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This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).

A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:

1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake

2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery

Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.

This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.

It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.

It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.

> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.

As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mathematical rules that is easy to abstract and rotate. It gets more complicated with complex objects and that’s where visualizing things really matters. Here’s a question, can you accurately visualize a loved one’s face, see it in your mind and describe all the features if you were for instance talking to a police sketch artist. I couldn’t even do that for my daughter or my wife.

I definitely can't - if I had to describe my wife or son, I would be hard pressed to go beyond very generic descriptors (long black hair, brown eyes, and so on), nothing useful to create an accurate sketch. And I wouldn't be able to draw them from memory even if I were good at drawing. This could also be explained simply by having bad memory for faces, though.

But yes, little bits of subjective introspective evidence (like that one, and also mostly ignoring visual descriptions in books, and the perception of having no mental images at all that is asked by the standard self-report tests, and so on) add up and make me 99.9% sure I have aphantasia. It's just that it would be nice to have the objective unambiguous external test, the silver bullet, to be totally sure that they're not a bunch of busses in a trench coat as so many honest beliefs are.

note that many autistic people (overrepresented on HN) have face blindness which is (probably) a separate thing. They don't develop the specific specialized circuits for recognizing facial features.

I think this is a better self-test.

Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

Now, answer these questions:

- What color was the ball?

- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

- What did they look like?

- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?

- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?

This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

Right. Details come in, for me, based on:

- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.

- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.

- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.

And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.

I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.

But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.

Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.

That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.

You might need to take a person's background into account as well.

I, for instance, am an avid billiards player. A "ball on a table" naturally makes me think of a billiard ball on a billiards table. A whole host of detail was filled in for me, but all specifically in that context. I could answer some of the answers as if I could visualize, but most of them as someone who could not.

n = 1, I know, but sometimes it takes only one example.

Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.

I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.

With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.

Those tests could also depend on some third thing, such as not believing that you're visualizing a bright light. I can't see their methodology. "Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength." Really, objective measures of how bright an imaginary light is, how on earth do they think they can measure that!? Was it like "we gave them a sheet of paper where they had to score how bright a light they were imagining, and the sheet of paper objectively existed so it was an objective test"?

Well anyway the whole concept, and the science, seems like a giant troll.

If the concept of the mind's eye seems like a giant troll to you, you're either aphantasic or haven't connected the right dots. Can you remember a song? If so, can you do something similar with a picture?

> All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not.

I don't know. Have you tried the ball on the table test that's inside the article? What was your answer to the last question?

It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.

In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..

In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"

It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.

That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?

For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.

Our world exists. Don't overthink it. But dreams aren't real at alll, they just fill in a bare minimum of data and handwave the rest. Which is also what I was getting at with my visual imagination, although the rest isn't handwaved away at all - if I think of an apple on a desk I'm under no illusion there's any more than a ("low res") image of an apple and part of a desk.

Ha, I was going to describe it the same way. The image is there in the buffer, you have full bit-level access to it; the only difference is that there's a firewall preventing it from being rendered to the primary display. Dreaming allows rendering it to a virtual display which is temporarily considered canonical.

I think the resolution and bit depth of that buffer is the aphantasia spectrum. Some people are working from a 160x120 1-bit image, for some it's 640x480 8-bit, and some can load up an 8K at 32-bit deep color.

I don't know if everyone is like this, but low-res is not to be deemphasized. When another comment had a test about bicycles, I can see the shape of a bicycle frame, but I definitely can't see how many gears it has unless I zoom in on the gears (and I don't know how many gears a bicycle is supposed to have, but I can imagine any number up to about 5.)