yes, exactly. Or at least this matches well with my inner experience. To be specific, I wouldn't even be able to think of a color, just the name of a color.

It's all symbolic. If you don't give details, the details very likely will not exist, and if they do, I still don't see them.

Thanks that might work better.

I think especial the other way around.

My wife for sure has a vivid visual experience, and only sees black when asked to see black. So, I don't think people without aphantasia will be identified having it with the question. I also was very specific with all black, not black and an image.

Asking a colour might identify people who do not know they have aphantasia

Because some people I've asked who think they can visualise, say they actually don't see anything, but imagine seeing. So what they see with eyes closed, is 'black'. That's why I've used that question. But they might not know the colour when not told in advance.

Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.

You still know the shape.

But the answer is definitely 'not very well'.

I’ve heard of artists with aphantasia, just maybe there are fewer as a percent than the general public.

Well that would certainly explain why I've always been absolutely terrible at drawing...

It's honestly more confusing to me that most people are bad at drawing but supposedly most people don't have aphantasia.

I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images.

When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I can anticipate which strokes will make sense.

It’s similar for me. It has to be a very iterative process where the image emerges rather than me having a solid idea in my head and bringing it to life.

It’s more of an artisan muscle memory thing. You can definitely tell sometimes, that someone has the right hand movements to sum up all the details that make a complete painting, but the overall composition is lacking in the coherence or planning or perspective. The result being something like medieval manuscript animals. There are still rules such as perspective lines and so on that can compensate. How can someone code without planning the architecture beforehand? Line by line, but spaghetti structure arises subtly. If you just start drawing, you have a sense of the next stroke, and next stroke. But yeah, drawing by markov process can lead to shoddiness without a clear guiding visualisation.

I think that sculpting would be much better suited as the properties and relationships of an object hold true. When making a 2d drawing it's a projection which has very different relationships.

I can’t really. If I draw I need reference material.

I can make little play dough models though? I know the shapes I just can’t see them in my mind.

Maybe this is why I am terrible at drawing lol. If I try to draw a dog there is a good chance most people wont be able to tell it's a dog.

I can try to draw one because I know the characteristics of a dog and I can fulfill them as I am creating the shape on the paper. But I don't think I see it ahead of time.

This is exactly why my drawings suck, lol. I know the basic shape of a dog but the details escape me.

Best I can tell is that I think I have this. Or at least some amount of it.

But I find it really hard to understand what people exactly mean when they describe their visualization experience.

Like I definitely don't feel like I see anything if I close my eyes and try to think of specific objects.

If I close my eyes and rub them I can see sorts of blobs and sparkles that are usually white or a bit yellowish even though my eyes are closed.

The sparkles are real, so they don't count. And yes, most people, when they count sheep, do this literally, i.e. imagine a bunch of sheep and count them. I also can't do that, never could. Realized my brain was different when I knew I couldn't do the memory palace thing, even though I'm among the smarter part of the population. /r/aphantasia has more info and other aphants ;)

I only recently realized that my mind's eye really isn't. Just now I made the connection maybe why I can't stand descriptive prose. I remember having to read the Scarlett Letter (think that was the one) and there were pages and pages of words painting a picture that did nothing for me, and I was just waiting for it to get on with telling the story. Out of context but "I'm drowning here and you're describing the water." sums it up for me.

Another thing that makes sense now is how I could never learn facts and stories in school. I'm guessing that I just couldn't form a conceptual model for me to store it. If I studied a field deeply I could probably be able to connect all the dots and it would make sense. OTOH math and science was super easy as they were all formulas and relationships that touched on each other and naturally all fit into place relative to each other, once I could get a thing to click I wouldn't have to remember it because I'd just know.

I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding, yes I can see the apple in my minds eye in all of its glory and color, but yes it’s still black “behind my eyes”, it all depends on where I am focusing, on my eyes or on the apple.

Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are experiencing the same thing.

I can’t. There is no apple. I remember how apples look from seeing them before. But I can’t see it. I can’t turn it, it’s a completely abstract thing in my mind.

Can you describe a blemish on an apple to me?

Yes, there's a spot on an apple. Probably brown. I remember that.

Can you describe it in any greater detail? What does the periphery of the blemish look like?

No idea.

I don't think it's agreeing. I can't "see" anything my any means just from thoughts. Either I see or I don't. There is no visual part I'm remembering stuff. Not that I can really describe how I memorize things ... but from all I read about there is a big difference between people. Not just disagreement.

I address the "maybe we describe our experience differently" in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139321

I believe that there is something past just a disagreement on definitions.

I would absolutely never write what you wrote though..

What "glory" do you speak of? For me, the apple is more of an idea and I can VERY faintly "see" fuzzy attributes about its geometry. And there is no color.

>I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding...this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing

The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.

I agree, not saying aphantasia isn't real but I think a lot of it is misunderstanding of those who think phanatasia is closing your eyes and "seeing" things. In an engineering class where I had to make drawings from multiple angles I would rotate it in my mind and draw it, I can can close my eyes and visualize walking around my childhood home, and I can visualize snap shots of important memories of my life. However, I don't "see" it in any sense of what it is like when my eyes are open, not even close really.

I think I'm pretty far out on the aphantasia spectrum. Mostly the spatial and abstract qualia of a scene, not like seeing. Even an afterimage of a strobe is more visual than my imagination. I can't really picture faces of loved ones, though I can sense strong recognition and/or anticipation of features or mannerisms when seeing an actual person.

But I have a variable audio and proprioceptive imagination that is something in between, like many people have described above for visuals. Not like a hallucination or waking dream with perceptions equivalent to real senses, but with way more qualia than just an abstract idea. A distinct category of simulation that lies somewhere in between.

So, I can believe that others have things more like this, but visually. And I have observed mentally ill people with full on hallucinations and delusions, and can also believe that there are other stages along this spectrum, more vivid but still distinguishing self-generated from sensory-generated perceptions.

For imagery, I have the most tenuous topological or spatial perceptions that, if anything, connect more to my proprioceptive sense. Like as if I could imagine myself being some sort of tentacled animal and reaching all over to feel a complex structure in an instant. Or at times of extreme focus, I can almost feel myself as an amorphous charge spreading out (breadth-first) through a complex graph or maze.

For me, if I try to visualize something context-less, my visual is very faint and smeared. My mind naturally starts to contextualize it, and when it finds one it becomes clearer, although it’s less that I’m visualizing something and more that I’m re-experiencing a memory… what I was doing, how I felt, etc.

As a result, I don’t tend to think of an apple. I think of the apples in the fruit drawer that I just looked at, or the apples we turned into cider when I was a child. I don’t see what my mom looks like in my mind so much as remember, and as I’m trying to hold her in my mind to describe her I see a dozen memories of her face that all sort of blend together.

I think when I was younger, it was more vivid and simpler. The murky, dark, and fleeting memory/visualization thing has increased over time, and that kind of scares me.

People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it. An imaginary horse pops into your visual field while you're making a tricky maneuver on the highway...

Also, presumably ADHD is widespread. But people who don't have aphantasia (most people) can reliably persist accurate imaginary objects in the visual field? Your attention is fragmented and jumping from thing to thing but the horse in your visual field persists there for you to visit and revisit? Highly doubtful.

The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention.

> People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it... > The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention

I have on a few occasions woken from a dream, opened my eyes and seen the image from that dream persist for a second in my visual field. It's a pretty freaky experience - probably very much like a hallucination.

I've also been walking, deep in thought and then looked up and not known where I was because I had a different picture of a different place in mind.

How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any visuals? (the article says that some do)

> How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any visuals?

Pretty sure that they have vivid dreams like everyone else. The aphantasia is limited to the topic of conjuring visual imaginations while awake.

Nah. Some people don't remember dreams.

All right, how about when you’re tired or drifting off to sleep? I can certainly see things vividly in my mind I during those times. It seems to me that being awake suppresses such visualizations, and that this is adaptive.

I have complete aphantasia when awake, but I do have visuals when dreaming. I can tell when I cross some threshold of awake-ness because the visuals of the dream I am having disappear (the dream usually continues, without visuals for a bit longer until I am more awake). It is a weird experience.

No. I replied in a sibling comment, but even in the few dreams I remember there is no visual image at all.

I have complete aphantasia. I do dream, but rarely remember them. The dreams I do remember have the same quality as my imagination when reading a book. Meaning, I don't see anything when I dream. I know the story, I can feel the place setting, and recognize the actors involved (even to the point of knowing their internal motivation like my own), but there is no visual component whatsoever.

It's more like having a separate eye you can direct your attention too. Perhaps like a spider might, with its extra sets of eyes? :D

Edit: And yes, better not do that too much while driving. Although I do use this faculty when parallel parking, I imagine the car and surroundings looking down from the top and simulate the optimal parking approach.

Yes! Apt description.

When I imagine an object, it doesn't appear in my visual field. Anyway, for complex visualization I have to close my eyes.

You can imagine an object right now, and it's floating in front of your laptop, occluding this text? If so, that's wild.

Edit: Oops I read "does appear" instead of "doesn't appear".

It doesnt occlude. It’s like “in your mind’s eye”. I imagine its like the perception of it is higher up in the visual processing hierarchy.

Yeah, it's more like a parallel reality which you can switch into. And sometimes the switching happens involuntarily.

I have a strong visuospatial sketchpad (e.g. I sometimes imagine building things from lego in my head). When Im driving at night on a highway I have to be careful because I can start to have complex and involved visual imaginations that take more attention than the road in front of me. I have ADHD as well.

Yes I can relate to this. I can get deeply sucked into imagination while ignoring my actual visual field / surroundings.

There is something called "Hyperphantasia" and yes, it is what it sounds like. But, there are much less scientific studies for this, as opposed to aphantasia.

Does the image from your left eye occlude the image from your right eye? No, it doesn't.

It's the same for mental imagery. It's a third "image buffer", alongside the two from the eyes. It coexists in the same coordinate system as the other two, but it doesn't occlude them.

Can you imagine a song in your head? If so, does it drown out the sound of the real world? Again, no.

I fully agree, and that is my experience. I am just grappling with what looks like quite a bit of misunderstanding around aphantasia. Some people make it sound like it involves imaginary objects in the visual field, causing other people (who probably don't have aphantasia) to start suspecting that they too have aphantasia, because when they close their eyes they can't see vivid images on the backs of their eyelids.

And here is what makes it difficult.

My wife really sees 'extra' images when imagining with eyes open and closed.

I can imagine very well but don't see anything, so no visualisation.

With eyes open I see what is in front in me, and imagine (ltterlaly) what I am thinking about. This can be in high visual detail, but with no picture. With eyes closed it is strange enough harder te imagine, because the black is all consuming.

Long story short:

I think you might have aphantasia but don't know or acknowledge it yet...

> Does the image from your left eye occlude the image from your right eye? No, it doesn't.

I know it's kind of a tangent, but I have double vision; the images from my two eyes do not converge, they're not looking at the same thing. As such, the images from my eyes overlap and I see both of them at the same time. I need to wear a fresnel lens on one of the lenses of my eye glasses to prevent this. If I'm not wearing them, it makes it complicated to interact with the world. It's mentally exhausting. Plus I sometimes walk into things because I avoided / went around the "wrong one".

This ability varies with our health and exhaustion. A year or two ago I had less control of conjuring images like these by choice. Only a week or two ago I regained more control of depth, not that it wasn’t 3d before, but making it really pop makes a big difference. The key has been long distance cycling, cardio is important for a clear mind.

> “It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh,” Ross wrote in a 2016 Facebook post about his personal discovery. All his life, he had thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor.

It's NOT a metaphor?? People are actually imagining sheep??

Anyway I've suspected before that I have some form of this.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the rumble of the hordes of people rushing to post "I have this".

A couple of things I noticed while teaching drawing to students (who were quite good) and i was a bit obsessed by Aphantasia..

It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable characteristic that isn’t present in drawings from imagination.

This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could from life/photo than anyone else.

Few cameras have the same focal length as the human eye. I wonder if your observation would hold if that were accounted for. Same as the difference between 'attractive' faces and 'photogenic'.

I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good at mental math.

Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)

Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).

Sample size of one. I have aphantasia and cannot picture images at all. I had a “natural” affinity for math and would often zone out extrapolating mathematical patterns in my head during school. Like the trick with multiplying 9s where you hold your fingers up. I remember spending days of class time working on a more generic rule to allow me to multiply any number by 9 in my head. This came to a crashing halt for calculus as I was not able to develop a mental model for it at all during high school. Everything that had been easy and interesting before just disappeared when it came to memorizing formulas with no rhyme or reason.

> Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well.

Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize doing the problem with an abacus [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus

For those who cannot visualize things: try the same experience with your eyes open. I can't visualize anything with my eyes closed - maybe black-and-white shadowy outlines if that - but with my eyes open I can visualize things kind of up above my head outside my visual field.

(There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older, perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very things that are you start to become threadbare.)

I find it's a lot easier to visualize vividly when I have a real problem to solve and harder when I'm just trying to visualize.

It may be worth investigating aphantasia from the perspective that space is a latent sequence [1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023

I recently learned that people are on a spectrum of thoughts visualization - not everyone _thinks_ the same. If you want to check your personal mix of “visualization” characteristics this questionnaire by Uni of Wisconsin-Madison is useful (you also get your position on the distribution curve):

https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...

Aphantasia might occur with other senses too. I'm almost certain I have aphantasia in taste and smells. I simply cannot conjure any in my head, even for extremely common ones like taste of apple or sun dried sheets. When people ask me about my opinion of food I just had, I'm simply recalling facts from my assessment made during the meal. It's very different from how I do it if I had to recall something visual like a painting, because I do have a vivid mental image.

I’m sorry what? pPeople are doing this with taste and smell too?

Can people just imagine all of their senses?

There's a theory that people are in general bad at doing this with taste and smell because we don't have a lot of words specifically for taste/smell to attach the concepts to. Colors, for example, have their own words, but tastes and smells are in the context of objects they come from instead of standing on their own.

I asked around and a few people seem to have no problem "visualizing" tastes and smells, especially for common ones. I can imagine sense of touch too, I just assumed it's normal to be able to imagine all senses.

I can see, taste and touch in my mind. Smell not so much. Its weird because food taste is strongly related to smell. But a fragance alone is very difficult to me.

What I find interesting is that people with aphantasia still dream like everyone else but can't voluntarily evoke images in their mind.

Which is why I thought I was completely normal, because when I remember them, I have very vivid dreams. When I found out about that, I did get a bit sad and jealous that there are people who can essentially do that at will, while awake. Sounds close to magic to me.

You're not missing much.

As far as I know, I have a very good ability to visualize things mentally. I can picture objects and scenes vividly, with good detail, rotate objects in my mind, etc.

However, there's one critical aspect of this that I don't see people talking about - if I picture a scene that is "pleasing" to look at, like a beautiful sunset - I get absolutely no pleasure or enjoyment from doing so, like I would if I saw it in real life. Somehow the fact that it is a deliberately imagined scene bypasses whatever part of my brain would react with pleasure. Part of this is that there's no novelty to it - I know what I'm imagining, so there's no sense of "Oh wow, look at that!"

So for me, this is a purely practical ability - I can go to Ikea, look at lawn furniture, and pretty easily picture how it will look in my backyard - but that's it.

If I lost this ability, I do think it would make some everyday tasks difficult that I take for granted, but I wouldn't be sad about losing the ability itself.

I believe I have complete aphantasia - I can't form any images at all with any detail. When I dream, it's conceptual with no images, like reading a story out.

I have this, as does my wife. We both thought it was normal up until about a year ago, until our kids informed us that they actually see the things they imagine.

I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by looking and imagining).

But yeah, no mind's eye.

I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)

This may not be for everyone, but I found it interesting:

https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/sex-and-aphantasia/

(mild nsfw warning)

How vivid is the normal level of visualization? I can barely imagine a red apple, but not detailed or vivid really, certainly don't see it in front of me, can barely imagine it. Would vitamin B12 help?

I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see" things.

Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it black)

I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!

It’s not like: visual stimulus. It’s more like when you see something, that experience eventually translates into a picture in your mind.

When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input.

I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.

This seems to be very similar to the debate on internal monologues. No-one can seem to agree on what exactly they think it means.

The internal monologue is interesting. If you are taking, who is listening?

Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple".

>She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.”

What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here.

So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.

It’s definitely different when you’re dreaming or when you’re falling asleep, I mean the vividness of one’s imagination so people are claiming they have the same level of vividness all the time it seems that you must take their word on this, no?

Anecdotally (can't remember the old book references), this had been observed in "new age" and "spiritual" groups in the 1960s, with the conclusion that people could be trained out of it.

I’d be careful about trusting spiritual/Word Of Faith groups too much, especially when the condition can’t actually be tested for. An individual in the movement can easily say they were “healed” to bolster group confidence, and a third party individual might say they’ve been “healed” after being requested to stand around in a circle of prayer for five minutes as an easy out from the situation. I’ve certainly been in the latter case, and the former is fairly well documented.

It wasn't a matter of healing in this case; I trust the accounts.

I wonder how this related to the phenomenon where people forget faces or don't realise that it is possible to remeber faces

I have aphantasia and I can remember faces quite happily but I can't visualise them when thinking about the person. Same as I can recognise a tomato, a ship, a train, whatever, but I can't visualise them in my mind.

I have it and I'm terrible with faces. If I spend long enough I can sort of pattern match distinct features but a whole face is generally lost on me.

Movies where you see a character that has aged or changed style are a mystery. My wife has to call out if it’s the same person. She’s pretty good at knowing when I’d have lost track.

Why do I sense there are higher percentage of people with aphantasia in Tech Industry?

Because in any other industry, you would not gain social capital for claiming to have it.

Or maybe the people is not interested in the phenomenom. I shared an article about aphantasia with my friends. They only responded with jokes: "I can't _imagine_ this being possible".

Similar here, but ALL people thinking not possible ( because obviously it is not the norm ) dont work in Tech / Science or Engineering Field.

While majority who reported having same issues are all from STEM background.

This is a comment out of ignorance but wouldn’t the only people who suffer of aphantasia be blind? How can someone say they don’t remember seeing something?

However if I think it about it deeper are there people who actually see see their thoughts like a dream?

This reminds me of something that might be related. Someone recently told me that if you look at any object, you can imagine what it feels like to put your tongue on it. (With all kinds of subsequent hilarious and disgusting suggestions.)

And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true for most?

A few months ago I took a mental imagery quiz and one of the questions was "Can you imagine what it would feel like to lick a brick wall?"

We have a lot of experience touching things with our fingers (in daily life) and tongues (more when we're younger), and can extrapolate from this experience.

In my own experience, this extrapolation is overconfident - I tested licking a few random items, and while my expectation was close to reality, I was always just a little off for the truly novel items. Of course for something gross, most people won't (and shouldn't!) test their expectation, so they go on with the confirmation bias that they got it right.

First example that comes to mind is that the roof of my mouth feels much smoother to my tongue than it does to my fingers.

.. and then, of course, there's "able to visualize an object when rotated in three dimensions."

I think the percentage of people who can't do that is way higher than 1%. I'm not great at it myself.

Yeah I have this. I also can’t hear voices or sounds in my mind. Poor autobiographical memory tracks too, major things stick but a lot just fades pretty quickly.

If you try to repeat a drum beat without making any noise can you image what it would sound like?

No, just silence.

Was really interested in taking VVIQ. My results: "You have a fairly vivid visual imagination known as phantasia. This indicates an average ability to visualize mental images. When you try to picture something in your mind, you can "see it" with a reasonable level of clarity and detail."

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