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Comment by dfan | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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).

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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