As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
My takeaway from all of the discussions is that the ability to 'see' an imagined visual representation of something exists on a spectrum from absolutely nothing ever, into a minds eye abstract idea of an image (like a melody heard in your mind rather than your ears) toward a full ability to see an image overlay in the visual space. There's a lot of debate as to whether this is a trainable ability.
The "mind's eye" isn't an actual image. It doesn't pop into view like augmented or virtual reality. It is imaginary.
What is an actual image?
I ask because you seem to dismiss the notion that some people have stronger inner images than others.
I think that language is hard and it sounds, again, to me, like there are people who think there are AR/VR like experiences when someone closes their eyes. That makes as much sense to me as not seeing the back of your eyelids. People are not "seeing" things - they are "imagining" things to various fidelities.
Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.
With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).
Nobody does, this is all unfalsifiable nonsense, it's an artifact of the language used to describe imagination.
I think, however, that your reasoning is backwards. Language such as "picture this," "envision yourself on a beach," the concept of the "mind's eye," or especially the word "imagination" from "image" is much more likely to exist as a result of the actual process than to be its cause. Parsimony favors assuming that the description evolved from the experience - if nobody "saw" mental imagery, we would more readily describe the thought process as "thinking about," "reasoning around," that sort of thing.
The language used cannot be used as proof on its own. What makes me think this is more than a description problem is that reported vividness of imagery correlates to unconscious effects: pupils constrict to imagined bright shapes and dilate to imagined dark ones, scaled to how vivid the person says the image was[0]. People reporting aphantasia don't show those effects. Despite this not constituting "proof," I cannot rationalize it being a coincidence.
If it matters, I call myself aphantasic, though I cannot prove it to you. You may relate to my initial thought - "surely all this language is metaphor, and people don't really walk around hallucinating on command." Taking (the vast majority of) people at their word, however, indicates that they really do see things when they think about them - though visual mental imagery is meaningfully different from actually seeing (but is more like seeing than aphantasics assume). Refer to Galton's original 1880 study[1] for 150-year-old rationalizations that are the same as mine.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 [1] https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
I can also experience a form of closed eye visuals when not tripping but mediating (or while relaxing in bed in the dark, waiting to sleep). But they're of a quite different kind, and remind me more of a very active type of phosphenes morphing with blotches of color and light. But they are also kind of on a different layer (more in the background of the "mind's eye") than the strong "in your face" visuals I experience when tripping.
I remember when I first realised people had real pictures, in my 20s. I had a friend whose technique for studying involved putting notes on his wall. He claimed he had photographic memory, and could walk over to his wall in his mind and read any piece of paper on it.
We had a long conversation after that exploring each other's experiences. I cannot picture anything while awake (only sometimes when asleep or in deep meditation). He was aware that photographic memory was unusually good, but assumed that everyone had at least some visual memory/imagination.
I also remember the first time I "saw" the difference too. I was waking up from a dream, once of only 2 dreams I remembered strongly after waking up.
I was in a scene like in an action movie, running away from someone in a tall office building. I run up some stairs, burst into a room, and spot an open window across the room, with a big bunch of blue balloons outside tied together and floating up.
I dash across the room and jump out the window, grabbing onto the string under the balloons. As I float up, I start to swing around, bback towards the building. I see the shiny windows, but just before I turn far enough to see the balloons or myself in the reflection, I fade into awakeness. Up to this point everything had looked just like real life, but as soon as I woke up, I could not imagine the imaagery any more.
Since then, on a couple of occasions when I'm really tired, I'll catch myself transitioning to sleep, because after the lights are out, I'll start fading into picturing myself in a random location, but as soon as I notice it and try to interact with the world, I fade out to black again.
So I have had the experience of being able to "see" things in my head (maybe a dozen times in my life while sleeping, two of which I remember vividly, and once while doing an extended meditation session, and once during a hypnosis lesson on induction). And I can contrast those specific visual experiences with the blackness I get when I close my eyes any other time.
Have you tried this experiment yourself, or on others to see how much detail they visually imagine? [0] In my experience, most people report somewhere between a 2 or a 3. I tend to ask people to close their eyes and imagine this scene, then read out panel 4 verbatim. "A woman sits at a table. She is resting her chin upon her hands. Apples sit on the table to the right of her. A pineapple to her left.". I give them 30 seconds to notice their imagination then show them the 4 panels and ask which is closest to their imagination. The thing that's most interesting is not the number that they say, but that a significant proportion of people point out the differences from what they imagined, unprompted. Like "I saw her with shorter hair", or "I saw green apples", or "in my head, she was a brunette". Those are not things I would even think of if you read out that description to me.
[0] <https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what...>
My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something.
How can we be sure that we're not just labeling the experience differently?
When I "imagine" something while I awake, it is not remotely like seeing. There is no image overlaid on the "real world" whether obscuring the black behind my eyelids or anything else when they are open. I can't tell shapes, or colours. If my eyes are closed, I just see the inside of my eyelids, nothing more.
My one experience of seeing something while awake during meditation was like being inside a movie. Everything was as clear as if I had been walking around in that setting for real.
I don't know what it will take to make you sure, but for me, I have experienced three entirely different "modes" of imagining things, ranging from no visuals, to shifting and unclear visual, to crystal clear images, and the distinction is stark and obvious - there's no ambiguity in it.
for me, it's much less detailed unless I focus my imagination on the less detailed part.
The two experiences are different, most of the time, yes, but only "completely 100% different" IMO to aphantasics, or those who are high in aphantasia. I.e. hyperphantasia is a thing, and a normal thing for most people in altered states (and schizophrenia might be seen as involving an extreme form of hyperphantasia intruding where it shouldn't, in some cases).
See also my post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707079
I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers trying to study aphantasia and come to your own conclusions about whether they're actually doing all that much. My own suggested that while there are some improvements since the papers I cited that it is still difficult to say that they've solved the problems in those studies.
Still, directionally, while inferring from "brain activations" to qualia is a difficult path, if there was enough data to show big and consistent correlations that would tend to satisfy me that maybe there is some sort of real difference and we're not just talking past each other. It's not such a shocking claim that I need truly shocking evidence to believe it, just some support.
I know the vast chasm between the two states from direct first hand experience.
So do many others.
Also the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia are especially troubling for the skeptical "semantic disagreement" cases, given that acquired aphantasia is entirely within-person.
This is fairly conclusively disproven by far more than just fMRI / brain-imaging studies. E.g. aphantasics have problem with visual memory recall, visual priming, pupil dilatory and skin conductance responses when imagining light and/or fearful stimuli, and many other results (especially acquired aphantasia) that don't depend on brain imaging and obviously rule out semantic explanations. Likewise, rejecting the reality of the phenomenon also seems to require believing an extraordinary amount of error and/or conspiracy on the part of highly educated and insightful people that explicitly are saying the issue is not one of semantics / description. This is also not to mention the rich history of visualization practices in much of the worlds religions and esoteric practices (which make basically zero sense if this is all metaphor). See e.g. the discussion in a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464414).
> I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers [...]
Likewise, an unbiased AI prompt (or two prompts in separate sessions, with opposite biases) will clearly reveal the "semantics denialist" case has very little to stand on here. Yes, there are communication and linguistic issues, but these only cover a subset of ambiguous cases. Rejecting or denying the reality of aphantasia is an extremely strong indicator you are aphantasic, to some considerable degree.
One easy answer up there with "more study is needed" in terms of being a bit cliche, but cliche because it's often true, is that there may be a richer spectrum or something that isn't even 1-dimensional then we're currently able to grasp, which will become more clear over time and more study. Perhaps it's less rare than we think and the rareness is only those we can talk into agreeing their qualia really is different from others. Or the way we are describing it leads people in the "1-2 out of 5" category to declare themselves aphantastic on HN when they aren't really properly so.
That a larger proportion of HN users are aware of their aphantasia is another matter - the renewed research over the last 10 years got a lot of attention.
It is very clear that there is a spectrum - hence why the typical test goes from seeing nothing at all via various degrees of seeing blurry or monochrome shapes to full colour vision. Going by Ed Catmull's survey of staff at Pixar, you will also find it extending further into hyperphantasia: People (and there's at least one in this thread too) who can "watch movies" in their head and can rewind and fast forward.
> Or the way we are describing it leads people in the "1-2 out of 5" category to declare themselves aphantastic on HN when they aren't really properly so.
People at the lowest end of the scale absolutely have aphantasia, but there's no "official threshold".
but also, if I could see even the vague outlines that'd place me one level up, it'd be very obviously different to my experience. I score the minimum possible 32 on the VVIQ2 test:
https://davidfmarks.net/vividness-of-visual-imagery-question...
And the minimum 16 on the older VVIQ test.
https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
The median score on VVIQ2 is 79. The median for VVIQ is around 60, and the thresholds used for aphantasia on the VVIQ test is 24 or 33 depending on who you ask.
I can very occasionally possibly see brief flashes of vague imagery, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have had a single experience of what was probably at hyperphantasia levels, so I don't think there's some inherent physical limitation preventing me from seeing more. But it is also very clear to me especially because of that experience that I do in fact not see more.
I agree this is an annoying confound, and also that it feels highly intuitive that being able to consciously visualize ought to correlate with better visuospatial (and thus much mathematical) cognitive ability.
I think the solution is recognizing that the reason cognitive deficits are mostly unobserved (visual memory recall studies aside) is recognizing that aphantasia is almost certainly a conscious access problem, i.e. most aphantasics are still using imagery too, just unawares. Last I checked, this is the leading hypothesis / explanation.
Also, plasticity and the ingenuity of the brain is clearly such that an aphantasic can also find other ways (e.g. other sensory modality imagery, pure logical relations, etc) of representing the problems that seem like they should rely on visualization. It seems obvious to me that these other ways can be both advantageous/disadvantageous, depending on the situation / phenomenon.
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.