Some people can't see mental images | Hacker News Reader

Some people can't see mental images

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183 pointspetalmind368 comments

I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.

I was thinking the same! At first, I thought I was firmly in the “can clearly visualize” camp, but the more I read and hear people describe how they form (or don't) mental images, the less sure I am.

I’ve interrogated people about this but can never get a straight answer.

——

“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”

Yeah!

“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”

Yeah, you don’t have that?

“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“

Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.

——

…and around we go.

Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes. I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.

I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see - things. Like, when I close my eyes, I see the inside of my eye lids, the blackness. When I then try to imagine a candle for example there is no candle appearing in the darkness, I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar characteristics. I see nothing.

> I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar characteristics

If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?

I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can see the yellow light it casts.

Not the parent, but I relate to their experience.

It depends on what you mean by “see”.

It’s nothing like seeing with my eyes, and it’s nothing like dreaming.

When I “see” it is abstract. There are impressions and sensations. I can recall the qualities of something - even the visual qualities - but it doesn’t feel like sight.

Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.

yes I think you come close to describing how I imagine things. Seeing is just fundamentally the wrong word, at least in my case. When I for example imagine a road I rode on with my bike the other day and do this with my eyes open, there is nothing popping up in front of my eyes, mixed with what i actually see atm, it's more like abstractions popping up in the back of my head. Very simple drawings maybe, just the contours of how it really looks.

Perhaps it is a mental process you can train and get better at. I understand the 'back of the head', location for imagination. And now - for me - it's at the front with some specific training. Drawing (and specific techniques within) have been the cause of the biggest shifts to 'where/how' my imagination is.

> it’s nothing like dreaming.

That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty much exactly like the sensation I have when I "see" stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close my eyes while awake — I can continue where I left off, and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.

But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the physical act of seeing with your eyes.

I think I am aphantasic or mostly so. I don't see visualizations but have vague echoes of their derived properties like spatial structures. It is almost like proprioception if I were some amorphous being that could spread out my countless limbs to feel the shape of the scene.

But, I do have vivid, sometimes lucid, dreams. I would say they are exactly like seeing and being in terms of qualia. It feels like my eyes, and I can blink, cover my face, etc. It's like a nearly ideal, first-person VR experience.

They are unlike reality in that I can be aware it is a dream and have a kind of detachment about it. And the details can be unstable or break down as the dream progresses.

Common visual problems are that I cannot read or operate computers. I try, but the symbolic content shifts and blurs and will not remain coherent.

Motor problems include that I lose my balance or my legs stop working or gravity stops working and I start dragging myself along by my arms or swimming through the air, trying to continue the story.

If I've been playing video games recently, I can even have a weird second-order experience like I am fumbling to find the keyboard and mouse controls to pilot myself through the dream! That is a particularly weird feeling when I become aware of it.

I feel like I have recurring dreams in the same fictional places, but they can have unreal aspects that lead me to get lost. Not like MC Escher drawings, but doorways and junctions that seem to be unreliable or spaces that don't make sense like the Tardis.

> Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.

Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not with most other foods so I think it's more mouth preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov saliva before feeding reaction.

What about memory? Do you occasionally have vivid memories of sight, sound or smell?

Can you describe what you mean by "seeing"? To me, imagination isn't like actual sight. The best way I can describe it is that it's a kind of meta-perception, I'm envisioning the thought, the impression of something. I can visualize the exact details and properties of the candle, but it's not like I'm actually seeing it, I'm just thinking of seeing it. The way you describe your imagination is that it's as if the candle is superimposed on your actual vision, like putting on a mixed-reality headset that's drawing in stuff in your real field of view, representing the same kind of sight as "real sight". Is that what that's like for you?

It's like a photograph is an indirection of the thing that was photographed: not the real thing, but a good visual approximation.

It's like watching a movie; the people are not there, but you still see them.

The cinema is in my mind. People here describe it as "thinking of seeing", but to me that's nonsense. It's definitely a visual thing, I bet it's activating some of the same regions in the brain. Seeing is thinking anyway, in the sense the brain is interpreting signals from the optic nerve.

It's never an hallucination in the sense of being confused about what's real and what's not.

I can also anticipate the taste of something I like, feel it in my mouth, and start salivating. Is it tasting or "thinking of tasting"?

It's more like it's in a different plane, you can see it but it's from another source, like how I can hear things but it doesn't effect my site. If I imagine a candle I "see" a candle in front of a black background, with a flickering flame and a bit of wax dripping down the side. Like how you can have a song in your head but still listen to people

I remember the shape of a candle perfectly well, I just can't "see" anything.

It's not a list of abstract properties, it's an understanding of the shape of a candle. Why would you need to be able to see it to remember its shape?

Because the shape is a physical thing, it's perceived by your senses.

I meant remember, not understand. You can understand something, but I specifically mean remember.

I can prove I can remember the shape, because I can draw it.

I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it. I can have a high-resolution image of a candle, but it's not useful for understanding that there's a candle in the picture - for that, you need to have parsed the image and understood what it contains. The visualization is just the source material. Similarly, when you read a book, you're not remembering what entire pages look like with all the words on them.

The problem with these kinds of things is that so much happens unconsciously that we're not aware of. You think remembering the image is important because you're unaware of all the processing that allows you to understand the image.

> I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it.

Almost all artists will tell you the ability to visualize is critical to be a good artist...

I'm also the same, but I do believe others can vividly see creations in their mind's eye. Nikola Tesla was one who could tinker in his imagination.

Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand, like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual information, it's far more topologically structural than bound to 3D physicality.

I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2 vividness.

But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.

What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.

So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.

Exactly same here. Can operation on the data, without the visuals.

Back when I was on some medication to help me sleep, it came with the side effect of having vivid dreams... and if I didn't fall asleep fast enough after taking it, I'd get hallucinations while my eyes were closed. I knew I wasn't seeing what I thought I was seeing, but I wasn't really in control of the imagery. In one case, I thought there was a suit of armor standing over me and mumbling. In another, I was laying in bed, but I was seeing the living room from a few feet outside of my bedroom.

My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't any different than those hallucinations, with the exception of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting, shading, and so on are all like what you would see with your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.

> I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see - things

My experience of seeing images in my mind is significantly different than when I am not seeing images, and also different from just remembering the details of an object like an apple vs visualizing it.

Regarding closing your eyes: I don't typically close my eyes when I create mental imagery, I'm turning it off and on right now as I type this, now there's an apple I can see in my mind, now there is nothing but the generic slightly darkish background that the apple was sitting in front of. Now the apple is there again but it's green not red, etc.

Pretend you're talking about photos and cameras. You mean you can see the image? even though the camera isn't pointed at it now? Like it's really seeing it?

Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg instead of a live feed.

Let’s suppose you have perfect recall.

Pull up the image on your phone and look at it. Now close your eyes and imagine the image as accurately as you can.

Is it as though you didn’t close your eyes at all? Do you see it the same way as when your eyes are open?

No.

When I'm fully awake, the mental images are more like someone attached a new camera with a field of view that ends at the edges of the object/scene I try to generate.

Okay, forget everything outside that field of view in your real vision.

If you could crop your real field of view somehow to just the photo in question, then would it be as though nothing changed?

(Like, I get that things outside the phone image would change, but does the image your imagining change? Does the sensation change?)

The details get better or near photorealistic when I'm about to doze off.

When I wide awake, parts of the image are "gone" when I'm not focusing them.

Also, the sensation of seeing in my mind does feel different. It's like there is some different place where that image is showing up.

Even if I imagine the mental image to overlay with my real vision, it feels like it's "added" somewhere between my conscious mind and the outside/real world.

I’ve got a hollow log from an apple tree in front of my parked car. I know the contractor put a bucket upside down on it, I could walk out my front door with my eyes closed and kick it (I know exactly where it is) But is the bucket at an angle to the left or right? I don’t have a picture I can reference. I know that I don’t know because I’d have to have noticed and remembered.

Does your photograph allow you to faithfully recall details you didn’t notice at the time or is it a simulation of an image?

It's like hearing a song in your head, you can listen to it and maybe keep time roughly but if someone asks you what instruments there are you might not be able to get all of them, or might not remember the drums or the baseline. It's all much more vague. If you asked me to remember my childhood home I can visualise 'all of it' in my head, but maybe not what the type of bricks are like, or where all of the windows were.

Not quite. I have had a lot of musical training and have a very good musical memory. I can write down songs from my head or hear a song and write it down later, depending on how complicated it is, usually with only 1-2 listens, or play it back, etc. I can visualize things in my head but it is a lot more abstract, or rather, harder to explain.

I think the person you're replying to didn't describe it exactly. It's not really about how good your memory is, I think. It's that no matter what, "replaying" the song in your head isn't going to bring about the same reaction as actually physically hearing music. It's like a simulation, a higher-order perception, thinking of yourself hearing it rather than willing yourself to really hear it in the same way as usual.

This actually highlights to me what may be different about mental images for other people. Because I can much more clearly hear music in my head than I can see images in my head. So if it's much more vague for others, that must be kind of what images are like for me.

For me images are clear and easy, sound is limited and more difficult.

For me it is like a different "space" for mental vs real images. It is not the same neurons, I would guess.

The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously, you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels" (not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very early embryonic development). The better I know the object the better this internal concept-image, but far from what looking at the real thing is like.

I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague without details unless I concentrate on them specifically, and it is very dark in there.

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones. Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for fantastical landscapes and architecture.

The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even though I read the books long before those movies were made. People like me need graphically talented people around, or my mental images will be very much limited to drastically reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to all graphical artists).

It's the same for me, in terms of it being dark and fuzzy unless concentrated on.

but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc).

I'm fairly good at remembering faces, and if they're next to a name when I see them, I can even associate the name! The flip side, of course, is that if I don't see the name, I won't remember it.

I find it implausible that people really have extreme, detailed imagery. Not that they can't do it on demand, if desired. But if every time they imagined something, it instantly appeared with all possible detail - that's just tremendously inefficient.

I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response viz".

What about people who can look at something and then draw it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire Do they have to recall specific areas, or do they perceive the entire thing as a fully instantiated mental image.

Glad that you used this exact example! This guy doesn’t have a photorealistic memory. At least it’s far from as good as it’s claimed to be. He’s an artist proficient in a particular style - better than most, but not superhuman. When he’s not drawing from a direct reference, he’s simply making up details based on assumptions, not on photorealistic memory. Here’s a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyPqQIHkasI

He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately. But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.

But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.

And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.

Yeah, it resembles what you'd get when using gpt 4o for image editing. Of the parts that should have been unaltered, the broad lines are correct, but the exact details are made up. A modern white chair is replaced by some other white chair. A book is replaced by some other book. Etc, etc.

Both brains and gpt appear to be doing lossy compression based on preexisting world knowledge.

but what we see in the first place is not what's out there. a lot of it is generated by the brain. (same for what we hear)

This is called building your 'catalogue' in art, especially concept art. In order to draw something (well) from imagination, you should draw it from reference many times. Then when you draw from imagination, your brain will pull from what it knows. And since you studied the subjects, the textures, the shapes, etc, so well, you will have that stored away and will be able to do so.

Not exactly. I can imagine (hehe) that robust imagination is useful for practical thinking. It allows to reason about the world without having to interact with it by simply simulating complex scenarios in your head.

It's like, if you want to make weather forecast, then you'll use as detailed models as possible, right?

It can be highly variable. For example in the morning or right after a nap I can visualize in extreme detail, but when I'm awake and at my most alert it will become a lot more basic.

Very very well put. I couldn’t describe my same state as you have. Makes perfect sense for me. Thank you.

I'd describe it as like having a second monitor in your desktop. It's not inherently "over" what I already see or anywhere physical, it's like in a different space. Sometimes it can feel like it's "behind" what I am seeing indeed (i.e. kind of over), but it can vary and I suspect that's just a learned position (I just tried and I can shift the position images 'feel where they are').

I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.

It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.

I have three different ways that vision seems to work with me.

1. Actually seeing something like in a dream.

2. A mental scratch pad I can draw on and use spatial awareness to navigate. (I see the code of applications as flying over a landscape or walking through a forest.)

3. Imagination, which uses whatever data vision gets turned into.

I'm not sure how common 2 is. A lot of my brain has broken parts and this scratchpad is used in place of logic. This works fine until I need to work on linear list of similar tokens and keep them in order, like math and some functional programming languages.

> Personally, I can see images when I dream.

If I dream I don't ever remember them - I assume I must, I think everyone (barring medical issues) has REM sleep.

I envy people that, dreams sound amazing.

In my experience remembering dreams is a matter of practice and stress levels. When life is calmer I remember alot more.

Not for me, never remembered them at any point, I asked my mum once if she remembered me dreaming when I was a kid and she couldn't remember it either, no dreams/no nightmares.

I have an active imagination and I read a lot of fiction and I don't think I have aphantasia, I just go to sleep, wake up and never remember a thing in between.

I went from frequent lucid dreams as a child and teen, to no (remembered) dreams, back to vivid (but very rarely lucid) dreams. Ask while having aphantasia, I wish I could get even approximately close to dream images while awake.

Have you tried a dream journal? We forget most of our dreams because we might have them at 2 am and wake up at 7 am. If you wake yourself up in the middle of the night one or two times, you're more likely to have been in the middle of a dream, and it's still up there in your brain enough to write down. The more you do this, the easier it becomes.

Personally I strongly do not want to get better at remembering dreams. At the moment I very rarely remember anything about dreaming, and on the very rare occasion that some fragment of memory from a dream pops into my head it is super confusing until I identify "oh, that must have been from a dream". I prefer to keep my memory uncontaminated with random garbage :)

I remember my dreams quite well. Years ago, I did a dream journal to up that even further. At the time, I discussed doing so with a friend, and she expressed a similar sentiment to yours. In our discussion, she explained not wanting to "carry emotional baggage" from a dream into her day, being distracted by it, and so forth.

That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with me, because together we realized that people can relate to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments after I wake.

As someone with very poor natural dream recall, I think you're right. One time I kept a dream journal and got really good at dream recall.

It was just hours and hours of random junk every night.

I threw away the journal and realized forgetting dreams is good.

It might be easier to describe as an eye that is only opened manually, and can only focus on highly specific things. This is my superpower - I can see things vividly in my mind, spin them around, zoom in/out, and more.

When I'm looking at it, the only thing I can see is whatever object is being imagined. However, yes - it's similar to the sensation of seeing with your own actual eyes. The reason it seems so foreign is because our real eyes can see more than one thing at a time. Our mind's eye can only see exactly one subject at a time (though I should mention that when I navigate cities, I do so by imagining a birds-eye view, so there are many objects IN the map, but I cannot see anything other than the map, and it becomes extremely blurry outside of the section I'm focusing on).

Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse, someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise: Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it. And so on.

For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.

That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".

I can _remember_ the properties of an apple - approximate size, weight (my hand does not instantly drop to the floor due to its weight), etc.

I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).

In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications.

One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_ what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving them into place.

I can make an educated guess based on their length/width but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged without physically moving them.

It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!

The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench but certainly not the one in front of me.

Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn movie that you make in your own mind.

I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch, smell, visuals.

And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it. Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and going to chat with women.

I have so many questions to ask people with aphantasia related to sex, but it would get uncomfortably personal, so maybe best not to.

The best I can do: do people with aphantasia only get aroused if the stimulus is present? Can't they not get horny just imagining things, like I imagine most people can?

Does steamy literature do anything for them? I imagine it doesn't, since if you cannot imagine things then words on a page just have no power.

In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".

> In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".

The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.

Hmm, no? The words must elicit images and sensations, otherwise they wouldn't work as erotica. Words are just words. If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.

> If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.

This is your thesis. In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed. I would furthermore claim that it calls this assumption into question. If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image. If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.

> In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed

Everything we are discussing in this comments section must be understood in an informal way. I obviously did not "prove" anything; I don't think anything can be proven about this anyway. Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".

It's a figure of speech: "this cannot be so!", "it must be like this other thing", etc. It's informal conversation.

> If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image.

Maybe straightforward, but as with anything related to the phenomenon of closure (as in Scott McCloud's closure), drawing an image closes doors. If you describe but don't draw an image, the reader is free to conjure their own image. Maybe they visualize a more attractive person than the artist would have drawn, or simply the kind of person they would be more attracted to.

Have you never seen a movie adaptation after reading the book and thought "wait, this wasn't how I imagined this character"?

> If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.

That's such a mechanistic description! Words don't work like this. Sometimes describing less is better, because the human brain fills in the gaps. You don't simply list physical attributes in an analytical way, you instead conjure sensory stimulus for the reader.

(If talking about sex and adjacent activities makes anybody nervous, simply replace this with literature about food. In order to make somebody's mouth water you cannot simply list ingredients; you must evoke imagery and taste. Then again, some people -- aphantasiacs -- simply cannot "taste" the food in textual descriptions!).

> Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".

read my statement as "it isn't any evidence at all"

Well, that's easy: your statement is wrong.

Good erotic literature does not only describe images, but also desires, emotions and sensations, all of which I think have different channels of imagination/recall.

I didn't mean it describes images, I meant it elicits them. If you cannot imagine what's happening, you cannot get aroused. Words are just words, they must conjure an image.

Aphantasiacs often cannot imagine sensations either (at least, my friend doesn't. He cannot imagine the smell of coffee either).

For me visualization by itself is mostly useless, it is more of a concept of something arousing happening and vague visual flashes of something similar I have seen. It somewhat works, but nowhere near as effective as real pictures.

What works for me - is imagining sensations, they could enhance both real and vague pictures, and I feel them directly in the body which makes them very effective.

> I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).

I think most people couldn't imagine holding an apple specced like a washing machine in one hand. :-)

That'd be a tiny washing machine, to be fair. That said, a 50cm diameter apple would weigh maybe half that, unless it's made entirely of water ice.

but are those details fabricated on demand?

I don't have any trouble following your path of increased detail, but if someone says "imagine an apple", I get a vaguely apple-shaped, generally redish object (I like cosmic crisp), which only becomes detailed if I "navigate my mental eye" closer.

I think that is pretty normal while dreaming, daydreaming, or awake if you don't have aphantasia. Someone skilled in neural-linguistic programming can guide someone into developing greater and greater details.

Psychedelics and certain meditative practices can enhance this effect. There are also specific practices that allow imagined object to take a life of its own.

That's in the private imaginative mindspace. There are other mindspaces. There was one particular dream where I can tell, it was procedurally generated on-demand. When I deliberately took an unusual turn, the entire realm stuttered as whole new areas got procedurally generated. There were other spaces where it was not like that.

When you image slicing, does the video your head renders smooth or jittery string of pictures strung together?

For me the default is typically an instant view of whatever is described, first an apple, then when I read "sliced" now it's suddenly in slices. But if I want to image motion I can easily do that also, like of a knife cutting down through an apple and the two halves falling to either side, just like a video but with a generic background and other simplifications, like the knife suddenly disappears when the cut is complete.

Can you remember seeing? I use my imagination to get a very grainy image but it's usually my interpretation of it and what I'm using it for.

Like when in school I'd imagine graphs lines before drawn or best example is a cad test and from reading the directions I could get an idea of what I was about to draw in cad

Man made computers in our image, it use to be a job title.

For me, it's a little more like you describe these days. It is images, but fuzzier and more impressionistic than it used to be. I have to concentrate harder to have a full-on image of a scene, and can't so much when multitasking.

In college, especially when I was studying Japanese and had to memorize a lot of shapes, I could look at a poster filled with characters and recall it hours later to translate those characters. Your mind is a muscle and it gets better with exercise, and grows weaker when lazy.

Some people can see images while they are conscious just like you see them in your dreams. Perhaps even better, depending on their ability to visualize. Maybe you just never developed the conscious ability to visualize.

When people tell me they can see things in their mind I usually ask something like:

"imagine a ball, can you see it?"

"yes"

"ok what color is it? "

I never heard anyone say anything other than a variation of "hm I don't know". It's just an anecdote but still

What's funny is, I have complete aphantasia, but I can imagine a ball, I just can't see it. If you ask me what color it is, I would say white, because I imagined a baseball. But I can't see it, I'm just thinking about it.

When you read this do you hear it in your head?

I wouldn't say "hear", but I do have an inner monologue. When I read, I have an experience of the words in my mind. But similarly, when I look at the world, I have an experience of what I'm looking at, while I'm looking.

The difference comes when I close my eyes vs. block my ears. When I close my eyes, I don't see images, I can't voluntarily make images appear. But with my eyes and ears blocked, I can still think words - my inner monologue - which I experience in much the same way as I do when I'm reading. I can't conjure other sounds though, which is why I don't really consider that equivalent to "hearing" - it's not sound, it's the concept of words. I don't have any analogue of that for images.

Ordinary aphantasia doesn't imply anything about lack of inner monologue. Some people apparently do lack an inner monologue, and if they're also aphantasic, that's been described by some authors as "deep aphantasia". But there's no evidence that the two conditions are related, except in a kind of conceptual sense.

“Yes — I can imagine it. A simple sphere, maybe sitting in a soft pool of light.”

“I’m picturing it as a bright red ball, glossy and catching a bit of light on one side.”

Great, huh? Except that’s what ChatGPT said when I asked it those two questions. It certainly isn’t picturing anything. If a robot which only ‘thinks’ in terms of chain-of-thought of abstract tokens can act as if it truly sees things, what makes you think this test has any validity at all?

Not everything is about AI, I don't give a shit about what chatgpt thinks

> "ok what color is it? "

As I was reading your post and imagining, when I got to the color question it was a plastic spotted ball, white background with various colored spots. As I continued reading I switched to a red rubber ball.

> Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes.

That's classic complete aphantasia. I have it too.

The "kind of different. I’m not really seeing it" would apply just as well to dream images. If you're interrogating people, you might try asking them whether it's similar to that.

I can visualize things in a lucid dream, and it's identical to seeing for me. But I can only control it for a short time before I wake up.

When awake, I have a "mind's eye," but it's more like what you're describing. As I fall asleep, I can actually begin to see things. I wonder if some people can do that when awake.

If you have something to describe "in your mind's eye" then you don't have aphantasia. We can't "see" anything in our mind.

It might be easier to think in terms of what you can actually achieve with your visualization.

I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I have to write down in full every intermediate step because I can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two steps in the future.

Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.

There's no diagnostic test for it. So is it real?

"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/

I can basically do a Google Street View of places I’ve been before, seeing what I’d be seeing if I was there. It’s not as clear as being there and having my eyes open, and th animation is jerky, but it’s in color, and I have the same spatial sense of where things are relative to where I am mentally standing.

For the most part, I can’t “think” about things except maybe mental math. I see things, and I talk to myself in my head.

I have the same thing, I can "walk" through my childhood home. I see how the living room was set up, I can walk from there to my bedroom and "see" everything. Honestly if I had good art skills I feel like I could draw it out pretty well. However I would in no way describe it as looking like I'm there at the real thing or looking at photograph, not even close really. It's kinda just a hazy construct in my mind.

I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.

YMMV, but for me, the image on en.Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia> made it easy for me to understand. That and having a frank conversation with someone close to me: "Wait, you just think of something and see it, like a picture or real life?" "Wait, you actually see anything?"

The test is this:

Close your eyes and try to visualize an apple. Do this for 30 seconds or so. Try to visualize the skin, the reflection, the texture, the stem, the depth, etc. Try to hold a stable mental picture of that apple.

After the 30 seconds, rate your ability to picture the apple from 1 to 5, where 1 is complete inability and 5 is as if you were looking at a picture of an apple for those 30 seconds. 1 is aphantasia.

Another idea is to recall a vivid dream you had. I think most people would describe it as being part of a movie or reality. While awake, are you able to recreate scenes in vivid detail as if you were dreaming? 5 for complete parity and 1 for not at all. 1 is aphantasia.

Are you really saying you can see an apple in the same way you see an apple with eyes opened? The exact same way? So if you close your eyes, imagine an apple and then look at an apple that someone holds in front of your eye, the apple looks exactly the same? As if you could look through your closed eye lids?

Some people can project the image of an apple into the real world. As in, they are able to imagine an apple on the table that they see with their eyes. They 'see' it, but see that it's a projection. It's a lot like when you have two very similar images (except one change), and you cross your eyes such that they overlap to highlight the change (it's ghostly, as it's only seen in one eye). Same Idea, only instead of the other eye, that projection is coming from your brain.

That's interesting, so how can people like that know which is real and which is not? I don't understand it.

Try the crossed eyes 'find the difference' technique. Which is crossing your eyes such that a third image (a blending of the two images: one from each eye) appears between those two images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdVBzuGWr4

You can easily understand where the difference is because the data is different between the eyes. The difference appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's eye is different from data from the physical eyes when those two 'streams of data' are blended.

Yes I can do this. I can see the image in the middle the same way as I see each individual image. (But not both at the same time, the outside images get blurry when I focus on the one in the middle).

Anyways, this is nothing like what I experience when I imagine something.

That's what it's like to 'overlay' imagination onto your vision. But that requires - like the eyes focusing correctly - for the 'imagination vision' and the physical vision to 'line up'

your imagination is more like it's in the the back of the head, yeah?

What helped me 'move' where my imagination was (to the front and center), was to do the flame meditation. Which is to focus on a flame in a dark room for a few seconds, close your eyes, and try to retain the phosphene afterglow in the flame shape. and repeating that until you are able to retain image of the flame while your eyes are closed.

Similarly: 'drawing from memory' - particularly from recent short term memory - was another method that had a profound impact on my ability to visualize.

Both of these take time and commitment, but they have worked for me. They may work for you.

I can do this, the best I can describe it is that your brain "knows" you're imagining it so it's different than for example hallucinations.

It's similar to replaying music in your head (if you can do that), you can hear the tune but your ears "know" no music is actually playing.

I suspect that much more people can do it than unable to do it (aphantasia)

I have a suspicion that aphantasia - in some cases - is something that can be trained out of. The mind is a powerful thing.

Might be possible but then you lose aphantasia :)

I'm not saying that at all. I think I have aphantasia. For me the score is 1 or 2 to picture that apple.

I was shocked to realize that when people said "imagine in your minds eye", they meant it literally. This seems to be a common experience for people with aphantasia [0].

Note that when I'm close to sleep or dreaming, then yes, my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity. While awake, its almost completely non-existent.

[0] "I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...

I don't feel like I know better what other people experience talking about it here. :)

Just now, what you wrote for example.

> my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.

What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of your head?

When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not "seeing".

Yes, I often don't realize I'm asleep and dreaming while I dream. It's a common experience for me to dream and think I'm experiencing reality while I'm asleep. Are you saying you have never had a visual dream?

Sometimes when I'm close to sleep or when I'm lucid dreaming, I can visualize things with good fidelity. While I'm awake, I'm almost completely unable to.

Interesting!

I experience visual dreams the same way I described imagining the environment when I read. It's a completely different experience than seeing with my eyes open.

Interesting. So it sounds like you don't even dream visually.

I think for many people, even people with aphantasia, dreaming is akin to watching a movie or actually experiencing the event (myself included). I know the experience is immersive because it's the same feeling as watching a movie, but I can't recall it visually the same way after the fact, while I'm awake.

I suspect the activated Default Mode Network interferes with the ability to perceive with detailed clarity.

But what does it mean "visualize" ? I can "think" of an apple and all it's detail, but I wouldn't describe any visual sensation. If I had to draw the apple I could draw it detail, right down the the variation in colors on it's skin. But no sense of this experience feels like a visual sensation. It feels like "thinking". To me, the act of closing my eyes emphasizes that this isn't a visual sensation for me, because with my eyes closed, I see darkness.

Bring a picture of an apple up on your computer screen and look at it for 30 seconds. There is a fidelity to that image that includes the color, texture, stem, shape, reflection, etc.

Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30 seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye, an image of an apple as if you were looking at on your computer screen? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is complete parity as if you were looking at it from your computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what is your ability to do so?

It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.

I know it sounds crazy but I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.

Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.

Here are some other articles of note:

"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/

"I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...

> I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.

Based on what evidence?

The article goes into the history.

Here's an article I found recently:

"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/

I am exactly like this. Great description.

I can visualize an apple, somewhat vaguely, but I've never been able to hold a stable mental picture of anything for longer that a split-second. It just blinks out of existence the moment I "see" it, which makes it rather dysfunctional...

Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own at night, not letting me fall asleep.

Imagination is weird.

This is similar to how I'd describe it for me. I can mold the apple into what I want it to be, adding a sheen or showing the bottom or the top, but any "visualization" that I do disappears basically immediately.

I also am often kept awake by my brain playing songs, wishing my brain would stop.

A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I never quite landed on an understanding of how much a person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is (assumed to be) innate or genetic.

Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not been trained for years in music.

In the right circumstances and frame of mind, symphonies or sometimes brass band tunes play in my head, multilayered and everything. They've even got enough persistence that I can "rewind" them a few seconds (probably within some kind of working-memory window), even isolate parts of them and usually know exactly what instrument is playing it, and so on, then let them continue. The course of them is automatic, I don't control them, though.

If I had the first clue how to record them, perhaps I'd have a career as a composer, LOL. The actual invention of them would be no work whatsoever, though the writing it down would be, and I'm sure there'd be a good deal of editing and arranging afterwards to fix them up (plus, who's to say if they'd be any good, or wouldn't all sound kinda the same, to a trained ear?)

I'm only barely familiar with the body of "classical" music, and even less familiar with big-band or brass band music, is the oddest part, but those couple narrow sorts of instrumental music are all I get without having to put effort into it (and I mean none, it just "plays" when I'm in the right head-space and surroundings, and no I don't mean "on drugs", and actually it can be really fucking annoying if I'm trying to sleep). I wouldn't be surprised if I actually lost that ability (such as it is) if I tried to train up enough to write the tunes down.

... maybe I should look into humming-to-MIDI software, hahaha.

What if you try it with the apple slowly rotating or moving in some way?

I can keep a visualization as long as it keeps moving or rotating. As soon as I try to visualize it as still, it disappears.

I prefer this test: "Imagine a ball resting on a table. A person walks up to the table and pushes the ball". Question for the test subject: "What will happen?"

Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground. But then ask them" "What was the color of the ball? What was the size of the ball? What was the gender of the person pushing the ball, what clothes were they wearing?"

People with aphantasia are usually stunned by the follow up questions. People who don't have aphantasia really have seen the table, the material its made of, imagined a ball of certain size/type color (e.g. multicolor beach ball, or basketball or what ever), and they saw an actual person pushing the ball, they saw the ball rolling on the table an falling to the ground and can answer details about their vision.

> Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground.

For me the ball kept rolling off the table and rolling through air but not falling to the ground, even while realizing I should be causing it to fall to the ground, but rolling straight just "felt" natural at that moment because it's in make-believe land it can do whatever.

Yep. Problem is that there's actually a spectrum of vividity of mental imagery, but in popular discussion it's always seen as a binary on/off thing.

An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...

In Russia, color-blindness is referred to as Daltonism, and I figured Francis must have been the one to be the source of that (given this topic), but apparently it was John Dalton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalton

I haven’t heard of Galtonism. From my experience as the colorblind child of native Russian speakers, it’s Daltonism (дальтони́зм).

https://en.openrussian.org/en/colour-blind

Good lord, I had both of their wiki pages open, and STILL somehow D and G were the same letter in my mind.

I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a monument to my goof.

shrugged

We all doof from time to time

He gone doofed.

Perhaps you suffer from D-G letterblindness.

It would be totally understandable for someone who reads handwritten Russian to confuse D and g in their mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_(Cyrillic)#Form

Oh man, I don't think I've written cursive Russian in something like a decade. I honestly have no idea how Russian historians parse old documents; old hand-written English is hard enough, but cursive Russian is a whole other thing.

My last name just looks like a child drawing a wavy ocean!

Quite a lot of languages use daltonism actually: French (daltonisme), Spanish (daltonismo), Italian (daltonismo), Portuguese (daltonismo), Catalan (daltonisme), Romanian (daltonism), Polish (daltonizm), Russian (дальтонизм), Greek (δαλτωνισμός), and Turkish (daltonizm).

Modern brain imaging techniques also weigh in on this issue. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/

I've been experimenting over the past year or so, and keep trying to visualise things. Part of this spun out from the fact that I can dream (I rarely seem to, or at least remember them), but when I do, I remember that it was a vivid real thing.

I actually feel like I'm closer than ever to getting towards visualisation. I've gone from a rock solid "zero" to "solid feeling, occasional split-second flash of something"

For most of the time with this exercise I was aiming for something simple. A red triangle in a blue square, but I'm not convinced that was an effective approach, I seem to be getting closer to the mark trying to picture something real.

When I want to close my eyes and distract myself, I've been visualizing the banana from the cover of that Velvet Underground album. (Not sure why I settled on that!) I can rotate it. I can peel it. With practice it has gotten larger and I can shift it away from the centre of the visual field. But I can't make it seem yellow.

Is it velvet?

"Others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes" - This sucks as a child, where you see a gymnasium floor open up beneath you. So you run to safety, just to be punished for what was an appropriate response.

Some children don't see any differentiation between their imagination and reality, so it's a matter of paying attention to how others' behave to know what to do.

Because you can't trust that the reality that you're in is shared by the people around you.

Comically, though, programming communities really seem to have a statistical over representation of both aphantasics and hyperphantasics. One of these articles comes out every few years and I've witnessed at numerous workplaces how quickly a large portion of the engineers realize they're aphantasic and everyone else is aghast that they can't rotate complete architectural diagrams etc.

That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.

I'm not sure its binary, I feel like ive gotten worse at it with age, and for some reason I find it harder with my head sideways.

For me this is the other way round. When I was a student (physics) I had a very, for a lack of a better word, "practical" visualization in my head - what I needed to understand what I was studying. There was a lot of maths too, visualized.

Today, 30 years later, I have vivid representations of calligraphy or art, especially when I fall asleep. I fall asleep within at worst minutes so I cannot really take full pleasure of watching these ilages and during the day I am too surrounded by sources of sound, images etc. to meaningfully repeat the exercise.

The _absence_ of visual imagery is binary: you cannot see images at all or, to whatever extent, you can. Those who do have any mental imagery at all, however, fall on a scale. There are numerous studies of certain real downsides to aphantasia, notably tied to episodic memory, which don't seem to be present in those simply with diminished visual imagery.

> I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible.

Is that because it’s hereditary or instead something that was missing in early childhood? Like as a toddler you were never given one of those games where you fit shapes into different sized holes for example?

I think it’s because you can find supports to help you learn.

I’ve been teaching math for almost 18 years at this point, and only a couple years ago learned that I lean towards aphantasia. Back in high school, geometry was HARD. Calc 3 was HARD. It was presented as visualize and imagine, and I tried my best. It just turns out other people could do that, and the fuzzy thing thing (or, more commonly, the ‘bulleted list of information’ that make up my imagination) was not “normal.”

If I’d known this (and my teachers were in a position to also know this), then maybe we’d spend more time with external visual models (what Geogebra now does for us, for example) to help me out.

Now that I teach future high school math teachers, it’s definitely something I talk about to normalize “not everyone can see in their mind.”

Do you have any advice for an experienced engineer who is considering changing careers to teaching high school math? I hear horror stories about teaching kids nowadays, with most having smartphones in class and AI use being rampant. Do you think there’s truth to that, or is it overblown?

The question of origin is still pretty unclear. There seems to be a tension between things that are more developmental (if you have mental imagery, for example, you seem to be able to get better or worse) and those that are likely genetic (research does suggest a connection between aphantasia and autism spectrum etc).

As someone said below, I suggested figuring it out early is best because of a lot of things that just work differently, especially in learning. There seems to be a real selection bias that most people who learned they were aphantasic reading a New Yorker article, say, by definition figured out how to make it work somewhere along the line. Aphantasia isn’t at all a learning disability in a real sense, but you definitely have to approach things differently.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Seems like a good test?

It's nothing like that at all. First, when you are awake you still see whatever is literally in front of you, even if it's your eyelids. Second, when you fail to recall something in detail, it isn't a sketch or child's drawing, it's just... incomplete sensation. We don't imagine things the way a painter paints a picture bit by bit (unless you are an experienced painter!)

"where" the mind's eye is also variable. And may be moveable.

For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of self to be.

The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training, training to remain conscious through the process of falling asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image, quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the blank page without access to the reference image}).

it reminds me a bit of the debate in psychology back in the day of propositional vs. analogical representation.

there was a long running debate in the literature about how mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like format.

two very different philosophies about how the information was stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be accommodated in the other.

with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based) framework

Relatedly, I'm not sure I really believe people who say they think in code and can't be bothered to render their ideas in design or decision documents with actual reasoning. I can't even tell if something is a real thought I'm having /in my own head/ until I've written it down or otherwise recorded it somewhere in the consensus reality. Very often, I /think/ I've got some problem or idea all fleshed out in my mind, but the process of writing it down (in code or prose) reveals that this was all just a kind of illusion. Or maybe I really did have it all figured out but something got lost in the process of writing it down? Seems literally impossible to say.

But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the same species had radically different methods of cognition, since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the broadest possible sense, is not radically different, and neither is our thinking hardware.

I think its far more likely that they're just bad at writing or drawing. Tons of people can picture a scene in their head but are absolutely terrible at drawing it, and can only render much more boring imagery in text.

Code is "written it down or otherwise recorded it somewhere in the consensus reality"

"thinking in code" means "render their ideas in code", like you render your ideas in English.

I agree, writing code is writing. I added a parenthetical above that hopefully clears that up. I guess my overall point is that I can't confidently say I've even had an actual idea, until I prove it to myself by voicing it, or writing it in code or prose, or drawing a diagram, or whatever. Thinking is hard, but it feels good to have thunk, so the mind is incentivized to give itself the illusion of having done so, if it can.

I have aphantasia in the sense that I have no sense of there being an image, but several years ago, I posted a comment hypothesising that the interpretation of the experience as an image might be the distinguishing factor.

The response to that suggestion was unexpectedly strong, People really didn't like the notion of doubt of their experience. Some said I was accusing them of lying.

It was quite odd, I thought it was an uncontroversial notion that what we feel we are experiencing can differ from reality.

I think, perhaps, it was received as me saying "This is the truth, you're the one who is wrong."

Many people believe everyone perceives reality the same way.

They don't understand that each of us composes a novel reality from our senses.

It’s actually even worse than that. Not only am I unconvinced that aphantasia is real or merely a difference in the way people describe the same experience (either because of how they use language, or because of how their mental images are connected to their speech processing), but even if it were an experimentally verified phenomenon, people still talk about it like it’s a /thing you have/ instead of a /skill you failed to develop/.

I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of charcoal, but I don’t consider this to be ‘acarbographism’ or something, I recognise that other people have put more effort into learning that skill than I have.

Throwing in my anecdote: I acquired aphantasia after a viral infection as a child. This also slightly impacted my speech. There can definitely be a fundamental difference.

In my case, I can distinctly remember my experiences from before the infection, and recall a clear difference in visualization capabilities before and after.

For me it's a gradient, depending on how tired I am. I can go from fairly vivid mental image to full on seeing things with my eyes closed. It's that window when falling asleep that is the most impactful visually and very close to lucid dreaming.

So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in your "minds eye".

If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's imagery but from a different place.

I can _kind_ of do it, but it's not something that really comes naturally to me. And only fairly simple shapes, generally.

Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.

(I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is something that some/most people do.)

Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just assuming is normal?!

It's quite funny, for myself, if I concentrate I can so strongly visualize something that I stop seeing through my physical eyes and kind of go "blind," only perceiving with my eyes once I decide to again or once some large visual stimulus surprises me.

Same for me. It has led to some awkward moments in public where it looks like I'm staring at someone from across the room, but I'm just thinking/visualizing and am only vaguely aware of what my eyes are looking at.

Most people are extraordinarily dim to the point that they have zero introspective capacity. For instance, if they had more than a third grade vocabulary, would they be using the word "see" to describe this talent they think they have? I seriously suspect that if you could somehow educate everyone up to some minimal level, this disparity would disappear entirely.

Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.

It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else imagines they have X-Men superpowers.

Describe how you see green and I’ll tell you if it’s the same as everyone else I know.

I didn’t know people see things in the real world, like an imaginary cat until I had a dream where I could imagine something purposefully. I woke up immediately, thrown out from the dream image.

I told my wife proudly that I could see something in my dream I wanted to. She told me she can imagine ANYTHING ANYWHERE ANYTIME (painter)

My question is: can you see the cat on the table? If not, sorry pal.

The way I understood it was the apple on a table test:

I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.

if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.

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then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.

For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.

For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.

The apple was red.

I didn’t even try to imagine anything. Apples are just conceptually red by default. I can also tell you that it was tart, and crisp. I didn’t imagine those sensations either, they were just the first words that came to my mind when thinking about apples. The table is brown. I didn’t try to imagine anything table either, but the table in my kitchen, where there might be apples, is brown.

Can you see how this exercise is flawed?

My guess is you are affected. You remind me of myself before I realised just how big the difference really is.

People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.

You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.

I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.

A guy was talking to me about designing some robot legs. He was just getting started and was new to mechanical design. The more questions I asked him the more I realized he couldn’t internally visualize what he was designing. When I’m putting something together in my head it’s like a mental CAD where I can place objects down, constrain them to each other, and see how they move in relation to each other. For this guy I recommended simply diagramming on paper to work out how it should function.

I have a fuzzy mental stage for these things. It’s like my mind’s second monitor. It mostly goes ignored but I can focus on it if I want to. Shapes and colors are weak but are definitely there. But still a useful tool.

Okay, so, if you think people are only metaphorically referring to their "minds eye", then you probably have aphantasia. If the idea of people "counting sheep" to go to sleep confuses you, thinking that perhaps you could not go to sleep if you just lay there counting to yourself (hint: that's not what they mean), welcome to club aphantasia.

I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't have aphantasia.

It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access data/information about things that the brain is presumably constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not very strong": none.

Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.

No? Thanks for stopping by. :)

My understanding of it has been that aphantasiacs can only imagine in terms of verbal descriptions, not images. If that's the case, it seems like visual analogy would be a good differentiator.

For example: without any internal monologue, think of the Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it resembles.

Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.

(Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)

By this reasoning aphantasiacs should be incapable of drawing anything from their mind.

They can, but the representations are much simpler, often lacking visual detail and leaning on written labels:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/12/05/865...

Just as an aside, I am aphantasic but also do not think verbally. It isn't a single dimension with images on one end and words on the other.

I'm in the exact same boat. I think I have aphantasia, because when I close my eyes all I see is black, and it is easier to conjure up images with eyes open, and I absolutely would never, ever, confuse what I "see" in my mind with reality.

Yet I am very good at recognizing faces, have okay memory of past events (not outstanding, but acceptable) and can describe places and people with reasonable accuracy.

So, I'm not sure.

There is really a fundamental difference as many studies now have shown---and I can attest from personal experience. Honestly, if you have to ask the question there's a pretty high chance you are: everyone at some level believes that their own inner experience generalizes to the rest of humanity, but it's those with aphantasia who thereby believe that everyone else's description is just a manner of speaking ("they, like me, surely don't really think in pictures").

I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple" less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?

The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look up the references if you're interested.

When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a large study found. Probably there are critiques of his methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for trying to figure out how exactly you think.

Are you saying that a non-aphantasic person can recall the eye color of everyone in their office?

No, certainly not. I was trying to pose a thought experiment that draws one's attention to the how of their thinking more than "think of an apple." Even if you can't figure out the person's eye color, did you bring to mind a blurred workplace image that just didn't have enough detail in the right place? For an aphantasic, especially if you don't even know this person's name, it's really a sort of experience of an empty thought in the way that thinking about an apple isn't.

It's hard to write about these things...

Aphantasia has nothing to do with emotional recall. You make the first assertion of this I've ever heard.

I am mostly aphantasaic, but have no trouble at all remembering emotions.

Weak mental imagery and no visual imagery are distinct.

The connection of aphantasia to strongly deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) is well-attested now. You can find numerous clinical studies on the matter.

I have aphantasia. I know what something looks like, I just can’t see it.

It’s not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no internal voice so that wouldn’t make sense. It’s just like the concept of what I’m thinking of is right there in all its detail. Its extremely spatial - I’m thinking in 3D even if I’m not visualising it.

On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is very hard, especially faces.

Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a second and can’t be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of thinking isn’t visual.

If you think about something famous, like the Eiffel tower, or big ben, you don't picture them?

No. I’m remembering the Eiffel Tower as a very specific moment when I saw it the last time I went to Paris, but it’s more like a description of the scene.

Not really a description though, that seems… slow? The elements are all there just not in visual form.

No, not at all.

A simple test I've seen mentioned is, ask someone this: “imagine a car, a fast car, zipping through a windy road… ok? (pause) now, what color was the car you saw?”

If you even need to think about it, you hadn't seen it.

That does not match my experience. I can imagine things, but details are limited to properties i intentionally think that the imagined object should have.

As a non-aphantasia person, this just seems like a really, really bad "test".

Famously, there's a psychology experiment where a person in a gorilla costume walks through the middle of a scene and beats their chest before walking off the other side of the screen, but people who've been given a challenge of tracking a ball being passed around will completely miss the gorilla. They'll laugh in shock on watching the same video a second time, amazed that they didn't "see" the gorilla on first viewing when their attention was on the ball.

In your simple test, focus is going to be drawn to other components - "fast", "zipping" and "windy" make me pay attention to the curves of the road, the wheels, the trees or cliffs causing the road to wind. The color of the car is irrelevant, so I don't pay attention to it.

I can't tell you what color the car was, but when I watched the gorilla video (without knowing in advance about it) I didn't know a gorilla had walked through the video either.

I believe both that aphantasia may be a real thing, and that the vast majority of discussion about it online is plagued by so much imprecision and variety in use of language that it can be hard to say how many people who think they may have it, actually do.

Consider attempts in this very thread to compare conscious visualization to visualization in dreaming. Someone who isn't in a critical frame of mind or doesn't know about the limitations of vision in dreams and how our brains trick us about dream-sight (or the fairly different limitations of real vision and how our brains also trick us about that, as you mention) may follow a train of thought like, "well, I 'see' just fine in dreams, and my conscious 'mind's eye' is very similar to that, so sure, by the transitive property, I can 'see' about as well when I visualize as I actually see things with my real eyes"

Me, I go "well dream vision for approximately everyone is total shit but with a layer of trickery on top, and my 'inner eye' is similar to that except with the trickery dialed way down so I can tell where the seams are and if I try I can be aware of when I've just invented some detail that was 'always there' but actually wasn't a moment earlier and I can tell that I'm not actually seeing with my eyes (unlike a dream, where I think I'm 'seeing'), so yeah those two are pretty close for me, and the ways in which they differ are basically just how much my brain's lying to me so arguably aren't 'real' differences anyway, but both are entirely unlike actually seeing, so no, I don't 'see' when I visualize the same way as I 'see' with my eyes, though it is close to how I 'see' in a dream except I'm less-fooled about how bad it is"

... and I propose that these two responses could come from people with identical actual capacity for mental visualization.

When one of the former meet the latter, it might end in the latter thinking they have aphantasia or at least lean farther that direction, without any difference in their actual experience of or capacity for visualization.

....

I've seen a supposed set of autism test questions (I don't know if they're really used in autism diagnostics) that include something like "would you rather go to a party, or stay home and read a book?" and supposedly the "autistic" indicator is asking follow up questions or excessive hesitation. Meanwhile I'm very sure you could find people who instantly answered "go to a party" but actually choose that far less often when presented with the real choice involving those two things (necessarily with a lot more details and context filled in). I don't think they're lying or deceiving themselves! I think they're regarding the question very differently from how some others do. I think something similar is going on here, with two "tribes" with different perspectives on the question itself trying to communicate and talking right past one another, leading to much confusion.

(Meanwhile, I do think it's entirely possible aphantasia is real, I just also strongly suspect a lot of the people who've been led, by online discussion, to believe they're far from the median in this regard, actually aren't)

As mentioned elsewhere, researchers have done brain scans while asking people to imagine something, and for the majority of people the visual cortex lights up, but for a small number of people the visual parts of the brain are not so active.

This is very much a real thing, but largely goes unnoticed because it doesn’t really affect anything, except for people going about their lives thinking that the word ‘visualise’ is a metaphor.

The Aphantasia Network has several interesting studies and a self-assessment test[2] that you can take.

[1] https://aphantasia.com

[2] https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq

For me, even if I drop into "mental space" completely and stop seeing(or being aware of) real world while thinking about something I saw/did recently, vividness of this mental image will depend on how close I am to dream state, but even so I think I can never see this image with a lot of details, I think even in my dreams I never see very detailed image.

It is like seeing with peripheral vision, I know that is there and sometimes see it with quick glances, but details only appear if I focus on some part of it and disappear quickly when focus shifts.

Is your mental imagery 100% under your control or does it seem that your visualization doesn't fully abide by your own will?

I think an interesting different way to talk about aphantasia is not, "Can you see an apple when you close your eyes" but more along the linked of, "Can you mentally edit the visual reality you see?"

A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.

It's not literally overriding my vision, it's almost like a thin layer, less than transparent, over reality. But specifically, it's entirely in my mind. I would never confuse that imagery with reality...

Having said that, I think that is related to the way our brains process visual information. I've had an experience when I'm driving that, when I recognize where I am, coming from a new location in not familiar with, I feel like suddenly my vision expands in my peripheral vision. I think this is because my brain offloads processing to a faster mental model of the road because I'm familiar with it. I wonder if that extra "vision" is actually as ephemeral as my imagined skateboarder.

> A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.

Oh, I've done this! I think many kids have. I remember a moment in my childhood when it was ninja turtles riding on those hoverboards, while I was bored watching outside the window of the back seat. Riding along the power lines, and occasionally katana-cutting something in the way.

omg! That was every trip to my grandparents house my entire childhood. I couldn’t “actually see” the skateboarder, but it was enough to serve as entertainment.

Mine was usually some sort of superhero who did flips over things and picked them up and whatnot.

I can’t imagine if you could “actually see” the skateboarder how much less boring those rides would be.

Mine was a guy running next to us jumping over any shadows on the road. He'd stumble a bit and then be able to sprint to catch up.

That's what i used to do too!!

Same but with rollerblades

Mine was a little 4-wheeled buggy riding along the guardrails as we drove. Really cool to see other people had similar imaginations!

As someone who has aphantasia I did the same thing, but with motes of dust on the window. I’d stare at a single bit of dust or dirt and move my head up and down to make the dirt move with the landscape. It’s funny to read these stories because it solidifies my assumption that I have aphantasia. I did the same thing as a child just without the imagery.

This is super interesting to me. A lot of threads about aphantasia devolve into both sides being mildly incredulous that the other exists, I think partially because it's _hard_ for us to imagine experiences outside of our own.

But here, I feel like we have a clear delineation of the differences between experiences, in a non-abstract way... and that feels more valuable to me, somehow.

Thank you for sharing!

It always blows my mind how universal this experience was for people around my age. Mine was a bouncing ball...

I have no real basis for this, but I always suspected that the majority of differences in ability to picture things is actually just a difference in semantics about terms like "visualizing", "picturing", etc. I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination. On the other end, I don't think anybody is actually unable to "think of" what a thing looks like. But it's really difficult to objectively describe what it's like to picture something in your head - so difficult, in fact, that I can see some people calling it "literally summoning an image" and others calling it "not seeing anything at all", while both talking about the exact same thing.

Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.

Yeah, when I first heard this I tried to picture an elephant. And I thought, huh. I can't. But I realised there's a vague, hazy representation of it in my mind. That idea of needing to see things with picture clarity really threw me at first.

Yep. I can picture things all right, even details such as surface texture, and if I'm eg. planning a route I'm certainly doing it in a visual way (imagining a map), but the sensation is much more "ghostly" and transient than real imagery. The same goes for other modalities like sound or smell or touch.

I agree with this. I thought I had aphantasia the last time I read about it here.

Then I started interrogating all of the people who claimed to “visualise” things and it turned out we were all doing the same thing - conceptualising in our “mind’s eye”.

For example, anyone I’ve asked to visualise something with their eyes closed can also “visualise” the same thing with their eyes open. It’s happening “somewhere else” and not in your vision.

So I think the term “visualise” leads to a lot of the confusion.

I’m friends with a Disney animator. I asked him, when you draw are you seeing the image in your mind? He was confused and said of course, he sees it very clearly, and his drawings are just laying down that image. He didn’t understand what it would be like to not visualize.

As a person with aphantasia, I can see actual images when I'm on the edge of sleep, and I can see actual images when I'm dreaming, but I can't get anything like that to show up when I try to "picture" something. Just black with static.

It is difficult to describe, but so many people talk about it as if they are seeing something and I never have - I've always assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind to visualize something.

I can’t generally “literally see” my mental images. But on a few rare occasions in my life, I did. I don’t know why, and it was brief, but at least I can easily believe now that some people do it all the time.

When it happened to me the few times it was an otherwise very mundane day and it felt very natural. It was overlayed onto whatever else I was looking at and could persist with eyes closed.

Honestly the experience kind of cheapened art for me to an extent since you either have that cheat code or you don’t.

For me it's like I'm seeing a wire frame through mist. I get vague impressions of what the thing looks like, but can't "see" the thing.

My wife swears she might as well have a movie playing in her head. And was totally befuddled when I explained what I "see".

No, I've talked about this with a friend with aphantasia, and that's not it.

While I'm willing to concede there's probably different degrees of visualization (which in my mind also explains why some people are able to draw "from memory" and others are less apt), there's also people who absolutely cannot visualize at all.

My friend:

- Cannot visualize AT ALL. If you ask him to picture a red circle, he cannot do it. He cannot visualize the color red.

- If you ask him to picture the face of his mother, he cannot do it. All he sees is darkness. (We've wondered about this, how can he tell it's his mother when he sees her? He has no difficulty identifying faces, he just cannot visualize them at all if they are not in front of him. Not "not close enough" -- AT ALL).

- He cannot mentally reproduce music, no matter how imperfectly. I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars (with reasonable fidelity), he cannot.

- He cannot taste in anticipation something he enjoys, like flavorful coffee. I can anticipate drinking a good coffee, and get some sort of sensorial stimulation/anticipation even before I get the coffee. He cannot, at all. And he does enjoy good coffee.

It's not about a difference in terminology, he really cannot visualize/mentally experience anything if it's not actually happening.

----

Finally:

> I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination

I am. It's not exactly a hallucination because there's no confusion about what's real and what's not, but "hallucination" is pretty close to what actually happens in my mind. I can visualize pretty much anything I've experienced, and some things I haven't too, like green elves dancing on my keyboard. I've always been a visual person.

I can draw things "from memory" and it's pretty much putting into paper what I'm seeing in my mind.

I think this is a typical response for someone with aphantasia.

To see why your take might be false, many people dreams have a fidelity of images that is comparable to reality, even for people with aphantasia. Do you dream with this fidelity? Can you recreate that fidelity while awake?

There are also testable differences that support the claim that people can actually visualize, in photographic detail, images while awake [0].

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

I might not be the most representative example (I seem to use visual and spatial more than most people for abstract reasoning), but here goes an attempt to convey one data point...

If I imagine a particular model of car, for example, I can instantly visualize much of what the entire car looks like. I can also move my attention around parts of the visualization, to see more detail. It's more than facts, and more than feelings.

This visualization is different than seeing with eyes, and is not confused with that, but seems to be using some of the same machinery.

I could sketch a detailed drawing from what I'm visualizing, a bit like the car was physically there, and I could keep looking back to it for references. But when it's in my head, I don't have to take my eyes off the drawing, and I can kinda merge my drawing and the reference in my head.

In contrast, if I try to imagine the scent of tire rubber, or of cooking, or any other scent, I cannot. Not even the tiniest bit. There's just nothing there.

As a point of reference for comparison, that's pretty dramatic and binary.

Of course, when I smell a familiar scent, I often identify it instantly. And while I am physically perceiving it, I can experience it, and move my attention around it, and introspect on its character, and have other reactions to it (e.g., good, bad, etc.), etc. But immediately after I stop physically perceiving it, I again can't imagine it. I can only recall previously registered facts about it: that vanilla smells good, kinda sweet(?), and maybe creamy(?). I could know more facts if I was a baker or cook, and I guess reason about how to use vanilla, but I still doubt I could imagine perceiving the scent of vanilla in my head.

And some scents will quickly surface related memories of previous times I perceived the scent, even decades ago. And those non-scent memories will remain activated and linger after the physical scent is removed. (Any rare accompanying wow deja vu sense is brief.)

I can picture the visual appearance of various glass and plastic bottles of vanilla flavoring I've seen over the decades, and how some vanilla flavoring looks in a particular stainless steel teaspoon with ambient light reflecting through it, etc. I can also visualize in detail the visual appearance of things that come to mind when I try to think about things I've seen that have vanilla flavoring. I just can't imagine what they smell or taste like.

It's not a confusion of terms. I can easily conjure up picture-quality images in my head, whether my eyes are open or closed. Compare that to my wife who says she can't even see my face in her head, at all, and has a hard time recognizing faces to the point where she asked my not to do anything about the red dot on my face (broken capillaries) because that's one way she recognizes that it's me. She can't see images in her head. She can't recall visual memories in her head, she sometimes struggles to remember which shelf the cups go when emptying the dishwasher. Perfectly normal and smart and capable. Not arguing that it's binary, but there are distinct ends of the spectrum. It might also be stronger for me because I tend to 'think' in pictures when the problem calls for it and it's a 'style of thinking' I'm used to.

Prosopagnosia is not what aphantasia is.

No, but it wouldn't be surprising if they might be somewhat correlated?

I can recognize my wife easily now, but the first few months as we dated I was always scared that I wouldn't see her because I don't know what she looks like, I just recognize her and everyone else when I see them.

To the degree I have any day to day mental imagery it only works as a very very brief "overlay" when my eyes are open and I only see certain pictures:

a passport image of my Mom that I have in a photo book

a picture of my wife before we married that is my phone background and that I therefore have seen many times

the wedding photo of my parents from the hallway as a kid (even though I meet them a few times a year and often see other pictures of them)

And these images are faint, overlayed on other images and disappear in milliseconds.

She has both. I described both, and I think they are related.

>I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination

I think it's basically exactly like a hallucination for some people, except it's mentally tagged as originating "internally" instead of "externally" (which is what freaks people out about having a hallucination). I think it's basically the same thing with internal monologue vs. auditory hallucinations.

(for the record I have neither internal monologue nor visualization)

I have aphantasia. Like many others, I am able to see images when I dream and very rarely in a hypnagogic state.

My partner is on the opposite side of the spectrum; she can conjure mental images with ease. Our differences in that respect have led to a lot of interesting conversations.

I think aphantasia is quite misunderstood by people able to visualize. I can remember how things look, have no issues identifying faces, have a strong spatial understanding of places I've been, etc. It's hard to describe precisely; we just remember things differently.

Instead of the whole image, you just visualize the main aspects as vectors?

Your metaphor isn't bad, actually. I just don't visualize anything. It's more like a feeling of abstract relationships. It often feels like most of my brain is in RAM; I can usually recall things almost instantly. And if I can’t, I can do the trick where you think of something else and let your mind crunch in the background until it pops up.

I should clarify that I can still imagine what a room looks like and what’s in it. I just don’t see it. It’s more like I feel the layout or know where things are, almost like navigating a mental map without any visuals. Specific details like colors, patterns, etc. are much harder to recall unless I am intimately familiar with the object or whatever.

a feeling of abstract relationships

This. If you ask me to imagine a triangle I'll start thinking about having three sides and three angles and the area is half of the base times the height and it's a rigid body and the angles add up to 180 degrees... but there's no visual aspect to it.

Sometimes I wonder if aphantasia gave me an advantage in mathematics, because I had no trouble whatsoever with the concept of "abstract symbols".

I think you have some abstract symbol capability that is not the opposite of imagery.

I lack imagery but also am nonverbal and hit limits in math. I am terrible at rote memorization or application of formulae.

I did well in math up to a point, which may have hurt me. I simply felt answers to quite a bit of algebra and some calculus, but it doesn't scale. I also got accused of cheating a couple times in primary school, when I could not explain my work when arriving at an answer very quickly.

Your description matches my experience exactly, and I find it oddly comforting to know someone else has the same thing going on in their head.

Yeah, people are definitely wired differently! It’s cool to see there’s a lot more research going into how minds like ours work.

My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?

I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptomps and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.

Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.

For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.

From a previous comment of mine[0] on this subject:

> When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

> I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45687441

After coming down from the shock of learning there are people like you I was even more amazed that one of the founding engineers of Pixar, and a giant in computer graphics, also has this condition. He even did a survey that found his artists where more likely to be on the aphantasia spectrum than managers. Dunno, maybe some people are so driven to create what they cannot think or see.

I’ve heard about that! My partner and I have both been learning to draw this year. I’m pretty decent at drawing observationally / from reference, but I haven’t tried much from memory. I imagine she’d be much better at that side of things. I’ve also noticed I’m not great at coming up with initial ideas or visual concepts, but once I have a topic or direction, I can absolutely run with it.

I also think it makes sense why a lot of software engineers (myself included) have aphantasia. Being “rational” is arguably easier when you’re not influenced by the emotional weight of images. Maybe we’re even less predisposed to PTSD, since we can’t visually relive things in the same way. My mind still races at night like anyone else’s, but it’s all non-visual. Just endless inner monologue instead of a reel of images. Couldn't count sheep if I tried!

I don't know why I'm surprised every time to see so many people astounded in the comments every time another of these articles come out. I guess I thought by now this phenomenon would be more common knowledge... I'm a non-seer and a non-self speaker. That is, I do not have any clear monologue whatsoever, nor can I visualize anything at all. However, I have a pretty great memory, just not for the experience of things, but instead only the circumstances, the trivia, the conclusions, and all of those can be very granular.

Words exist for me in the space beyond my lips, or my fingertips; what that feels like, in the moment, is that it is the act of externalization of words which makes them come into being, but not for a moment are they ever out of my control.

I can't remember the sound of my mother's voice. Not really. Of course if I heard it in a recording it would be as recognizable as any voice, and in fact when I watch animated shows, like classic King of the Hill for example, I'm extremely good at picking out all the celebrity voices and I'm often surprised that I can identify a voice I didn't know that I knew.

I used to have an internal monologue. I used to be able to picture things. That all went away in my teens. Not only can I somewhat remember what that was like, I'm able to experience vivid internal pictures and internal sounds sometimes in the moments just before I'm fully asleep. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it's enjoyable when it does.

And that's it. If you have any questions for thisaphantasic non-self-speaker, have at it.

When you're standing in front of a mirror, can you ask yourself a question and then answer it without saying anything out loud?

Not the GP, but I find it hard to even respond to your question. The whole framing seems unrelatable, but I can try to read between the lines to understand your intention. Normally, my mental experience does not include anything that feels like questions nor answers, nor other words really. Being verbal is almost like climbing into my verbal mecha-suit and piloting it for a while, which I am doing right now to type this post.

In summary, there is no sense for me in posing a question and casting an answer. I either know or don't know. I can't communicate with myself to expose things. To do so feels like trying to act out (while rolling my eyes) some classroom exercise on the Socratic method, which feels as artificial as one of those team-building corporate retreat games.

When I am actually trying to choose something, there is just the fleeting feeling of doing a little "path search" or simulation into my future. This is not likely to involve any awareness of words, unless I take an extra effort to meta-think and verbalize. If I wanted to explain to my wife what I am thinking about, I could deliberately force myself to articulate it. I could stop short of speaking that, and have a sense of the intended words without a sense of speaking, hearing, nor communicating.

Me naturally trying to "ask myself" what to do is more like directly simulating a future and which way I will go at the fork. I don't think words "left or right". Instead, I can feel the branch and whether I am going to innately go one way or the other. I could even feel myself hesitate there with indecision or ambivalence. I mean this metaphorically.

If I literally think about travel, it is less like a first-person simulation and more like flipping through a set of routes or destinations. It's not a visual map nor a first-person vista, but an innate understanding of place and/or manner of movement. For a walk or day hike, I don't see options, but I feel a sense of topology, topography, relative effort, and even accompanying qualia. Whether it is an out-and-back or loop, whether it feels like closed-in canyons or open hillside or steep cliffs...

For driving, I would similarly feel the shape of the route and the important bits like congestion, bridges or tunnels, mountain passes, or a tricky freeway interchange.

For airplane travel, I might have a fleeting sense of the geographic distance, but mostly I would think about logistical elements like ground transport, airport terminals, and duration of the air phase. Or I might think more on the people and social contexts.

For something abstract, like how I should set my retirement investment allocation, I'm not going to think words like "SP500 vs REIT vs i-bonds". I feel the different buckets and also feel a sort of weighted distribution like a branching river. Or more likely, a hazy maelstrom of risks and uncertainties in this case.

For something very concrete and near-term, like am I getting a snack from the cupboard or bypassing it and getting tea, it almost feels pre-motor. Which way am I moving through the kitchen as premonition. Similarly, if I'm pondering how to dress for an errand, I am almost feeling the particular pants, shoes, or jacket in the expected environment. Or I'm stuck in front of the closet, not knowing what to grab...

You pretty well describe my experience as well. So much of recall for me is "just knowing" and already having the mental "thing" at hand in the moment (rather than starting with any perceptible intention) and I do wonder if our kind of thinker might end up more devastatingly affected by age/illness-related memory issues because we simply take for granted /just knowing/.

No idea. I'm still in the middle of shepherding parents through dementia, and I can only hope that it can be delayed and then come all at once if it must come at all.

I think I'd be ok with shifting into a catatonia of non-knowing and non-intention, the basic metastability and paralysis I have always known at times.

I think it would beat the paranoia, confusion, and recriminations I saw in one parent. Or the apparently chaotic internal dialogue/chorus of the other who seems to fluidly conflate imagination with conversation and visitation.

I don't want to ever feel like facts are being beamed into my head, that people I remember are "behind me" and doing my actions for me, or inverting cause and effect and thinking that my fears are putting my loved ones in danger.

I am also aphantasic and have no internal monologue. I never had them as far as I know. When I heard that kids could have "imaginary friends" I thought it sounded totally absurd. I equated it with my schizophrenic relative who hallucinates and suffers delusions.

Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except for some spatial or topological feeling.

I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel a subset of recognition features are present or there is something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct triggering on the recognizable features.

I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective. I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger was a very disturbing perspective shift.

Well, I have another question further down to another guy about how he imagines sex, I guess you can answer that as well.

But also, how do you solve math problems? Often the you need to draw a graph and look at some crossing points. For me, I can conjure up a video in my mind similar to 3B1B, and I use that to think about the problem. It can even get complicated enough that it would take me a while to draw on paper. How do you solve such problems?

Not the person you asked, but as someone who also cannot see mental images at all I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "imagines sex". I don't really imagine sex and self-gratification is usually not worth it without visual aids. The times I pull from memory, it's more about the overall experience rather than visualizing anything specific.

As far as math goes, I've always been pretty good at it. I generally don't think about graphs at all in mathematics. That's something I associate with learning math more than I associate it with "doing math". The only time I'm reaching for more complicated math is in a computer science context so I'm rarely trying to solve anything other than arithmetic or rough approximations in my head.

> The times I pull from memory

What does memory even mean though, if you cannot recall the video of what happened? I find it hard to fathom you can recall an experience without replaying the sensory impressions you got. It's almost definitional, isn't it? To remember something that happened to you is to be able to re-experience it.

What is it like to read fiction? Tolkien’s writing comes to mind as a good example: many passages of Lord of the Rings are detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Are these types of works just not enjoyable?

Many people with aphantasia skip descriptive passages when reading books.

Right. It's fine to a point, if it's too much, it gets tedious.

https://archive.ph/iMdvd

I have aphantasia and it always astounds me when I see an article like this, or hear a friend talking about it (about not having it) and realize that their experience of the world is so fundamentally different than my own.

Have you seen the Aphantasia Apples?

https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of with what kind of fidelity you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it?

I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several different numbers.

I have seen it and unfortunately, I'm a 5. I quite literally cannot picture an apple in any form. I understand what I'm supposed to be picturing but when I try there's nothing that appears. It's fascinating to me too, since I typically have quite vivid dreams and I've been able to lucid dream on a number of occasions.

Now, I've chatted with friends, and my one friend is close to a 2, or maybe a 1 from how he described it (being able to visualize the apple and rotate it 3-dimensionally).

I fully believe this to be real, but I struggle to internalize that there are people who genuinely can't picture an apple. That is a very useful simple tool. Thank you for sharing it.

Even this feels like only a partial scale. I can picture what an apple looks like, rotate it in my, and see how light would reflect off of it as it moves.

How about smell? Can you call you mind what it would smell like to slice open an apple and experience that in some sense? Or what it would sound or feel like? I'm curious if it's literally "seeing" or if it's the entire experience of imagining an event.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'm also a 5.

I can do none of the things you describe. I know how an apple looks, smells, tastes and sounds when you cut into it, but I can't visualise or hear those sounds at will. I cannot call to mind any visual image of an apple.

I also can't visualise my wife or children's faces, although again, I know what they look like (so it's not face blindness).

I do think I also have SDAM as well, which I think quite often goes hand in hand with total aphantasia.

Hasn't really affected how I go about in the world. I don't feel deficient in any way. It was only a few years ago I found out my experience isn't what the majority experiences.

This is incredible to me. I wonder if you have some other mechanism of "knowing" or recalling that I don't that substitutes in. It's entirely possible, given that so many people report not being aware their experience is atypical.

I find this absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you sharing.

I'm 4 at a push. When I read, I see _very_ vague images in my head, but that's about it.

I'm very adept at conjuring up sound, though. Maybe it doesn't apply in the same way, but I can hear full symphonies and pick out individual instruments and harmonies and the like.

Is there a 0 where you can make the apple into anything you decide?

For example I can picture infinite combinations of apples, large, small, one with bites, one with orange inside, one with glass skin etc…

I also have it I’m in my late forties and only found out last year. It blew my mind people saw, heard and smelled things in there mind.

I barely ever dream.

Guided meditation has never worked for me.

I have a crazy good sense of direction. My girlfriend doesn’t understand how that works if I can’t see it in my mind.

I do have vivid recall of what things look like but I don’t see them at all.

It all made so much more sense when I figured this out.

For those who find themselves wondering whether they 'have' aphantasia or not, I would really recommend looking at the aphantasia apples:

https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of as to the fidelity with which you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it?

I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several different numbers.

I think this test is bad at accounting for subjectivity. A literal image you see with your eyes doesn't map exactly to an image you "see" with your mind.

It... doesn't, but I've found that a large number of people (I've asked at least many dozens) find it relatively easy to rank themselves on it, and differentiate amongst one another's subjective perceptions.

Also see my sibling comment about contrasting and tasks!

I have no frame of reference for what a 1 is even like so I don't know how to judge myself on it

Do 1's see it as clearly as if it was through regular eyesight?

According to my wife (a 1), yes. Seems wild to me as a ~4. If I concentrate really, really hard on trying to imagine visual detail I can get something to a ~3 at low detail or hold individual small details at a 2 until I stop concentrating on them.

I have sometimes wondered whether there is a personality or cognitive trait that makes one unable to respond to tests measuring personality or cognitive traits.

Every personality test I have ever taken, on many of the questions I've felt that I could answer almost anything and still be truthful.

When I see this apple scale, I simultaneously feel that both 1 and 5 apply to how I visualize an apple. It's hard for me to describe what's going on in my brain, and I don't think language or images are very helpful at illuminating it.

If such a meta-trait were to exist, which would have more to do with the narratives and metaphors we use to describe our mental processes than the processes themselves, it would be funny if that's actually a good deal of what was being measured all along.

(Or maybe it just means I'm a 5)

Something that might help - in this specific instance - is trying to contrast with others.

That is: if you show this photo to people that you know and you compare and contrast _how detailedly_ you can imagine the apples, that can help.

For example: are you imagining a _specific_ apple? What high-level color is it? How about more specifically? How does the color change across the surface? If so, does it have any distinguishing features? Leaves on the stem or no? What does the bottom look like? Can you turn it around and describe that?

Folks who are high up on the spectrum (like 1) can often answer these questions specifically, whereas as you go down the spectrum these tasks seem progressively more impossible.

That doesn't really help me, because I feel that I could answer those questions in detail but also truthfully say that there is no image at all of the apple in my head.

I guess what I'm saying is that image / not-image binary doesn't really map on to how I perceive the experience of my own imagination.

But again, maybe that just means I'm a 5 and I'm coping.

I've had mixed results with this method, especially for folks in category 5 because they grew up in a world where people casually talked about [actual] visualization and they've associated [not actually visualization] with the word (thinking it is a metaphor for something else). As someone who cannot visualize at all when faced with this question I feel like my answer wants to be.. "null" / "the premise of this question doesn't make sense" and not "5"

A variant that I've found helpful for teasing out this case: 1. Ask the test subject to visualize an Apple 2. Ask them for a few very specific details about the apple they are currently visualizing (what color is it? does it have a leaf or a bite out of it?, etc)

In many cases aphantastics will not object to the activity in step 1, but they won't be doing the same thing as the folks who are actually visualizing. They'll just do what they do when people talk about "visualizing".

When you get to step 2 someone who is actually visualizing can immediately answer the questions and don't think they are strange, they are just reporting what they are visualizing in front of them.

An aphantastic in step 2 is often confused. They aren't actually visualizing any specific apple so there isn't a reference to answer the questions. You'll get a response like.. well what kind of Apple is it? How should I know if it has a bite out of it? You first have to either provide more context or reword the question to something like: What is a color an Apple could be? or What color is your favorite Apple?

I'm definitely in category 4 by default, though I can do category 2 with concentration. But I don't really feel like it's a problem? If things have colors and surfaces then your view of one object can block your view of another object which seems like it makes visualizing complex scenes or devices much less convenient.

I think I'm a 3? I don't see a real apple, more like the concept of an apple, but the harder I try, the more characteristics I can conjure -- although it would be a stretch to say I "see" them.

From the comments here I'm almost getting the impression aphantasia is more common than not, which is wild to me. I'm quite sure I'd place myself on one. I can imagine an apple, and it will vividly appear. I can transform it, see reflections on it or imagine the feel and sound from slicing it. However, I do not experience the apple as part of an overlay, as some others have described it. Rather, it's as if I use a different set of eyes, ears or a another skin. The more vividly imagine the apple, the less aware I become of my actual senses. I can of course also imagine how the apple would interact with the environment around me, but the combined environment is still distinct from reality. I also have very precise memories of faces I've seen. I've always wondered if there's an inverted correlation with my number memory, which is much more diffuse.

This has always been interesting for me, as I think I have aphantasia but also can vividly experience taste in the same manner as if I'm eating foods.

In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti & meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking, as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or different techniques to follow.

I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes. Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.

I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me and develop image visualization abilities over time.

I am fascinated by the extent to which people can mentalize their different senses. I can visualize most of my primary senses. Sight would probably be my weakest one. I am definitely not aphantasic, but the images seem much more ephemeral than what other people experience. I can conjure up an image at will but if I focus too much it will become fuzzier.

Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of what is missing, but which it is not.

None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are somehow so bland yet over spiced.

I also wonder how much of our differences are often our inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient manner.

I've only skimmed the article but it seems to relate memory with aphantasia, which I haven't heard before. I'm a bit skeptical of this take.

Note that people aphantasia tend to score better at scene recall, at least in some metrics, than people without ("Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" [0]). I think the idea is that people with aphantasia tend to build language "scaffolding" to describe relations rather than relying on a visual representation.

If true, this might be why people with aphantasia tend to gravitate towards some engineering and science disciplines.

There's a lot of people lamenting the loss of minds eye visual imagery but a potential benefit is to have a lifetime's practice of using language to reason and quantify relationships between pieces of knowledge.

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

I do have the "second visual canvas" people here are talking about, but the thing about mine, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, is that I don't have full control of it.

For example, I have a memory from childhood of visualizing a yellow bucket, and it showed up in my mind's eye with big cartoon eyes. I tried to delete the eyes because I just wanted a normal yellow bucket, but they kept coming back.

Also, when reading Harry Potter as a kid, Severus Snape always showed up in my mind's eye with the head of a crocodile. I remember telling my brain, no, he's just a guy, just give him a normal man's head, but it never worked. Even now when someone mentions Severus Snape I see him with the crocodile head.

Anyone else, or am I just nuts?

Some people have more vivid imaginations than others and a vivid imagination entails more than just noodling and doodling well. Evidently.

People vary in their capacity to reason with things. People who “see” things with their eyes closed probably don’t believe that they are physically seeing them (i.e., with their actual eyeballs). People who can’t...probably can; they just expect to actually see what it is that they're thinking about.

This is a sensitive subject. At its core it beckons forth for questions of spiritual import.

Is society fit to address something as abstract as this problem in an age where “Chatbot psychosis” is becoming a thing?

I'm a bit tired of people trying to explain it away.

I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe because I have experienced and sometimes still experience seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time it is absolutely impossible.

There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started researching this topic was because a person who had very clear visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his description got this thing started.

For me I can "see" things in my minds eye and it almost doesn't matter if my eyes are closed or not. The detail isn't perfect and it's unlike anything else I would ever "see", such as a blurry image or simple drawing. I can manipulate the image in my mind, rotate it or fold it over, etc.

The longer I think about a specific part the more detail I can see in that part. Unlike when I look around and see infinite detail all at once, my minds eye only sees the detail when I really focus on generating it.

>Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.

I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague sense of knowing) the character looked like.

However:

>Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine.

I do find that, once I've seen a movie or show adaptation, that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's glass in the first Harry Potter book/movie.

These passages about reading were interesting to me as well, particularly the preceding one:

    > Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.

I do not have aphantasia, but I'm not seeing mental images when I'm reading unless I'm not "in the zone" and consciously choose to do so. Good fiction especially is more direct-to-memory.

That's me! I can visualize processes really well, and complex systems. But ask me to picture or hear something in my head and I'll just stare at you.

I was about to write something almost exactly this. However I can "hear something" if I try but definitely not picture something in the literal sense.

Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are related. Do you have the same?

Yes same even multiple times, but if I met them online (slack, teams) I'll always remember them.

When I was younger I was much worse at recognizing people and names, as an adult it's gotten much better

For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial elements.

If I'm in a quiet place I can walk through the project, and understand where different things fit into place - even for very very complex systems, I can almost simulate algorithms and see where things go wrong without looking at my code. I realized this ability is not normal, and many people even software engineers struggle immensely with fully understanding large complex systems

To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams. But it does not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling stuff.

> He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally.

This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.

Do you see them in dreams? I normally struggle to visualize things but when I'm half asleep my imagination suddenly has color and detail that normally doesn't happen when I try to picture stuff

I can't speak about my immediate experience of dreams because I'm not dreaming right now, but when I remember my dreams I remember them the same way I remember anything else, which is to say, without mentally reproducing any visual component of the memory.

At first I had some suspicion that perhaps the findings were partly a result of interpretation of the question. After all, I don't generate a crystal clear image of what I'm thinking about - the image has some amorphous qualities and comes in and out of focus.

But dreams are ultra-visual experiences for me, to the extent where I will occasionally have flashbacks or deja vu to dream images that were exceptionally strong.

So that nullified my suspicion! That said, I do wonder if it's a spectrum, in that some people are more or less visual in their thinking, and on the extremes people may get the capability snipped, as the dim visual hum fades to black and background noise.

Not the OP - I think it's the same process. The difference is in what my inner narrator is doing. When I asleep it is almost always gone, and this is when I typically see things in full color. When awake, my attention is split between listening to its storytelling and the mental imagery, which I believe makes the latter more dull. I noticed that the narrator is more loud when I'm in a minor mental state, like tired or annoyed. When happy/refreshed - there is no voice in my head and I can "see" things very clearly, especially their colors. So, I started looking for ways to divert my attention from the narrator. The most effective seems to keep the narrator busy with commenting on my breath ("in" and "out"), got some boost of mental clarity from that.

The hypnogogic state seems to work fine in at least some aphants, including myself. I see nothing at all when I try to visualize. I have also lucid dreamed in the past and have consciously seen things in a dream as well. I can remember the dream as having been visual in the same way I can remember seeing things with my eyes open yesterday.

This is the fundamental question about experience.

You may be "right". What you consider to be "seeing" things in one's head may be not what's happening in that person's mind. What they call "seeing" may be something else.

The best way I can describe it is essentially generating a memory. If I were instructed to picture an apple in my mind, I could imagine a hand holding up an bog standard Red Delicious. I can imagine it free-floating. And it would be much like when I remember what happened yesterday for instance. Of course, we get into whether or not we "see" the memory or not.

So, if you are saying you do not consider yourself to have mental images, what, to your best ability to describe it, do you do when you remember an event?

Personally, I remember "facts" about the event. Like, who was there, when it was, what was said. I don't have mental images of an event.

So it's like an analytical description of the event?

You don't remember sensations about an experience, like touch, smells, etc?

Basically? It's a "sense" or "vibe". "There was a guy begging on the street" is what I remember. Not the actual words or a picture, just the "vibe" of that sentence. Definitely no touches, sounds, smells, or pictures.

My wife, who has a very visual and auditory memory, to the point that she can basically re-watch movies in her head, is still dumbfounded by this fact.

So, if you watch a poor person begging for food on the street, how do you process that in the future? Do you rely on the remembered feeling and literal observation in words? How do you not remember what you saw?

I "know" that I saw someone begging on the street. I might remember other "facts" as they seemed appropriate. But that's it. If you asked me what color their hair was or what they were wearing I would have no idea unless I had chosen to make a note of that fact.

I rely on the feeling, the sounds, the words on the sign, or by analogy to another thing. I don't remember what it looked like in the way that in a dream I believe I physically see things

How will you remember this comment in 2 hours? Will you visually see the words? You don't need to visually see something that happened to remember it happened or the idea of it. I don't need to visualize Harry Potter in my head to remember the fact he has a lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead. I just remember the fact.

Adding a data point. I don’t think this is aphantasia, but rather SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory). For the future, the memory has to be recorded as facts as the original experience is gone. This means the emotions and other aspects cannot be experienced again. Recording things like, I saw this, I felt like this, I intend to do this.

Not all people who can’t visualise have this SDAM thing (though it is a common overlap), but SDAM means I would remember an event like this less than a problem at work (as an example), without intentional effort to transcribe it.

This sounds a bit cold, but it’s not as cold as it looks. If I read your description of the poor person begging for food, I am emotionally moved. In a similar way, if I examine my memory of the poor person begging for food, I am emotionally moved. I might not be reliving the experience, but the narrative I’ve preserved is enough.

This is why I like listening to my wife describe things we’ve done together. I often don’t remember it, but the narrative is still emotionally impacting. She’s my external memory for things that have happened in our lives.

I don't find it so surprising, because I can recollect sounds, voices, songs. The same thing, another sense.

So it's probably like hearing "inner" sounds, just with motion pictures.

I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly likely.

Different to the case described at the beginning of the article I have lots of memories. But they are stories of what happened, not movies.

> I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly likely.

My friend is one such person. He is amazed I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars. I'm amazed there are people who cannot.

It's probably a related phenomenon to visual aphantasia. My friend, poor thing, has it all.

would your friend be able to hum the star wars theme song from memory? it seems impossible for me to be able to recreate the star wars theme song without being able to hear it in my head.

It’s probably related but not directly connected. My mind’s eye is almost totally blind but I can have John Williams conducting a full orchestra in my head if I want.

(I can’t ‘hear’ lyrics though and have great difficulty remembering them)

I still struggle to believe that some can't. There's just always been an abstract 'canvas' separate from the one signals from my eyes end up on and I can 'draw' on it by thinking about visual stimulus, and it's hazy but perceptibly there, the same way I 'hear' a song when I think about it. When this subject comes up I also always want to ask if people with aphantasia can hear sounds or music in their head. Or a taste or smell, etc..

I have no idea if I have aphantasia or not but the comparison between sound is interesting

I can very clearly imagine sound or music in my head. My visual imagination is at like 20% of that and it's a struggle

My visual imagery is also "hazy" and somehow fleeting and unreal, but still very useful. I don't find it that hard to imagine (heh) that for some people it would be more vivid, and for others almost nonexistent – though a total lack of visualization ability is perhaps more difficult to picture (heh^2), similarly to how it's almost impossible to imagine what it is like to be born blind, for example.

It would definitely be interesting if there were more discussion on other imagined sensory modalities, too. For example, as a choir singer I'd guess that, say, keeping a given starting pitch in your head is easier for people who can mentally "hear" it. Myself I can sort of imagine sounds, but keeping a pitch in my head is more about the physically preparing my larynx to produce that pitch.

I have aphantasia and cannot hear sounds or music in my head. I can't taste or smell things either, but I've also been going through life assuming most people can't either. From reading about it, it seems that some people can do hear things but not see them and probably various other combinations.

I have no abstract canvas to write anything on that I've ever seen.

Something not usually discussed is the different kinds of internal sensing:

- Seeing images (what we usually talk about). Can you see your loved ones’ faces in your mind’s eye? Can you picture an elephant? Can you hold an image still or is it an ever-shifting scramble?

- Seeing color. In your mind’s eye, can you conjure up just the colors green, red, yellow…? No shape or imagery needed, but only the plain color. To my surprise and delight I discovered I can visualize colors without being able to see any actual image.

- Seeing movement. Independent of actual imagery, can you visualize pure motion. Again to my surprise, I can visualize movement without any associated imagery. Like, I can imagine a runner on a treadmill and clearly see the motion of the arms and legs going back and forth — but I don’t actually see the arms and legs at all. I’m seeing only the first derivative of an image, like a Schlieren image.

- Hearing music in your head. Can you pick out the different instruments? Can you anticipate the guitar stab in the 2nd verse. Can you hear the harmonica in Karma Chameleon even though you’ve only ever listened to that song a couple of times, and probably not in over 20 years?

- (might be same as above) Can you hear people’s voices? Can you randomly conjure up your parents or Obama or Tina Fey counting to ten?

Any others I’ve missed?

Speaking of the Apple test, as many other commenters here I truly believe that people who describe themselves as being at 1 are actually much closer to 4, they just aren’t aware of it or don’t understand the concept well. https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

I’m an artist - I draw professionally and studied drawing in a group setting. It seems like a profession that would require the highest level of visual imagination. And I wish I could see clear pictures in my head, but I don’t. I need to have a reference in front of me, constantly compare it with my sketch, and refine it using knowledge and techniques that took years to learn.

When discussing this concept with my artist peers, many say they’re at 1. But they clearly aren’t - I can see that in their work process. There’s an immediate difference in art quality depending on whether the artist is drawing from reference or not. If someone could truly see the picture in their head and draw from it, they could skip years of art training and become good almost immediately. Such a genius would be clearly obvious to their peers. But I haven’t met a single person like that - it seems like everyone works with roughly the same hardware as I do and has to develop the same workarounds to become good.

I believe that Kim Jung Gi was a 1. I’m sure there were other historic geniuses with such a superhuman ability. But I’m also sure that 99% of people just aren’t there - whether they admit it or not.

Maybe that are two different thing? Some may experience what is in their head the same or very similar way to how they would experience it if they would actually see it, but I think that doesn't mean that what is in their head must be static or photo-realistic. I suspect these are important factors, too, in a reference image you use for drawing.

I mean - it's either similar or it's not. Things I see with my eyes are definetely photo-realistic. So mental visualisations similar to that would also be photo-realistic. If they're not - they can have interesting qualities, but they're not similar.

From my recent experience I believe you can train your mental vision, at least to some extent. I play chess and the ability to imagine a position and moves in your head is quite common among chess players, but I was always struggling with it. I could not see the board clearly in my mind and when I was doing exercises on telling the color of a given square I was checking coordinates parity, as I could not see it in my mind. Only recently I tried to train chess vision starting with 3x3 board, than extending to 4x4 and finally glueing 8x8 with 4 4x4 boards. To my surprise after a while I started seeing the board more clearly and I could memorize some simple positions. I've noticed that my general mental vision improved significantly at the same time. If you don't play chess you can start with playing tic tac toe in your head, focusing on seeing the board and marks. I think such exercise is better than imaging an apple, because you can objectively check if what you see is correct. Any board game would do, but start with a small board, and extend only when you feel comfortable. Imagining horse moves on a 4x4 board, focusing on seeing square colors helped me a lot.

I wonder if this explains at all why I've never had the need to diagram anything before I build it - whether it be software or something concrete like a cabinet - I just don't

I work very much like my dad, as I build I just refer to the image in my head

On the other hand, some people keep meticulous notes and diagrams about what they are going to do

This isn't a knock - I have some very sharp co-workers that do better work in some areas even than myself who need to compulsively diagram/take notes

Each has its pros and cons. For me the pros are I can get to building super quickly. It means on a microlevel I can explain things to people who will help with the build in great detail and make sure they "build the right thing"

On the other hand, the con is communicating at a macro level. I don't have anything diagrammed out typically, or notes even, so sometimes it feels to people like they are working with a black box and I have to make a conscious effort to document and diagram

Interesting stuff

For the people here debating whether they have it or not: my take away from many years of therapy is that when it comes to mental stuff like this, it's pretty much just whatever you say it is and how much it impacts your life

If you think you have OCD but it's not interfering with your day to day life, you're probably fine, even if you feel like it's overboard

On the other hand, even mild OCD can be devastating to a different person if they feel like it's making their life hell

So while not quite the same thing, if you think you have aphantasia and you think it's to the point where it's affecting your life in one way or another, than you probably do

If you think you have it but you don't really notice/care and feel like you get by just fine, then you might or might not

Moral of the story is that I hope it's just a thought exercise for you and nothing you're sweating about

I think it's easier to square the circle about this by focusing on 'internal voice' - For those with an internal voice, where do the words come from? We don't pick them from a conscious word bank (mostly), they arise from the subconscious brain thinking about the topic at hand. So to sever the 'internal voice' step of thinking and go from the sub/semi-conscious to the page is if anything just more efficient. It's interesting to think about what we actually gain from conscious articulation of words and images - the benefits of visualization seem more clear cut(though more limited than non-aphantasia-havers might assume) than internal vocalization.

I wonder what happens when you e.g. flash a 5 digit number to a person with aphantasia for say 0.1 seconds. Can they read it from memory? Or are they worse at this task than people with mental imagery? How about mentally rotating 3D objects?

I can no longer rotate or even imagine 3d objects.

My lexical memory is very high, and I have long running echoic memory so I can post process audio but a 0.1 second visual flash?

Unless my brain picked it up and had time to parse out the numbers into lexical storage I would not be able to go back and recall it at all.

I don't have congenital aphantasia and it's clear to me that there are certain kinds of background processing still occurring in my subconscious, it's like a unidirectional connection between parts of my brain that was once bidirectional.

that was what i was wondering. if i showed someone a strange sort of asymmetrical 3d object and told them to tell me what it would look like if there were looking at it from the back, it seems like it would be almost impossible to do.

If it's something I'm capable of figuring out, then I'll just know the answer (and I guess I'm pretty good at this sort of thing). I recognize that that's a terrible non-explanation but I can't explain what's happening outside of my awareness. I'm just good with spatial problems. I can't /visualize/ a damn thing but that doesn't appear to be necessary.

I developed aphantasia around 13 after a series of heart procedures where I had to be under.

Evaluating qualia in others is extremely difficult/philosophically impossible, I have pre/post expierence with both states of being.

I can still somewhat conjure up imagery from prior to the procedure series, it almost feels like I can see them, my mother's face, my father face, kinda of, it did not effect my dreams or ability to have imagery in my edge of dreaming state, not immediately at least.

I went from being very imaginative to trying to surf that half awake state in the mornings because it was such a loss.

At this point it's all mostly gone. My memory is entirely text strings now.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

So, for you at least, there is/was a significant difference between "seeing things in your mind" and not being able to. Have you ever gone under any studies or tests to compare your brain activity to others?

No, if there was a study I would join it. I wish I had done an MRI in my "pre" state, the change was very rapid.

You'll see a bunch of people always pile into these aphantasia threads and basically show a bias towards their own qualia being the only type of existing experience and the whole thing being mere semantic differences to describe the same mental function.

It really boggles my mind, it's like in HS when I told people I was mildly color blind and they literally took it as being "like, blind?". I get that from a bunch of high schoolers, it's very odd to see in what are presumably adults on this site.

Those people are simply incorrect, I and many like me didn't have congenital aphantasia, it's well established in the literature.

I mean, the issue is that we cannot know what is actually going on in someone else's mind. All we can do is describe it to the best of our ability. So there is some likelihood that things like inner monologues and aphantasia are simply different ways of describing similar things.

However, you present an interesting point of view. As someone who remembers being able to visualize but is no longer able to.

And while I feel you on the MRI thing, I don't think you could have known you'd lose the ability to visualize. But I think there would be some value in comparing you against people who both claim to be able to visualize and those who claim to not be able to. You would serve as a sort of marker. Someone who we could be relatively comfortable categorizing as you have distinct memories of being able to visualize and now have a different experience.

This may be a bit nitpicky of me but:

I guess I just find qualia skeptism to be generally unhelpful and on a purely personal level I find it annoying and think of it as an almost brain dead take. Uncharitable though that may be, I guess I need an explanation for the behavior because I just don't get it.

I distinguish this from being skeptical about specific qualia explanations (the voices in my head are demons talking to me) which I think is fair, you don't have to accept the attempt to explain.

People who were skeptical of post covid health complications (also called long covid) who just straight up asserted it must be false and it's not worth looking into.

I don't understand the knee jerk denialism of qualia, a thing widely understood to be essentially irreducible and "unsharable".

It's completely ephemeral and ridiculously difficult to prove or demonstrate.

We only really know what goes on inside our own heads. And unlike other things, like long covid, there's no outward expression of not being able to visualize.

And even for those who claim to be able to visualize, they'll admit that they aren't "seeing" the object. But it's difficult to explain what I mean when I say "I can see it in my head". But it's not. So it's hard to say whether what we're doing is the same or not.

Like the old bit about whether or not the blue you see is the blue I see. In the end, it kind of doesn't matter. If something is "blue", we both agree that the thing is blue, it occupies a certain wavelength, etc. So even though we agree that the thing is blue, we cannot know if we actually see it the same. But since the results are the same, the particular qualia doesn't matter.

We can't make that comparison with inner monologue or visualization. Which is why I guess it fascinates people.

Is this related to internal monologue? I don't see mentioned in my view.

I've seen some sections discussing memory, but not necessarily internal monologue.

I don't think so.

Anecdotally I know someone with aphantasia and they report having an internal monologue.

I’m aphantasic and can hear internal monologue just fine.

From everything I've read about aphantasia, I'm certain it described me -- I have absolutely no ability to consciously "visualize" things in my head (I was also surprised to learn that some/most people sometimes experience a smell sensation if they recall smells, or "hear" music when they think about music or have a song stuck in their head, etc.)

Really the only thing in my head is my internal monologue. If I'm thinking about something I've seen, it's my internal monologue "saying," with words, physical attributes I remember about it. If a song is stuck in my head, it's my internal monologue (in my own voice) signing the lyrics or my own voice humming the tune in my head. No sensation of it being the original artist or the actual instruments, it's 100% my own voice in my own head.

I have a friend who says she does not have any inner monologue at all, and thinks entirely visually. I can't imagine! We're on the pretty extreme opposite ends of the spectrum of how we think, apparently.

Yes, that. Same here.

I still remember (semantically) that my parents laughed at me, when they told me to count sheep to fall asleep and I told them all I can see is darkness and white dots when I close my eyes. They probably thought I was joking.

Yeah, aphantasia is talked about a lot but similarly whether people have an internal monologue, and to what degree, varies a lot. But they're not necessarily highly correlated, if at all.

I think it might be. I'm pretty sure I don't have an internal monologue the way people describe it, and I definitely can't conjure up actual images in my mind. I can however imagine sounds or music.

There is a related set of experiences that articles like this tend to conflate.

* presence of internal monologue

* ability for visualization

* ability for audiation

* affective memory (remembering feelings)

* SDAM (weak autobiographical memory)

It speaks to the larger questions around the human experience, and that we are only now discovering the many ways it differs for each individual.

If you could see a photographic-quality image in your mind, you could answer questions about it the way you’d answer questions about a photograph in front of you. 'what’s written on the sign?' 'how many windows?' That's photographic memory. Since that’s not real, the 'normal visualization' everyone's comparing themselves to doesn’t exist either. Yet we keep treating as credible people who assert what others experience based on not experiencing it themselves. This is epistemically bankrupt.

'If you could see a photographic-quality image in your mind, you could answer questions about it the way you’d answer questions about a photograph in front of you'

...yes. I wouldn't describe it as photograph-quality, for me it's fuzzier and lower fidelity than that, but yes.

Vestiges of the bicameral mind pre consciousness. The cartesian theatre replaced the external "voice" or volition that gave impetus. Think Old Testament "voices" which were external to the hearer and the need of external laws as in tablets, eventually replaced by internal thinking and Laws on the heart which are internal. Old to New, rough to smooth, external objective to internal subjective thinking and mind mapping

What about visualizing physical systems. Billiards, air flowing over a wing, what's causing the flaws in an anodizing process. This is really more important because you can't invent machines (or even diagnose them) if you cant visualize how a physical system operates.

This is an clear shortcoming of LLMs/RLHF. They can talk a good line about any subject, but become hopelessly confused when discussing a physical system. Because they just knows the words, they dont really have any idea about the physical world.

There is an interesting reddit community 'CureAphantasia' with resources to develop your ability to visualize mental images. Together there are ca. 25 posts that offer a complete guide that might as well have been a book.

This seems like a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/xgtyd3/trad...

Same here. I can't see, hear nor smell anything apart from what is really there.

I can 'imagine' in great detail, have a good visual/ auditory memory, but there is no real picture or sound. It is black / silent. I never forget a face just can't picture them.

I found out about this via an article posted here when I was 45 years old, now 4 years ago.

It never felt and does feel like a disability in any way.

Dreams in contrast are a full sensory experience for me, so the route back from memory to senses is there, only it is blocked when I am awake.

Based on comments here I guess in addition to having no internal monolog, I also have no "mental images."

I can imagine how a specific voice sounds, or singing, etc.; and I can summon a vague visual impression of something,

But ITT people are describing a level of detail I can't comprehend. I have no images I can "study" and I can't solve visual puzzles in my head. I can't rotate arbitrary objects and tell you the shape of their outline.

I guess some of you can do this? Jealous AF.

i can visualize only faint wireframes and blobs, if that makes sense. the closest analog is, my internal monologue can speak, as if i were to physically speak, but i cannot "hear" it with my ears. i can visualize "where" each part of a composite scene should go (e.g., my laptop on a table, with a whiteboard in front of me, and a window to my left), and rotate a representation of the scene, but there is no visual component aside from a very plain outline, if i concentrate.

speaking to people who claim to be able to visualize colorful scenes in 3d, with sound, etc., and truly see the scene before them --- there is probably _some_ variance. i wouldn't say it affects my cognition, but how could i really know? i've never asked my friends, but i imagine the percentage of people who use 3d visualization to reason, e.g., complex math, is small, given the number of people i've seen use the right-hand rule on exams :) (especially given aphantasia is supposedly quite rare).

i attended a talk recently on experience with organic chemistry pedagogy at a university for deaf students. few requisite terms are defined in american sign language, so the professor formed a committee to create 400 or so signs. "tetrahedral" uses four fingers in a tetrahedral formation, "chiral" moves one hand about the other to simulate a mirror, etc. education of stereochemistry wasn't necessarily heavy on visualization, as you can draw the molecule and reason about it without conceptualization in 3d, but i caught that i'd often look at clocks for R/S rotation problems (where clockwise-counterclockwise in 3d was relevant).

Given how diffently people describe various phenomena which are easier to actually compare, I have lost most hope of quantitatively understanding aphantasia. Of course people differ in ability to visualize thing and using "the minds eye", but exactly what they mean when describing their experience is only confusing.

Many, many people are so very imprecise with words. And we humans are generally bad at analyzing ourselves vs others.

I am sure any statement "Some people can't X", for X a mental trait, capacity, capability or measure is valid. The thing is how often such happens and how the spectrum severity distributes between normal and total absence.

Exactly the same holds for "Some people can X more than average"

The article suggests that 2-3% of people have aphantasia.

I wouldn’t doubt that maybe there’s also some condition where people can’t see physical images at all. Like they know where stuff is because signals go to their brain but if you ask them to describe what they are seeing they can’t, they see nothing. It’s really not much more bizarre than aphantasia.

There are several levels of this. There are people who can do things as though they see but have no conscious access to the interpreted visual information. Or they can do something that requires vision with one hand but not the other.

You can think of it like a bunch of different subsystems responsible for different kinds of tasks and some of them can be broken so the connections between them don't work.

Read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks for a lot of case studies.

The most astounding thing to me (able to form mental images just fine thanks) is that aphantasia does not cause more problems. Naively I would have assumed such a condition would cause problems navigating abstract problems, nearly as badly as actual blindness impairs physical navigation.

One of the "big" things I've come to understand is that there really are very different ways to think, but yet it seems that they all have more or less the same "expressive power", up to some natural variance in how good people are at specific tasks like navigation.

It's possible that in some configurations of aphantasia the brain is still doing some sort of processing that is made available via a subconscious process.

So you can't visualize an occluded surface in an active way but your brain still prevents you from running your rear bumper into another car.

Many people with aphantasia still dream at night.

Congenital aphantasia and emergent aphantasia may effect brain structures differently, perhaps some forms just disconnect the pipeline that feeds the brains computed data back into our visual centers for further visual analysis.

It's very interesting, in running down these differences we would probably learn a lot about the brain.

Looking at it from another direction, sometimes daydreaming can get so intense that what is in front of your eyes disappear. Internal imagery completely takes over. Does this happen to people who identify as aphantasiacs? Is everyone able to daydream?

Thats me to a tee. I also don't have a inner dialogue when thinking through a problem:)

> I also don't have a inner dialogue...

I wonder if some people grow to develop an inner monologue, but also immediately start developing an ability to silence it, to the point they don't have to try.

Mine is basically always on, and it can be problematic.

Ok, here's the 'related' list that I could come up with. Anything I missed?

(Note: lists of previous threads aren't meant as criticism for a topic being repetitive! On the contrary, the classic topics always reappear and that's fine when the new article is interesting. Lists like this are just for curious readers who might want more.)

Aphantasia and Psychedelics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438296 - Oct 2025 (117 comments)

I do not remember my life and it's fine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196576 - June 2025 (223 comments)

Most self-reported aphantasics also reported weak or absent auditory imagery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42534859 - Dec 2024 (6 comments)

What do you visualize while programming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237 - Oct 2024 (167 comments)

What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138338 - Aug 2024 (432 comments)

Aphantasia Is No Creativity-Killer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40810777 - June 2024 (1 comment)

Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40757775 - June 2024 (401 comments)

Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951990 - April 2024 (114 comments)

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887661 - March 2024 (89 comments)

Aphantasics less likely to be engaged with a short story, but still enjoy it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113343 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)

Aphantasia: The inability to create mental imagery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877146 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)

Poll: Can you visualize details with your eyes closed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660632 - Dec 2023 (60 comments)

What happens in the brain while daydreaming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38654388 - Dec 2023 (146 comments)

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37789989 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784984 - Oct 2023 (60 comments)

How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37718999 - Sept 2023 (232 comments)

Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807533 - July 2023 (88 comments)

Aphantasia: Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36723060 - July 2023 (2 comments)

How blind photographers visualize the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719490 - July 2023 (48 comments)

Ask HN: It seems I lost imagination, what to do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34862427 - Feb 2023 (41 comments)

Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862468 - June 2022 (1 comment)

Ask HN: Do you think in words or pictures? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684070 - June 2022 (29 comments)

Aphantasia: Not Everyone Can Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377295 - May 2022 (5 comments)

Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153061 - April 2022 (1 comment)

Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121556 - April 2022 (111 comments)

Aphantasia, or how not to do math in your head (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments)

How do you visualize code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29979958 - Jan 2022 (86 comments)

I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551579 - Dec 2021 (306 comments)

Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments)

Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments)

Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27669211 - June 2021 (146 comments)

Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment)

Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27437001 - June 2021 (31 comments)

Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)

People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23689667 - June 2020 (147 comments)

Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments)

Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments)

Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (424 comments)

The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments)

What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments)

Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments)

Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments)

Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)

I have no mind's eye, and neither does my wife. Neither of us even realized people can actually see images in their head until recently.

Our children appear to have a mind's eye though.

I tried telling people I couldn’t. I don’t mention it anymore because inevitably there is a person who doesn’t believe me and won’t stop trying to argue I’m wrong.

I believe you, It think I'm also the same; however for me at least, I feel like I can "think" of what something looks like. This is hard to explain since its very "personal" way its easier to say "i can see a square" nope I can't see anything but I can "think" of a square.

The whole imagine a ball in your mind. Now tell me what colour it is. No idea you tell me :D I can pretend and make up a color or go with what my gut tells me which is the most common color my brain was probably trained on.(red). but in reality I don't see any ball.

Flouride calcifying the pineal gland, the center of visualization internally, doesn't help.

That take is firmly rooted in fantasy.

I have aphantasia and autism. There are pros and cons. It seems to be the reason we're good at tech.

I dont have a narrator neither. No voices in my head at all. If im talking to myself, im saying it outloud. But imagine as well, there's little to no distraction. We can focus on what we want. But it's also amazing to see other people in society who are clearly hearing voices in their head and completely and utterly distracted from day 2 day life. It's like they are possessed by demons in the bad cases.

>a vulnerability to trauma

But because of aphantasia, we dont ever qualify for PTSD. A key part of PTSD is flashbacks and rumination that we dont get.

>emotions and memory

Since memories dont have a visual aspect, the emotional impact of memories is greatly reduced.

>meditation

Since we dont get distracted, we are naturally significantly better at meditation.

Does that mean they also can't dream?

Mental images are a distraction from what is here right now. Be here now. Not be here yesterday or be here tomorrow..

Regarding "a propensity to hold grudges" and "easily move on, forget, not hold grudges": I find this to be the case. I can easily hold a grudge, because it's like the grudge is a post-it-note stuck to the front of my book-of-knowledge. This means I can readily recall the grudge, and that I can also easily forget/move-on from the grudge (just remove the note).

Continuing with the post-it-note analogy, the note can only hold a small amount of information, and so the grudge will be recorded as something simple like "fuck ___, they're an arrogant twat". So then the situation arises where you're talking to someone else and they ask "what do you think about ___?"; and so you answer "I can't stand them, they're so arrogant"; to which they respond "oh really, how so?"; and you can't give an answer, because it wasn't written on the note.

I think this ties in with memories not making you feel the relevant emotions, because the emotion you felt was also just saved as a "fact". I have found though that if I step through all the facts of an "event" and consider each "moment" along the way, that I can often generate the relevant emotion. So say I was remembering an argument, I can remember various facts about the argument and that I was angry about it, but I can't feel that anger. But if I walk through the moments, like `they said this, which made me think that, to which I rightly responded with...`, then eventually I'll start to feel angry just like I would have.

For an analogy on how I think memories are stored differently: then for non-aphantasiacs, I reckon their brain must save `memory.zip`, which contains `video, audio, smells, emotions, etc`. For a person like myself with aphantasia however, it's like I asked ChatGPT for a summary of `memory.zip`, and then I only saved the summary.

Saying that though, I do wonder about the connection between "fact based memories" and aphantasia's lack of mental imagery. Because if >50% of the usefulness of `memory.zip` is from the video, but you can't "see" the video because you aphantasia — then has your brain decided/learned to not bother saving `memory.zip` and instead just save the summary, or are all components of `memory.zip` also corrupt/unplayable?

Just to elaborate on the "fast-facts"/post-it-note point I made: it seems there's actually a lot of "facts" ("conclusions") stored in a readily available manor in my brain. All the references/data that lead to these conclusions are stored in some deeper "archive" section though, and aren't readily available.

I guess you could compare them as if they are API's to different LLM's, and my "consciousness" is the web-browser. So it's like;

  - `fast_facts.llm` is a micro model with good breadth and fast response times, but it has little depth. So it's API can be fetch'd without worrying about it blocking the main-thread/browser.  
  - `all_data.llm` is a full size model, but it's slow to respond, and "costs" more to run. So in the browser, it is only lazily-loaded (ie, not always used), and it has to be called async style because you have to wait for the results to slowly "stream in".

And stream they do, because back to my example conversation where someone asks "how are they arrogant?" — whilst I likely wouldn't immediately remember any examples (unless they happened very recently), at that point the request to `all_data.llm` would have been sent, and so after some umm's and ahh's, I might have an answer. Or I might just say "I can't remember off the top of my head, but also ..." start talking about something else, and then after 30 seconds I will drop the classic "but actually, i just remembered, ...".

Must be a boring wank.

The question is: why is there so much porn out there at all, if most people can visualize it in their heads?

I simply do not buy any aspect of this. It is absolutely untestable. It's not just that I don't think people who can't see mental images exist, I don't think that you can prove that anyone does see mental images. It's pure introspection and self-reporting, and half of the scientists named had very odd, old-timey standards of evidence that led them to many very wrong conclusions in their fields.

I couldn't say whether I, myself, have any mental images. I wouldn't even know what it meant to see without eyes. Does that mean that I don't have mental images, or does that mean that I have them so easily that they pass without notice? Or does it mean that this is horseshit, and the consequences of it very much not profound or even detectable?

People's self-reported subjective experiences, about any subject, are almost worthless. You are even an unreliable narrator to yourself. The burden of proof lies on the people who would claim these mind ghosts, not the people that deny them. These descriptions are all so much poetry, so literary.

Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of work on introspection, and reminds us of things like how we thought we all dreamed in black and white before the invention of the color television, and we thought that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness; and how blind people who experienced "blindsight" had no idea that they were reflexively echolocating until you covered their ears and tested them again.

People can have entire, sound chains of reasoning that they are only aware of the conclusions of (and unaware of the process even existing.) We are not aware of all of what we're thinking or how. Our self-perception relies as much or more on our self-images than actual recall of our experiences.

Also, going through severe trauma and saying you see the world differently afterwards is not evidence of anything. If it was brain trauma, it'd be surprising if you didn't have a different understanding of the world during and after your recovery.

I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as mysterious superpowers. I do think it helps to remind ourselves in these times how far just babbling the most likely thing can get us, now that we're in the age of LLMs. There doesn't have to be anything inside.

edit: I've been paid as an artist at times in my life, and very much like to draw, and I still have no idea if I have any mental imagery. It's just not a concept I can attach any meaning to.

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edit2: I entirely forgot that there's a specific essay on this subject by Schwitzgebel.

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery

> Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or "phenomenology". I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory.

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm