Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?

If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?

View on HN

Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.

I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".

Some people have inner dialogues. Some authors are literally writing down what characters are saying in their head, and sometimes what they see them "do" as well.

Me here, inner dialogue frequently, inner monologue never (self-directed speech like "okay now I need to pick up the ...")

My inner dialogues almost always come with full fidelity, visual, audio, tactile, I can still smell the Marlboros on my dad's flannel even though he stopped smoking 20+ years ago.

People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).

As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.

I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.

I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word

To add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.

> I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it

Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.

Some people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery

Some people hear it more like a recording.

Yeah, I can do that, but I think it is the same thing on a spectrum, just like the visual imagination.

Hearing your own voice Vs high fidelity musical instruments and other people's voices seems like a very wide spectrum. And indeed, it is wider as some people don't hear anything at all, including no inner monologue (I know someone like that - she's a good writer, and it freaks people out to realise the she can't 'hear' the words before she writes them, which is weird, because my vocalisation of words I wrote noticeably lags my writing)

This entire conversation is new and fascinating to me. I used to be much more visual but I would say that my primary mode of thinking now is monologic. However I would never think to describe it as hearing. It is more like an imaginary 'voice' that is not the one I use with other people (it is absent timbre etc and just a much simpler more efficient voice abstracted from physical constraints). I use it to write out my thoughts in my mind. I quasi-visualize the chain of words just in a very abstract, largely amorphous way using this 'voice' and play them through my mind while 'speaking'/'hearing' them. In this sense I pretty literally get 'lost in my train of thought' when thinking about something interesting.

I don't know how much this style of thought came about because I really didn't enjoy constantly visualizing things and consistently fought against it; mainly due to the constant intrusive visual sequences of various types, of which I still have far too many for my taste. I use schematic and visual imaginations all the time, but I guess I feel safer using the monologue and so it has become the bulk of my thought. At the same time the fact that I have learned several languages and have had to consciously focus on language over the years undoubtedly plays a big part. I wonder how many polyglots who learned languages later in life use a similar monologic imagination style?

For my part I have a constant droning monologue on my voice I can only stop by sleeping or intensely focusing, like meditation. It's unambiguously my voice, as if I'm about to speak, but my vocal chords just don't engage but the sound appears in my head instead.

My monologue uses several languages... But my monologue has always been there, since years before I learnt my second language.

I think there should be some focus on nature vs nurture here. At least some people have some degree of control over how they imagine things, and some training of when to use the best imaginative process as the tool it is would be useful. Struggling with a problem? Perhaps stop visualizing and try linearizing in monologue, or vice-versa, etc.

I'm pretty sure this is the default. Who literally hears music when thinking of it.

I do and just asked around among friends. Everyone did.

Most I think, especially among musicians, which makes the GP fascinating to me!

I can play the piano, saxaphone, and guitar, and I've never considered being able to think about music to be actually hearing it.

I only learned that some people don't from the Mastodon thread - it's slightly disorienting finding out how differently other people's brains work. This, for you, might be like the day I realised that aphantasia was a thing and people weren't just using flowery language when they talk about visualising things.

I do. I can "play it back" in my head, with full music/lyrics/chords/etc.

I have aphantasia, and I think my experience with music is similar.

I can think about a song, think about the melody, lyrics, etc… but I don’t hear it. If I hear a couple notes that remind me of a song, I can go through the rest of the intro, get to where the lyrics start, and get to the chorus and remember the name of the song (if it doesn’t come to me instantly), but it’s nothing like playback. It’s more like my inner monologue doing a bad a cappella cover version.

I sometimes wonder if everyone is talking about the same thing, but using different language to describe it. Some being more vivid and metaphorical in their speech than others.

> I sometimes wonder if everyone is talking about the same thing, but using different language to describe it

As someone who can hear music "on demand" in my head I can say that's not the case. I can hear the music with instruments and the original singer's voice. It's not as clear as listening to actual music, and in some cases it may be incomplete if I havent' listened to the song for a while, but it's definitely a playback.

As an example, right now I am thinking of The Trooper by Iron Maiden, and I can hear the drums, base, guitars and the lead singer's own voice. I can also separate the different instruments if I want to listen to just the guitar or the singer's voice because I know the song well. I can also change the lyrics or the guitar solo if I want.

It's the same as imagining an image. It is not a perfect reproduction of a "photo" that pops up in my mind, but it is still an image with colours, shapes and faces.

I understand where you are coming from, because you don't have the necessary context. When I read about people who "see" music in colours or smells, or even simple colour blindness, it is hard to imagine. But I still accept that it exists

Can you literally hear music in a dream have you never had an auditorial hallucination?

Yes I've had auditorial hallucinations. It was clearly inside my head, I was not "hearing" it

I have music running in my head most of the time, at least in the background unless I’m concentrating deeply on something. I’m also a musician and the best way I can describe it is that the music I’m hearing in my head somehow comes out of my instrument.

It reminds me of a joke. It's better told in person but you get the idea:

A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks.

"Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?"

"Yeah?"

"Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?"

hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture!

As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.

I have no idea if I'm anywhere on the spectrum, but I really don't visualize images, but I can definitely hear sounds in my mind's ear. Not smells, tho. When I dream, it's almost no images. It's feelings, with a story associated. To the extent i do have images, they are very washed out, basically no color or detail.

Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com