I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projector screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
basscomm
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
jawns
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
antonvs
Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
jawns
Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane.
So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.
jaggederest
That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.
yubblegum
He started by saying he initially couldn't even achieve phantasia (at school) but now can and that validates his experience which is he has made strides on mental imagery department.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
jaggederest
It's not, but you then must admit that there's a variety of experience that you may not experience, and that some people don't need to learn, or vice versa, cannot learn.
yubblegum
Fair enough but we're not discussing all under the heaven here.
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
jaggederest
Parent poster was rejecting the idea that subjective reports claiming impossibility were possible, I'm not going to extend them the benefit of the doubt in the opposite direction. "That's not a real thing" puts the onus on the demonstrator, you can't disprove subjective experience using subjective experience.
I believe in a plurality of human experiences, they do not, because they experienced one thing different. It's a specious argument, just like all the people rejecting the idea that other people can have a different subjective experience (based solely on their own personal experience) in this thread.
watwut
> Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack?
He literally said he HAS the ability. He can actually do it. It is just that he learned it at some point.
jaggederest
I think people can experience A, B, and C, he's saying "I was like A, but I learned to be like B, therefore A does not really exist". It's a bad argument. It's like claiming that, because you have dyslexia and learned to read, dyslexia doesn't exist, even though other people who are dyslexic can have a severity where they can't learn to read.
watwut
He desribed his own experience of learninig to visualise. That is entirely valid thing to say in the context of "is it learnable or unchangeable or something in between".
He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.
Also, dyslectic can learn to read. They have difficulty with it, including in later age. But "cant learn to read" is not that thing.
jaggederest
He rejected the idea of it being fixed for anyone else, based on it being changed for himself, which is uncharitable at best. Some people with dyslexia are incapable of learning to read, maybe you should check it out. That doesn't mean every dyslexic is incapable, but that's a real variation. And you're rejecting the idea of that yourself, which also feels pretty uncharitable.
antonvs
How does it compare to the imagery you see in dreams?
layer8
FWIW, I don’t have aphantasia; I can visualize stuff in my head, but it’s nothing like actual vision, and neither is how I see in what I would call vivid dreams. My dreams and my wakeful “mind’s eye” are pretty similar, I would say. The point is, they are only faintly comparable to actual vision, but I would never characterize that difference as aphantasia, or say that I have trouble visualizing things.
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
selfhoster1312
That sounds like hypophantasia, i.e. not the absence of internal imagery, but a very vague one.
wahern
Few people routinely mentally visualize with the same breadth and vividness as dreaming, unless perhaps they have poor dream recall or don't dream very vividly. It's probably more rare than aphantasia.
On the flip side, this means with some introspection and reflection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization as the dominant mode is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner, and the other modes are difficult to identify or articulate.
ethbr1
A fascinating thing about dreams I realized as a midlife adult after getting into ML is how coupled brain storage : dreaming is.
Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?
If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.
But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.
Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.
vehemenz
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
D-Machine
Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.
riffraff
Fwiw, I can visualize things, I can hear noises in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, smell things in my head.
So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.
satvikpendem
I can smell phantom smells through my nose directly it seems, like I feel the sensation of detecting some smell directly in the neurons connected to my nose. Not sure if that's the same for you or others. It's not in my mind per se, at least not initially.
riffraff
Perhaps different from mind's eye then! But alas, I can't do that either.
chownie
This same behaviour does actually persist in other areas. I'm colourblind, even as an adult I have other people argue that perhaps I just don't know which colours are which rather than have a problem with the mechanism within the eye for detecting them.
feoren
> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
kansface
Some/many people who can’t smell actually don’t know that, nor do the people around them. The same can be true for color blindness and actual blindness!
foobarchu
> Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia
Citation needed.
People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.
Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.
That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.
Why do conservatives think trans people are everywhere?
jurgenburgen
Because they hear about it all the time in their bubble.
julienmartlet
"People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere."
ozten
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
brookst
Greetings fellow music-hearer.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
red369
Sigh! I am so far from having this ability.
Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.
It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:
- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia
- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)
- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)
- Memory vividness
Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?
slv77
It is amazing that humans can communicate at all given the variance. Visualization is also tightly tied to the emotional centers of the brain and serve as an emotional amplifier. Visualize a scenario and you’ll get an emotional reaction on how you’d likely feel in that situation. Some people have normal visualization but don’t get emotional reactions.
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
brookst
For me, inner monologue isn’t audio wildly different from imagining / reliving audio. Both exist, it’s the difference between listening to music and having a conversation.
satvikpendem
Interesting. Do people not have some sort of sound or inner monologue running at all times? Apparently a quarter of people have no inner monologue at all which is wild. As for music, I can listen to whatever music I want in my mind whenever and even make compositions purely in my head that I can then write down into notes verbatim.
brookst
My inner monologue isn’t audio… it’s more like reading.
But yes, with you on composing songs. One reason I can’t fall asleep on airplanes or in other noisy environments: the closer to sleep I am, the less control I have over the tendency to weave audio patterns, and as soon as it gets interesting… I’m awake and thinking about the music. Repeat, for however long the flight is.
case540
How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.
zwayhowder
Funny you should ask. In high school I was regarded as highly intelligent, I was near the top of all of my classes and widely read, with an excellent memory for facts and figures. (Though no visual memory whatsoever).
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
loa_in_
In my experience with IQ tests involving complete the sequence many of the solutions when I looked up the intent behind them made very little sense to me.
nottorp
Hmm I'm pretty sure I have some degree of aphantasia, because I read a lot but I never visualize what's going on (or not consciously, at least).
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national math competitions once.
Maybe though, it's because i was drawing helper figures on paper instead of imagining them.
I have no problem with figure matching IQ style tests, as opposed to one of the sibling posters.
Edit: oh interesting, lower in the article. I have absolutely no problem with spatial navigation, on the contrary, I'm better than many people. But for example if we're retracing our steps on a mountain path I can't tell you in advance what were the landmarks to look for. I will recognize them as soon as we see them or notice we're missing any landmarks though.
Cerium
Visualizing for me has always been like touching something with my eyes closed. I can't "see" the object, but I have a feeling for all the shapes and contours. You can feel which way a key is in your hand and where each ridge is without having to see it. I solve geometry problems the same way. I can't see the whole thing at once, but I can move my sense of feeling across arbitrary scenes.
BobbyTables2
That’s exactly how it is for me.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
Suppafly
>How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.
Not the other guy, but I can think about how they look without actually 'seeing' them in my mind.
metabagel
I was good at mechanical drawing in college, meaning I could visualize the view of something from different sides. But, generally there was a perspective to work off of.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
cyberax
I can "visualize" geometry and technical drawings by focusing on parts of them. It was enough for all my school work.
But then I learned about analytic geometry in the 8-th grade. I annoyed every math teacher by just using it to solve all the school geometry problems. And quite a few geometry problems in math competitions.
mcmcmc
Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
aculver
Yes. Different people answer this differently: I'm 100% aphantasia while awake, but dream vividly as if it were real life. However, once I'm awake, I can recall the dream but can't visualize it, the same way I can't visualize a previous experience in real life.
ozten
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
soupfordummies
can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?
ozten
If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
ozten
Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.
axegon_
So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
BobbyTables2
I’ve always wondered if some people can “draw on a whiteboard” in their mind.
I certainly never could…
jstanley
I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
frant-hartm
Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
inigyou
It is definitely different from seeing something. I'd guess it activates a subset of the semantic level neurons that activate when you see a thing. There are no actual pixels. I also guess that something similar happens in dreaming.
When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
cdelsolar
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it?
If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
throwawaythekey
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
scruple
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
feoren
I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
y1n0
This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
saltcured
I'm aphantasic, but I can relate to almost going blind with inattention. Not like I now have a black visual field, but just losing awareness of what is actually in it, like it is some sort of matte painting put up during intermission. But there remains some lower-level processing, because I may reflexively kick back into full seeing due to some unexpected change.
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
slv77
This is a blog post from someone who had aphantasia and was able to develop a minds eye.
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
I would love to know what that is called.
saghm
At best, what you're describing seems like a skill issue with the people describing it. Using multiple different metaphors that imply the thing you're saying is unrelated (mind'seye, visualization, image, etc) is just bad communication.
I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
ethbr1
At the end of the day, it's the "Is your green my green?" question and is unknowable.
You cannot describe something that someone lacks or has a substantially different subjective experience with, truly.
The best we can do is show that the effects of your seeing green are the same as mine (biologically, behaviorally, etc).
If you're curious about the broader subject, would highly recommend reading An Anthropologist on Mars.
vinceguidry
Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing.
Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.
We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
ethbr1
It's not the question of if objective physical green pigment is objective physical green pigment, but rather if what I see when I look at it is what you see (and not in the color blind sense, assuming neither of us are).
saghm
Except there are no people like the parent commenter insisting that everyone is capable of seeing their green if they tried hard enough or whatever
saghm
> At the end of the day, it's the "Is your green my green?" question and is unknowable.
It sounds like you're equating the comment I responded to with a question about colorblindness is a skill issue. I'm guessing that's not what you're actually arguing, but it's not clear to me what the actually analogy you're trying to make is.
inigyou
This makes me think of how everyone is born with the muscle to wiggle their ears, but if they don't discover it as an infant, it atrophies.
ludicrousdispla
A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
jawns
I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
jacobsimon
Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.
t-3
No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).
D-Machine
This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
inigyou
When I took psychedelics they were still in effect when I went to sleep and I experienced unusually vivid and strange mental imagery. They call it closed-eye hallucinations, as opposed to mis-seeing the world around you while your eyes are open, which I also experienced.
t-3
I've never experienced visualization under the effect of hallucinogens, but I have once when I took very strong opiates.
lampiaio
One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?
0xfaded
It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
1135813fib
i've always used this image [1] as an example; it's there, but there's no "seeing" attached, just the conceptual understanding.
I have another question I've always wanted to ask. How do you spell words if you can't picture them in your mind?
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
flemhans
I just know it. And I also think it speeds up certain thinking not having to go through the cycle of visualizing and assessing the visualization. But definitely impairs other things like thinking about geometric relationships.
cyberax
For spelling, I memorize pseudo-Latin letter pronunciation.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
pstuart
I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
ksec
It wasn't until this site did I know there are people with aphantasia but also have the ability to dream with at least some imagery details.
To answer your question. Nothing. It is just black. Not even a slight hint of shape of Eiffel Tower or even a tall rectangle or just outline of the structure. It is just nothing.
I sometimes think or wonder people who can dream and close their eyes and actually see things must have so much fun.
caturopath
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
citadel_melon
I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
nkrisc
It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
mcmcmc
Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
nkrisc
Easier to focus, perhaps, but for me it doesn’t really make any difference.
Perhaps I’m the odd one then. It’s certainly a difficult topic to discuss with other people.
inigyou
I think for me it reduces distraction but otherwise has nothing to do with it.
cdelsolar
Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
Marciplan
it’s ok to just sympathize instead of running to those conclusions
xlii
I have aphantasia in both visual and audio forms. And I can tell you audio aphantasia is wild.
I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it.
Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't remember my own compositions. They usually come back to me as a play on hands and not on audio.
I thought I was music deaf for the most of my life. My music teachers mocked me in my youth showing me as an example of someone with zero hearing.
My latest music teacher discovered that I actually have absolute hearing skill but... can't recall sound in my head. So I sense even slight shift in toning (e.g. given few variations of same melody I can tell which one is the original tuning) but I can't reproduce it.
You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!
dtkav
There's been some great research into aphantasia in the last ~5 years - worth reading about if you have aphantasia.
dtkav
I think i have this too (also play piano, have perfect pitch). I have an excellent musical memory, but i have to actually play a song / sing it out loud to hear it if that makes sense.
I do have the motion-centric imagination sense (i could "feel" what it would be like to do a layup) without physically moving.
No ability to generate audio, visuals, etc "on the inside".
Do you have an internal voice?
satvikpendem
You should read the book Blindsight which your last paragraph reminds me of.
D-Machine
Very cool
mucha
For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization."
Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.
On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.
fellowniusmonk
On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
inigyou
A boy and his mother are in a serious car accident. The mother dies on scene and the boy is rushed to the hospital where he needs urgent life-saving surgery. But the male surgeon says "I can't operate on this boy - he's my son!" How is this possible?
numeri
there are also people who have become aphantasiac after neurological damage, which seems like pretty cut and dry evidence against the qualia argument.
goatlover
Maybe I misunderstand, Why is it an arguments against qualia? Qualia doesn't deny a neural substrate, just that qualia isn't reducible to the neural activity, being that one is objective and the other is subjective.
It's sort of the difference between logical supervenience and metaphysical, or weak emergence and strong emergence. Qualia being something additional to the neural description.
feoren
Here's my problem with this: take an fMRI of a bunch of professional jugglers while they imagine juggling. Now take an fMRI of a bunch of non-jugglers while they imagine juggling. I promise you they will be strikingly different, with the professionals having all sorts of real-life coordination areas lighting up.
Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!?
I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.
pdonis
Learning to juggle involves easily observed objective activities that other people can check, and which can be learned that way--you can watch someone else juggling, read book that describes the tossing of the balls, etc.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
feoren
Yes, it's harder to evaluate whether someone can visualize well, but that does nothing to invalidate my point.
Have you actually dedicated significant time to trying to learn how to visualize? I suspect that if you did, you'd realize: oh, wow, maybe I can actually get better at this. If most people who give it a serious effort also come to that conclusion, I feel like we've pretty much settled the question. So it is testable, just not as easily.
pdonis
> Have you actually dedicated significant time to trying to learn how to visualize?
I haven't had to. I don't have aphantasia. Visualizing doesn't feel like a learned skill to me. It feels like something I've always known how to do. Of course if I pay more attention to what I'm doing, I can visualize in more detail than if I just do it casually. But I've never had the feeling that, oh, if I practice this and learn I can get better at it, the way, for example, that I can get better at playing the piano by practicing.
Where I'm stuck is, if someone else who couldn't visualize asked me to teach them how, I wouldn't know what to do. Whereas, if they asked me to teach them how to play the piano, I'd at least have some idea.
asveikau
I realized I have aphantasia after reading an HN thread about it a few years ago. I talked to my daughter about it and I realized she has it too.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
theshrike79
It does affect things though. Like reading books.
I _HATE_ reading books that spend pages and pages explaining how things look to a very detailed degree even when it's not relevant to the plot in any way - it's just set dressing.
I can't see that. It's just word noise to me.
Now I noticed my kid has the same thing, they like other books and actively dislike others. It's the same as me, without me affecting their judgement in any way. Any book that spends too much explaining the environment is boring, books that just get on with the plot are a bit hit.
nephihaha
Yes, some of it can be quite wild, especially dreams but most of it isn't. The fun part of it is being able to place people in funny situations. Many people just do a rewind and visualise real life events from earlier.
Most of the visualisation I do is extremely mundane, like if I'm planning a route or doing something with the garden.
ToyKeeper
I know someone with aphantasia. It's absolutely wild to me that he can't see things in his head. Totally alien from my perspective, since I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I see what's in my head so vividly that I often won't see things in real life which are right in front of me.
But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Refusing to believe aphantasia or hyperphantasia exists. Refusing to believe that other people are telling the truth when they describe their experiences. Insisting that everyone is the same, actually, and anyone who thinks differences are real must be confused or misunderstanding something.
I guess these are both types of cognitive disability... but I know what aphantasia is called. Not sure what the other thing is called, but I'd imagine it's something which sounds pretty unflattering.
boogieknite
im like you where i become so caught up in the image in my head that i lose track of my surroundings
when engaging in small talk i make eye contact and have been told im very easy to talk to
when discussing something im interested in, i stare into the distance and start waving my hands around gesturing at the diagrams im describing. its to the degree where my managers prefer i not meet with one specific customer who commented on this
at my first job my coworkers pointed out that i stare directly up to the ceiling for a period of time, then will type furiously, and repeat. id never known that was different before. assumed everyone constructed their ideas mentally before getting it down on paper
im reminded of my high school AP physics teacher who would close her eyes while lecturing because i assume she was picturing things. the funniest students knew how to get some physical comedy into those windows of obliviousness
when it comes to aphantasia it reminds me of Stan in South Park: "I get it now! I don't get it!" the best i can do be nice and accommodating and acknowledge i simply cant relate
strken
I believe some people have aphantasia and hyperphantasia, but a lot of people who claim they have either are somewhere on the bell curve between them.
I also suspect that some of the people who think they have aphantasia could learn. I personally am not good at visualising and don't naturally do it, but these days I can imagine a not very good apple if I try hard, and I trained this by building on my existing ability to imagine the tactile feel of holding an apple and on spatial awareness.
D-Machine
To be polite, it is called "typical-mind fallacy". To be less polite, it is called "cope".
selcuka
In fact, the term typical mind fallacy was born from aphantasia [1]:
> Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. [...] Though another psychologist, Dr. Berman, did, at that time, come up with a name for the masking behavior, called the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
I don't see my dreams either. Dreams, when they occur (it's very rare), are a flurry of words and feelings.
techgnosis
I'm one of the naysayers denying aphantasia in the comments.
Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantics has created this illusion?
You're defaulting to being nice, which is fine, but it doesn't make you any more right than me and my skepticism. We both have no idea what the truth is.
ToyKeeper
> zero evidence
That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.
> there are suddenly two types of people
This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.
Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.
For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.
Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).
selcuka
> why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people
Because we know that there are already more than two types of people, even when we ignore aphantasia? So there is nothing new here.
Also if you read the FA, it explains that there are objective differences:
> People have taken various physiological and behavioral tests in a research lab. Researchers have observed that people who report vivid imagery respond differently to these more objective measures than aphantasics. Although this doesn't let us know definitively that they vividly see an image, it all points to the fact that something is truly different between people who claim to see vividly and those who don't.
iamhamm
Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black. That’s it. No amount of effort conjures an image. That’s not what most people I talk to about it report, so I am going to assume there’s a functional difference between me and people with functioning visualization.
mikestorrent
I believe you. Why wouldn't someone believe you? There's not much reason to claim "I cannot do X" maliciously. I'm hopeless at catching a ball, can't play tennis to save my life, for instance... believe me?
I just want to throw my two cents in: I think I have a pretty good level of visualization ability, but it's not actually projected into my field of vision. It's like having a second monitor plugged in somewhere... _else_. It doesn't overlap with the 3D space of our world. I don't SEE it, but I do "see" it, not as concepts but as something akin to generated memories.
It does often help to look away from visually distracting things so that the mind is more free to use its capacity to generate things.
toolslive
I have the same. I'm looking at my laptop's screen as I type this, and if I close my eyes while typing I cannot even visualise said screen. Now, I can blind-type, recognise faces, navigate aso without any problem. I can even play chess quite well (fide ~2050, 2200 blitz on chess.com), but I cannot visualise a chess board, nor can I visualise my moves or the moves of my opponent.
However, I don't "see" (pun intended) it as a problem. On the contrary, I'm not wasting cycles on irrelevant details while I'm thinking.
jaggederest
If it makes you feel any better, I'm on the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum and it is honestly actively problematic sometimes. For me, it can be very difficult to work with things that I can't translate to visuals, mentally; and daydreaming, and memories can be so vivid they are distracting or disturbing. It's very much an asset in certain circumstances (like debugging code or fixing an engine), but there's a reason most people don't have that fidelity.
Suppafly
>Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black.
This, I can imagine things, but it's like the idea of something, not a picture of it. Blows my mind when people tell me their imagination is like watching a movie.
iamhamm
Same! My wife is at the opposite end and can visualize these wild scenes and describe them in detail and I’m like “I can tell you roughly where the parts of a cat go”.
jaggederest
That's so funny, my wife and I have the opposite dynamic. She rolls her eyes at me when I insist "no the couch would definitely fit through that doorway if we rotate it like that, I don't need to measure", and after she gets a tape measure it's about an inch of room to spare.
nomel
> zero evidence besides a self-reported experience
I'm on your side of the argument, but while that research may be evidence, it's not definitive proof.
UpsideDownRide
What would you accept as a proof if that doesn't clear the bar for you?
hirvi74
One, a study with more than 32 people. Two, replications with equally strong observations.
I've read a lot of research on fMRIs and mental disorders. Something like this pops up every other day. Not a single one has really study the test of time ion terms of diagnostic utility.
inigyou
Qualia can't be definitively proven.
hirvi74
I meant definitely proven with in a realistic sense. Smoke causes lung cancer, albeit only something like 20% of smokers get lung cancer. It's been proven, but not in the mathematical sense of the word.
metabagel
I believe it, because I tend to have a hard time visualizing even the faces of people I love and know well. It takes great effort.
andy99
It was funny to watch this discussion turn from skepticism at the top to then a bunch of proponents moving in and crowding out the rational voices. It feels a bit religious to me, at least unscientific, there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions, and so people seem to dig in on their sides more than if there was a real basis for comparison. I default to not believing in it until there is actual strong evidence, same as ghosts and the Loch Ness monster and whatnot.
selcuka
I'm not sure how the examples given in this thread, such as brain scans, are "unscientific" while simply saying "nah, I believe everybody else is exactly like me" is "rational voice"?
D-Machine
> there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions
Clearly false if you take just 30 seconds to scroll through this thread. Embarrassing.
andrewla
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
jhedwards
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
techgnosis
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
ksbd-pls-finish
Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
D-Machine
This is why the denialism about differences in visual experience are so indefensible: they basically require an assumption that the whole world is out to lie and deceive.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
jhedwards
This is such a weird response, what do I have to gain by lying about such an event? Why would you want to "verify" it? I am sharing a lived experience: my visual experience of the image of the dystopian landscape was so strong that my cognitive experience was consumed by the image in my mind, to the extent that I no longer saw the image conveyed by my eyes.
I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.
lojban
I think I may share the same experience as you, but I've never known if what I have is closer to aphasia or hyperphantasia.
From the way people describe their experiences, it's difficult to know what they truly mean. I don't think anyone is lying, but it must be hard to convey these experiences with our language as it is.
In your first post, I thought "that's definitely not me", but in your second post I thought, "oh, that's actually 100% me"
To me, everything I imagine is on a different mental plane. This is what I thought people meant by a "minds eye". You don't see it literally, but it's there in your imagination.
What confuses me though is that for some people, it sounds like it's an overlay on their actual visual perception, something so vivid they could practically rotoscope it. I could never do that; I imagine I'd be a better artist if I could.
My imagination on this plane is so vivid that I'll get lost in it, and not see what's in front of me, as you describe it, simply because I'm "not paying attention" until some immediate danger jolts me "awake". I colloquially call this "zoning out" or "daydreaming"
Actually, I think my imagination might be part of what makes it so hard for me to read books. I'll get distracted by the world building, playing the different scenarios in my head, that I'll forget about the words in front of me, and minutes will go by before I remember I'm supposed to be reading a book.
the_gipsy
I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.
jhedwards
I think "visual hallucination" is something very different from the minds eye. The imagination is one source of visual experience, the eyes are another. A visual hallucination is when something goes wrong and the data from your eyes is contaminated or distorted in some way. In my case, my imagination can produce photo-realistic visual experiences which are strong enough to block out the data from my eyes. They don't mix, but I can supplant one for the other at will. If they did mix I think that would be a disorder and we'd be talking about something other than aphantasia and imagination.
the_gipsy
Exactly, so you just got distracted on the steering wheel, happens to the best of us.
numeri
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
D-Machine
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
estearum
Yeah, this is a valid critique of the whole internal monologue idea, but interestingly aphantasia has been quite empirically confirmed and the simple apple test has been validated!
tomveber
The self-report objection has been tested, though. Aphantasics show no imagery priming in binocular rivalry, no pupil constriction when asked to imagine bright shapes, and flat skin conductance to frightening text while responding normally to frightening pictures. A questionnaire that predicts autonomic responses nobody can fake is doing more than semantics.
estearum
Yes, sorry I believe we are saying the same thing.
I'm saying there are a number of physical tests like the ones you describe, and those line up with the much simpler apple imagery self-report test.
zeofig
I don't consider self-reported nonsense to be empirical confirmation. There can be correlations between different self-reports, that doesn't mean that our idea of why those correlations exist is correct.
D-Machine
There are plenty of examples multiple times in this thread that show that what is self-reported is demonstrated in non-self-reported phenomena, so those self-reports are clearly not nonsense, basically by definition.
The aphantasia theory is clear and parsimoniously makes sense of all this, but your "it's all just semantics" does not, and additionally requires rather other extreme acrobatics with regards to much of the entirety of human experience and discourse. Scholarly research also basically says this.
Your mind is clearly closed and you do not have any serious interest in understanding anything here.
I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
Rooster61
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
anonybob
If you can merge them, that's the key to a few things.
andrewla
Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
estearum
Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.
jaggederest
I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
estearum
Yeah that's totally insane to me.
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
jaggederest
Completely opposite on that front, here, as well. I can't even really associate, I have visual memory all the way back to my earliest childhood memories (specifically, 3-4 years old, stepping on the track of a sliding door in San Diego, I believe, it hurt, I wanted to go see the pool outside), and my memory is so visual that sometimes I can see people's face, and what they were wearing and where we were standing, in the conversations we had but not necessarily hear what they're saying. I also have some semantic memory, something like "we talked about x for a while, and then I think we did y", but it's much hazier.
Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.
inigyou
After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.
D-Machine
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will.
Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.
inigyou
Tell me you can still tell it's two separate layers though. You aren't actually getting visual feedback, you are combining the actual visual feedback from your eyeballs with the pseudo-visual feedback from your imagination.
I would say when I do this, it's more like underlaying my imagination with reality, than overlaying reality with imagination - the combination is still clearly imaginative. Right? (I think I'm a 3 or a fraction higher, on the apple test scale)
D-Machine
I can almost always tell the projection and reality are different, but in some very rare and extreme cases (psychedelics, sleep deprivation, extremely protracted and deliberate meditative focus / practice, or e.g. in situations where the projection is properly aligned with the actual stimuli, like seeing a face in the clouds, or in vivid / lucid dreams), the differences can be so small that what allows you to distinguish the two can simply be knowledge of the will / effort involved or e.g. knowledge from laws of physics that what is visualized cannot be present, or, in the case of dreams, an inconsistency with autobiographical memory.
Otherwise, yes, in almost all other cases, I suspect our experiences aren't that much different.
nomel
For me, when I'm really concentrating, the imagined becomes more dominant.
I like to do mechanical/visual designs in my head, intentionally avoiding whiteboards and whatnot, so I don't lose the ability! When I do this, I've had people come up to me and wave their hands right in my face to get my attention, because I don't see them. I "spaced out" alll the time as a kid.
anonybob
Those people here (not you) telling all of us what is and what is not possible have their view based on how they see things. That's it. I hear they don't see things in mind, visually like a phone or a screen. Or do overlays. I remember finding out and being incredulous about whether others did something I don't.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
chownie
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
If "at will" is the hinging point then maybe not because the scenario to trigger the behaviour isn't clear to me still, but this is definitely possible.
I have had the superimposed belief-image confuse my spatial brain until I moved my point of view (in which the real world obviously reorients while the brain conjured image doesn't) to clear it before. This happened far more when I was younger than now as an adult, but it very much still happens.
The very last time I recall this happening was at my former home during a strenuous house move. I was on my back for a breather between boxes and a delay getting the car around gave me some time for my mind to wander, which it did on that occasion to thoughts about how very old buildings with column supports used to look. By the time I needed to move the next box I had to shake my head to de-conjure the little stone plinths that had appeared in my vision from my imagination trip.
vehemenz
It is a red flag to me too.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
hondadriver
There is a full visual memory, just not any sense of an image or sound nor smell in my case.
I am very sure there is a difference after interrrogating multiple people about it.
adverbly
> Of course, this is not possible.
I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people.
I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack.
Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at.
When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would basically describe it as effectively identical to seeing them.
So now I'm confused about if these few people are the exceptions or the norm, and to what extent I'm lacking something that some others have.
inigyou
I think when I dream it feels real, but upon closer analysis, it's about as unstable as when I imagine things. It's just overlaid with the additional semantic vector of "yes this is the real world and everything is normal" or something.
dannygreer
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
thewebguyd
> If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
theshrike79
The best way I can describe is that my brain is a vector database. Stuff is linked to other stuff.
There is no visual component to any of it, it's just "feels" as the kids say.
I couldn't imagine any of my family's faces in my head even if my life depended on it. I'm not face blind, my brain just doesn't work like that.
I also have zero internal monologue. I can "talk" in my head, but it's just me, there's no discussion or multiple participants and none of it is unprompted. I'm pretty sure I'd have myself committed if I started hearing random voices or music in my head unprompted...
zug_zug
I'm going to second you for a different reason:
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
inigyou
That's how it went for me. I thought of the correct shape of a bicycle frame (I think I've seen this art thing before) but didn't "pull up" the little pieces like gears and seats until you actually mentioned them.
selcuka
> most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like
Not only people. LLMs too.
thestu
It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
andrewla
The cube test is an interesting one, but, to pile on another stupid internet trend, that seems more like a "shape-rotator" vs. "word-cel" question. For very simple fold-ups I can do this, but for more complex decompositions (like if you have me an octahedron) I doubt that I could reliably do this.
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
clort
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
andrewla
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
clort
I think the poll itself is faulty. You appear to be suggesting that the two things - seeing an afterimage and being able to consciously superimpose an imagined image into your visual field are related. An afterimage is literally a physical phenomenon as I explained before, and it passes quickly. There is an explanation of this, in an article that somebody posted a link to the other day in the discussion about Olo. https://dynomight.net/colors/
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
andrewla
In my opinion, as someone who does *not* think that they have aphantasia, the two things are definitely not equivalent. I know what the afterimage is, I know what it is to visualize something, and they are completely different both qualitatively and intellectually.
But as I keep saying, there are people on this thread that are saying they are literally equivalent. I don't know if I believe them, but that is what they are saying -- talk to them!
estearum
People are saying they are phenomenologically equivalent (or close to), not that they're literally equivalent as in generated by the same mechanisms.
torgoguys
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.
When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.
doug-moen
I have 3 kinds of mental vision.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
D-Machine
> Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia.
Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.
It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
andrewla
I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?
D-Machine
The projected image is not typically indistinguishable from normal vision, namely in that there will be an "ephemerality" to the image. Some examples of this ephemerality:
- the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there
- the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you let any aspect of your mind wander or stray from the task, the translucency increases, it may pop out of the visual field, or lose details
- the projected image (say, an apple) doesn't have full details at every particular point, i.e. if I focus on where the stem would be, that detail intensifies, but the surrounding areas become more ephemeral; with a real apple, this happens somewhat depending on the focal point too, but not nearly as much
- the projected image can be made less ephemeral and more rich and stable with the use of pscychedelics (e.g. psilocybin) or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis)
So, yes, you can "see" it in reality, but not, in most cases, to the degree that you "see" a real apple. Often the ephemerality really does manifest in a way extremely similar to how an afterimage persists, but this isn't always the case.
It is quite possible that this is drawing a line, as you say, between hyperphantashia and regular phantasia, though I'm not yet willing to give up on the idea that we are just giving subjective names to the same phenomenon.
To wit, when I "hear" things with my "mind's ear" I can "hear" them very well in all the layers and components, I can "hear" drums and guitar and bass and voice, etc., but they are very clearly in my head -- they do not have a location in real space the way that real sounds do; I can't "hear" a sound so loud that it makes me cringe or so quiet that I have to strain to hear it.
D-Machine
In case you missed my other comment linking to similar polls and stuff on Reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469522. The hyperphantasia subreddit covers all other sense imagery too, and I am high on all of them.
Also, to be clear, my images usually are NOT spatially located, but I can choose to make them so if needed, and occasionally they just are spontaneously.
You might also find the work of Louis Sass ("Madness and Modernism", and other works) to be relevant, as he notes it is extremely common for schizophrenics to always be localizing (sensing) their thoughts have specific locations in space, or e.g. are "moving from the front of my head to the back", and other such extreme (and arguably unhelpful) spatialization of aspects of the mind's eye. He argues this might be part of why they are prone to hallucinations and delusion.
inigyou
Now I'm wondering if the mental focus that a trained mage requires to sustain an underworld portal, or any other spell, is the same feeling as an ordinary person in real life uses to hold a visualisation.
D-Machine
If you want to get really kooky, read up on Western Esotericism and Chaos Magic or tantric Buddhist practices and etc. They make basically this exact claim that this is how you "do magic" or similar such things, via sustained, "one-pointedness" and focus of attention and the Will ("gnosis"), and that, yes, often this one-pointedness of mind/attention is what lets you manifest things.
Untrue, of course, but very clearly something people have believed almost universally for centuries.
inigyou
I have no doubt it can allow you to walk on coals or similar.
komadori
I would characterise myself, per your original question, of being able to superimpose imagined objects onto my visual field.
I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detailed and solid.
This feels a bit like "is my red the same as your red?". What do even mean when you say you can "imagine that wall with the red circle on it", but you can't "see" it? Is there no visual aspect to your experience whatsoever? Do you have a spatial sense of the red circle's size and position? Do you experience (hear?) verbal statements about the red circle's existence and properties, or is this some conceptual sense of the red circle that is both non-verbal and non-visual?
andrewla
I actually agree with you about the "is my red the same as your red" -- I do not believe that aphantasia is real but simply that people are talking past each other and getting hung up on semantics.
I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers. I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is *akin* to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this. I don't know if I believe that other people can. But a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'" -- I'm not interested in you, you are like me, I'm interested in people who say that they can "see". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365#49469495
D-Machine
> when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. [...] The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them. [...] a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'
I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of the time, visualizing is indeed only analogous to seeing, i.e. visualizing is "seeing, but not 'see-see'ing". However, with extreme focus, regular practice, and/or altered states, this distinction breaks down, and it is harder to make the separation so clear.
I suspect the more hyperphantasic you are, the more easily you can find examples in experience that blur the boundary between seeing vs. visualization, but with normal visualization capacity, these blurred cases are likely quite rare. But I don't think, fundamentally, except in true aphantasics, that there is always a 100% clear dividing line between seeing and visualization.
andrewla
I'm with you -- human experience is complicated, and language is a poor approximation to our inner lives.
But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a helpful metaphor", but there are a lot of people (including yourself) who say that you can. I want to see if I can pick out that difference. I almost wish the survey instead said "No, of course I can't *see* it, nobody can" to really nail down that perspective.
D-Machine
Cool, I was really worried I might be sounding dismissive. This has been an obsession of mine since long before it got popular, and I've been enjoying your comments particularly in this thread.
jibal
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things.
That's your experience. Other people have different experiences.
> That is what seeing is.
What an incredible leap of petitio principii. Yet there are people who can't see despite their eyes being open and the optical machinery working correctly, and there are people who see things without having eyes at all -- in some cases things that are only in their imagination, in some cases due to brain probes, in some cases due to synesthesia, in some cases due to having an array of probes on their backs that translate images into touch sensations which their brains translate into images. You seem to know nothing of any of this, or how the brain works at all, or how language works, but you have a whole lot to say about it in this thread.
BY DEFINITION you have aphantasia, according to your self-description. You seem to believe, for no good reason and contrary to a large amount of evidence, that that everyone else also has aphantasia (i.e., no one has phantasia), but that's a different issue.
I won't respond to you further.
inigyou
No, based on the description they are normally phantasic and are just quibbling semantics.
D-Machine
Frankly, it is very hard to tell at times.
jibal
The self-description I referred to is
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is... Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this.
But he also said
> I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Initially this struck me as logically incoherent, but reading it again and taking into account the fact that he defines seeing as using eyes--an unreasonable circular precondition--he does indeed seem to be describing normal phantasia, given the reference to images that do not disappear, and to visualization. As someone with near-complete aphantasia, I cannot produce such images or visualizations and I certainly can't rotate them around.
What is quite clear here is that people are describing different sorts of experience, not mere semantic quibbling (which defining seeing as using eyes is certainly an example of) ... and we have physiological data that supports that view. I find it quite bizarre that there are so many people on this page who insist that these differences cannot exist, that everyone is exactly like them (even though there are differences among those who claim this), to the degree that they claim that others are lying, seeking attention, seeking profit, etc. ... there is no reason at all in evidence or logic to support these claims or the position that everyone's mind is the same, in this or any other aspect.
inigyou
Same here (I don't actually see the circle)
Georgelemental
I have hypophantasia, so it's very easy to convince me that both exist (because I'm right in the middle between the two)
malfist
Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
vehemenz
"Exist" is probably the wrong framing. It doesn't seem unreasonable that such a phenomenon could occur after a traumatic brain injury, for instance. I'm sure there's some evidence of it, neurologically (like split-brain syndrome). But it's also true that people who say they "aphantasia", in 99.9% cases, don't experience that phenomenon.
andrewla
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
Not sure about phantasia, but aphantasia exists. I don't know why you say it doesn't?
markers
Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
inigyou
No, it's definitely akin to imagining a song for me. It is not confusable with actually seeing things.
ergonaught
It exists. You're wrong. Update. Thanks.
jpfromlondon
You're absolutely right.
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
estearum
Can you explain why people who report aphantasia don't show physical responses (like sweat or pupil dilation) in response to imagined visual stimulus (like being described a scary scene), while people who report mental imagery do show these physical responses to the same stimulus?
andrewla
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
throwawaythekey
If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
jibal
> If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
jpfromlondon
>they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
I think by any reasonable definition everyone has aphantasia, which is why it's a nothing burger.
estearum
Yet you decline to offer an explanation for the observed physiological differences between people who self-report aphantasia and those who do not?
I am able to see stuff in my head all the time. It is a matter of degree, i.e. some people see things more clearly than others. But the same could be said of real eyesight.
Very few of us have 20/20 vision but that doesn't mean we're blind.
jibal
> Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object
Prove it.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I won't respond again.
jpfromlondon
aaw, touched a nerve have I because I'm suggesting you're not special?
>Prove it.
Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense.
>You can't keep track of your own argument
MY argument is this: people don't actually see things or even have imagery inside their head, which is normal, and self-proclaimed aphantasiacs are attention seekers who think they have a disability or special characteristic...there is no logical inconsistency in my argument.
estearum
Not sure what could be motivating your reasoning here, but you've ignored several times the physiological evidence of differences in visual cognition between self-reported aphantasics and non-reporters that shows up in: fMRIs, skin conductivity tests, visual priming tests, and pupil dilation tests.
Agreed no logical inconsistency, just very strange laziness and prickishness.
jibal
He doesn't even know what an argument is ... he says "MY argument is this:" and then just makes an assertion, not an argument. Of course there's no logical inconsistency in his raw assertion -- there's no logic of any sort. But what I pointed out about his previous comment is that he asserted that no one "sees" objects in their minds -- implying that it is those who claim that they do who are lying -- and then he attacked aphantasics as attention seeking and angling at it being some sort of disability (a remarkably stupid mischaracterization, but then that's true of just about everything he said, like his remarkably hypocritical accusation that I had a nerve touched -- I simply chose to fisk the incoherent ranting of a troll). So his whole "argument" is inconsistent in its framing and presentation and who he is criticizing. It's hard to call it logically inconsistent because there's no logic ... his claims don't flow from reason or evidence, just sheer emo. His utter irrationality, cognitive ineptitude, and bad faith are epitomized by his response to my demand that he prove his claims with saying "Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense."
I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
D-Machine
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
drakonka
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
mostlylurks
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
chmod775
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
christophilus
I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
Al-Khwarizmi
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I 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.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
slibhb
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.
vidarh
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.
dyauspitr
> 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.
Al-Khwarizmi
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.
inigyou
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.
sixothree
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?
drakonka
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.
Jtsummers
> 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.
davidsojevic
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.
card_zero
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.
cassianoleal
Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.
LordGrey
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.
idoubtit
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.
card_zero
That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.
inigyou
It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.
drakonka
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..
inigyou
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.
drakonka
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.
inigyou
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.
mortenjorck
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.
inigyou
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.)
card_zero
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.
inigyou
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?
nottorp
> 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?
fellowniusmonk
I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
It's not semantics.
D-Machine
Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
vehemenz
I have doubts about aphantasia as a legitimate phenomenon, but whether it is or it isn't, it seems likely that many of the positive reports are a result of a misunderstanding, semantic or otherwise.
D-Machine
Certainly some self-diagnoses (positive or negative) are definitely based on misunderstanding, much semantic, as I already agreed in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468528.
edgyquant
Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
drakonka
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
I'm sure it's not, because most of the time I'm aphantasic and rarely I'm not and they're completely different phenomenological experiences.
andy99
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
_dwt
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
_dwt
I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".
defatigable
Ironically your comment has strengthened my belief that aphantasia is real and that I have it. :-)
The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".
If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."
But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.
Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.
D-Machine
Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
jibal
How could it be just semantics if I and others cannot do what you can? The comment you responded to said "I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language" to which you responded "I'm very convinced this is what's going on." -- but what is "this"? They said that they don't see anything, which is by definition aphantasia, but you say that "I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here". You are clearly the one who is confused. If your self-report is accurate then people differ in this regard -- and we already know this from differing physical measures when people are tasked with visualizing.
The people who hold that it's just semantics and all minds are alike in this regard are just expressing a belief that has absolutely no evidence to support it and a great deal of counterevidence.
Noaidi
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
jibal
A lot of people here are insisting, with no evidence whatsoever, that a lot of other people are deluded, or are in it to make money, or for an ego boost, or to get pity, etc. ad nauseam ... so don't play dumb.
Aphantasia, hypophantasia, phantasia, and hyperfantasia are all real, per the evidence. Absolutely no evidence supports the contrary claim.
I won't respond further.
jtbayly
It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.
quickthrowman
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
inigyou
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
kwarcode
Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?
inigyou
Oddly, it keeps shifting to cutting a slice out of the apple instead. But with a bit more focus, yes. Even with the specific peeler I have in the kitchen, which has a blue handle. Maybe I'm not actually below average.
suusjejwuwiw
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
weezing
It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
inigyou
I don't navigate by visualizing the road ahead, I mostly navigate by recalling what I saw on Google Maps. Yes, always with north at the top and if I rotate the map 90 degrees it'll be completely unfamiliar - I have tried that - I think that's fairly normal though.
randomImmigrant
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
cassianoleal
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
randomImmigrant
Oh proper images. And if I focus I can increase resolution. I can get to where it’s as good as real life, for most things. But if it’s a book character I’ve never seen, the details are more oddly distributed and not stable over time, except when the author does a really good job with descriptions.
Seeing mental images that are as good as a well done animation, on the other hand, is a lot easier and less draining to hold.
athorax
I see actual images, but at least for me its not anywhere near the same as actually looking at something. Its sort of like watching a low fidelity movie for me and I can't really "focus" in on specific details of what I'm visualizing. I think there is definitely a spectrum.
PcChip
exactly the same for me
D-Machine
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
jareklupinski
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
starky
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
feverzsj
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
athorax
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
jpfromlondon
Neither, they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
v64
I have visual aphantasia but not aphantasia of any other senses, so I can assure you it's not a semantic misunderstanding. I play piano and can hear tunes in my head and use what I hear to play it out on the piano, like playing by ear but without actual sound. And I simply don't have this same ability with visualization.
However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.
boutell
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
sixothree
> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
inigyou
Yep. I remember doing an exercise where we would take a photo of something, divide it into 1cm squares (that's 0.4 freedom units) and then draw the same grid on a block of wood and copy it by chiseling one square at a time. The result was impressively accurate (obviously), not at all what you'd get by drawing freehand.
jumploops
Both my brother and I have aphantasia, though neither of our parents have it, nor 3/4 grandparents.
What’s maybe most interesting, is that we both seem to have “spatial” perception.
To try and be a bit more specific, when I think about “things” I can organize them in my mind in relation to other “things.”
The most clear example is a path I’ve walked through a building, where the halls, rooms, and corridors are all connected. I easily know exactly where I am, not because I remember the literal steps I took, but because I have a spatial construction in my mind.
I cannot visualize the space, there’s no inherent right side up or preferred perspective. I can model the space with my hands, and create it physically, but am terrible at trying to transform it to 2d.
This doesn’t just work for physical “things” but works for purely abstract concepts like software, stories, and songs.
I’ve always rationalized aphantasia as something where my brain put “skill points” in one area rather than another, but maybe the neuroplasticity is long gone.
theshrike79
This is exactly how my brain works too, everything is related to everything.
A specific set of words can trigger a memory of a song for example.
There's a lot of "I know it when I see it" kind of things, I need to find one link in the path to the relevant thing to get there.
mercutio2
I have a strong sense of the geometry of things, which helps a lot with navigating in buildings.
So when people describe a flattened dodecahedron wrapping into its regular form, I have no trouble conceptualizing (I was going to say visualizing, but it's frankly not at all visual; I got nothing, when it comes to visualizing anything but what's in front of my eyes). But if you ask me to think about alternating solid colors on the dodecahedron, I can't do it.
Clearly there are many different variations on the theme, not just one modal experience! But it's nice to know we're not alone.
cyberax
One interesting example: learning Chinese characters. Different people do it differently.
I have mild aphantasia, and I initially tried the approach of memorizing the shapes and/or associating the shapes with easy-to-remember pictures ( https://www.chineasy.com/ uses this approach). Some of my classmates could do that easily, but it didn't work for me.
Instead, I started memorizing the characters as a series of hand movements. Essentially "serializing" the picture into a series of strokes, and that I can remember easily. I can also "render" them in my mind's eye on demand.
alnwlsn
For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.
gww
I have multisensory aphantasia. I assumed everyone was like this until I read an HN thread a long time ago. I have a very strong inner monologue. For example, I can hear part of a song in my head. Ie the guitar but it's my inner voice initiating the sound of a guitar. But I cannot hear a whole song. Maybe it's what rhythm had always been a challenge for me with guitar and piano.
nikkaelle
I have mild visual aphantasia in that I by default do not picture an image for something like the ball test, but instead have something between a concept and a wireframe or flat boxy rendering of it. When pressed for details I can fill those in and form a reasonably vivid mental image, but it is not by any means the default.
However, I have almost hyperphantasia for audio. I can hear near perfect recreations of the sound of something in my head, especially if it's music. This turned out to be extremely handy for voice modification training, as I could hear the target sound exactly in my head and then work to match it.
inigyou
Hm, same for me, although my margin for error on how well I know this is now very wide thanks to this thread. I did think I had below average visual phantasia and I get songs stuck in my head all the time. I also read by imagining a voice (I guess my own idealised voice, not what I actually sound like).
srcreigh
Do any other aphantasia folks have the experience of like, that one time they saw a very vivid image, but it only ever happened once for a short time?
That happened to me a few years ago. It was a very interesting experience.
It’s surefire subjective proof that aphantasia is real - the image I saw was so vivid and colorful, even animated. I can say for sure that I almost never have that experience.
At the same time, my one experience was surely in many ways much more limited than some others normal visual thoughts.
The mind is an interesting place.
corysama
I distinctly remember as a child watching Garfield the cartoon cat walking on the sofa. I remember explaining to my mother how cool that was that I could actually see him as real as anything.
I don't know when that ability faded. I think it was early because didn't really notice until people started talking about it recently. I can paint and draw. I can think about how things look. But, I don't see them. If I'm on the edge between awake and asleep I can force visualization as a lightweight lucid dreaming.
When I code, I think about data structures and algorithms using a mental proprioception. Putting things in space, moving them around. But, I have to remember where they are. Like playing the shell game with your eyes closed.
mohamedkoubaa
Sometimes in the first few minutes after waking up I experience images though I wouldn't call them vivid
inigyou
People have commented this a few times in this rather long thread.
kstrauser
Well. Today I learned something new about myself. I can't visualize a thing, but I can pull up something vaguely visualish that represents its inherent thingness, while not at all resembling the thing. For instance, the way I might picture program code looks nothing like lines of text, but more like something black on a black background moving through something algorithm-shaped that bends it. I realize I couldn't make that sound more vague if I tried, but it's still accurate.
Meanwhile, I can hear every sonic detail of every song I enjoy whenever I want to. Want me to imagine the drum break in "In the Air Tonight"? I can imagine every little bit of the gated snares and the reverb on them, and exactly the way Phil's voice kinda shreds immediately afterward.
Go figure.
But wow, that bit about meditation hits close to home. I love meditating and try to do it daily. Guided meditations like "imagine you're on a beach..." drive my batty, though. OK, I'm on a beach. I can feel the sand. The sun is nice. But I'm pressed to imagine the sun shining on the waves, it's probably going to resemble something out of The Matrix more than a drawing of the ocean.
xg15
I don't have aphantasia, but I'd be interested to know how it influences coding and software development.
I think, coding typically involves a lot of keeping track of the "runtime state" of the program, i.e. how variables, data structures, objects, resources, threads etc change state during various points of the program. Same goes for the "architecture" of a software system.
As a programmer, that's what you're usually do "in your head" when understanding or writing code.
I do a lot of that by visualizing. I'd be interested to know how people with aphantasia are doing it.
shric
I have aphantasia and I don’t have much trouble thinking of data structures and so on without visualising them. It’s hard to describe how I do it. I do imagine it would be easier with visualisation. If it gets hard I’ll use a pen and paper or an editor to make diagrams.
Things I seem to be average or above average at that I’d expect aphantasia to be a disadvantage for:
- the “chimp test” (search if you don’t know what this is)
- chess (but I have hit a wall at 1500 on chess.com and I find it very hard to explore future moves in my head more than a few. I feel like if I studied chess 8 hours a day for 30 years I still couldn’t hope to play blindfold chess)
- remembering numbers and computer facts.
- spelling including remembering spellings of obscure surnames I’ve never heard of before
I think even people without aphantasia can’t typically use visualisation for reliable storage of things even in the short term, correct me if I’m wrong. A extremely rare few have a photographic memory.
theshrike79
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 symptoms 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.
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.
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I'd get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain
harel
I found out that people DO visualise about 10 years ago when that interview with Pixar's animation head came out. I had a bit of a shock at first, then disappointment, then a deeper understanding of why I am like I am. A few metaphorical minutes later I got on with life. I'm not sure how to take this "club" for the "mentally blind". On one hand, I applaud humanity's ability to monentise pretty much everything, and on the other hand, I'm not sure I want to talk about how I can't see in my mind with other people who can't see in their mind. It's a neat conversation piece when in a group of people or friends, but a club?... Jury's out... I did sign up though.... Took the "test"...
greazy
I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness.
I have a theory that Aphantasia is the symptom of something else, and this other thing relates to how the brain of such individuals stores information. I think it's stored in a more "compressed" state.
As an example, I find myself remembering where info is and not what the info acrually was.
Humans are not homogeneous. I think this is a huge evolutionary advantage, different mental modes improved our survivability.
But of course in modern day life such "divergence" can lead to pathology.
selcuka
> I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness.
Aphantasia is usually associated with spatial memory difficulties [1].
Anecdotal, but I am aphantasic (almost zero visualisation) and also have low spatial awareness (can't navigate without a map or GPS). I have no issues with driving or map reading, though.
In contrast, someone I know can almost perfectly visualise things mentally, but they struggle with reading maps. They can also navigate perfectly without requiring assistance.
Thanks for answering my question! I also have mild aphantasia, I can navigate okay but not as well as my wife.
I also get lost or disoriented in big city centres but in a natural park or trek I'm totally fine.
marak830
I have Aphantasia, as well as excellent map reading skills and spatial awareness. BUT I'm pretty sure that spatial awareness is something I developed when cheffing (needing to know where things were rapidly) and map reading I attribute to video games (specifically doom originally haha).
teunispeters
I have total aphantasia. Can't do pictures. I'm still unsure what I'm missing with sounds.
Anyway, it was an article like this that made me realize others could do this "visulization" thing, and it wasn't just pure metaphor. So weird.
Next, people say they have "inner voices". That can't be real! (/s) (again, like aphantasia, I found out that others have inner voices, and that explains some more things that made no sense to me!)
... I keep running into people that "cannot imagine this". That is so weird, I can't imagine people HAVING "pictures in their head" and "inner voices". I can comprehend it as an idea, but it just does not seem real.
Side note : this is not related to dreams. Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses and complex stories, and almost never related to anything in one's daily life. Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.
selcuka
> Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.
What you can "see" when your eyes are closed has no connection with visualisation either. There are no photons hitting your retina. So aphantasia and dreams can be related.
> Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses
Why "of course"? It looks like it's a spectrum, too. I have total aphantasia like you do, and my dreams are also greyscale, foggy and vignetted (only the centre is somewhat visible).
Noaidi
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
boguscoder
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
jvolkman
I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
techgnosis
This is the correct conclusion. We have no shared, objective way to label our visual experience. We will never know the truth here. This is indeed a quirk of human psychology powered by internet trends that encourage people to find reasons to feel their health is special and unique.
newswangerd
One thing I'd like to learn is how to effectively meditate as someone with aphantasia. I took a course in college and all of the exercises involved some variation of tuning out your internal monologue going to your happy place in your minds eye. I'd love to get the benefits of meditation, but I can't visualize anything so none of the meditation tools that are taught in these kinds of courses work for me at all.
D-Machine
There are plenty of competent meditation approaches that don't really require visualization of any kind. Most Western "mindfulness" meditations don't require visualizations, nor does e.g. shi-ne / opening awareness, nor most forms of concentration meditations (e.g. transcendental where you focus on a sound like "ohm", meditations that have you focus on your breath, etc).
spoiler
Read the book Mind Illuminated. Visualisation isn't really necessary for meditation
Cider9986
There's plenty of meditations that don't need it. You don't need to tune out your internal monologue, it's generally more about awareness, so you can be using your internal monologue or just be aware of your thoughts. It's about noticing distraction, which means you are aware.
This book is a great, easy to read, science-based explainer.
You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
perrygeo
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
dooglius
I thought the point of counting sheep was to do something boring and repetitive that puts your brain into a relaxed state
perrygeo
Visualizing a sheep is not something I can even do once. Let alone repetitively until it gets boring. Being asked to visualize is quite frustrating and confusing - especially to a little kid not sure exactly what he's supposed to be "seeing". Hardly relaxing.
dooglius
I don't think you actually had to visualize the sheep for it to work, I never thought of that as being explicitly required
tpoacher
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
xerox13ster
Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
ctxc
Thank you for your comment! It was useful. Found this that helped me look through the signs
I normally have no autobiographical memory, but once I went to a weeklong meditation retreat and around the second day it sorta all showed up at once.
Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
thirdtruck
We strongly suspect we have SDAM as well and only more so after reading your description here. Only got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and as on the autism spectrum this year, here in our forties as well.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
Noaidi
Aphant and SDAM are linked with many neurological disorders. I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type and OCD.
I didn't realize they were correlated. I have total visual and auditory aphantasia and can count childhood memories on one hand. But I have great semantic memory and could probably win a game of jeapordy.
davidsojevic
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
theshrike79
I remember the massive hubbub about the Mortal Engines movie specifically.
The only thing I remembered about the main character was that she had a scar on her face.
Fans were nitpicking every single strand of hair and I was like "You guys remember that, do you make notes when reading or what?". Apparently people visualize books so hard that they "see" the characters and remember them.
audidude
I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.
vidarh
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
christophilus
Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
audidude
They are real for some. I have Aphantasia but my wife has Hyperphantasia so we compare notes often. Each of us are at the edge of the spectrum.
stephen_g
Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
nephihaha
Yes, unfortunately they are. I say unfortunately because they are often connected with trauma. When something goes very badly, those memories can go cycling around one's head. PTSD can do that too. Some people relive wars years after they happened. It's very real.
stephen_g
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
FeistySkink
Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.
croisillon
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
sixothree
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
vidarh
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
pm215
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
mercutio2
For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions.
I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.
I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
Noaidi
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
sixothree
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
myhf
> it opened my eyes to many things
feverzsj
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
graeme
From what people report some can see a full picture.
feverzsj
Photographic memory is very rare.
NoGravitas
There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.
pjerem
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
faeyanpiraat
Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
LordGrey
There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims:
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
snarkconjecture
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
ludicrousdispla
No, it is nothing like retinal fatigue, which is what they are referencing in that sentence.
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
LordGrey
The potential value of the after-image test was (hopefully) a concrete way for me to understand better what a visualizer could actually see. From the replies, it seems that it is really a very poor example.
For someone with aphantasia, the failure of the "What Do Most Visualizers See?" section is that it is still just a wall of words. I have to imagine what a visualizer might see, which is, of course, difficult for me!
hugeBirb
If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
dcanelhas
I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply.
Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
evenhash
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
imzadi
Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.
Serious question... are LLMs basically operating like aphantasia?
Because phantasia seems to me to be just memory of actual qualia having actually experienced seeing something. No? Can't people with aphantasia remember that experience in any kind of vivid sense? Because "the concept of a beach" is something that an LLM can read from a corpus, and so can a person, even if they never experienced one.
Rooster61
One thing that I have always noticed about my own internal images (yes, I am not an aphant) is that when I am perceiving something in my mouth (such as a sore spot or tooth), my perception of it visually in my mind is wildly different than if I actually look in my mouth using a mirror. Objects look and feel much larger and more detailed in my mind than they actually are.
smokel
Would it make sense to guess that humans have something analogous to the latent representations or embeddings found in LLMs or VLMS, with different neural circuitry to experience them?
Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all.
I don't buy that over 10%+ of HN has proper aphantasia, though. I wouldn't trust my own mind at self-reporting anything.
D-Machine
Almost certainly there is also a "latent" representation that isn't just based on sensory imagery (i.e. some kinds of logical relations).
But it is also not likely that an absence of sensory imagery is without impact, i.e. that only the latent representations matter. You can see this in studies where aphantasics can't be subconsciously primed by images as easily [1], have skin conductance responses to visual stimuli less to imagery compared to normal people [2], and miss more visual details when attempting to redraw complex images from memory [3]. I.e. the visualizations are likely important in some cases, with the latent (non-visual) representations alone being deficient in some very particular cases, at least.
I had no idea people could conjure images in their head.
nephihaha
How do you think they write novels and film scripts, or draw from memory?
woggy
I'm not sure, when I try to picture something I just get the concept of it in my head. I thought people were just really good at taking that and working out how to draw it out. Makes a lot of sense to me now that some people can be so good at drawing.
nephihaha
When I try to write dialogue or scripts, I do play the conversation out in my head or even talk to myself... But when writing fiction, I definitely visualise.
I wrote a failed novel some years ago. There were several problems with it, but the geography was not one of them. I can still visualise the headland it's set on made of dark volcanic rock, the nearby village, the low lying islets off the coast and the rounded mountain at the end of the bay. I can visualise the routes between all of these, and they're entirely imaginary... Although nothing that would seem out of place in the real world. The locations play a large part in the story.
The brain does usually distinguish between internal visualisation and real life memories. When it doesn't, and hallucinations occur, that's when mental illness can arise.
laxpri
I dont have Aphantasia ,but there is something weird I noticed ,
when I am trying to visualize something I dont know about or know very little about I have to draw it in my mind instead of instantly visualize it .
example - like pretzel , I saw this for the first or second time in my life, so I have to draw it out. not like a house or horse or..
vanderZwan
I know someone whose partner was murdered in an extremely horrible, brutal way. Years later they told me in a completely unrelated discussion that they have aphantasia. I always wondered if in their case it might be trauma-induced, but obviously don't want to ask given the topic. Either way I think it's for the best in their case.
powerbroker
What is it called when you can vividly see the silhouette of your hands with your eyes closed -- and particularly if your fingers are brushing against your skull. I didn't discover this 'transparent skull' skill until I was in my 50s -- much like those with aphantasia don't know they perceive things differently than many others.
Totally useless of course -- but it was a weird discovery nonetheless.
RA2lover
Does this happen in the absence of light sources? I believe i have aphantasia but can still see those when one is present.
My guess is my eyelids don't block off enough light. Coincidentally, i have some trouble sleeping with light sources present.
lefrenchy
I struggle with this. I think i'm Aphantic, but then again I can imagine a red apple in my mind. But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes. I just imagine it, with some detail but also limited detail? I guess that puts me slightly on the aphantasia side of the scale, but it feels very hard to understand my own subjective experience in contrast to the written version.
inigyou
You are not aphantic. We can argue whether that's average or below average, but people with aphantasia can't do it at all. TFA uses the word "hypophantasia" at least once.
Jtsummers
> But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes.
Only the excessively literal think that this is what people mean when they say they "see" an image in their mind. Everyone else understands what you describe (imagining an object and conjuring up an image in your mind) as what the metaphorical "seeing" in "seeing in your mind" means.
What you describe, about imagining an apple, that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
Ever been lost in thought and ignored your external senses? That's what they're describing, but with visual imagery included and not just however you may normally experience thoughts.
thirdtruck
Not really, actually, and not for a lack of trying very very hard at times. Even when we tried LSD the most it did was make us more aware of the actual curvature of our eyes' lenses, lessening the mental illusion of uniformity.
selcuka
> that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
That's an oversimplification. I have a friend who says that they can visualise things mentally exactly like in real life, with their eyes closed or open, and that they can also make changes to those images, such as changing the colour of an apple from red to blue, or rearranging furniture in an imagined room.
Of course they might be lying, but if we ignore that possibility, it definitely doesn't sound like a figure of speech.
wmorgan
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
Noaidi
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
physicalecon
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
LoganDark
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
cocacola1
That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
xerox13ster
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
kstrauser
That's so bizarre to me. I can "picture" an apple, but I'm not literally seeing something resembling an apple in my mind. It's closer to the classic object-oriented example of "Apple isa Fruit", except not in text but in vague geometric shapes that to me say "appleness".
xerox13ster
I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
kstrauser
I honestly can't imagine this concretely at all.
Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of:
class Cow:
spinning = True
What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading).
OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wouldn't think that people literally imagined an apple, either, and yet here we are. But let's assume that people don't usually literally imagine pictures of the numbers in their mind when they add them.
Take 12. Add 7 do it. Now you have 19, right?
My mental imagery of adding 12 + 7 = 19 is nearly identical to that of picturing a spinning cow. Take a cow. Spin it. Now you have a spinning cow, right?
In both cases, those are just facts. Now, higher math does look like something to me, as does writing code. Those do have geometric shapes for me, kinds of blobby things with curved edges but not colors, except maybe rainbowy shimmers on those curves. I can feel the shapes moving and bending, and that moving and bending makes them makes sense to me. "OK, so I'm trying to do a binary search of this set... Alright, so if I push this shape into there... Oh! That'd work! Alright." But in no case do those shape-like things resemble anything I've ever seen in the real world.
xerox13ster
My experience of mental math at the most common and basic is teasing apart the numbers into components and adding/multiplying/dividing their sums. Sometimes that's like the math confusion meme where it's "floating in front of my eyes" (mentally, internally) in the "void", sometimes I'm literally imagining in my minds eye doing the math at a desk on notebook paper with all the feedback that comes with it. Sometimes I use a mental TI-84/89 to do the math, or this one calculator I had when I was a kid. It's usually paper though. Many times I apply a synesthetic association to a number, be it textural, color, attitude, or "shape".
However, I also have the ability to mathematically evaluate an equation and graph it on a mental visualization of a graph. I've been able to do that in 2d and 3d for a range of quadratic, cubic, and quartic graphs since high school. Also asymptotes, hyperbolas, sinusoidal functions. You know those youtube videos where they do the CGI animations to show a rolling cylinder tracing out a sine wave? I've been able to do that in my mind since I was a teen.
In high school I would do calculus rate of change functions in my head with a visualization like a laser going from perpendicular to a wall to parallel with the wall, and how the speed of the point at the end of the beam on the wall approaches light speed as the beam approaches approaches parallel, or the shrinking surface area of a liquid in a vertical conical funnel.
The funnel i imagined is yellow with an equilateral cone and a long neck that tapers to a half inch and has a worn, wrinkled blue white and red sticker from being run through the dishwasher a few times. It's injection molded and not shaved/sanded. Excessive detail for a feature of a math problem, but it's there anyway.
For me a spinning cow can have horns or be a holstein heifer or an angus steer or a dairy calf, or a buffalo. Could be a chik fil a cow. Or the one from Barnyard...right, Barnyard? the Dreamworks movie...
I can go back and read pages of books and documents that I have already read in my mind, which means (with effort) I can retread any sheet music I've ever played, or redo the math that I did in calculus and chemistry and physics classes. For a long time it completely ruined re-reading books for me because I would know exactly what was coming and I didn't need to turn the page.
I used the sheet music thing to teach myself guitar based on what I learned on trumpet through recall of arpeggios and and scales. Notes are also synesthetic and I can make them dance off the page in my head.
dtho
The ultimate test is having them draw a picture. If they can visualize imagery then they should be an excellent artist. If they are bad at drawing, then they must have aphantasia.
urban_strike
I mean, I can look at something physically in front of me, like a still life, all I want and still draw it like shit. So I'm not sure what that would prove?
dtho
You would be able to reproduce the object very accurately, given enough time. You can simply continuously refine the drawing by comparing the drawing to the object.
nephihaha
I'm terrible at drawing but I definitely don't have it.
dtho
If you do not "have it" and you are unable to reproduce the imagery you see in your mind's eye using a pencil on paper, then that is clarifying. Whatever you consider to be visualization is not even close to the same as actually seeing something. If whatever you experience was a "vivid visualization", then you would be able to reproduce it drawing.
I personally don't experience anything that I would consider "visualization", and I am also terrible at drawing, but I can reproduce a photorealistic drawing of a photograph if I am allowed to look at the photograph while drawing.
nephihaha
I think you are confusing two separate issues. I struggle to do still life as well, when the subject is right in front of me. That's not due to eyesight problems. My visualisation is not perfect but is much better than anything I can draw. However, when I have taken art classes and I practised, my skills improved... Much like music or chess. If I stop practising drawing then my skills deteriorate.
I can write about things in far more detail than I can draw them. Both from my imagination and sometimes memory. I can remember the floor plan of certain buildings I haven't set foot in for over thirty years. (Or at least the parts I had access to.) I can remember which direction they are orientated in, and where the sun rose and set in relation to them. As me to do a drawing, as opposed to a diagram, and I will struggle due to poor art skills.
My drawing skills are more to do with the fact I have mild dyspraxia than my ability to visualise. My handwriting is pretty atrocious too for similar reasons. My visualisation skills are far from perfect but still much better than anything I can draw.
micromacrofoot
This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory? I can imagine things happening and fill in lots of detail but I never really "see" anything
riffraff
The Apple test is great, my wife found out with it that she, and our daughter, have aphantasia, we kept bringing this up with other people and turned out quite a few do, and also quite a few do not have an internal monologue.
It's very surprising!
vehemenz
I wonder what it's like to be born blind and have zero visualization ability.
Then I wonder what it must feel like for that person to read sighted people on the Internet debate their supposed lack of visualization abilities.
D-Machine
You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind.
E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.
corecoder
OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
D-Machine
It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.
I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.
dcanelhas
I find it harder to conjure up the sensory experience of scents and flavors, is that something other people can do instinctively?
Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
aezart
I would say taste and touch are my strongest recall senses. I can still remember the experience of my favorite sandwich at a local sandwich shop, discontinued around 2009.
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
edgarvaldes
To the people who have aphantasia, do you daydream?
mercutio2
Of course! About plot, not scenery.
tintor
I can visualize algorithms, graphs, 3d objects, 3d environments, but no colors.
gtg239a
As I'm taking music more seriously, I'm encountering a lot more practice instruction that recommends mental practice or visualization. Athletes have been doing this forever too. Essentially, imagining yourself doing something correctly or adjusting to a mistake can help you to perform that thing.
In my experience, my issue is not with being able to conjure the mental image + sounds, but holding on to it long enough; which, I suspect is just a matter of my degraded attention.
Anyways, this is fascinating stuff. One of the proponents of visualization/mental practice is Molly Gebrian, a brilliant violist, who, by her own admission, can't "visualize" sounds, but relies on conceptual evocations of the act. (https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain)
evilbob93
haven't read the whole comment thread but wanted to mention this:
as an "aphant" (never knew that was a word) I get really vivid visuals on certain psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or DMT. Not so much acid, however.
jibbit
people who don't have aphantasia are demonstrably and measurably better at .. something, right?
so you're saying people with aphantasia test worse for memory?
mohamedkoubaa
Depends on whether the tests are general or if they give a different score for spatial, semantic, and episodic memory.
vivzkestrel
- kudos to whoever made this
- need one for alzheimers
bryanrasmussen
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
Jtsummers
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
LoganDark
Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
bryanrasmussen
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
t-3
I don't know how visually complex phantasic dreams are, but my dreams as an aphantasic person are sensually just like real life.
LoganDark
Half the time my dreams are just weird perversions of childhood homes or schools or so on. Hybrids of different places and times. Not particularly complex, just familiar. Apparently it's pretty common.
LoganDark
> Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
It's called hypnagogia, and is indeed involuntary.
cbeach
I have aphantasia. When I learnt the “mind’s eye” was not a metaphor, it was a wild moment for me! I still find it hard to believe that others are able to visualise using their imagination.
I’m curious about a potential link between aphantasia and autism. I’m 37 on the Autism Spectrum Quotient scale (test link below if anyone’s interested in doing it). “Significant autistic traits.” It makes sense to me that my inability to visualise people’s faces might make me less empathetic with others. Aphantasia might explain why I imagine systems, concepts and ideas rather than people, things and events.
I love this debate. It'll never be solved, and the best argument is literally "are you sure?". You have no idea what I can see in my head, and I have no idea what you can see.
James_K
Ironic that people without imagination write a page using AI.
inigyou
It's selling you a product. It's spam.
deadbabe
I always get this eerie feeling that if someone has aphantasia, they are possibly also a P-Zombie.
If you cannot visualize things in your mind, and seeing is just transforming light into visual imagery, how do you know you're actually "seeing" anything? The data goes to your brain but you just process the image without actively observing visuals, you just know what's there in front of you, but as data. If you can't see visuals, what else can't you see? Conscious processes?
The analogy to use would be like an LLM's way of "seeing" an image: it describes it into words and then recognizes what it is. A human brain would just do this much faster. Aphantasiac brains.
tolerance
This is peak internet banality.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
mucha
Yay, I'm one of "these people" now. Aphants can still have inner monologues, and most do. I do.
vonneumannstan
Yes thats exactly what a P-zombie would say.
inigyou
A PZ says exactly what a normal human says, including the reports of mental imagery.
nephihaha
Do you dream?
mucha
Yes, and I can visualize in dreams too.
anentropic
then you haven't understood what P zombies are
vonneumannstan
Only a P-zombie would say this.
kwarcode
Can you reach the ground? If not, you may have Short Arms.
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projector screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
I believe in a plurality of human experiences, they do not, because they experienced one thing different. It's a specious argument, just like all the people rejecting the idea that other people can have a different subjective experience (based solely on their own personal experience) in this thread.
He literally said he HAS the ability. He can actually do it. It is just that he learned it at some point.
He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.
Also, dyslectic can learn to read. They have difficulty with it, including in later age. But "cant learn to read" is not that thing.
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
On the flip side, this means with some introspection and reflection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization as the dominant mode is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner, and the other modes are difficult to identify or articulate.
Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?
If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.
But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.
Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.
So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
Citation needed.
People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.
Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.
That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.
https://worldmetrics.org/aphantasia-statistics/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.
It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:
- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia
- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)
- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)
- Memory vividness
Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
But yes, with you on composing songs. One reason I can’t fall asleep on airplanes or in other noisy environments: the closer to sleep I am, the less control I have over the tendency to weave audio patterns, and as soon as it gets interesting… I’m awake and thinking about the music. Repeat, for however long the flight is.
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national math competitions once.
Maybe though, it's because i was drawing helper figures on paper instead of imagining them.
I have no problem with figure matching IQ style tests, as opposed to one of the sibling posters.
Edit: oh interesting, lower in the article. I have absolutely no problem with spatial navigation, on the contrary, I'm better than many people. But for example if we're retracing our steps on a mountain path I can't tell you in advance what were the landmarks to look for. I will recognize them as soon as we see them or notice we're missing any landmarks though.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
Not the other guy, but I can think about how they look without actually 'seeing' them in my mind.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
But then I learned about analytic geometry in the 8-th grade. I annoyed every math teacher by just using it to solve all the school geometry problems. And quite a few geometry problems in math competitions.
I certainly never could…
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
I would love to know what that is called.
I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
You cannot describe something that someone lacks or has a substantially different subjective experience with, truly.
The best we can do is show that the effects of your seeing green are the same as mine (biologically, behaviorally, etc).
If you're curious about the broader subject, would highly recommend reading An Anthropologist on Mars.
Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.
We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
It sounds like you're equating the comment I responded to with a question about colorblindness is a skill issue. I'm guessing that's not what you're actually arguing, but it's not clear to me what the actually analogy you're trying to make is.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
[1] https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq...
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
To answer your question. Nothing. It is just black. Not even a slight hint of shape of Eiffel Tower or even a tall rectangle or just outline of the structure. It is just nothing.
I sometimes think or wonder people who can dream and close their eyes and actually see things must have so much fun.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Perhaps I’m the odd one then. It’s certainly a difficult topic to discuss with other people.
I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it.
Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't remember my own compositions. They usually come back to me as a play on hands and not on audio.
I thought I was music deaf for the most of my life. My music teachers mocked me in my youth showing me as an example of someone with zero hearing.
My latest music teacher discovered that I actually have absolute hearing skill but... can't recall sound in my head. So I sense even slight shift in toning (e.g. given few variations of same melody I can tell which one is the original tuning) but I can't reproduce it.
[0]: https://on.soundcloud.com/Rv6t1jXzyAH8E2jEaY
I do have the motion-centric imagination sense (i could "feel" what it would be like to do a layup) without physically moving.
No ability to generate audio, visuals, etc "on the inside".
Do you have an internal voice?
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization."
(edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
It's sort of the difference between logical supervenience and metaphysical, or weak emergence and strong emergence. Qualia being something additional to the neural description.
Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!?
I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
Have you actually dedicated significant time to trying to learn how to visualize? I suspect that if you did, you'd realize: oh, wow, maybe I can actually get better at this. If most people who give it a serious effort also come to that conclusion, I feel like we've pretty much settled the question. So it is testable, just not as easily.
I haven't had to. I don't have aphantasia. Visualizing doesn't feel like a learned skill to me. It feels like something I've always known how to do. Of course if I pay more attention to what I'm doing, I can visualize in more detail than if I just do it casually. But I've never had the feeling that, oh, if I practice this and learn I can get better at it, the way, for example, that I can get better at playing the piano by practicing.
Where I'm stuck is, if someone else who couldn't visualize asked me to teach them how, I wouldn't know what to do. Whereas, if they asked me to teach them how to play the piano, I'd at least have some idea.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
I _HATE_ reading books that spend pages and pages explaining how things look to a very detailed degree even when it's not relevant to the plot in any way - it's just set dressing.
I can't see that. It's just word noise to me.
Now I noticed my kid has the same thing, they like other books and actively dislike others. It's the same as me, without me affecting their judgement in any way. Any book that spends too much explaining the environment is boring, books that just get on with the plot are a bit hit.
Most of the visualisation I do is extremely mundane, like if I'm planning a route or doing something with the garden.
But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Refusing to believe aphantasia or hyperphantasia exists. Refusing to believe that other people are telling the truth when they describe their experiences. Insisting that everyone is the same, actually, and anyone who thinks differences are real must be confused or misunderstanding something.
I guess these are both types of cognitive disability... but I know what aphantasia is called. Not sure what the other thing is called, but I'd imagine it's something which sounds pretty unflattering.
when engaging in small talk i make eye contact and have been told im very easy to talk to
when discussing something im interested in, i stare into the distance and start waving my hands around gesturing at the diagrams im describing. its to the degree where my managers prefer i not meet with one specific customer who commented on this
at my first job my coworkers pointed out that i stare directly up to the ceiling for a period of time, then will type furiously, and repeat. id never known that was different before. assumed everyone constructed their ideas mentally before getting it down on paper
im reminded of my high school AP physics teacher who would close her eyes while lecturing because i assume she was picturing things. the funniest students knew how to get some physical comedy into those windows of obliviousness
when it comes to aphantasia it reminds me of Stan in South Park: "I get it now! I don't get it!" the best i can do be nice and accommodating and acknowledge i simply cant relate
I also suspect that some of the people who think they have aphantasia could learn. I personally am not good at visualising and don't naturally do it, but these days I can imagine a not very good apple if I try hard, and I trained this by building on my existing ability to imagine the tactile feel of holding an apple and on spatial awareness.
> Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. [...] Though another psychologist, Dr. Berman, did, at that time, come up with a name for the masking behavior, called the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/1e5vbuu/mind_bl...
Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantics has created this illusion?
You're defaulting to being nice, which is fine, but it doesn't make you any more right than me and my skepticism. We both have no idea what the truth is.
That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.
> there are suddenly two types of people
This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.
Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.
For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.
Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).
Because we know that there are already more than two types of people, even when we ignore aphantasia? So there is nothing new here.
Also if you read the FA, it explains that there are objective differences:
> People have taken various physiological and behavioral tests in a research lab. Researchers have observed that people who report vivid imagery respond differently to these more objective measures than aphantasics. Although this doesn't let us know definitively that they vividly see an image, it all points to the fact that something is truly different between people who claim to see vividly and those who don't.
I just want to throw my two cents in: I think I have a pretty good level of visualization ability, but it's not actually projected into my field of vision. It's like having a second monitor plugged in somewhere... _else_. It doesn't overlap with the 3D space of our world. I don't SEE it, but I do "see" it, not as concepts but as something akin to generated memories.
It does often help to look away from visually distracting things so that the mind is more free to use its capacity to generate things.
However, I don't "see" (pun intended) it as a problem. On the contrary, I'm not wasting cycles on irrelevant details while I'm thinking.
This, I can imagine things, but it's like the idea of something, not a picture of it. Blows my mind when people tell me their imagination is like watching a movie.
There are clear differences in brain scans [1].
[1] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/01/mind-blindness...
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9018072/
I've read a lot of research on fMRIs and mental disorders. Something like this pops up every other day. Not a single one has really study the test of time ion terms of diagnostic utility.
Clearly false if you take just 30 seconds to scroll through this thread. Embarrassing.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.
From the way people describe their experiences, it's difficult to know what they truly mean. I don't think anyone is lying, but it must be hard to convey these experiences with our language as it is.
In your first post, I thought "that's definitely not me", but in your second post I thought, "oh, that's actually 100% me"
To me, everything I imagine is on a different mental plane. This is what I thought people meant by a "minds eye". You don't see it literally, but it's there in your imagination.
What confuses me though is that for some people, it sounds like it's an overlay on their actual visual perception, something so vivid they could practically rotoscope it. I could never do that; I imagine I'd be a better artist if I could.
My imagination on this plane is so vivid that I'll get lost in it, and not see what's in front of me, as you describe it, simply because I'm "not paying attention" until some immediate danger jolts me "awake". I colloquially call this "zoning out" or "daydreaming"
Actually, I think my imagination might be part of what makes it so hard for me to read books. I'll get distracted by the world building, playing the different scenarios in my head, that I'll forget about the words in front of me, and minutes will go by before I remember I'm supposed to be reading a book.
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
I'm saying there are a number of physical tests like the ones you describe, and those line up with the much simpler apple imagery self-report test.
The aphantasia theory is clear and parsimoniously makes sense of all this, but your "it's all just semantics" does not, and additionally requires rather other extreme acrobatics with regards to much of the entirety of human experience and discourse. Scholarly research also basically says this.
Your mind is clearly closed and you do not have any serious interest in understanding anything here.
There are correlations to non self-reported phenomena. This comment names a few (despite being dead for some reason?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475441
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.
Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.
I would say when I do this, it's more like underlaying my imagination with reality, than overlaying reality with imagination - the combination is still clearly imaginative. Right? (I think I'm a 3 or a fraction higher, on the apple test scale)
Otherwise, yes, in almost all other cases, I suspect our experiences aren't that much different.
I like to do mechanical/visual designs in my head, intentionally avoiding whiteboards and whatnot, so I don't lose the ability! When I do this, I've had people come up to me and wave their hands right in my face to get my attention, because I don't see them. I "spaced out" alll the time as a kid.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
If "at will" is the hinging point then maybe not because the scenario to trigger the behaviour isn't clear to me still, but this is definitely possible.
I have had the superimposed belief-image confuse my spatial brain until I moved my point of view (in which the real world obviously reorients while the brain conjured image doesn't) to clear it before. This happened far more when I was younger than now as an adult, but it very much still happens.
The very last time I recall this happening was at my former home during a strenuous house move. I was on my back for a breather between boxes and a delay getting the car around gave me some time for my mind to wander, which it did on that occasion to thoughts about how very old buildings with column supports used to look. By the time I needed to move the next box I had to shake my head to de-conjure the little stone plinths that had appeared in my vision from my imagination trip.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people.
I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack.
Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at.
When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would basically describe it as effectively identical to seeing them.
So now I'm confused about if these few people are the exceptions or the norm, and to what extent I'm lacking something that some others have.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Here’s a helpful overview of anendophasia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/anendophasia
And a few active communities for anyone interested:
Aphantasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
Anendophasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anendophasia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/silentminds/
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
There is no visual component to any of it, it's just "feels" as the kids say.
I couldn't imagine any of my family's faces in my head even if my life depended on it. I'm not face blind, my brain just doesn't work like that.
I also have zero internal monologue. I can "talk" in my head, but it's just me, there's no discussion or multiple participants and none of it is unprompted. I'm pretty sure I'd have myself committed if I started hearing random voices or music in my head unprompted...
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
Not only people. LLMs too.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
But as I keep saying, there are people on this thread that are saying they are literally equivalent. I don't know if I believe them, but that is what they are saying -- talk to them!
When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.
It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
- the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there
- the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you let any aspect of your mind wander or stray from the task, the translucency increases, it may pop out of the visual field, or lose details
- the projected image (say, an apple) doesn't have full details at every particular point, i.e. if I focus on where the stem would be, that detail intensifies, but the surrounding areas become more ephemeral; with a real apple, this happens somewhat depending on the focal point too, but not nearly as much
- the projected image can be made less ephemeral and more rich and stable with the use of pscychedelics (e.g. psilocybin) or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis)
So, yes, you can "see" it in reality, but not, in most cases, to the degree that you "see" a real apple. Often the ephemerality really does manifest in a way extremely similar to how an afterimage persists, but this isn't always the case.
It is quite possible that this is drawing a line, as you say, between hyperphantashia and regular phantasia, though I'm not yet willing to give up on the idea that we are just giving subjective names to the same phenomenon.
To wit, when I "hear" things with my "mind's ear" I can "hear" them very well in all the layers and components, I can "hear" drums and guitar and bass and voice, etc., but they are very clearly in my head -- they do not have a location in real space the way that real sounds do; I can't "hear" a sound so loud that it makes me cringe or so quiet that I have to strain to hear it.
Also, to be clear, my images usually are NOT spatially located, but I can choose to make them so if needed, and occasionally they just are spontaneously.
You might also find the work of Louis Sass ("Madness and Modernism", and other works) to be relevant, as he notes it is extremely common for schizophrenics to always be localizing (sensing) their thoughts have specific locations in space, or e.g. are "moving from the front of my head to the back", and other such extreme (and arguably unhelpful) spatialization of aspects of the mind's eye. He argues this might be part of why they are prone to hallucinations and delusion.
Untrue, of course, but very clearly something people have believed almost universally for centuries.
I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detailed and solid.
This feels a bit like "is my red the same as your red?". What do even mean when you say you can "imagine that wall with the red circle on it", but you can't "see" it? Is there no visual aspect to your experience whatsoever? Do you have a spatial sense of the red circle's size and position? Do you experience (hear?) verbal statements about the red circle's existence and properties, or is this some conceptual sense of the red circle that is both non-verbal and non-visual?
I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers. I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is *akin* to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this. I don't know if I believe that other people can. But a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'" -- I'm not interested in you, you are like me, I'm interested in people who say that they can "see". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365#49469495
I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of the time, visualizing is indeed only analogous to seeing, i.e. visualizing is "seeing, but not 'see-see'ing". However, with extreme focus, regular practice, and/or altered states, this distinction breaks down, and it is harder to make the separation so clear.
I suspect the more hyperphantasic you are, the more easily you can find examples in experience that blur the boundary between seeing vs. visualization, but with normal visualization capacity, these blurred cases are likely quite rare. But I don't think, fundamentally, except in true aphantasics, that there is always a 100% clear dividing line between seeing and visualization.
But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a helpful metaphor", but there are a lot of people (including yourself) who say that you can. I want to see if I can pick out that difference. I almost wish the survey instead said "No, of course I can't *see* it, nobody can" to really nail down that perspective.
That's your experience. Other people have different experiences.
> That is what seeing is.
What an incredible leap of petitio principii. Yet there are people who can't see despite their eyes being open and the optical machinery working correctly, and there are people who see things without having eyes at all -- in some cases things that are only in their imagination, in some cases due to brain probes, in some cases due to synesthesia, in some cases due to having an array of probes on their backs that translate images into touch sensations which their brains translate into images. You seem to know nothing of any of this, or how the brain works at all, or how language works, but you have a whole lot to say about it in this thread.
BY DEFINITION you have aphantasia, according to your self-description. You seem to believe, for no good reason and contrary to a large amount of evidence, that that everyone else also has aphantasia (i.e., no one has phantasia), but that's a different issue.
I won't respond to you further.
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is... Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this.
But he also said
> I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Initially this struck me as logically incoherent, but reading it again and taking into account the fact that he defines seeing as using eyes--an unreasonable circular precondition--he does indeed seem to be describing normal phantasia, given the reference to images that do not disappear, and to visualization. As someone with near-complete aphantasia, I cannot produce such images or visualizations and I certainly can't rotate them around.
What is quite clear here is that people are describing different sorts of experience, not mere semantic quibbling (which defining seeing as using eyes is certainly an example of) ... and we have physiological data that supports that view. I find it quite bizarre that there are so many people on this page who insist that these differences cannot exist, that everyone is exactly like them (even though there are differences among those who claim this), to the degree that they claim that others are lying, seeking attention, seeking profit, etc. ... there is no reason at all in evidence or logic to support these claims or the position that everyone's mind is the same, in this or any other aspect.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
I think by any reasonable definition everyone has aphantasia, which is why it's a nothing burger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473050
Intellectually lazy, to be honest.
Very few of us have 20/20 vision but that doesn't mean we're blind.
Prove it.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I won't respond again.
>Prove it.
Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense.
>You can't keep track of your own argument
MY argument is this: people don't actually see things or even have imagery inside their head, which is normal, and self-proclaimed aphantasiacs are attention seekers who think they have a disability or special characteristic...there is no logical inconsistency in my argument.
Agreed no logical inconsistency, just very strange laziness and prickishness.
The guy has a lot of baseless and downright false opinions, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296897
And he seems to live in a perpetual state of annoyance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296897
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I 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.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well anyway the whole concept, and the science, seems like a giant troll.
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?
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
It's not semantics.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".
If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."
But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.
Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
The people who hold that it's just semantics and all minds are alike in this regard are just expressing a belief that has absolutely no evidence to support it and a great deal of counterevidence.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
Aphantasia, hypophantasia, phantasia, and hyperfantasia are all real, per the evidence. Absolutely no evidence supports the contrary claim.
I won't respond further.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
Seeing mental images that are as good as a well done animation, on the other hand, is a lot easier and less draining to hold.
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
What’s maybe most interesting, is that we both seem to have “spatial” perception.
To try and be a bit more specific, when I think about “things” I can organize them in my mind in relation to other “things.”
The most clear example is a path I’ve walked through a building, where the halls, rooms, and corridors are all connected. I easily know exactly where I am, not because I remember the literal steps I took, but because I have a spatial construction in my mind.
I cannot visualize the space, there’s no inherent right side up or preferred perspective. I can model the space with my hands, and create it physically, but am terrible at trying to transform it to 2d.
This doesn’t just work for physical “things” but works for purely abstract concepts like software, stories, and songs.
I’ve always rationalized aphantasia as something where my brain put “skill points” in one area rather than another, but maybe the neuroplasticity is long gone.
A specific set of words can trigger a memory of a song for example.
There's a lot of "I know it when I see it" kind of things, I need to find one link in the path to the relevant thing to get there.
So when people describe a flattened dodecahedron wrapping into its regular form, I have no trouble conceptualizing (I was going to say visualizing, but it's frankly not at all visual; I got nothing, when it comes to visualizing anything but what's in front of my eyes). But if you ask me to think about alternating solid colors on the dodecahedron, I can't do it.
Clearly there are many different variations on the theme, not just one modal experience! But it's nice to know we're not alone.
I have mild aphantasia, and I initially tried the approach of memorizing the shapes and/or associating the shapes with easy-to-remember pictures ( https://www.chineasy.com/ uses this approach). Some of my classmates could do that easily, but it didn't work for me.
Instead, I started memorizing the characters as a series of hand movements. Essentially "serializing" the picture into a series of strokes, and that I can remember easily. I can also "render" them in my mind's eye on demand.
However, I have almost hyperphantasia for audio. I can hear near perfect recreations of the sound of something in my head, especially if it's music. This turned out to be extremely handy for voice modification training, as I could hear the target sound exactly in my head and then work to match it.
That happened to me a few years ago. It was a very interesting experience.
It’s surefire subjective proof that aphantasia is real - the image I saw was so vivid and colorful, even animated. I can say for sure that I almost never have that experience.
At the same time, my one experience was surely in many ways much more limited than some others normal visual thoughts.
The mind is an interesting place.
I don't know when that ability faded. I think it was early because didn't really notice until people started talking about it recently. I can paint and draw. I can think about how things look. But, I don't see them. If I'm on the edge between awake and asleep I can force visualization as a lightweight lucid dreaming.
When I code, I think about data structures and algorithms using a mental proprioception. Putting things in space, moving them around. But, I have to remember where they are. Like playing the shell game with your eyes closed.
Meanwhile, I can hear every sonic detail of every song I enjoy whenever I want to. Want me to imagine the drum break in "In the Air Tonight"? I can imagine every little bit of the gated snares and the reverb on them, and exactly the way Phil's voice kinda shreds immediately afterward.
Go figure.
But wow, that bit about meditation hits close to home. I love meditating and try to do it daily. Guided meditations like "imagine you're on a beach..." drive my batty, though. OK, I'm on a beach. I can feel the sand. The sun is nice. But I'm pressed to imagine the sun shining on the waves, it's probably going to resemble something out of The Matrix more than a drawing of the ocean.
I think, coding typically involves a lot of keeping track of the "runtime state" of the program, i.e. how variables, data structures, objects, resources, threads etc change state during various points of the program. Same goes for the "architecture" of a software system.
As a programmer, that's what you're usually do "in your head" when understanding or writing code.
I do a lot of that by visualizing. I'd be interested to know how people with aphantasia are doing it.
Things I seem to be average or above average at that I’d expect aphantasia to be a disadvantage for:
- the “chimp test” (search if you don’t know what this is)
- chess (but I have hit a wall at 1500 on chess.com and I find it very hard to explore future moves in my head more than a few. I feel like if I studied chess 8 hours a day for 30 years I still couldn’t hope to play blindfold chess)
- remembering numbers and computer facts.
- spelling including remembering spellings of obscure surnames I’ve never heard of before
I think even people without aphantasia can’t typically use visualisation for reliable storage of things even in the short term, correct me if I’m wrong. A extremely rare few have a photographic memory.
I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms 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.
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.
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I'd get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain
I have a theory that Aphantasia is the symptom of something else, and this other thing relates to how the brain of such individuals stores information. I think it's stored in a more "compressed" state.
As an example, I find myself remembering where info is and not what the info acrually was.
Humans are not homogeneous. I think this is a huge evolutionary advantage, different mental modes improved our survivability.
But of course in modern day life such "divergence" can lead to pathology.
Aphantasia is usually associated with spatial memory difficulties [1].
Anecdotal, but I am aphantasic (almost zero visualisation) and also have low spatial awareness (can't navigate without a map or GPS). I have no issues with driving or map reading, though.
In contrast, someone I know can almost perfectly visualise things mentally, but they struggle with reading maps. They can also navigate perfectly without requiring assistance.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...
I also get lost or disoriented in big city centres but in a natural park or trek I'm totally fine.
Anyway, it was an article like this that made me realize others could do this "visulization" thing, and it wasn't just pure metaphor. So weird.
Next, people say they have "inner voices". That can't be real! (/s) (again, like aphantasia, I found out that others have inner voices, and that explains some more things that made no sense to me!)
... I keep running into people that "cannot imagine this". That is so weird, I can't imagine people HAVING "pictures in their head" and "inner voices". I can comprehend it as an idea, but it just does not seem real.
Side note : this is not related to dreams. Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses and complex stories, and almost never related to anything in one's daily life. Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.
What you can "see" when your eyes are closed has no connection with visualisation either. There are no photons hitting your retina. So aphantasia and dreams can be related.
> Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses
Why "of course"? It looks like it's a spectrum, too. I have total aphantasia like you do, and my dreams are also greyscale, foggy and vignetted (only the centre is somewhat visible).
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
This book is a great, easy to read, science-based explainer.
https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SDAM/comments/nkolwi/my_attempt_at_...
Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
The only thing I remembered about the main character was that she had a scar on her face.
Fans were nitpicking every single strand of hair and I was like "You guys remember that, do you make notes when reading or what?". Apparently people visualize books so hard that they "see" the characters and remember them.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.
I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
For someone with aphantasia, the failure of the "What Do Most Visualizers See?" section is that it is still just a wall of words. I have to imagine what a visualizer might see, which is, of course, difficult for me!
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
Because phantasia seems to me to be just memory of actual qualia having actually experienced seeing something. No? Can't people with aphantasia remember that experience in any kind of vivid sense? Because "the concept of a beach" is something that an LLM can read from a corpus, and so can a person, even if they never experienced one.
Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all.
I don't buy that over 10%+ of HN has proper aphantasia, though. I wouldn't trust my own mind at self-reporting anything.
But it is also not likely that an absence of sensory imagery is without impact, i.e. that only the latent representations matter. You can see this in studies where aphantasics can't be subconsciously primed by images as easily [1], have skin conductance responses to visual stimuli less to imagery compared to normal people [2], and miss more visual details when attempting to redraw complex images from memory [3]. I.e. the visualizations are likely important in some cases, with the latent (non-visual) representations alone being deficient in some very particular cases, at least.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29175093/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383478/
I wrote a failed novel some years ago. There were several problems with it, but the geography was not one of them. I can still visualise the headland it's set on made of dark volcanic rock, the nearby village, the low lying islets off the coast and the rounded mountain at the end of the bay. I can visualise the routes between all of these, and they're entirely imaginary... Although nothing that would seem out of place in the real world. The locations play a large part in the story.
The brain does usually distinguish between internal visualisation and real life memories. When it doesn't, and hallucinations occur, that's when mental illness can arise.
when I am trying to visualize something I dont know about or know very little about I have to draw it in my mind instead of instantly visualize it .
example - like pretzel , I saw this for the first or second time in my life, so I have to draw it out. not like a house or horse or..
Totally useless of course -- but it was a weird discovery nonetheless.
My guess is my eyelids don't block off enough light. Coincidentally, i have some trouble sleeping with light sources present.
Only the excessively literal think that this is what people mean when they say they "see" an image in their mind. Everyone else understands what you describe (imagining an object and conjuring up an image in your mind) as what the metaphorical "seeing" in "seeing in your mind" means.
What you describe, about imagining an apple, that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
That's an oversimplification. I have a friend who says that they can visualise things mentally exactly like in real life, with their eyes closed or open, and that they can also make changes to those images, such as changing the colour of an apple from red to blue, or rearranging furniture in an imagined room.
Of course they might be lying, but if we ignore that possibility, it definitely doesn't sound like a figure of speech.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of:
What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading).OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wouldn't think that people literally imagined an apple, either, and yet here we are. But let's assume that people don't usually literally imagine pictures of the numbers in their mind when they add them.
Take 12. Add 7 do it. Now you have 19, right?
My mental imagery of adding 12 + 7 = 19 is nearly identical to that of picturing a spinning cow. Take a cow. Spin it. Now you have a spinning cow, right?
In both cases, those are just facts. Now, higher math does look like something to me, as does writing code. Those do have geometric shapes for me, kinds of blobby things with curved edges but not colors, except maybe rainbowy shimmers on those curves. I can feel the shapes moving and bending, and that moving and bending makes them makes sense to me. "OK, so I'm trying to do a binary search of this set... Alright, so if I push this shape into there... Oh! That'd work! Alright." But in no case do those shape-like things resemble anything I've ever seen in the real world.
However, I also have the ability to mathematically evaluate an equation and graph it on a mental visualization of a graph. I've been able to do that in 2d and 3d for a range of quadratic, cubic, and quartic graphs since high school. Also asymptotes, hyperbolas, sinusoidal functions. You know those youtube videos where they do the CGI animations to show a rolling cylinder tracing out a sine wave? I've been able to do that in my mind since I was a teen.
In high school I would do calculus rate of change functions in my head with a visualization like a laser going from perpendicular to a wall to parallel with the wall, and how the speed of the point at the end of the beam on the wall approaches light speed as the beam approaches approaches parallel, or the shrinking surface area of a liquid in a vertical conical funnel.
The funnel i imagined is yellow with an equilateral cone and a long neck that tapers to a half inch and has a worn, wrinkled blue white and red sticker from being run through the dishwasher a few times. It's injection molded and not shaved/sanded. Excessive detail for a feature of a math problem, but it's there anyway.
For me a spinning cow can have horns or be a holstein heifer or an angus steer or a dairy calf, or a buffalo. Could be a chik fil a cow. Or the one from Barnyard...right, Barnyard? the Dreamworks movie...
I can go back and read pages of books and documents that I have already read in my mind, which means (with effort) I can retread any sheet music I've ever played, or redo the math that I did in calculus and chemistry and physics classes. For a long time it completely ruined re-reading books for me because I would know exactly what was coming and I didn't need to turn the page.
I used the sheet music thing to teach myself guitar based on what I learned on trumpet through recall of arpeggios and and scales. Notes are also synesthetic and I can make them dance off the page in my head.
I personally don't experience anything that I would consider "visualization", and I am also terrible at drawing, but I can reproduce a photorealistic drawing of a photograph if I am allowed to look at the photograph while drawing.
I can write about things in far more detail than I can draw them. Both from my imagination and sometimes memory. I can remember the floor plan of certain buildings I haven't set foot in for over thirty years. (Or at least the parts I had access to.) I can remember which direction they are orientated in, and where the sun rose and set in relation to them. As me to do a drawing, as opposed to a diagram, and I will struggle due to poor art skills.
My drawing skills are more to do with the fact I have mild dyspraxia than my ability to visualise. My handwriting is pretty atrocious too for similar reasons. My visualisation skills are far from perfect but still much better than anything I can draw.
It's very surprising!
Then I wonder what it must feel like for that person to read sighted people on the Internet debate their supposed lack of visualization abilities.
E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.
I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.
Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
In my experience, my issue is not with being able to conjure the mental image + sounds, but holding on to it long enough; which, I suspect is just a matter of my degraded attention.
Anyways, this is fascinating stuff. One of the proponents of visualization/mental practice is Molly Gebrian, a brilliant violist, who, by her own admission, can't "visualize" sounds, but relies on conceptual evocations of the act. (https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain)
as an "aphant" (never knew that was a word) I get really vivid visuals on certain psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or DMT. Not so much acid, however.
- need one for alzheimers
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92...
including:
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
It's called hypnagogia, and is indeed involuntary.
I’m curious about a potential link between aphantasia and autism. I’m 37 on the Autism Spectrum Quotient scale (test link below if anyone’s interested in doing it). “Significant autistic traits.” It makes sense to me that my inability to visualise people’s faces might make me less empathetic with others. Aphantasia might explain why I imagine systems, concepts and ideas rather than people, things and events.
https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient
If you cannot visualize things in your mind, and seeing is just transforming light into visual imagery, how do you know you're actually "seeing" anything? The data goes to your brain but you just process the image without actively observing visuals, you just know what's there in front of you, but as data. If you can't see visuals, what else can't you see? Conscious processes?
The analogy to use would be like an LLM's way of "seeing" an image: it describes it into words and then recognizes what it is. A human brain would just do this much faster. Aphantasiac brains.