Like quite a few people I discovered aphantasia and the fact I had it simultaneously. This was 0nly in the last few years as articles on the topic appeared. Since then I have been analysing my experiences relative to what I have been told is normal. Art tutorials I find especially odd, because they analytically break things into components the way I would. If people can visualise, why don't they just draw what they see.
Thinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility. What if no-one had a mind's eye and Aphantasia is simply the lack of a delusion of a mind's eye. Such tricks performed by the brain are well documented with regard to time, decision-making, optical illusions. Derren Brown exploits a lot of these for entertainment.
That leads to a philosophical notion of whether the delusion of having a sensation qualifies as a sensation itself. Would that make it the opposite of blindsight where people have the experience of being blind while being able to experimentally demonstrate they can see?
At first glance it seems like there should be observable differences between the delusion hypothesis and the aphantasia hypothesis and thus they can be told apart experimentally.
It might also be possible to check with MRI which areas of the brain are active and whether there's a difference between those groups. If something known to process visual data is active in some people and not in others it would be evidence against the delusion hypothesis. In fact, some of the cited papers seem to be doing something like that.
I'm not sure I would trust a (f)MRI analysis, but I expect it could be tested for. Experiment designers can come up with very cunning methods to tweak these things out.
There are experiments showing that some people who are cortically blind can make decisions based upon the vision of which they have no sense experience. The McGurk effect demonstrates people having an experience that isn't real. In fact the McGurk effect also shows how difficult things get with terminology when you 'hear' something different to what you hear. It's the same problem I mentioned above. If you feel like you are hearing 'da' when your ears receive 'ba' what are you actually 'hearing'?
Its such such an odd conclusion you've come to, some art tutorials are technical, therefore everyone doesn't have a mind's eye.
Anyway, the reason why people have to have drawing explained to them is because you have to translate 3d into 2d. Perspective is hard. And different parts of the brain can, essentially, fight about it. I suggest "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" for more info.
Well I haven't come to a conclusion. It's a hypothesis and rests upon more than just art tutorials. That was just an example that I was reflecting upon. In fact I would say that it doesn't rest at all upon that but rather that it was the starting point of my thoughts.
Well, it's incorrect. I recently realised that I have got aphantasia too (in my late 30s!) and have talked to a fair few people now about it, including artists.
I've also 'cured' it, using a technique called image streaming, which most aphantasia sufferers can do. Very few aphantasia sufferers are actually incapable of using their mind's eye. It's hard, but apparently it gets better with practice. I have "seen" a mind's eye picture. It took me about 6 days before I saw something. I've not kept it up as it was kinda cool, but I've got enough projects on at the moment without adding another.
An easy test for you is to ask a friend to picture a person. Now ask what colour their coat is. For me and you, we have to make that up, add a new property to the description that is essentially a list of properties we know a person should have. For them, they already know, as they've "seen" a picture of that person. They don't say that they'll add the purple coat property to the list of characteristics, they have already seen a picture where the person was wearing a purple coat.
It's not mass delusion, it's a real thing. Also, of interest, is that there are degrees of skill, so some people have extremely vivid mind's eye, and some people have fuzzy, or black and white, or not very detailed, etc. Here's a good starter article:
Did image streaming get you vivid images, or just images, period? I have dull and fleeting mental images, but they're there. Am wondering if I can expand them.
It's supposed to improve it. I don't really know, there's little scientific study on it, and some people claiming it's tosh vs some people saying it worked for them.
I did it for about a week before I started seeing images, so it does take some practice and some time. I found recording myself while I did it helped me to keep speaking, which helped the process. The first few days were frustratingly without any progress, but things did start to come together about day 6 or 7.
At the time I had a ridiculous amount of projects I was trying to do, realized I was overwhelmed and this was one of the ones I have parked until a later date. I will try it again as it did seem to be working.
It’s an interesting concept but to me there’s enough evidence that people really can make images in their head while I cannot.
I remember being really amazed at photo-fit artists and how they could recreate faces someone else had seen just from an explanation. It was only once I realised I couldn’t make images in my head that I realised it wasn’t the artist who had super-powers, it was the person who could actually remember someone else’s appearance in their head and tell them what to draw.
It's interesting to talk! I believe I have rather the inverse of aphantasia — I "see" music as shapes and colors in my mind's eye. Also I think in pictures and relationships which I have to translate into words after the fact.
Whether it is a delusion or not is interesting. It might be moot. Maybe the judgement of realness or delusion is whether it is a competitive advantage or not. I have read that people with more synesthesia than me who can e.g. see numbers in colors, these people can pick out numbers faster off a page as they just go by the color. The color is processed in at a lower level, so it does come out as a competitive advantage.
For me, the visualization of everything is useful in interface design. Conversely I find it hard to talk to people sometimes due to the translation lag.
Re. the last paragraph, the delusion of a sensation vs. the sensation itself: Very interesting. The vision of the visual field in front of you, the vision of the surfaces and things and light in front of you, that vision does not exist there — it only exists inside your mind, physically inside your head. It is the delusion. Furthermore, the colors you might see do not exist at all.
A few counter-questions to poke at your hypothesis:
Are you able to imagine sound? To me, imagining and hearing sound, and imagining and seeing images are equivalent relations. It seems obvious to me, but of course since we're talking about the literal differences of the way human minds can function here, I can see how it might not be to some.
Do you dream at all? I can still picture a lot of scenes from my most vivid dreams.
Do you read fiction? It's hard to imagine what's that like if I can't, well, paint a picture of the scenes you're trying to imagine, like in a movie.
(not the person you're replying to, but as someone with aphantasia I'll bite...)
I can imagine sounds extremely well. For songs I feel like I have a CD player in my head, remembering even surprisingly subtle nuances and bits of a song. No musical background at all - maybe I should have been one.
Dreams are sometimes extremely vivid - sometimes I wake up astonished and the colors and the imagery I saw, but the memory quickly fades. After finding out about aphantasia I'm frustrated to hear that others can do the same thing while awake.
Read tons and tons of SciFi for the last 40 years. No images through, it's like listening to a radio play. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to movies, TV, and comic books - for the supplied visual material.
I'm mildly aphantadic. I can see flashes of image, but can't hold them, and with little colour. I feel this has worsened with time.
However, I can know where objects are in a room and am excellent at navigating a city in my mind. It's like the data is there, but I can't visualize it, if that makes sense.
Music and sound recall is excellent. I have good memory of spoken words, and I can play songs in my head in what seems like full detail.
I dream. I kept a dream journal for a while and had a lot of detail. Though, I think I had more visualization then. I can definitely still recall dreams with a lot of detail though. But it's like my waking thoughts: the images aren't vivid.
Fiction is easy. I don't have visuals in the rest of my life, so I'm hardly missing them there. I think the same thing happens where I imagine a room with objects, but I just can't quite see it. But it's there.
What is hard is poetry, most of it I simply can't get into. There are a few exceptions. I've liked some ancient greek stuff, and I liked Felix Dennis. But most is just dull for me.
I'm not really into hiphop and it occurs to me this could be part of it....
I am aphantasiac. I can imagine sound, but I bet it's not the way a person who 'hears it' does.
I play piano and sing (badly), so when I imagine sounds it's imagining moving the muscles to create them -- either my fingers or vocal chords. By 'imagining moving' I mean similar to subvocalization or imagining, like, throwing a ball or something -- there is clearly some interaction between my muscles and my brain when I do it, like it is simulating the muscle activations necessary without actually executing them.
I imagine sounds, better than most people I think. I wouldn't say I hear the sounds I play in my head but I can run a recording though my head and sense, for example, the differences between two instances of the same tune, like switching back and forth between a live and studio recording of a song in my head.
It makes me particularly good at identifying tunes from the first few notes.
I dream, my memory of dreams is much worse than most.
I used to read a lot of fiction, I don't anymore due to depression, when I finished a book it tended to send me into a crash.
When I did read fiction the words on the page were what was happening. It feels to me like painting a scene from the words and then looking at it with your mind's eye to get the experience is just a middle step that I skip, the words provide the experience directly.
I remember a talk (Ted maybe) about this, the theory being no one actually saw in pictures. As a demonstration the audience was asked to 'picture' a pirate with a peg leg; Once the picture was firmly in their mind they were then asked what colour of trousers/shirt the pirate was wearing. IF they were actually picturing the pirate it would be as simple as looking but most people didn't initially know and had to 'paint' in trousers/shirt and colour them before answering. Presumably if their mind actually held a picture they would have noticed the lack of trousers, or the lack of colour.
The talk went further to suggest that we don't actually 'see' with our eyes either, that our eyes and senses sends raw information, more like a description and the concepts are built in our mind, our experience might be like we're looking through our eyes and see a kind of picture of the world; But actually that is an illusion and our visual experience is more conceptually based which is why we are vulnerable to things like focus-blindness and other optical illusions where any kind of camera or picture taking device would not be.
Interestingly, the clear image we think we see with our eyes is very much an illusion (or rather: best effort reconstruction). The area our eyes can see sharp in high resolution is tiny, and our peripheral vision is mostly greyscale. Yet we think we see everything sharp in full color.
A similar thing may happen with mental images. You "see" the pirate, but unless you are looking at the trousers you can't tell their color (the same would work with a real life pirate in front of you)
If vision was actually made up of conceptually 'tagged' zones, then it would stand to reason that the hierarchical structure would only be developed within our 'focus', so that makes sense.
However, if i had a picture of a pirate, even a cursory glance would tell me if he had trousers on, even in the absence of hairy legs, censored, smudged, missing, i would notice it instantly and know it was missing before being asked.. but not if the image was in my mind, which means mental images don't act like actual images.
Elsewhere in the comments, a person suggests this exact test as a way of telling whether someone is aphantasic or not (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805666). I also remain unconvinced since I seem to construct details such as these automatically. In other words, I do believe I see the colour of the shirt even before the question is asked (though not always).
Interestingly enough, as I followed along with your description of the demonstration, I too "painted in" the pirate. But when analyzing the rest of the scene, I realized that I had already created the background of the picture (ship, deck, sea, sky, rigging) and just had to look at those elements.
I wonder if the things like ship, deck, sea, sky, rigging have sub-hierarchical tags that are missing in the same way the shirt or trousers colors were missing from the concept of a pirate.
Ha! As I was reading that and pictured my pirate I was focusing on getting the drape of his pantaloons correct, so they hung over the top of the peg leg just so. When I went back to check color I realized it was like a coloring book image, thickly inked, but colorless.
> What if no-one had a mind's eye and Aphantasia is simply the lack of a delusion of a mind's eye.
The article proposes and falsifies a different hypothesis (that aphantasic subjects actually have a mind's eye but have the delusion that they don't) but the scientific argument is equally valid against this hypothesis. There is a difference in implicit behavior (in this case, priming during binocular rivalry), so the difference between aphantasic and non-aphantasic individuals seems to go deeper than metacognition.
This happened to me. Saw a Facebook post forma friend and then realized I had it, and all the implications and some difficulties in my academic and professional life.
I told my friends, some of whom went "ah-ha!". Oddly, someone who ran a lot of our WoW raids basically put 2+2 together and recognized why I had an almost impossible time on some bosses.
I also found out my mother has it - and she didnt know it was a thing either.
I had ALWAYS thought people were just bs'ing when someone would say stuff like "visualize this or that".
It's a shame that it feels like it hampers (or partly hampers) a lot of fields I am very interested in.
I have 0 visual ability when awake, but fully vivid dreams and vivid lucid dreaming... so theres just something that turns that off completely while fully awake.
Just because you don't experience images doesn't mean nobody else does either. What is it with this thought process? Stop being so self-absorbed and closed- minded to other experiences. This is yet another thread where some people aren't willing to accept others have a different sense experience or behavior or whatever else and it's infuriating. Your experience doesn't invalidate the experience of somebody else, and using your experience as the basis for this doubt is incredibly self-centered.
I don't and I have never doubted in somebody not seeing images in their head when they reported that was the case, even if I do see these images, however clearly or unclearly. I don't doubt your aphantasia on the basis of my having a different sense experience.
I certainly did not expect a simple musing to evoke such an emotive response from multiple people.
This in itself is probably worthy of study (and I hope someone is already researching this area).
That people have different experiences is uncontroversial, but the depth of feeling that seems to come from a challenge to one's sense experience seems disproportionately severe.
Consider the Blue and Black/White and Gold dress and Laurel, Yanni. There were extremely heated arguments over these otherwise trivial curiosities.
> the depth of feeling that seems to come from a challenge to one's sense experience seems disproportionately severe.
Yes. Because the lack of empathy is appalling. Whether it's this topic or the dress color or whatever, there's a crazy amount of lack of empathy for other points of view and other ways of experiencing the world - thus, all the pointless arguments over something that is just down to equally valid ways the brain interprets the world. I never argued with anybody what the right color was, because that was never the point or the interesting part of the whole thing - the interesting idea was what part of the brain is responsible for the differences from person to person, and that people take for granted how they experience the world.
> I think your harsh reaction to his thought experiment is entirely anti-intellectual.
I don't think that's the case. A lot of racist or discriminating ideas can come from a place of "Well, my basis for thought is my own direct experience with no regard for how other people experience it or the validity of that experience." When his doubting of other peoples sense experience is solely based on his own sense experience without any interest in scientific basis or context, it's not an intellectual line of thought - it's just pseudo-intellectual rationalization for his own sense experience.
Again, I am not claiming this to be true, just that it would be an interesting possibility. I'm not sure why this deserves such an abusive response.
My experience does not invalidate yours, but neither does yours invalidate mine. My view is a minority perspective, you are discounting my _suggestion_ outright with a claim of being closed minded.
To be clear. I do not consider it to be wrong to have the experiences such as this or not. The notion that I have declared a majority of people broken is just plain false.
> you are discounting my _suggestion_ outright with a claim of being closed minded.
Ideas can be wrong, misguided, based on false assumptions, etc. The way I experience the world, or you experience the world, is not wrong - it's just how it is.
> just that it would be an interesting possibility.
This interesting possibility is based on the idea that your experience is somehow indicative of a "higher" or more truthful version of reality than everybody else's. I don't see how it's in any way helpful or productive.
I'm mostly aphantasic: I get brief flashes of images, completely out of my control, and I can't hold onto them; images appear and disappear in a split second. After learning about aphantasia and the very surprising reality that some people can just see whatever they want in their head I started practicing. I've only gotten slightly better in about two years of practice. Best results are as I'm falling asleep, but I still cannot force an image to appear, I just try to hang on to whatever shows up, though it still doesn't last longer than a couple seconds. So this doesn't seem like something one can meaningfully improve through practice :/
Your comment made something click for me: I just realised that I'm losing this ability somehow.
I'm in my late twenties, and as a teenager I was very into reading novels, very dreamy and would daydream constantly about things ( real-world situations, memories, or fantastic ideas).Nowadays I barely get into fiction, pretty much all I read is either technical or essays, and it's been a while since I have a memorable dream. My memory is horrible for personal events too.
I don't know whether this development of my personality is due of barely being able to see something in my mind, or the other way around - but I just tried, and realized that I can't do it anymore. I try to visualize a car, or a landscape, and I just can't, only abstract concepts come to my mind. I'm only getting flashes of an image when trying to "see" familiar faces, like those of my family.
Are you on a low-carb diet by any chance? I only ask because I've been on one for a while and one reason I suspect I'm having similar effects as you're describing is maybe because of long-term consequences of carb restriction.
interesting hypothesis. i have been on keto for quite some time a year ago until i decided that it's not for me as it makes me totally numb and uncreative.
and i have complete aphantasia, i don't see anything in my mind at all. but that has always been the case. maybe there is a correlation between the need for carbs and aphantasia?
soo, that is very anecdotal - does anybody else share this kind of symptoms when on carb restriction?
Nope, doesn't fit for me. I work out and I guess I have a pretty high metabolism because I've always been quite thin, so I put that advantage to good use by not exactly eating clean - I eat plenty of fast food.
I am aphantasic at least since I'm 14. I definitly wasn't (as) aphantasic around the age of 10-12. I used to daydream a lot back then, and when reading fiction I had an image in my mind how those characters looked. In a way I still daydream when I don't constantly distract myself with my phone, I just shifted to "daydreaming" in more abstract concepts instead of visual imagery. And while most of my reading has shifted to technical and other nonfiction work, I very much still enjoy fiction.
Though as I am typing this out I am questioning my motives for liking fiction. I like fiction mostly for exploration of moral and ethics, as well as philosophical questions. Basically I read fiction to further my understanding of the world, which is the same reason I read a lot of non-fiction.
Yes, my experience is very similar. I do enjoy novels and sagas such as A song of Ice and Fire, but what I enjoy is the accumulation of information (plot, lineages, scheming, conspiracies, etc). It's all abstract. I find myself glancing over most of the descriptions, since they're nothing more than empty filler for me.
If I try to play an RPG game now, instead of enjoying the feeling of being inside a new world I'm just eagerly waiting for new plot developments while being frustrated at having to walk through places that the old me would have loved to explore.
Interesting. I'm in my early 30s and also feel my ability is declining. I recall at age 23 arriving in a new country and being able to recall in detail my whole drive in and first day. Can not imagine such things now. I can recall the day, and move through it, but without colours and few images. The data is there, but I can't see it, if that makes sense.
Any head injuries, antibiotic use or other big changes?
(Not sure about antibiotics, but I did lose some pre sleep visualations after a course of them, I think)
Try playing chess. I found the visualisation the game demands to have greatly increased my enjoyment of fiction—the visuals become so much more detailed.
I'm curious if any of the Buddhist visualization techniques would help, particularly vajrayana practices. I can dig some up if you're interested, but they are boring and very rote. You start very simple and small and slowly add features or details one by one until they are static and achievable to whatever you are trying to visualize, but some of these prescribed years of practice. They also don't stop at just visualizations, so it may be irrelevant as well as impractical depending.
I'm not aphantasic, but experience something very similiar I guess. Sometimes when I'm exhausted and close to falling asleep, I experience very clear images of either faces or rooms. The faces always belong to people I know personally, change shape, then as soon as I become aware, they fade almost instantly. As for the rooms, I get the impression of being able to see with closed eyes. Usually I'd see my blanket, random items (such as a chocolate bar laying around) and room interior. Again these are very clear, but fade rather quickly.
This phenomenon I found referred to as astral projection[0], mostly in esoteric circles.
> as soon as I become aware, they fade almost instantly
I have this too. I feel that, for example, if I visualise a room of people I know but when I actually go and look at any detail then the situation goes. My hypothesis is that my immediate memory doesn't have the detail I'm wanting to look at so pushes me away rather than make something up or just give nothing.
The seeing with closed eyes is, I think, just the same but a local location.
i am a mathematician and i have aphantasia. i am pretty certain that not having to train not to rely on visual intuition was very helpful for getting into the kind of mathematics i do (set theory and very transfinite topology). on the other hand i am always completely amazed by what some people can "see" and feel in 3 or 4 dimensions. i have absolutely no access to this kind of spatial reasoning.
I remember an article about an architect who lost his mental visualization, he had no problem performing mental rotation puzzles. Can't seem to find the article, unfortunately.
In general, from reading a lot about this a few years back (when I found out "seeing a picture in your mind" is not just a metaphor...) it seems aphantasiacs don't have any difficulty with any kind of mental task.
Edit: here's the article, rotation stuff is in the 2nd paragraph on page 2.
I wanted to be an architect or similar in high school - but I was always painfully slow at drafting.
I also found throughout life I cannot easily transfer my ideas (like, if I have a concept for something, its not an image, its just a collection of ideas or concepts) into something physical
Can people really see something that they imagine? I can only create a conceptual image in my head but I don't really see anything. It's like a symbolic version of the image. If I imagine a beach, I can tell where sand, ocean and sky are located but I don't see anything visually.
That's my own experience as well. I would guess that this is how most people experience 'imagination'.
Same with faces: I guess nobody can really 'see' a face in their imagination, at least not for more than a few seconds of high-resolution short-term memory. They can, however, use their knowledge about nose shapes etc. to construct a symbolic model of the face in their mind.
A little while ago I watched a series called The Brain with David Eagleman and one thing that really stuck with me was how the eyes and brain interact.
The eyes are not connected straight to the main brain, they feed into a 'frame buffer' which creates an image. The brain then looks at what is in the 'frame buffer' and can also add/feedback into it.
This is partially why psychosis can seem so real. One part of our brain feeds into the 'frame buffer', the other part of the brain interpreting what you see can't tell the difference between input from the eyes and feedback from the brain. Those spiders you are seeing are as real to you as if you really do see them with your eyes.
This also goes some way to explaining how the 'gorilla walking through the basketball game' illusion works and other visual tricks such as not seeing the blackout when your eyes move - you really didn't see that cyclist etc.
(I've explained that in my simple language from recollection as it's how I easily understand it.)
This is 100% me when I remember a beach scene, but my mom sees a photorealistic photo in her mind. This photo or movie quality seems more typical for memories for most people, whereas for synthetic imagination I think the ability to make it photorealistic varies more.
I have an unusually vivid imagination I think, but I absolutely see things that I imagine. I can also hear improvised music, voices, almost whatever I want.
Language is unfortunately constrained when discussing internal mental states; we use “imagination” to describe internal mental models of even non-image things.
Myself:
• I can “visualise” images moderately well; ditto the tingling feeling of UV light and pins and needles (the paresthesia, not the objects of the same names); and both real electric shocks and the experience of the same description that happens when withdrawing from SSRIs.
• I can “visualise” sounds, balance, sustained pressure, heat, and kinesthetic senses to the level they have sometimes become indistinguishable from my actual senses;
• I can sometimes switch off pain
• I cannot “visualise” smells or tastes at all. Pattern match to other similar tastes and smells is only possible while I am experiencing the thing I am trying to compare.
This is interesting. Can you elaborate? Is this something you have worked on or is it just intuitive for you?
I have been able to do this exactly once in my life, during a meditation session in which I was meditating on external sounds. I also had acute pain in my elbow, arthritis-related. At one point the access concentration became very focused, my sense of self disappeared and I could not distinguish myself spatially from the sounds I was hearing. At the same time the pain in my elbow also detached from me. It was still all present but it was just no longer my problem. The sense of relief, the surprise that this was possible, and the realisation I could do this with just my mind, the blissful feeling from the intense concentration; it all added up and I simply broke out into surprised, joyful, laughter. It dissipated in a minute or two after that. Therefore I'm curious by what you mean about being able to do this.
I’m not sure how to phrase it, but it’s not only as you describe. While I can make my pain “not my problem” — present but irrelevant, which is what I think you describe — I consider switching it off entirely to be very different.
For lack of better words: the situations have involved knowing the cause of the pain, knowing it represents nothing important, and making it totally cease from the point of view of my (I dislike this phrase but don’t have a better one) conscious self awareness.
I read that this was common and I polled people I knew. Some people can vividly recall many smells, whereas I can do maybe one or two, and only with so much difficulty that I'm not sure if I'm just tricking myself. I don't know if anyone can visualize the _elements_ of smells, though.
I'm also a games programmer. I make mental models too, I almost feel like it would be excessively restrictive if they had to have a visual representation. On the other hand, if I had mental visual representations, maybe I wouldn't be surrounded by a million bits of paper with weird things scribbled on them.
I have aphantasia (or am on the spectrum) and my mind can only see in "concepts" and flashes of light. I can't think of a banana and "see" it. The closest i get to visualization is recalling photographic snapshots of things but only if i saw a photo of it once.
One interesting aspect are psychedelics. I only get open-eye visuals but almost no closed-eye effects except for light flashes (black & white, no imagery), even on high doses of LSD/Mushrooms. But i do get dream-like, very abstract 'recreations' which are hard to describe. I get to relive memories etc, just not see them.
But, using DMT - i visualize like crazy with abstract / geometric colorful patterns. And even when totally sober, i sometimes dream/recall those patterns during sleep, which wakes me up immediately because it's so overwhelming compared to my dull normal dreams.
This makes me think that i actually can visualize, i just block it out (i'm a very headstrong/rational person) and i'm working with meditation techniques to open the gate (or chakra, if you're esoterically inclined) permanently, so far unsuccesfully.
I do think that more research here would be great as i'm convinced it also impacts creativity and thinking patterns. For example, my strong creativity outlet is music; visual art is foreign to me.
OK, so I'm either aphantasic, or there's some semantic confusion. Perhaps with me, I admit.
But anyway. Normally, I do not see stuff that isn't (arguably) there. With my eyes open, or closed. But I can imagine stuff, and reason based on those imagined images or whatever. That is, I can do all those object rotation tests. I can imagine some thing, and create it in wood or metal, without anything but crude drawings.
Or when I read a good description of a fight, for example, I can imagine how it would work. Or not, if it wouldn't.
But is this basically a form of blindsight?
Also, it was my impression that people who experience stuff that isn't there are typically diagnosed with some sort of psychosis. And from my experience with psychedelics, I know what that's like. Even with good marijuana, I sometimes see and hear people talking to me, just before I pass out.
I can't imagine how it would work if I were constantly seeing stuff that isn't there. How could I, for example, drive a car? Or walk across the room, even?
When I "imagine" images, they're not usually superimposed or mixed into the input from my eyes like you described. They're on like a "second computer monitor" in my head. Maybe this helps you understand what it's like?
I "see" what I imagine, but I also can see what it is that's in front of my eyes, and the two things don't conflict with each other.
So I have aphantasia, and I first realized when talking to someone about mental images and memories. They have photorealistic pictures in their mind, or even video scenes like a movie. At my best I have something like an expressionist painting with words and concepts arranged spatially on blobs of color representing the object. More typically, just blackness.
I mean, how does driving work, when you see what you imagine?
Edit: And now that I think of it, I have had some accidents where I reacted to what I expected the other driver to do. But they did something else. One in particular I remember. The car ahead of me had a turn signal flashing. I thought that it was the right one. Or at least, that's what I remembered. So I passed on the left. And hit the other car, because it had turned left. And I recall thinking that I actually saw the car turn right.
I think mentally imagining while driving is probably dangerous for everyone, normal and aphantasiac. It's a question I otherwise can't answer, since I just see mostly blackness. Though I liked nnnn's answer about a second monitor, separate from his visual input stream.
If that's a literally accurate description, then I am indeed aphantasic. Because I don't actually "see" anything. I can describe it as if I were seeing it. I know what d orbitals look like, and benzene rings, and rotating hypercubes and hyperspheres. But there's no experience of a "second monitor, separate from his visual input stream".
It does remind me of blindsight. That is, people who complain of blindess, but obviously do react to visual input.
The abstract of the paper contains the interesting insight "Aphantasic participants' self-rated visual object imagery was significantly below average, however their spatial imagery scores were above average".
From wikipedia "spatial imagery consists of mentally representing spatial relations between the parts or locations of the objects or movements.".
Analysing whether a written description of fight choreography would work in actual 3-dimensional space is very much spatial imagery, a strenght of aphantastic people.
I can also reason about the three-dimensional shape of a banana and create a technical drawing of one, rotate objects in my mind, fold objects in my mind etc. But all this sounds like spatial imagery, and does not involve me actually having a mental image.
Arguably, you have mental images. But you just don't "see" them. And if it's true that "their spatial imagery scores were above average", then not "seeing" mental images arguably works better ;)
(Going purely from my experience, so this might be anecdotal)
I wouldn't describe it as "mental images", but I certainly have mental representations. But these mental representations are about the 3d shape, the behavior, texture etc. Images on the other hand are not properties of an object, they are projections of 3d geometry into 2d space (with the added work of simulating light to properly shade the image). I suppose I would be decent at painting if I put the practice in it, but the idea of an actual mental image is foreign to me. For me, creating an image is basically a conscious translation task, and without a medium to record my progress I can't handle at best basic shapes.
Basically talking about images is no different to me than talking about textures, or the propagation of smells, or the orbits of planets.
Got an related idea from the IQ thread: is there a correlation between aphantasism and IQ? Most IQ tests require you to visually imagine the sequences that lead to the correct answer.
> "Most IQ tests require you to visually imagine the sequences that lead to the correct answer."
I think you assume it is required to do it visually only because you do it that way. Personally I've had no trouble with that kind of IQ test without using visualization.
In grade school, they did some testing on me for a study or something, and it had to do with visual stuff - my parents remember that I just came up with correct answers but I had a novel way of coming to them, and I think this gets to what you're saying.
I have an ok IQ and have aphantasia. It makes some questions harder I am pretty sure - I am always second guessing and re-checking because I cannot retain even a small amount of visual information.
I only found out about aphantasia early 2018. I had always suspected there was something different/difficent and went to a university study, and just reaffirmed my IQ and discovered that I reallly get slow on some tasks - I find the answer fast enough but I have a lifetime of distrust on my processes, so just out of habit do double or triple checks (which dont really make better answers, just verify what I am writing is what was meant, I guess). Of course, no one knew about aphantasia at this point.
I failed geometry in jr.high hard. It was almost impossible. But making and passing calculus was relatively easy (long story short: parents moved, lied about passing geometry).
I have mild dyslexia, so I think that mixed with the other just makes it reallly hard.
I'm not quite sure if I have it or not. I visualize mostly in 3d but without a specific viewpoint, or more exactly I get a feel from how it would look from various viewpoints simultaneously. I find it easier to mentally see as a 2d picture, something I saw in photo, or on a screen.
If I specifically force myself to imagine how it would look if I was at a specific position looking in a specific direction (i.e. do the 2d projection), I can in-paint in my mind starting from a black canvas, focusing sequentially my attention on a part of the canvas making details appear at the center of attention. I scan the canvas a few times in-painting details, and then I try to mentally take a step back visualize all those various details in a unique coherent picture, by un-focusing attention. It kinda work, but it needs to get into it. It's easier to imagine looking at a photo from the scene I'm trying to visualize.
I noticed my eyes do some REM when I do this. Color and illumination comes last. Closing eyes helps.
I can mentally do a "street-view" experience of my home, moving inside and answer question about details, but I need to focus my attention first on the relevant area.
Those mental exercises are quite funny, not sure how useful they are though. Once you add some moving objects (like pendulums) in the scene in your mind, it gets even harder to make something coherent. Then you can add animals and people, wind. Noises, music. I guess when you add complexity, you must relax your attention to make a coherent global picture, then you get into a flow-like state, and it becomes more similar to a lucid dream.
On the other hand of the spectrum, I'm not quite sure about auras too. It's kind like of synesthesia but for people instead of numbers. I guess the brain hallucinate colors around object/people to make it faster to process. I find it quite unnecessary to hallucinate rather than having a specific feel about the person. And I feel it's quite reductive/intolerant to put/interact with people into a category based on subconscious perception. But I guess that if I was a bouncer, I'll probably be seeing colors around people too.
To conclude this already too long post, I think aphantasia is probably very correlated with hyper-attention.
I'm aphantasic, and like others here was blown away to learn that people can see things with their eyes closed. That statement seems like an oxymoron to me.
Once I started thinking about it more, I realised I can actually imagine a very precise scenario, except that it is always behind me. It could be similar to how a blind person perceives the world, not seeing anything but knowing that everything is there.
The way I see it, I can process two different worlds at once. I've always been very good at modeling abstract things in my head, e.g. binary trees or a graph.
One thing the Internet has been good for has been finding people with similar conditions. Knowing that many people can see images on demand alleviates some of my confusion; "Imagine yourself on a beach" to relax never made much sense to me.
I do feel I'm missing out somewhat on richness of experience. When I try to visualize it's as if there's just a texture to the blackness in my mind, like a handprint in mud.
I recently learned about Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). It's hard to tell based on textual descriptions, but it does seem to relate to aphantasia and the fact I can't recall most of the past, whether it be ten days or ten years ago.
Quite the other way round, excuse the possible off-topicness:
As a boy, way back in the sixties, age four or five, one day I overheard my parents talking of 'color tv' and the possibility of getting such a thing.
"What is that?" was my obvious question.
"A tv that can show colors, of course".
"But our tv does do color", I informed them, and was promptly told it didn't.
But of course it did. I was adamant. I knew that television was full of colors, and always had been. I could describe the colors of all sorts of things I'd seen on our tv. I remember knowing for a fact that a Volkswagen in some series I had been following was bright red. Stupid parents for not realising.
Next time the thing was turned on in all its vacuum tube glory, everything - to my immense disappointment - was greyscale, and remained so for several years until an actual color tv was actually purchased.
I was amazed to find out people have aphantasia. I'm def. a visual thinker. I went to art school, and had a hell of a time, until I could competently draw out what I imagined in my head (my hand/eye coordination had to catch up!). But even before that, I could visualize a lot of detail on just what I wanted something to look like. I could see a detailed part, or manipulate the visual in my head.
I remember waking up and playing Tetris in my head before I got out of bed. I could keep track of the piece falling, the next piece and the board as it stood.
Even when I started programming, I would just remember like, the pattern the code made, and where it was within the file structure. I never used an IDE - I kinda felt like I could fit the entire thing in my head and just compile it dynamically to imagine what it would do. Some languages are easier to do that with then others. Even before that, learning HTML coincided with dreams of simply writing HTML and seeing the results.
I had a nightlight until I was at least 12 (off and on), as I would imagine the craziest things happening while I slept. I also suffered from sleep paralysis - I can still picture some of the demons that were on top of me from 25 years ago.
To this day, I live in a daytime world of constantly daydreaming, making up scenarios, and playing them out. I probably shoulda went into film.
Here, something you might find even stranger than aphantasia, a stark contrast in visual thinking between people WITHOUT aphantasia, i.e. between people with a functioning mind's eye:
Has anyone had aphantasia onset after antibiotics? Or, a worsening.
I have had poor visualization for years. I do remember being able to see images in my head when younger though. In a fair of detail in some cases.
A few years ago (when I had already lost much visualization) I took a course of antibiotics for MRSA. After that I lost the ability to see colourful visions pre-sleep.
I used to get the most fantastic images in full colour with incredible detail. Then when on the antibiotics they seemed dark. Now I can still have visualizations, but I can't see them. (Meaning, they're happening, and I get glimpses, but I can't continuously view them)
Sort of annoying as they were a good way to fall asleep. Focussing on them hasn't seemed to rebuild the ability.
I went from hyperphantasia as a child to complete aphantasia in my early teens. When I was <= 7 y.o. my favourite past time was playing and directing vividly realistic movies behind my closed eyelids. Sometimes I could even visualize things with my eyes open, creating a kind of "extended reality" with imagined things or creatures interacting with real ones. This ability started to gradually disappear around the time I went to school, and now I'm completely unable to visualize anything (other than occasional involuntary hypnagogues before falling asleep).
As others I learned that this was not a universal thing a couple years ago. Ironically I studied physics. It makes a lot of sense why learning certain things were so damn difficult for me now.
It’s crazy how little we understand our mind still.
In the 'New Yorker', 2003, the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks explain that he had a very poor mental imagery. But once, it took a strong medication and his mental visual skill increased a lot but after stopping his medication everything got back to poor.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8da6/ee8fa95f52476fc5d81f60... (page 9)
105 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadThinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility. What if no-one had a mind's eye and Aphantasia is simply the lack of a delusion of a mind's eye. Such tricks performed by the brain are well documented with regard to time, decision-making, optical illusions. Derren Brown exploits a lot of these for entertainment.
That leads to a philosophical notion of whether the delusion of having a sensation qualifies as a sensation itself. Would that make it the opposite of blindsight where people have the experience of being blind while being able to experimentally demonstrate they can see?
It might also be possible to check with MRI which areas of the brain are active and whether there's a difference between those groups. If something known to process visual data is active in some people and not in others it would be evidence against the delusion hypothesis. In fact, some of the cited papers seem to be doing something like that.
There are experiments showing that some people who are cortically blind can make decisions based upon the vision of which they have no sense experience. The McGurk effect demonstrates people having an experience that isn't real. In fact the McGurk effect also shows how difficult things get with terminology when you 'hear' something different to what you hear. It's the same problem I mentioned above. If you feel like you are hearing 'da' when your ears receive 'ba' what are you actually 'hearing'?
Anyway, the reason why people have to have drawing explained to them is because you have to translate 3d into 2d. Perspective is hard. And different parts of the brain can, essentially, fight about it. I suggest "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" for more info.
I've also 'cured' it, using a technique called image streaming, which most aphantasia sufferers can do. Very few aphantasia sufferers are actually incapable of using their mind's eye. It's hard, but apparently it gets better with practice. I have "seen" a mind's eye picture. It took me about 6 days before I saw something. I've not kept it up as it was kinda cool, but I've got enough projects on at the moment without adding another.
An easy test for you is to ask a friend to picture a person. Now ask what colour their coat is. For me and you, we have to make that up, add a new property to the description that is essentially a list of properties we know a person should have. For them, they already know, as they've "seen" a picture of that person. They don't say that they'll add the purple coat property to the list of characteristics, they have already seen a picture where the person was wearing a purple coat.
It's not mass delusion, it's a real thing. Also, of interest, is that there are degrees of skill, so some people have extremely vivid mind's eye, and some people have fuzzy, or black and white, or not very detailed, etc. Here's a good starter article:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34039054
I did it for about a week before I started seeing images, so it does take some practice and some time. I found recording myself while I did it helped me to keep speaking, which helped the process. The first few days were frustratingly without any progress, but things did start to come together about day 6 or 7.
At the time I had a ridiculous amount of projects I was trying to do, realized I was overwhelmed and this was one of the ones I have parked until a later date. I will try it again as it did seem to be working.
I remember being really amazed at photo-fit artists and how they could recreate faces someone else had seen just from an explanation. It was only once I realised I couldn’t make images in my head that I realised it wasn’t the artist who had super-powers, it was the person who could actually remember someone else’s appearance in their head and tell them what to draw.
Whether it is a delusion or not is interesting. It might be moot. Maybe the judgement of realness or delusion is whether it is a competitive advantage or not. I have read that people with more synesthesia than me who can e.g. see numbers in colors, these people can pick out numbers faster off a page as they just go by the color. The color is processed in at a lower level, so it does come out as a competitive advantage.
For me, the visualization of everything is useful in interface design. Conversely I find it hard to talk to people sometimes due to the translation lag.
Re. the last paragraph, the delusion of a sensation vs. the sensation itself: Very interesting. The vision of the visual field in front of you, the vision of the surfaces and things and light in front of you, that vision does not exist there — it only exists inside your mind, physically inside your head. It is the delusion. Furthermore, the colors you might see do not exist at all.
Could be a type of synesthesia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Chromesthesia
Are you able to imagine sound? To me, imagining and hearing sound, and imagining and seeing images are equivalent relations. It seems obvious to me, but of course since we're talking about the literal differences of the way human minds can function here, I can see how it might not be to some.
Do you dream at all? I can still picture a lot of scenes from my most vivid dreams.
Do you read fiction? It's hard to imagine what's that like if I can't, well, paint a picture of the scenes you're trying to imagine, like in a movie.
(edited to clarify the last sentence)
I can imagine sounds extremely well. For songs I feel like I have a CD player in my head, remembering even surprisingly subtle nuances and bits of a song. No musical background at all - maybe I should have been one.
Dreams are sometimes extremely vivid - sometimes I wake up astonished and the colors and the imagery I saw, but the memory quickly fades. After finding out about aphantasia I'm frustrated to hear that others can do the same thing while awake.
Read tons and tons of SciFi for the last 40 years. No images through, it's like listening to a radio play. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to movies, TV, and comic books - for the supplied visual material.
However, I can know where objects are in a room and am excellent at navigating a city in my mind. It's like the data is there, but I can't visualize it, if that makes sense.
Music and sound recall is excellent. I have good memory of spoken words, and I can play songs in my head in what seems like full detail.
I dream. I kept a dream journal for a while and had a lot of detail. Though, I think I had more visualization then. I can definitely still recall dreams with a lot of detail though. But it's like my waking thoughts: the images aren't vivid.
Fiction is easy. I don't have visuals in the rest of my life, so I'm hardly missing them there. I think the same thing happens where I imagine a room with objects, but I just can't quite see it. But it's there.
What is hard is poetry, most of it I simply can't get into. There are a few exceptions. I've liked some ancient greek stuff, and I liked Felix Dennis. But most is just dull for me.
I'm not really into hiphop and it occurs to me this could be part of it....
I play piano and sing (badly), so when I imagine sounds it's imagining moving the muscles to create them -- either my fingers or vocal chords. By 'imagining moving' I mean similar to subvocalization or imagining, like, throwing a ball or something -- there is clearly some interaction between my muscles and my brain when I do it, like it is simulating the muscle activations necessary without actually executing them.
It makes me particularly good at identifying tunes from the first few notes.
I dream, my memory of dreams is much worse than most.
I used to read a lot of fiction, I don't anymore due to depression, when I finished a book it tended to send me into a crash.
When I did read fiction the words on the page were what was happening. It feels to me like painting a scene from the words and then looking at it with your mind's eye to get the experience is just a middle step that I skip, the words provide the experience directly.
The talk went further to suggest that we don't actually 'see' with our eyes either, that our eyes and senses sends raw information, more like a description and the concepts are built in our mind, our experience might be like we're looking through our eyes and see a kind of picture of the world; But actually that is an illusion and our visual experience is more conceptually based which is why we are vulnerable to things like focus-blindness and other optical illusions where any kind of camera or picture taking device would not be.
A similar thing may happen with mental images. You "see" the pirate, but unless you are looking at the trousers you can't tell their color (the same would work with a real life pirate in front of you)
However, if i had a picture of a pirate, even a cursory glance would tell me if he had trousers on, even in the absence of hairy legs, censored, smudged, missing, i would notice it instantly and know it was missing before being asked.. but not if the image was in my mind, which means mental images don't act like actual images.
I heard chess masters are way better than normal people at remembering legal chess positions but no better than average at remembering illegal ones.
So I think it could be about learning a better representation with fewer artifacts.
The article proposes and falsifies a different hypothesis (that aphantasic subjects actually have a mind's eye but have the delusion that they don't) but the scientific argument is equally valid against this hypothesis. There is a difference in implicit behavior (in this case, priming during binocular rivalry), so the difference between aphantasic and non-aphantasic individuals seems to go deeper than metacognition.
I told my friends, some of whom went "ah-ha!". Oddly, someone who ran a lot of our WoW raids basically put 2+2 together and recognized why I had an almost impossible time on some bosses.
I also found out my mother has it - and she didnt know it was a thing either.
I had ALWAYS thought people were just bs'ing when someone would say stuff like "visualize this or that".
It's a shame that it feels like it hampers (or partly hampers) a lot of fields I am very interested in.
I have 0 visual ability when awake, but fully vivid dreams and vivid lucid dreaming... so theres just something that turns that off completely while fully awake.
I don't and I have never doubted in somebody not seeing images in their head when they reported that was the case, even if I do see these images, however clearly or unclearly. I don't doubt your aphantasia on the basis of my having a different sense experience.
> Thinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility.
I think your harsh reaction to his thought experiment is entirely anti-intellectual.
This in itself is probably worthy of study (and I hope someone is already researching this area).
That people have different experiences is uncontroversial, but the depth of feeling that seems to come from a challenge to one's sense experience seems disproportionately severe.
Consider the Blue and Black/White and Gold dress and Laurel, Yanni. There were extremely heated arguments over these otherwise trivial curiosities.
Yes. Because the lack of empathy is appalling. Whether it's this topic or the dress color or whatever, there's a crazy amount of lack of empathy for other points of view and other ways of experiencing the world - thus, all the pointless arguments over something that is just down to equally valid ways the brain interprets the world. I never argued with anybody what the right color was, because that was never the point or the interesting part of the whole thing - the interesting idea was what part of the brain is responsible for the differences from person to person, and that people take for granted how they experience the world.
I don't think that's the case. A lot of racist or discriminating ideas can come from a place of "Well, my basis for thought is my own direct experience with no regard for how other people experience it or the validity of that experience." When his doubting of other peoples sense experience is solely based on his own sense experience without any interest in scientific basis or context, it's not an intellectual line of thought - it's just pseudo-intellectual rationalization for his own sense experience.
My experience does not invalidate yours, but neither does yours invalidate mine. My view is a minority perspective, you are discounting my _suggestion_ outright with a claim of being closed minded.
To be clear. I do not consider it to be wrong to have the experiences such as this or not. The notion that I have declared a majority of people broken is just plain false.
Ideas can be wrong, misguided, based on false assumptions, etc. The way I experience the world, or you experience the world, is not wrong - it's just how it is.
> just that it would be an interesting possibility.
This interesting possibility is based on the idea that your experience is somehow indicative of a "higher" or more truthful version of reality than everybody else's. I don't see how it's in any way helpful or productive.
Your comment made something click for me: I just realised that I'm losing this ability somehow.
I'm in my late twenties, and as a teenager I was very into reading novels, very dreamy and would daydream constantly about things ( real-world situations, memories, or fantastic ideas).Nowadays I barely get into fiction, pretty much all I read is either technical or essays, and it's been a while since I have a memorable dream. My memory is horrible for personal events too.
I don't know whether this development of my personality is due of barely being able to see something in my mind, or the other way around - but I just tried, and realized that I can't do it anymore. I try to visualize a car, or a landscape, and I just can't, only abstract concepts come to my mind. I'm only getting flashes of an image when trying to "see" familiar faces, like those of my family.
It could be some sort of deficiency though.
I am aphantasic at least since I'm 14. I definitly wasn't (as) aphantasic around the age of 10-12. I used to daydream a lot back then, and when reading fiction I had an image in my mind how those characters looked. In a way I still daydream when I don't constantly distract myself with my phone, I just shifted to "daydreaming" in more abstract concepts instead of visual imagery. And while most of my reading has shifted to technical and other nonfiction work, I very much still enjoy fiction.
Though as I am typing this out I am questioning my motives for liking fiction. I like fiction mostly for exploration of moral and ethics, as well as philosophical questions. Basically I read fiction to further my understanding of the world, which is the same reason I read a lot of non-fiction.
If I try to play an RPG game now, instead of enjoying the feeling of being inside a new world I'm just eagerly waiting for new plot developments while being frustrated at having to walk through places that the old me would have loved to explore.
Any head injuries, antibiotic use or other big changes?
(Not sure about antibiotics, but I did lose some pre sleep visualations after a course of them, I think)
This phenomenon I found referred to as astral projection[0], mostly in esoteric circles.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AstralProjection/comments/7ofaol/se...
I have this too. I feel that, for example, if I visualise a room of people I know but when I actually go and look at any detail then the situation goes. My hypothesis is that my immediate memory doesn't have the detail I'm wanting to look at so pushes me away rather than make something up or just give nothing.
The seeing with closed eyes is, I think, just the same but a local location.
Edit: here's the article, rotation stuff is in the 2nd paragraph on page 2.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120615154334/http://discovermag...
I also found throughout life I cannot easily transfer my ideas (like, if I have a concept for something, its not an image, its just a collection of ideas or concepts) into something physical
(found out about aphantasia early 2018)
Same with faces: I guess nobody can really 'see' a face in their imagination, at least not for more than a few seconds of high-resolution short-term memory. They can, however, use their knowledge about nose shapes etc. to construct a symbolic model of the face in their mind.
The eyes are not connected straight to the main brain, they feed into a 'frame buffer' which creates an image. The brain then looks at what is in the 'frame buffer' and can also add/feedback into it.
This is partially why psychosis can seem so real. One part of our brain feeds into the 'frame buffer', the other part of the brain interpreting what you see can't tell the difference between input from the eyes and feedback from the brain. Those spiders you are seeing are as real to you as if you really do see them with your eyes.
This also goes some way to explaining how the 'gorilla walking through the basketball game' illusion works and other visual tricks such as not seeing the blackout when your eyes move - you really didn't see that cyclist etc.
(I've explained that in my simple language from recollection as it's how I easily understand it.)
Myself:
• I can “visualise” images moderately well; ditto the tingling feeling of UV light and pins and needles (the paresthesia, not the objects of the same names); and both real electric shocks and the experience of the same description that happens when withdrawing from SSRIs.
• I can “visualise” sounds, balance, sustained pressure, heat, and kinesthetic senses to the level they have sometimes become indistinguishable from my actual senses;
• I can sometimes switch off pain
• I cannot “visualise” smells or tastes at all. Pattern match to other similar tastes and smells is only possible while I am experiencing the thing I am trying to compare.
This is interesting. Can you elaborate? Is this something you have worked on or is it just intuitive for you?
I have been able to do this exactly once in my life, during a meditation session in which I was meditating on external sounds. I also had acute pain in my elbow, arthritis-related. At one point the access concentration became very focused, my sense of self disappeared and I could not distinguish myself spatially from the sounds I was hearing. At the same time the pain in my elbow also detached from me. It was still all present but it was just no longer my problem. The sense of relief, the surprise that this was possible, and the realisation I could do this with just my mind, the blissful feeling from the intense concentration; it all added up and I simply broke out into surprised, joyful, laughter. It dissipated in a minute or two after that. Therefore I'm curious by what you mean about being able to do this.
For lack of better words: the situations have involved knowing the cause of the pain, knowing it represents nothing important, and making it totally cease from the point of view of my (I dislike this phrase but don’t have a better one) conscious self awareness.
I read that this was common and I polled people I knew. Some people can vividly recall many smells, whereas I can do maybe one or two, and only with so much difficulty that I'm not sure if I'm just tricking myself. I don't know if anyone can visualize the _elements_ of smells, though.
How many coders here also can't picture things in their mind visually for longer then a quick flash?
One interesting aspect are psychedelics. I only get open-eye visuals but almost no closed-eye effects except for light flashes (black & white, no imagery), even on high doses of LSD/Mushrooms. But i do get dream-like, very abstract 'recreations' which are hard to describe. I get to relive memories etc, just not see them.
But, using DMT - i visualize like crazy with abstract / geometric colorful patterns. And even when totally sober, i sometimes dream/recall those patterns during sleep, which wakes me up immediately because it's so overwhelming compared to my dull normal dreams.
This makes me think that i actually can visualize, i just block it out (i'm a very headstrong/rational person) and i'm working with meditation techniques to open the gate (or chakra, if you're esoterically inclined) permanently, so far unsuccesfully.
I do think that more research here would be great as i'm convinced it also impacts creativity and thinking patterns. For example, my strong creativity outlet is music; visual art is foreign to me.
But anyway. Normally, I do not see stuff that isn't (arguably) there. With my eyes open, or closed. But I can imagine stuff, and reason based on those imagined images or whatever. That is, I can do all those object rotation tests. I can imagine some thing, and create it in wood or metal, without anything but crude drawings.
Or when I read a good description of a fight, for example, I can imagine how it would work. Or not, if it wouldn't.
But is this basically a form of blindsight?
Also, it was my impression that people who experience stuff that isn't there are typically diagnosed with some sort of psychosis. And from my experience with psychedelics, I know what that's like. Even with good marijuana, I sometimes see and hear people talking to me, just before I pass out.
I can't imagine how it would work if I were constantly seeing stuff that isn't there. How could I, for example, drive a car? Or walk across the room, even?
So am I confused, or aphantasic?
When I "imagine" images, they're not usually superimposed or mixed into the input from my eyes like you described. They're on like a "second computer monitor" in my head. Maybe this helps you understand what it's like?
I "see" what I imagine, but I also can see what it is that's in front of my eyes, and the two things don't conflict with each other.
Here is another description of it, and a test in the first part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI
I mean, how does driving work, when you see what you imagine?
Edit: And now that I think of it, I have had some accidents where I reacted to what I expected the other driver to do. But they did something else. One in particular I remember. The car ahead of me had a turn signal flashing. I thought that it was the right one. Or at least, that's what I remembered. So I passed on the left. And hit the other car, because it had turned left. And I recall thinking that I actually saw the car turn right.
I'm glad that doesn't happen more often :)
It does remind me of blindsight. That is, people who complain of blindess, but obviously do react to visual input.
From wikipedia "spatial imagery consists of mentally representing spatial relations between the parts or locations of the objects or movements.".
Analysing whether a written description of fight choreography would work in actual 3-dimensional space is very much spatial imagery, a strenght of aphantastic people.
I can also reason about the three-dimensional shape of a banana and create a technical drawing of one, rotate objects in my mind, fold objects in my mind etc. But all this sounds like spatial imagery, and does not involve me actually having a mental image.
I wouldn't describe it as "mental images", but I certainly have mental representations. But these mental representations are about the 3d shape, the behavior, texture etc. Images on the other hand are not properties of an object, they are projections of 3d geometry into 2d space (with the added work of simulating light to properly shade the image). I suppose I would be decent at painting if I put the practice in it, but the idea of an actual mental image is foreign to me. For me, creating an image is basically a conscious translation task, and without a medium to record my progress I can't handle at best basic shapes.
Basically talking about images is no different to me than talking about textures, or the propagation of smells, or the orbits of planets.
I think you assume it is required to do it visually only because you do it that way. Personally I've had no trouble with that kind of IQ test without using visualization.
I only found out about aphantasia early 2018. I had always suspected there was something different/difficent and went to a university study, and just reaffirmed my IQ and discovered that I reallly get slow on some tasks - I find the answer fast enough but I have a lifetime of distrust on my processes, so just out of habit do double or triple checks (which dont really make better answers, just verify what I am writing is what was meant, I guess). Of course, no one knew about aphantasia at this point.
I failed geometry in jr.high hard. It was almost impossible. But making and passing calculus was relatively easy (long story short: parents moved, lied about passing geometry).
I have mild dyslexia, so I think that mixed with the other just makes it reallly hard.
If I specifically force myself to imagine how it would look if I was at a specific position looking in a specific direction (i.e. do the 2d projection), I can in-paint in my mind starting from a black canvas, focusing sequentially my attention on a part of the canvas making details appear at the center of attention. I scan the canvas a few times in-painting details, and then I try to mentally take a step back visualize all those various details in a unique coherent picture, by un-focusing attention. It kinda work, but it needs to get into it. It's easier to imagine looking at a photo from the scene I'm trying to visualize. I noticed my eyes do some REM when I do this. Color and illumination comes last. Closing eyes helps. I can mentally do a "street-view" experience of my home, moving inside and answer question about details, but I need to focus my attention first on the relevant area.
Those mental exercises are quite funny, not sure how useful they are though. Once you add some moving objects (like pendulums) in the scene in your mind, it gets even harder to make something coherent. Then you can add animals and people, wind. Noises, music. I guess when you add complexity, you must relax your attention to make a coherent global picture, then you get into a flow-like state, and it becomes more similar to a lucid dream.
On the other hand of the spectrum, I'm not quite sure about auras too. It's kind like of synesthesia but for people instead of numbers. I guess the brain hallucinate colors around object/people to make it faster to process. I find it quite unnecessary to hallucinate rather than having a specific feel about the person. And I feel it's quite reductive/intolerant to put/interact with people into a category based on subconscious perception. But I guess that if I was a bouncer, I'll probably be seeing colors around people too.
To conclude this already too long post, I think aphantasia is probably very correlated with hyper-attention.
Once I started thinking about it more, I realised I can actually imagine a very precise scenario, except that it is always behind me. It could be similar to how a blind person perceives the world, not seeing anything but knowing that everything is there.
The way I see it, I can process two different worlds at once. I've always been very good at modeling abstract things in my head, e.g. binary trees or a graph.
I do feel I'm missing out somewhat on richness of experience. When I try to visualize it's as if there's just a texture to the blackness in my mind, like a handprint in mud.
I recently learned about Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). It's hard to tell based on textual descriptions, but it does seem to relate to aphantasia and the fact I can't recall most of the past, whether it be ten days or ten years ago.
As a boy, way back in the sixties, age four or five, one day I overheard my parents talking of 'color tv' and the possibility of getting such a thing. "What is that?" was my obvious question. "A tv that can show colors, of course". "But our tv does do color", I informed them, and was promptly told it didn't. But of course it did. I was adamant. I knew that television was full of colors, and always had been. I could describe the colors of all sorts of things I'd seen on our tv. I remember knowing for a fact that a Volkswagen in some series I had been following was bright red. Stupid parents for not realising.
Next time the thing was turned on in all its vacuum tube glory, everything - to my immense disappointment - was greyscale, and remained so for several years until an actual color tv was actually purchased.
I remember waking up and playing Tetris in my head before I got out of bed. I could keep track of the piece falling, the next piece and the board as it stood.
Even when I started programming, I would just remember like, the pattern the code made, and where it was within the file structure. I never used an IDE - I kinda felt like I could fit the entire thing in my head and just compile it dynamically to imagine what it would do. Some languages are easier to do that with then others. Even before that, learning HTML coincided with dreams of simply writing HTML and seeing the results.
I had a nightlight until I was at least 12 (off and on), as I would imagine the craziest things happening while I slept. I also suffered from sleep paralysis - I can still picture some of the demons that were on top of me from 25 years ago.
To this day, I live in a daytime world of constantly daydreaming, making up scenarios, and playing them out. I probably shoulda went into film.
Anyways, y'all aren't like that? Weird.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f1c0/e09b9909a751de4f1c15cd... Spatial versus object visualizers: a new characterization of visual cognitive style. [2005]
Here's an imgur album of the two most important figures from the paper, which might very well already summarize the majority of it for you:
https://imgur.com/a/6C7WcWk
I have had poor visualization for years. I do remember being able to see images in my head when younger though. In a fair of detail in some cases.
A few years ago (when I had already lost much visualization) I took a course of antibiotics for MRSA. After that I lost the ability to see colourful visions pre-sleep.
I used to get the most fantastic images in full colour with incredible detail. Then when on the antibiotics they seemed dark. Now I can still have visualizations, but I can't see them. (Meaning, they're happening, and I get glimpses, but I can't continuously view them)
Sort of annoying as they were a good way to fall asleep. Focussing on them hasn't seemed to rebuild the ability.
Do you know which exact antibiotics? Some antibiotics have psychoactive effects.
How would I search once I found them?
It’s crazy how little we understand our mind still.