Hypnosis with Aphantasia
aphantasia.com
aphantasia.com
I tried the exercise they described… and nothing happened.
I can’t even remember major life events that everybody is supposed to. Best I can do is recall there’s a photograph of the event, and using my recollection of the existence of the photograph, I can pull up a few facts I’ve intentionally made note of.
And now cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
It likely exists on a spectrum (just like mental imagery).
I have aphantasia and struggle quite strongly with autobiographical memory, but if someone reminds me of an event or I look through old photos, I can remember things.
This is why I love having Immich so much - it lets me feel connected to my past.
Today I have medium-ish hypophantasia, but I remember when I was doing phantasia exercises, in particular "snapshotting" and "memory streaming", at least two times, there was a subtle shift in my perception and all of a sudden I could remember a ton of things, as if I opened a door. It would only last maybe 10-20 minutes (I would practice 30 - 60 minutes per day).
It wouldn't surprise me a bunch of those memories are in the brain but you just don't have access to them in everyday waking consciousness.
So, for me, it feels like a lot of my memories are visually indexed, and if I can't visualize then I can't remember, but once I configure my mind through meditation and these exercises, it is like I can "tune my mind" to mind's eye access (radio/TV analogy here) and with it the memories.
Then once I stopped the exercise (for the day) it would go away in around 10-20 minutes (kind of like how a muscle pump goes away rather quickly after exercising).
I don't have the visual imagination, episodic memory, or time travel of the paper you linked, but I have had full-sensory dreams and I can make myself salivate and taste sourness by thinking of lemons. Hypnosis has never worked on me. I've experienced visualization once, under the influence of heroin (only tried it the one time, no idea if that experience was anomalous or not). Other drugs, including other opiates and opiods and a variety of hallucinogens have had no effect of inducing visualization for me.
I am much more on the hyperphantasia side of mental imagery but I am constantly astounded at how poorly visual imagery is conveyed as well as the difficulty in conveying the experience of mental imagery intuitively. Similarly it amazes me when people with mental imagery simply cant conceive that there are people without it.
Looking at a test such as this one (https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq), the best descriptor for the most vivid mental imagery is:
>Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision
I have always felt that comparing mental imagery to normal vision kind of misses the mark. For the common question people ask, where they say "imagine an apple sitting on the table of front of you" or something similar, where aphantasics simply can't conceptualize what that means, I have seen people say something similar to "Its like photo shopping an apple on top of what your eyes are seeing".
This, to me, sounds more like hallucination rather than mental imagery and I think completely misses the mark for explaining what mental imagery is like to people who don't experience it. For me at least, mental imagery is much more like having some space inside my head disconnected from the physical reality in front of me. So when someone says to 'picture an apple on the desk in front of you', what I experience is that a perfect replica to my surroundings is created in this non-physical space and in that space, there is an apple on my desk. Bare in mind, this is completely detached from what I am literally seeing with my eyes. I could picture an apple on my desk rolling off and onto the ground, and follow that path with my eyes in the physical space in front of me. Really though, I am imagining how this scenario plays out in the non-physical space in my mind, and mapping the motion data of the apple back into reality and using my eyes to see where it 'would be'.
I think what really becomes difficult in conveying mental imagery to people with aphantasia is that they completely lack the conceptualization that you can have all the qualia of a physical space represented to you without it being actually connected to your literal experiences of your surroundings and the space they take up. Like explaining color to the blind, or how some colors are warm and others are cold to a blind person, language fails to adequately transcend the difference in mental facilities. It seems much easier however to go imagine the experience of the blind as a sited person, much like a 3 dimensional creature could imagine the experience of a 2 dimensional one but not a 4 dimensional one.
(A)phantasia and Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory: Scientific and Personal Perspectives.
Wow, take it easy.. This whole pathologization of "aphantasia" really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.
Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.
After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.
In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.
Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.
What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...
The fact that the author doesn't mention the details of the memory or events of the day also suggests shame and concerns of being judged for them.
The good news is they are writing about their struggles which suggests their willingness to work with these fears.
I think the answer probably isn't about pretending you're not better or worse, but accepting that being better or worse at something doesn't change your inherent self worth. Accepting that your not in control of many of your conditions and conditioning can free the mind from a sense of guilt and the fear around judgement of yourself and others. Hopefully this helps the author and those who struggle with notions of identity and self worth.
No, it's not a defensive/counterattacking reflex. The thought of people hallucinating all the time is terrifying to me, because hallucination is a sign of something being very wrong, like schizophrenia. After getting past the language barrier and finding out these were "mental hallucinations" rather than "visual hallucinations", it's slightly less scary, but still unsettling for me to think about. Finding out that visualization was actually a thing meant that idioms that I thought were metaphors or superstition were suddenly something the majority of the population takes literally. People who have "invisible friends" talking to them all day long scares me though.
Also you might find it interesting to read Jaynes' Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's evidently controversial and not a viewpoint to uncritically adopt wholesale, but it does get you thinking about mental visualization/audiolization vs. hallucinations etc... and contains some intriguing historical anecdotes.
I thought the same, but after reading this I'm beginning to wonder whether or not there is actually a difference: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260122074033.ht...
It seems like the "voice in the head" is distinguished from real voices by a mechanism similar to how tickling yourself doesn't cause the same sensation as another doing the tickling. People with inner voices and visualizations might actually be hallucinating all the time, they're just aware of it and not being misled by their senses like a schizophrenic would be.
Of course it's hard to argue with the bare fact of someone feeling something, but everything surrounding that such as the attribution of the causes, potential solutions, and the terms in which feelings are described are all open to debate.
How exactly is this anything but a pathology?
Those studies, well, I'd have to see them. There's the risk that people for whom (e.g.) memory is accompanied by imagery automatically assume that imagery is required for memory. Vague correlations with social functioning can be drawn for nearly anything.
Regarding dementia: obviously the disappearance of imagery in someone who used to have it is very different from someone who never had it.
However, there may also be benefits; for example, it seems to be associated with stronger conceptual imagination.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/payx1i/craniosa...
(I'm sure I wasn't asleep as I both never remember my dreams, but have distinct memories of how "fuzzy" and ethereal the imagery in my dreams feel, while this imagery during meditation was crystal clear and I was fully lucid)
> Can aphantasics be hypnotized? My experience learning to be hypnotized with imagery-free inductions.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
E.g. when reading I tend to skim over writing that spends a lot of time describing the visual appearance of things unless the words themselves are beautiful to me, because no matter how well written the descriptions are, they don't achieve anything for me beyond the shape of the prose itself.
(I love the structure and flow of language, so there are absolutely moments I find myself reading visual descriptions because of the descriptions themselves)
When writing, I prefer to write relatively sparse prose that focuses on how things works and relates to each other, and dialogue, rather than trying to evoke imagery that I can't see for myself when reading the text back.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
Is it common for people with aphantasia to not realize it until well into adulthood?
One of my good friends has it, didn't realize it until he was married (~40 years old) and his wife "figured it out." He doesn't care for fiction - especially written fiction, but movies/TV to a lesser extent - I always wondered if that's related. Aside from that, you'd never know - he's a good photographer and excels with mechanical stuff (rebuilding/modifying vintage motorcycles in particular).
My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.
So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
Even though we live in a visually stimulating environment, and society tends to express things to us in visual ways, the goal of hypnosis is to relax the person and guide them to a comfortable place, so we can relate to people how they are internally and we don't have to worry about making everything highly visual.
The myth that everyone, or even anyone, can imagine anything, and is doing so regularly, has no basis, yet is the only cited basis of the diagnosis.
People that think they have aphantasia like talking about it because we like applying labels to ourselves and it makes them feel distinct. I’m sure this is not a popular opinion, but given the inability of knowing what it’s like to be someone else, it’s the only rational belief about aphantasia.
I wonder if people process and feel what they think are same emotions in very different ways? I usually am externally quite unreactive though, but I didn't think I don't feel emotions actually?
Or maybe I do feel something in my bodyparts, but I am just unable to identify or recognize it? If I am frustrated or anxious and I focus on my brain, maybe I can kind of tell there is tightness? But then I could focus on other bodyparts, and I can also think that maybe there is chest heaviness? But then I can focus on my feet and think ok even my feet can feel weird, but is it because I am focusing on them and thinking there should be something?
But the tension is everywhere not necesseraily pointed to a specific location.
Like I don't ever feel what I think is "good". I feel like there is always something that I should be doing, solving some problem that is on back of my mind. I can try to make myself forget about the problems I have to solve temporarily, but mostly it doesn't work.
But it is always the same, constant feeling of pressure and inability to relax, while my therapist seems to assume it comes on and off and in a specific body part.
It’s a theory psychologists and philosophers still argue about.
E.g. I am worried about upcoming deadlines, or whether I am going to make it, maybe it is not a direct fight or flight anxiety though, but what is it then, just stress?
I've meditated, and experimented with self hypnosis (still on the fence on whether hypnosis works), and I simply always interpreted such "visualize" instructions as metaphorical, as I had no idea until a few years back that people meant them literally, so pretending was the only option I thought possible.