> If you want to see what aphantasia is like look at the picture of the Apple. Now close your eyes and try to imagine the apple, seeing it mentally in your mind’s eye. If you don’t see anything, you might have aphantasia.
I can imagine the apple, but I can't literally see it. Nothing I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia actually the inability to even imagine the apple?
Not the GP, but it was hard for me to take that test: I can describe features of a thing I am trying to imagine, but it does not show as a visual image at all. So it's all "nothing at all" all the way in the test. My first thought is "am I trying hard enough?"
It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's really hard for someone with it to understand what's being asked of them. :)
I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly not sure, just like the GP.
Huh, maybe I have aphantasia too, thanks. The lowest level above "no image at all" is "Dim and vague; flat", which are not words that I would ever use to describe thoughts.
But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else would use these words to describe thoughts.
The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of mental images are.
If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what?
I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count?
When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?
> When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed.
Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in front of them, that would be a hallucination.
I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the way visualization is described.
From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism.
A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.
I do think there's a difference between visualizing something clearly and not clearly, though, and this is what the test is asking.
The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or different facial expressions she makes.
If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up with something vague. I remember he was wearing large earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at his face, there are parts that simply won't come into focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way).
So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction between visualizing things clearly and not.
That's also just memory. I couldn't describe most servers I've had after a few hours if it was the only time I saw them. Try to imagine a barista. Imagine a scene in a coffee shop, it will get filled in with your actual memories of places you've been and people you've seen. Can you produce a detailed (but not accurate to reality) mental image of such a place or a barista working there that is comparable to your recall of your wife's face? (maybe not as detailed, but not as fuzzy as trying to recall a specific barista)
No, but what I'm describing is that I have a phenomenological experience of both non-clear images and clear images.
It was in response to the complaint that the "Vividness of Visual Imagery" test is ambiguous, because people can't decide whether their visualization is clear or not. I'm saying that, for a person with a good ability at visualizing, the distinction is fairly clear.
And it's not just fuzzy memory, the fuzzy memory causes a non-clear picture. But I can't transfer my phenomenological experience to you, so you'll either have to accept that some people can have both clear or non-clear imagery, or not.
In answer to your question, I can certainly produce a mental image of an imagined barista. I can imagine very fine details in, say, the handlebar mustache I invent. Yes, those details will probably have come from reality, but I don't know from where, and I can visualize it very clearly if I choose to.
In answer to a question you didn't ask, when I read books I rarely have a detailed image of a character. They're kind of faceless people, roughly sketched. I actually discussed this last week with my either-year-old, and she had the exact same experience, but had never really stopped to think about it. (Like what I was saying before about the nose missing not being weird.)
Hallucinations and visualizing are completely different things. Even in my worst psychotic episode, I knew the difference between real and not-real.
The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source didn't matter to the rest of my brain.
People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing on.
Similar problem here. I actually notice that the imagery is a fleeting caricature trying to capture what Im attempting to observe, some kind of CGA resolution image of a lake, trees and so on. It’s also very confusing that I can actually transpose myself within my imagination where I barely notice Im blind because I can feel it all around.
Same here. I didn't think I had aphantasia at all until I tried this test and then realised that me "visualising" something doesn't really bear any relation to being able to see a visual representation of that thing. Mostly it just felt like pulling up memories, and in fact when it asked me to visualise a rainbow I simply couldn't, though I could "see" one when I thought about a photo of a rainbow I took not so long ago. But again, that feels more like simply remembering.
That thread seems to indeed suggest that people are confusing seeing something with imagining seeing something. The point about the common inability to draw an accurate bicycle seems to prove it.
That point actually proved nothing. It demonstrated that there's a distinction between:
1. Ability to visualize
2. Accuracy of memory
3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings
Those aren't one thing, it's a combination of things. The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save their lives. It says nothing about their ability to visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and ability to draw.
The people who had trouble drawing a bicycle from memory would presumably have no problem connecting the right parts if they had a bicycle in front of them, which suggests they are not accurately visualising a bicycle.
Right, but accuracy with respect to reality is not the distinction between aphantasia and non-aphantasia, that's more about memory or technical knowledge than about the ability to visualize itself. Someone without aphantasia can also visualize fantastical scenes with no connection to reality, either because it is fully fantastical (dragons and dwarves) or not a real memory (imagining meeting with someone, but it hasn't happened yet for you to be able to recall). They could visualize cartoonish scenes or cel shaded scenes or animated XKCD stick figures. None of those are realistic, but they could still be visualized in detail.
If I read a paragraph of text and then try to write it down from memory, I would probably produce something vaguely similar but not quite exact. Maybe I would change some words or phrases with similar ones, or miss a part entirely. The better I understand the underlying idea, the closer it is likely to be to the original, but unless I reread the paragraph many times with the specific goal of memorising it, I'm unlikely to reproduce it exactly.
Same with visualising a bicycle. I've seen many bicycles and I know what parts a bicycle has and roughly how they fit together, but unless I've paid attention to the exact shape and position of each part, I could at best visualise a rough approximation of a bicycle.
I'm not aware exactly what is wrong, just as I would not be aware of what part of the paragraph I changed. But in many ways it doesn't matter, because the high-level idea is there mostly unchanged, just as with the text. The difference is that if you don't fit the parts in exactly the right way, the bicycle will not work, but I'm unlikely to completely change the paragraph by substituting a few synonyms.
This is not even getting into the jump from visualising to drawing, which would depend on my ability to draw.
I see why you’d think that but it’s not how it works for a lot of people. As others have tried to explained to those that think no one can visualize in their head, for most of us that can visualize it’s not a photograph in your head. And besides, drawing from imagination takes practice. Heck, even drawing something that is literally right in front of you takes practice.
> Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it?
Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the scene and draw up the details.
I think it's interesting that the author of the article suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are definitely advantages for both types of thinking.
> I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra.
I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without externalizing everything.
> it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it?
So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not.
Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question. I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or weak.
But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g. But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now remembering it.
> So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not.
I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to remember images at all.
Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it?
No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant
turning and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case.
Oh that's fun. I imagined a distressed elephant walking through the office and pulling down ceiling tiles, the wood floor splintering under the weight. Didn't think about ears. Attitude, mass, height, and building materials: yes. Ears: no.
Most people can see things in their mind that they don't consciously remember as discrete facts. For example, many people have a visual and motor memory of things like passcodes, but do not consciously and discretely remember the digits. A fun example from my own life: when I was a child, during a spelling test, I couldn't remember where to put the "h" in "ghost" until I called to mind the cover of this book:
The way I would describe things (being a programmer) is that my actual eye and my "mind's eye" are using different display devices. The actual eye comes out as a PNG in its full vividness, but the "mind's eye" only "sees"... something like an SVG? It definitely comes across that the "mind's eye" is encoding visual information differently, and words like "wireframe" or "storyboard" (for entire scenes) seem to be a better way of describing it than anything else, although I wouldn't call them great descriptions [1].
The most notable difference is that there's no "visual" encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"--and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can tell you if that shade is "color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color. It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green square, but something like a color gradient just makes my "mind's eye" go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
[1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail. Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.
Just to add my own anecdatum here -- my mind's eye definitely encodes color, and I can relatively easily match a color in the real world to one in my mind's eye. Color gradients are instant for me, although I summon the incorrect red-green gradient caused by incorrect gamma correction to mind by default rather than the more pleasing one with correct gamma correction.
In the case of the red-green gradient, I'm not exactly computing the colors intentionally; I've just seen quads with interpolated coloring often enough that those memories feed my mind's eye. I can fairly easily visualize a blue-purple or orange-teal gradient, too, but I can't attest to their accuracy.
> But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.
That's my experience, too. Reading your description of somebody driving away in their car, I was able to easily reconstruct an imagined scene in my mind's eye, but I naturally filled in the missing details with a kind of "default" -- camera position and angle, whether the parking is covered, the car is like the one Dexter's dad drives in Dexter's Laboratory (but not a cartoon), etc. The details are... there-ish, if I care to query them, but for a simple replay of the scene, my imagination doesn't bother rendering them to any significant fidelity unless I intend to.
I'd slightly trollishly say nobody has aphantasia, it's just that some people make a false distinction between remembering what something looks like and seeing it. Same as what you're saying really, but makes people feel better about themselves, rather than worse.
It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it is.
Ok, I didn't need to learn that I might have aphantasia too :)
Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and mathematics.
But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write-only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well.
Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since.
On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is missing for me.
And I have audio aphantasia. I can't remember the sound of anyone's voice and can't recall music. Never had a song stuck in my head. But I can remember the words and content just no tones/sounds/etc.
I do seem to have a high quality memory in general for other things. So, maybe that counts? But I haven't really done a comparison with others for higher ability to recall different senses. I think its hard to judge due to language barriers in describing our own personal experiences compared to others.
I listen to music, but only as background. It has caused some odd dating issues in the past because I don't care about concerts nor can I recall "our song". But I am also comfortable in silence and I generally won't notice if the background music stops.
I own a bar which has a relatively small food menu, and interestingly I always need to see a physical menu, despite knowing it pretty intimately. I imagine the tastes, and maybe the smells (though I hadn't thought of that before) and decide what I want to eat.
Customers will sometimes comment that it's strange I need to get a menu, but the staff seems to agree with the method.
Me neither. I realised very young, well before I even knew visual aphantasia existed. I get where the people lacking visual are coming from. It's hard to even imagine imagining a smell.. where in one's head does the minds nose feel like it is? What's to stop people just imagining nice smells all day..
Tried smelling coffee and tea just now. I can recognize them perfectly, but I can't remember what coffee smells like after smelling tea. Repeating the process doesn't seem to help either.
I remember reading about aphantasia while I was in art school. It made me wonder if the opposite also might exist: being really good at visualizing images in your head, and whether or not some of the people in my school might have it. The few classmates I asked thought I was being ridiculous, so I dropped the subject. I still wonder how one might test this though.
There is a story that one of the animators in the 1940s Warners studio got into a car accident, and suffered a mild concussion. When he recovered, he found that his visualization was much improved - suddenly he could visualize the simple construction of the characters, and "trace" it directly onto the paper. This resulted in him being able to draw a lot faster, so that's a pretty obvious test.
(IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you want citations.)
My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a lot of steps that younger me couldn't. I generally like to describe the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer and a library of models on your brain".
Wow, this is interesting. And I am now wondering if describes how I process visual information mentally. Outside of dreaming I do not specifically see anything visually if I close my eyes and think about something. I can describe. I can attempt to draw badly (more of a comment on my low artistic ability).
On the other hand it seems that I have hyperphantasia (I can visualize anything, animate it, rotate, check any of the details) and at the same time I work as an software engineer, but in contrary to what people might think it helps me a lot as I can visualize and remember all the parts of the code that I work on.
I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding aspect.
Have you tried OpenSCAD (https://openscad.org/) yet? If you have hyperphantasia and can code getting a 3D printer and fooling around in OpenSCAD could become your new favorite hobby/addiction!
Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD:
Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I hate the ternary operator! It's so obtuse.
I always wondered to what extent aphantasia affects mundane tasks, like setting something down, turning out the lights and picking it back up in the dark. I always seem to use a mental image of the thing in the space where I left it.
That's more a spatial awareness and memory, I think.
I think I might have "aphantasia" (or I am not trying hard enough :)), but I can perfectly well find things I left somewhere in the dark. I could also easily find that place I got to once through a maze of one-way streets following instructions by someone else weeks ago by kinda-recognizing buildings and houses where I need to make turns. I couldn't describe what those houses looked like for the life of me, but I could perfectly recognize them once I saw them.
All of these are things I've noticed in the past, but never put a name to it (not that I looked).
I always thought "picture in your head" was a figure of speech. I was also really confused how police sketch artists worked. I have zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people could somehow describe features of strangers? A lot of things made more sense once I learned about aphantasia.
I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind. I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element.
You seem to have some degree of aphantasia. I do too and have similar experiences with audio and olfactory recall as you do. I had once been robbed and when police showed me a few mugshots I completely forgot what the mugger looked like and my theory is that since I could not entertain the image in my mind’s eye it was very weak and quickly got disturbed by seeing all the other faces in photos. Id be a terrible eye witness I think
Like many mental traits there's a spectrum: Some people (like me) have extreme levels of visualization in our heads. I can picture things I'm imagining in intimate detail which is (probably) why I'm pretty good at turning code into precisely what I'm imagining (e.g. https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise it's a keycap). However, I have such bad long-term memory that I qualified for special needs (mental impairment edition) education (which I did not get enrolled in, for reference).
I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in true 3D. I thought it was because of this--and my long term memory issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces (or names). I am not the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind in one eye that are absolutely fantastic at remembering people's faces (and names, obviously).
So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason haha).
Not parent commenter, but took me maybe 20-30 seconds to come up with the answer with validating by comparing how each character stands to each other.
I can't see images in my head. But at least I can try to fold it within my imagination. I can at least rotate it like in 3D computer program. But void is all I "see" in my imagination.
Not that it makes me a genius or something, but it's not that hard for me to picture that cube folding. Or to imagine it folded and rotated. I did have to slow down a little to make sure I wasn't making a mistake about the orientation of the characters.
I'm great at paper folding visualization. I know this because I was given tests like that (by professionals) twice in my life (99th percentile =).
For reference, that particular cube folding question is easier than others because you can take the "shortcut" and just pay attention to the orientation of the numbers. The ones that I have to stop and think about the most are the ones with nothing but colors or (minor) shading. For whatever reason I find sides with shapes the easiest to visualize... Even if the shape is the same no matter the orientation (e.g. a circle).
Interesting tidbit: I love 3D puzzles and I always try to visualize what it looks like inside (if it's the type where you can't see the inner workings) while I'm figuring it out. I'm almost always way off with what I thought the inside would look like. Different kind of visualization I think. Probably has something to do with the ability to turn physical sensations (i.e. "what you feel") into a mental image.
Interesting. This question is not hard to solve for me, but I can't solve it by visualizing the cube rotating despite having no trouble visualizing the cube in its initial position. More specifically, when I try to rotate the cube in my mind's eye, to get it "started" rotating, I have to anchor my focus on one particular side of the cube, which I can then rotate correctly. However, this causes me to lose focus on the other sides of the cube, and I can no longer simply look back at them to see how their numbers are oriented after the rotation completes.
When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times? Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then look back at the others and see that they are still correct?
> When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times? Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then look back at the others and see that they are still correct?
I visualize the entire flat object and fold it (all at once) in my head, paying attention to where all sides end up. I can then rotate it around in any direction (some are easier than others though; not sure why). Basically I visualize animating the flat object so that it folds into a 3D object at the edges. Just as if you were to do it with something like Blender.
I have a very easy time turning the flat object into a 3D object (accurately) but remembering which markers/colors were on which side is where my visualization often falls apart, haha.
Very difficult. I can't fold the cube up in my mind. I tried for a few minutes and just felt frustrated. Instead I needed to look at angles of the numbers relative to each other and eliminate wrong answers.
Same here: it reduces to a logic problem. I can imagine the transformation, the space, the cube, the rotation individually as concepts, but all of it is more memory than visualization and carrying through the shape and orientation of the numbers seems like magic.
> a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble with faces haha).
I am the same way. I'm also highly myopic (I got glasses at age 4). There are times I've failed to recognize old friends until they started speaking to me (they did look a little different from the last time I'd seen them).
I always assumed that not seeing very well as a little kid is part of why I sometimes have visual recognition problems, too.
Very interesting, I got glasses at age 5 and I'm exactly the same, including not being able to clearly visualize even my wife's face.
My last job was 100% remote, and I started a week before one of the twice-yearly retreats where everybody gets together in person. Knowing that I'm poor at recognizing faces and poor at remembering names, I threw together https://github.com/philsnow/slanki and was able to put a name to about 50% of the 250 faces I met at that retreat, which felt absolutely like a superpower to me at the time.
I was able to get the answer to that test question pretty quickly and comfortably.
...but then it took me more than a minute to figure out why the test wasn't responding no matter how many times I clicked on the answer, and then other answers, and then even other buttons on the form.
There's definitely many different spectra of perception out there! :D
Somehow I feel like I cleverly tricked you without intending to. Won't stop me from taking credit for that unintended consequence though, "MUWAHAHAHA! He fell for it!" :)
> I have zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people could somehow describe features of strangers?
But could you describe your wife's features?
And if so, do you think it's because you're reciting a list of memorized facts ("she has brown hair" etc) or because you're drawing on your memory, even if not visually?
Could you describe (at all) any major pieces of art, such as the pose of the Mona Lisa?
I guess I'm drawing on memory, but not visually. Try closing your eyes. You probably still have a sense of the shape of the room you are in, without actually picturing it right? Like you know how far away the walls are and where the bookshelf is. It's similar with faces. I have some sort of "model" of her face in my head, there's just no visual component.
And as I read that over, I realize it's a terrible explanation. I have no clue how to respond usefully.
Forensic artists learn how to help people describe more. They can try different shapes until the witness says it looks right. And the successes get more attention than the failures.
> I was also really confused how police sketch artists worked.
There are standard "algorithms" how to draw people. You kind of draw standard shapes and then make differences against "standard". Proportions of peoples heads, eyes, noses and other features are surprisingly similar among people.
Sketch artists basically learned very well how to draw peoples faces specifically and what are important features people notice.
This is an interesting point, because while I find it trivial to work with geometric objects in my head (see my other post in this thread), I find it very hard to recall a face as anything other than "a face".
I recognize people just fine, but if you sat me down with a sketch artist (or indeed the sketch-artist sub game in Police Quest II), I'm at a loss to say whether someone's eyes are wider or narrower-spaced, whether their mouth is higher or lower, etc. Sometimes I do notice people's noses in the abstract and I may have a describable memory of that, and I think I remember most people's hair shape if not the color. But "A face with a small nose and long hair" is not really much to go on.
Smells, too. I smell just fine, and sometimes smells evoke instant memories, but I can't name a smell that I'm smelling. I'm absolutely at a loss to figure out what herbs are missing from food I'm making, or what I've added too much of. I can't describe tastes or smells beyond a very basic level.
Interesting that it's different for sound, taste and smell! Do you have an internal narrative?
I think I can kind of imagine what it's like not to be able to picture images in my head but I always have a very hard time imagining what people without internal narrative feel like (as I assume it must be to imagine what it's like to have one when you don't)
A friend of mine spent much time on MUD[1] servers playing and interacting with strangers. The game theme was fantasy-ish.
As he moved through the large world of the server he would repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some trait or role that you can have in the game.
Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision played there, using screen readers.
Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a wall of ASCII.
Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
A MUD (/mʌd/; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
That is really cool. I remember reading about 'Real Sound: Kaze no Regret' and thought that was really nice. I wonder if it would be difficult to make a MUD that is easy to play for blind people.
On another note, does anyone know if screenreaders read advertisements? I got so upset the other day when I realized that blind people might have to deal with screenreaders narrating advertisements.
Fun fact: I have no mind's eye UNTIL I take Tizanidine. That was a really weird discovery.
I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug fixes that.
I was practically blind my first years of life too, and have aphantasia, how come did you started taking the drug, by chance unrelated ? Did it fix it for once or it reverts when not taking the drug?
I’ve been only able to “see” in colors and details, in a state of half sleep half awake, never awake, and very low res when dreaming.
I got diagnosed with MS and I take it for my muscle spasticity at night to help me sleep, so it's completely unrelated. I have -20 vision with severe astigmatism and was completely uncorrected until I had eye surgery at 4 to fix some eye muscle issues.
It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing' it.
I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also experience.
> Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in which the nerves do not function properly and patients may experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax.
> ...
> This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask your doctor or pharmacist for more information.
I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to follow/copy bits of it :)
I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg recreational options) to shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost to helping me reset stuff.
I don't, sadly. It was a complete accident. I have MS and take Tizanidine for my muscle spasticity; being able to imagine things is just an odd side effect. I also can't imagine there's enough formerly-blind people with MS to test this on with science. (I'm a statistical oddity!)
One side effect of tizanidine at higher doses is hallucinations, so it would seem to do SOMETHING with your visualization center, but idk what.
For your autistic difficulties, I'm curious if finding resources for people that have gone blind/deaf might help. I know it sounds weird, but as a visually impaired person, we thought I had Asperger's for a while because I literally couldn't see body language well enough to read social cues, and I found it really helpful to look up information on how to 'read' that information elsewhere. Likewise, if somebody goes deaf, I'm sure there are lessons on how to do things like read more into body language. It just might help explain a lot of things that neurotypical people take for granted.
Also biology: I find it really helps me to remember that humans are sacks of hormones and that sometimes when they're silly it's not me being wrong. They might just have gotten a surge of adrenaline and had a knee jerk reaction, or they might be overstimulated. I know I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies will allow.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! (Apologies for my slightly late response.)
The consideration to consider blindness/deafness as a source of insight to reading social cues is definitely not something I would've thought of anytime soon. I think I might just follow up on that.
Regarding the "actually-relevant implementation detail" perspective of (neuro?)biology, I echo the sentiment of the other comment :) - I also find it all too easy to lose sight of the bounds of the bounding box and forget how important it can be to correct for them.
Is this really testing aphantasia? I would think that to do that you'd have to show someone the first image, give them time to remember it or whatever, and then ask them which of the shapes are possible without reference to the original image. I think anyone can look back and forth between these things and reason about how they come together ("this is not adjacent to that so this folded version is not possible").
Yeah, I have the same concern as well. However, I felt that being able to visualize things in my head allowed me to solve some of these problems very quickly (in around 4-5 seconds). I can make the 2-d image collapse into the 3-d object in my head. I guess not having aphantasia would make you quicker on these tests? I must admit though, I had to look back and forth for some problems as well.
I am mind-blind in every sense, yet I got a 9/10 on that. It's still only checked by qualitative things, how a person self reports about it. I know it's not just a language thing though. My go to example is that if you knew morgan freedman wrote this you could read it in his voice in your head. I can't, I'd recognize his voice, but I can't use it in my head.
OK, so this is new to me. I can't see anything in my mind, but I can construct any celebrity's voice completely perfectly in my head. I can read anything in anyone else's voice. When you read things in your head, are they only in your own voice?
The way I’m wired has given me (and likely other founders and those in other fields) an edge.
This seems like wild speculation. The single cited study is also riddled with problems, including comparing 2,000 people with self-reported aphantasia to a set of 200 control individuals from an entirely different study.
Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly-impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially through a text medium!).
I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!".
I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people - for starters, people vastly overestimate their ability to picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. Even if they didn't have the artistic skill to make a "good" drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has the handlebars in front of the front wheel).
My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my brain is recalling apples it's seen before and telling itself to process that information as if it were coming from my eyes. Even though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I visualize it in my head, it feels like I'm seeing it. She chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same vividness anymore (she's since "recovered").
I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring each other that we weren't really mind-blind - but that would either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that make them more likely to be friends :)
As I read your 6/7 dinner party example I couldn't help but wonder if it's just a "birds of a feather" bias: People who have trouble visualizing things tend to get along well/have similar interests/beliefs/realities and just naturally often end up hanging out together.
You could say that about any sort of human trait: People who <share trait X> tend to enjoy each other's company. Some traits having more influence than others (obviously).
I have an extreme ability to visualize, which includes all of my senses, to the ability to imagine being an animal. Smell, taste, hearing, limited visual senses, instincts, the feeling of fur on my skin, and more are all within my ability. For lack of a better term, I call it my "mental holodeck", which seems to get the point across. It's more of a virtual machine because I'm running someone else's brain on my hardware.
This ability evolved from lucid dreaming I learned in high school. After eighteen years of deliberate practice (several times per week), I can drop into this state at will. My real senses are dimmed, but not gone. If my phone beeps, I will hear it and likely lose what I'm imagining.
Despite all of this, I couldn't draw any of it. I can't draw and I lack the ability to keep a single image in for a prolonged period. But I can write it. Finding ways of describing smells or sensations in a way other people can understand is fun. (My virtual machine can also run approximations of other people.)
Agreed with your comparison to your wife as being better at visualization: I think in general "aphantasia" is on a spectrum, with some people being completely unable to visualize things, and others hearing about people who can visualize incredibly well and thinking "If I don't have that, then I must have aphantasia!"
It's also a skill: I used to think I had aphantasia. Over the last ~3 years I've been practicing visualization -- nothing fancy, just trying to close my eyes and visualize things every so often for a few minutes. With that low-level practice, my ability to visualize things has improved a lot: before I had nothing, now I can get black-and-white shaky images, and manipulate them, rotate them, etc.
Still can't do faces though, I can imagine the rest of a person but their face is just missing. Still working on that :)
I can, and for context I've known about the distinction of people who can and cannot for years; even then I didn't notice until last year that I can't smell or taste in my imagination and other people can. "Lemon" to me is pictures of lemons, to my mum it's a lip-curlingly intense sour taste.
You'd think it would be a simple hop years ago from sight to the other senses and which ones work in my head and which don't. But no, smell and taste are "out of sight, out of mind" for me in a way that sight isn't. When they aren't present I don't have a good way of thinking about them and don't really think about them much at all.
What about the other senses, can people imagine kinaesthetic body positions of poses they aren't currently doing? Can people imagine balancing on a high-wire or being off-balance on a moving boat, while sitting on steady ground?
I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood.
For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also have to be true:
- He never heard anyone talk about dreams
- He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
- He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art
- He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used and people describe what they see in their memory of an event
- He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something was demonstrated visually
- He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image
- He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they literally just have a storage location for words/letters and that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they, "know them when they see (or write) them."
You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath).
Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?
The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head.
You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them.
This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums.
Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel
every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.
> cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood
There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can find examples in this very thread.
Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" while you do that.
I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image in my head.
All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, just on the other end of the curve).
I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly differently.
So in short, I could notice that there are some special things about my brain, but I did not know that this might be "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it).
I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that you find it implausible that adults would only learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a miniscule part of them.
If you find it implausible, you need to simply read the literature on perceptual changes caused by brain lesions.
Try reading “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks.
Most of your examples don’t have any obvious connection to what was posted.
E.g. most people don’t have a photographic memory and we all know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head doesn’t require you to visualize anything. It just requires you not to say what you read out loud.
Many color-blind people do not discover they are color blind until teenage years (or even later). You can live without realizing you're different even when people use different words that to them seem to be describing the same thing.
I recommend reading the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is incomplete).
I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets.
> - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it to myself.
> - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art
I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the real thing.
> - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image
When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to remember the underlying information.
> - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen Wiltshire[1].
There are similar experiences reported by many, many people. Check out /r/aphantasia, it's full of people saying variations on "omg my whole life I didn't realize 'mental images' weren't metaphorical!!!" Example:
>Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) because they can ‘see’ the person’s face in their memory.
Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet another colourful metaphor.
I'm 63, literally up until 5 minutes ago I didn't realise that most people (or any people) actually see images when they imagine things, I'm quite flabbergasted, in retrospect it explains lots of things
I don't have aphantasia but if I never learned about the mind's eye from other people I think I would have used it almost never, just sometimes as a memory aid.
Everything I think about is done abstractly; ie words in books and conversations take on no image in my mind, only the ideas transfer.
After learning about how imagery springs to other people's minds when they're reading, conversing, etc. I've tried to do it myself and it is possible but always a conscious effort and usually tiring. The benefit for me is that images are more memorable than ideas alone so my recall of the things I try to visualize improves if I do it well, and has led me to try things like diagramming the things people say, also improving recall and understanding.
I’m not sure why I’m the first to point this out on HN (which is usually a pretty skeptical group) but “aphantasia” is very poorly studied (1). I’ve met plenty of people who claim to have it but it seems more like a failure of language to compare experience. That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently.
Why? There are seemingly plenty of different ways that people are wired. Assuming everyone is wired the same seems like a preposterous null hypothesis given how varied we are in every observable way.
I can understand the skepticism. I have aphantasia and am equally skeptical that most people can actually "see" anything. When I'm supposed to visualize a beach, for example, for me it's merely a list of things I would tell the setup crew to make if this were a movie. Chair, umbrella, lifeguard stand, ship on the horizon, trail of footsteps along the water's edge, film it at sunset.
I have found differences between myself and others, though. When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note about it.
It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly tell me they "see" something.
I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently, is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc. it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON" signal.
So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason!
The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT".
When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.
Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in your head, you do not work with visual representations of your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is that impossible as well?
Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while tuning out the rest.
I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two."
If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology.
Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.
I don't think about the visual representation of equations. I think about the equations, not in any specific representation, but as what they are. I think my mental abilities are roughly average, including my ability to picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only for images of written expressions that represent equations.
It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.
And you are able to manipulate complex equations without any visual tools, just by "thinking about what they are"? For example mentally multiply a term into nominator and denominator of a rational function? That's just inconceivable to me. Where's your "scratch pad" essentially. To me it works pretty much like it works on paper, only that the "paper" is in my head, and the visuality of it all (being able to "focus" on a particular part of the equation etc.) helps in keeping the problem tractable, otherwise even a relatively simple equation quickly becomes overwhelming to manipulate.
(To say nothing about the other meaning of the word "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it" without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because that pun was also too good to pass up).
You are able to conceive of it, you're just doing it without realizing what you're doing. Someone with a good imagination but no math knowledge at all could picture the same squiggly lines as you can, but without meaning. In your head there exists both the squiggly lines, and what they mean. All you have to do is fill in the last quadrant, which would be holding the meaning without picturing the lines. I would suggest that you might be using the meaning scratch space without using the imagination scratch space every time you think about something that can't be pictured.
You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is going, people with bad imaginations would be people with an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking.
And yet in some areas at least so much about the language in math itself seems to be centered about a visual understanding.
I mentioned the s-plane earlier: We talk about poles and zeros in the s-plane, because they form poles and zeroes visualized in an actual plane, a 2-dimensional plate with protrusions into the 3rd dimension. The poles pulling the plane upwards into infinity, the zeroes tacking it down to the "floor". In the z-plane, we talk about getting the spectrum of a signal or filter by tracing the unit circle, because you can imagine tracing a literal circle in the plane. We "shift" signals up, down, left, right, we "flip" spectrums, we "cross" the origin.
To know whether a z domain transfer function is stable, I don't read "the complex roots of the denominator have to have a magnitude < 1" past some initial textbook definitions, it's just "the poles have to be inside the unit circle". In the s-plane, we instead talk about the poles being on the left half.
And yet the subject matter, signals and filters, has nothing to do with "visual objects" per se (like geometry would, for example). Even if the signal is a video signal, what we are manipulating here has nothing directly to do with what the video signal shows. And the signal might be an audio signal or just some nondescript digital data to begin with.
It just amazes me that someone can grasp such a complex subject without working with its ubiquitous visualization, so pervasive that its objects were named accordingly. It's true that I can build enough intuition to say things like "okay, if I put a capacitor there I'll have another pole" and not think about the actual plane for that instant, but as soon as it's something more complex that I don't immediately "know", I have to resort to my visualization again. I probably speak out of envy, because this also means I can never fully have the feeling of "grasping" higher dimensional problems for example, especially when familiar properties that are true for n<=4 break down there. I always only feel my understanding is working with a "shadow" of what's actually happening, to use another visual metaphor.
Well, if you're looking for someone who can tell you how to do electrical engineering without being able to visualize a circle, you'll have to find someone with less imagination than me. I can do a circle, it's the "using your mind's eye as scratch paper for doing integrals" bit that's beyond my highly average abilities.
As for higher dimensions, yes, when you can barely visualize R3, R4 doesn't seem much harder, but that's hardly a superpower, it's just a pair of equal inabilities. I find it easy to accept the principles of noneuclidian geometry, but that comes with the side effect that if I was told they applied to euclidian space, that'd come "naturally" too.
When I'm working with equations in my head, which I don't do often, I think of them as a list of terms and what's done with them. No visual representation, just a memorized list. For electronic circuits, I would probably remember what connects with what, but not how they are laid out spatially. For textbooks, I do remember sometimes that the specific text I'm think of is found on a left page near the top, but I can't see it. That's just where my eyes will scan when I look for it again. Most often I don't, though, unless I poured over it a lot when learning it.
I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than others and I think it's because most people were trying to visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it was just another equation to work with.
Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape.
But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned.
I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.
Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment:
I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while.
Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer.
Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.
> I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.
I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious. Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair, square face, just standing there watching things". It helps me to remember in case it's important later.
And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what that is like. I don't have that kind of experience otherwise.
Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it makes us that little bit more unique.
I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept.
Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.
> That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently.
Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.
I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I thought it would.
I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain:
I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought.
So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.
I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5 pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the visualization of seeing.
I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable.
When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training?
I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.
I don't have any concept of seeing something in my head. I always assumed it was a way to say "think about this thing" and never thought people could "see" it in any meaningful way. If someone asks me to picture an elephant, I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me. I can describe what an elephant looks like. I can draw something--poorly--that other people would immediately identify as an elephant. I can talk about the shape of an elephant, the parts of an elephant, colors, textures, and other physical properties. But I can't "see" or "picture" an elephant.
I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like that.
Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.
Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have memories of documentaries that “replay” in my head. When I am imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I can’t really see what is in front of me.
In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.
Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.
> Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild!
ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow.
How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that?
These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme
Yeah, that’s definitely more vivid than what I see, and I’m fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have trouble “seeing the entire thing at once”.
That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.
Usually, I can see everything all at once, fully detailed. Think of a screenshot, that's basically how it is like for me. I've even visualized entire websites in perfect clarity and reproduced them from that screenshot-like memory.
What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities.
If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination:
* I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery.
* The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part.
* The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail.
* There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update.
It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation.
It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.
I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract thoughts in visual form.
My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.
Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that people ask you to explain how you know where things are.
I mean that's one specific example, but I get what he's saying. I'm super verbal and I used to do problem sets in college with a friend that obviously had much better visuospatial abilities than me. >75% of the time he'd be the one that really figured out the question. But then we'd go home to write up our solutions and I'd get consistently full letter grade higher marks on what was essentially the same work. He was just doing a way worse job of putting his own work into words.
Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.
You don't know how you know where you left your own things, but if I do know where a friend left e.g. their wallet or keys, I often do remember why. As if the novelty of the circumstance that allowed me to store the information also caused my brain to store metadata about that memory, e.g. the novelty itself.
I think of myself as a very visual thinker, but I actually cannot form conscious images in my head. This seems like a contradiction, but it's true anyway.
I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape.
It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself.
The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.
It is not either or. I went from not never imagining things in visual way to having images popping up in my head by themselves. The brain started to visualize things, after I started to learn to draw. I knew absolutely nothing about drawing and used draw-a-box and youtube tutorials to learn.
I never felt like missing something and those images dont add much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.
I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of things and much better at noticing properties of objects around me.
>> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.
Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.
It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only this one specific difference in how people think.
I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.
As a sibling comment posited, its popular pretty much anywhere.
Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.
If there were a concrete phenomenon that's consistently observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We can't directly compare subjective experience, so any comparison is going to be filtered through the language of how we describe said experience, and so it's that much harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category and the extent to which people have it.
Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic.
Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is.
(Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.)
Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition.
Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.
I mean, if you have a strong mental imagery, it's not ambiguous at all whether it's metaphorical or not. It really is seeing. All experience is subjective, but it's like if half of people were seeing in greyscale and tried to argue that there may or may not be different colors other than grey, and that the discussion is pointless. The people seeing colors are like, uhhh no man, there are actually different colors and you're just not seeing them. It's incredibly obvious that there are more colors than grey. But when a large chunk of people see in monochrome, and even more people are seeing an extremely desaturated palette to where it's almost grey but not quite, the discussion gets muddied. And then the greyscale seers try to convince everyone that it's just a difference in language and actually 'red' is just a feeling. It's just absurd to anyone who has the strong sense.
Except this is nothing like color blindness. No matter how much you play with colors, you remain colorblind. Colorblindness also affects your life at least somehow.
This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops.
It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.
Are you implying that aphantasia is treatable by practice visualizing things? My own experience with it and everything I've seen (no pun intended) says otherwise, but I'm happy to read a good source of reasoning around your theory.
Yep. And it completely ignores aspect of it being something that you can train. It is more of mental skill, like ability to manipulate numbers in your head, remember worst and what not. I 100% doubt I am only one whose visual imagination got significantly better with trying to learn new strongly visual skill (in my case drawing).
> or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition
Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.
>Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too.
Oh sure, that too. I was just going for brevity in that part. As per my first paragraph, I'm not convinced that aphantasia is a natural category, which would be necessary for framing it as a condition.
(Although I'd maybe say I'm more "on the fence" than "convinced its absurd" -- I'm open to the possibility someone can come up with a clear test, I just don't see it and don't expect anyone to.)
For me, and I think for most people, "picturing an elephant" is very literal. For example, you could ask me to "picture an elephant" then follow up by asking "what is the elephant which you pictured doing with its trunk?" To answer the question, I focus my attention on trunk in the picture in my head in order to "take in" what it is doing (e.g., perhaps "it is curled upward but otherwise not doing anything" or it might turn out that "it is grasping a branch").
> Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.
Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or focusing attention on an image in your head in order to describe it, the way I explained above?
I'm honestly not even sure if someone could describe their own experience of thinking about visual things with enough detail that I could tell whether my own experience of thinking about visual things is significantly different. When you started talking about having no concept of seeing something in your head I thought "whoa, that's very different from my experience." But then what you went on to describe sounds precisely like my experience. I can make poor but recognizable drawings of commonly-known objects like animals. I can also imagine large human spaces I've spent a lot of time in, like my apartment building or old Counter-Strike levels, with a fair amount of detail (certainly enough to describe how to navigate). But now I'm wondering what distinction you're making between being able to use your imagination to accomplish these tasks and "seeing" or "picturing" these objects in your mind. Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects? Surely that ability is extremely rare, and isn't what people mean when they say they're picturing something in their head, right?
> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?
It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's why I think it may have more to do with the language people are using to describe the experience than the experience itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.
If it helps, when I close my eyes I see black/darkness.
If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks like, I still only see black/darkness… but I can still describe the features of the room in very much detail. I definitely can’t conjure up a vivid image in my head, I would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly visual experience. Same with recalling what someone’s voice sounds like… I can imagine what someone’s voice sounds like, but definitely can’t hear their voice in any meaningful level of detail, yet I’m still able to describe the voice - it’s more of a feeling than a literal audio/visual experience.
I definitely wouldn’t describe my own experience as anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see black/darkness… (I think) it’s uncommon to literally see things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is abnormal?
I have no idea if I'm in the minority of humans in this, but when I picture something in my head, it has colors, shapes, and I guess I'm using the same brain hardware as when I use my eyes to process the "phantasm" of it. My mental model is that this facility is another "source", in addition to my eyes, that can be used to pipe sense data into the visual processing "sink".
When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text file got me thinking about what it would look like if my eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would look like (given what information I had about things like whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not, whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind of thing).
Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I keep track of whether I'm running out of various things (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so, it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent reality, with more familiar things being represented more accurately.
It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing it (my parents called it "staring off into space").
I'll second the first paragraph here. The demonstration I've come up with involves holding a hand closely in front of only my left eye. My brain lets me see both things, but my hand also has a 'transparent' characteristic when I'm focusing on my right vision. Back to visualizing, the 'other source' isn't anywhere near as crisp as the demonstration, and often is a mix of memory / imagination / caricature / labeling it with the concept.
It's still not clear to me if there's a difference between imagining I'm seeing something and actually seeing something in my head. When I imagine what it's like to see something, of course it has colors, shapes, etc. I can also imagine what a room would look like from a particular vantage point (although I may not be as skillful as it as someone who has practiced doing it and experimented with computer graphics). I guess I'm still curious if there's truly any difference in our experiences. I wonder if optical illusions work when we're picturing things in our head.
That's so interesting! I did the test linked to in the article, and I noticed that I am able to "visualize" object, but have decidedly a hard time to think about how I would perceive them if I looked at them - so I guess just opposite from you.
I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once. And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different sense.
> I wonder if optical illusions work when we're picturing things in our head.
I want to say that some won't work, since I know there are some that rely on design flaws in our eyeballs (placement of the optic nerve). I'm thinking specifically about the ones where you are directed to look at some part of the figure and notice that some other part has vanished.
I feel I am the same as this. I often build things from wood and steel. In order to plan parts to be made, where to do cuts and make joins I need to think and "see" how best to do that. I believe I do this quite well, and my thoughts work out well once I put my hand to my tools and make what I foresaw. But I don't believe I ever had a vivid hallucination of what I was making, more a hazy wireframe that gets the job done
It's certainly hard to describe the inner workings of one's mind with adequate detail to compare them to others. However I believe this anecdote may provide some insight.
One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the elephant or apple in the article.
I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.
> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?
That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.
When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to sketching and ordering.
Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who would arrange for a delivery the next day.
I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put them together. After running it through the fax machine to get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was probably the best place for me.)
The majority of installers in the field could do this, though some were certainly better at it than others. Most would start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight out.
I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head was the anomaly.
> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space
I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely flustered my brain to the point of switching majors.
Every time this topic comes up, there are people describing a world with a complete lack of visualisation capability of any kind (and it affecting their life/career, even, as in the person you responded to) and people describing being able to rotate things around in their head in 3d. And then a number of people, like you, claiming that it could just be a terminology difference. These are clearly very different levels of visualisation ability and it's not just terminology.
> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc.
I can do this too, but it is not literally a visual experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual perception, not visual sensation in the way that a hallucination does.
Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of something in my literal vision. Which is what some people are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing to talk about.
I don't know of anyone who can summon an image such that it blocks their literal eyesight. But in my head, I can still "see" the image, with definition, color, etc. I can vividly recall photographs and "see" the colors, lines, and details of those photographs in my head. I am still also seeing what is in front of me, though in a more "out of focus" fashion - my visual concentration is elsewhere.
I don't know how best to express it, but it's extremely visual. It's not just that I am recalling and describing - I am viewing and describing.
Ironically, I am terrible at drawing things because I can't see past the "big picture."
Super interesting. I can't "see" concretely at all in my mind - it's essentially always the back of my eyelids. But I am excellent at imagining just about anything, including rotating it around, zooming in, animating, etc. It's not seeing, it's more feeling I guess I'd describe it. I was always great at those "rotate this shape" questions on tests. Yet there's no concrete visual of it at all. Yet I can change zoom, colors, design pretty easily and have a good idea of what it looks like.
I'm terrible at drawing, but could describe any scene I'm imagining have a near-perfect idea of how it should look if someone drew for me.
This discussion is fascinating. The various participants describe their experience very differently, but I still have absolutely no idea whatsoever if their internal experiences differ at all, or just the verbalizations.
Given that there are people who describe having no visuals of any kind and people who describe having a 3d rotatable view in their head, you should have some idea of how their internal experiences differ.
Personally I can imagine describing my experience as either a 3d-rotatable view in my head or as no visuals of any kind, depending on differences in the definition of “visual”.
But I can identify most closely with the other commenters here who describe their experience as more proprioceptive or spatial than visual per se.
Right, I think that's the case, but it's very difficult to tell where genuine difference in experience ends and difference in the way it's described begins, is the point. Language is just very imprecise in this area.
Interesting. When you rotate it in 3d space in your head, is the movement continuous?
I can rotate things in my head, but I get a very low framerate - roughly 1fps. Its easy for me to imagine the keyframes, but the interpolation between them is much harder.
I also tend to have a small rendering resolution - ex. I can render keyframes of details, but holding the entire image in my head simultaneously is difficult
I can close my eyes and see a picture or even video of any scene, from any angle, that I have seen before or that I could arrange the details of in my head, as if it were real. I don't even have to close my eyes, but it's more vivid if I do.
However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to recall it, the more blurry it becomes.
Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real. I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind, but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird.
The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament to the neuroplasticity of our brains.
If I understand OP correctly I think a test of sorts might be mathematical objects. If I think of a cube, I can visually imagine a cube in my head, turn it, and so on. It's not 100% percent detailed, it's harder to 'see' it than to actually see it, but is is 'there' in a way.
However some sort of abstract higher dimensional thing that doesn't have a physical analog I can't imagine at all. If there's really a difference in how people perceive these things than I imagine for OP there is no difference between visualizing any object but for others there is.
> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?
It's not a hallucination because that would imply it interferes with your eye vision. It's like a third eye, independent of the other two, so it doesn't interfere.
I consider myself good at visualizing form and space, but when people say they "see" something in their mind's eye, I assume they're not like literally having a full-blown DMT hallucination where objects appear solid and indistinguishable from physical reality. The "images" are part information. You can think about the shadows or the highlights and they'll pop out or recede as you think about them.
I actually have a thing where I can't process math without seeing geometry in my head. But I was never naturally good at perfectly visualizing real world objects. Instead of math
and code, which came naturally, I pursued art college because I considered it a weak spot for me. And indeed, I wasn't very good at it... but years of classes and practice made me better, and strengthened my visualization skill. I think it can be learned and exercised, like any other part of the brain. Just like musical recognition can be learned, if not perfect pitch.
This. It is a mashup of both. I can clearly visualize many 3D objects in my mind, as well as zoom, pan, scale, rotate, recolor, animate, distort them, etc. But it is not purely visual, because I often "see" opposite side of a cube momentarily, which I should not be able to from this perspective.
So, it is not a rendering engine. It is not physically, spatially and temporally stable. Stability is lost especially as your focus shifts (e.g. "seeing" behind objects as your attention slips there)
Yeah it's confusing me too. When I asked a friend if he could picture a red apple he said he could 'see' it visually. If I do the same thing, I can't see an apple, but I do think about an apple, and I know what it looks like.
I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way :)
People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.
> When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.
Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I ‘visualize’ a tiger, it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read your comment I said ‘oh, wtf!’ out loud
Consider sitting outside and looking at a flowering bush or tree. At first it's just a tree. Then you realize that there are flowers on it (they were always there, but you weren't attending to them before). After a little while you'll again suddenly realize that there are bees buzzing around the flowers, and a nest halfway up and a few feet from the center on the right. You, most likely, did not have all that in your head on your first glance at the tree. It was just a tree. This is how many mental images are formed.
If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, or am asked a question about it, more details will come to mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a scene, like from a commercial.
The way it works for me (I can't visualize like that), it's like I am writing a story. I can say I see a tiger, then think about it and write down more details but I am always consciously adding stuff to the tiger. If I want details about number of stripes, I need to think about it and then "write" it. Never do I see something I am not consciously forming.
Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.
Ok, this is mindblowing for me. When I think of a tiger I have some kind of visual sensation, but it's extremely low on information. Like maybe 12x12 or 16x16 pixels. But not sharp pixels, but fuzzy, colored shapes, or very, very simple details, like whiskers. Like in a impressionist picture. But way simpler.
Never though that this was different of anyone else.
Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things i realised that apparently i can have this image only for about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of other people aswell.
Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class, despite trying.
For what it's worth, I'm also completely worthless at art, despite being on the opposite end of the visualization spectrum -- I can easily conjure very detailed visual (and sonic) impressions in my mind's eye, and the act of reading itself for me cannot be decoupled from "hearing" the words (tone and all) in my head.
It's depressing in a totally different sense, because I can never capture on paper the things that I visualize -- I just don't have the knack for art.
Funny, I can't do that, because my mind's eye moves with my eyes, and if I count things, my eyes naturally move, so my eye pointing causes the tiger to move rightward which prevents counting the stripes.
Do you have visual experiences while dreaming? For me "seeing in my head" is most similar to those: certainly a visual experience but with less detail than when I'm actually looking at something. I believe some people's are much more detailed than mine, as some people can reproduce scenes in exquisite detail from memory.
Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite like reading from paper, but very similar.
Same here. I could "think" about it, but I couldn't see it. I just tested this out in a completely dark room. Both with or without my eyes open. I just cant see it. I cant visualise an Elephant in my head. Not even the slightest. I never thought when someone visualise it they really meant "visualise" it. This is shocking!
I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend.
When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ?
And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.
For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
> And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.
> For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a mental narrative voice.
I have "thoughts" or argument flows through my mind. But they are definitely silent and messy. So instead of arguing about it inside my head, I talked to myself, this makes things much clearer.
Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.
Do you just not hear your voice when you think? Are there words? How do you formulate ideas without words? What happens when you speak - do ideas just cross some event horizon and come out as vocalizations? Do you know what the words are going to be before you say them?
Just like I know I am thinking of an elephant, but I cant "see" an elephant. I know I am thinking about a topic and precise words I am using like what I am typing out now, but I cant "hear" the voice in my head of what I am typing / about to type.
My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my head without me realising I was actually saying it out.
So you’re unable to “think” a sentence word for word? You cannot think the sentence “If I were to grab that apple, then I would be holding it in my hand”? You’re unable to hear yourself say those exact words in your head as if you spoke them aloud?
If so, that is truly fascinating. What happens when you try to speak a sentence in your head?
Sometimes, sometimes not. I can structure my words before I say them and they literally appear to me like text on a page, in front of my mind, and I hear myself saying those words with various versions of intonations before picking out the version I want, then I say them out loud in that intonation to the person I'm speaking to.
Wow, that is very different from my experience. While I can consciously think about words, I can't "hear" them at all, let alone with different intonations. Seeing the words seems even stranger to me...
When I think, it’s a mixture of 1) hearing my voice and 2) thinking in purely abstract concepts and relationships without putting English to it.
When I want to think in English, I can hear it plain as day, as if I’m saying the words aloud, with their exact cadence and accent. I can also “speak” with someone else’s voice and hear them say anything as clearly as if they were speaking in front of me.
Thinking in English can help me find the holes and gaps in my abstract thoughts, because I’m forced to formalize each logical leap and conclusion.
I would describe it this way: my mind kind of has a scratchpad of sorts that's separate from what I see or hear. It's a dream-like space that you can conjure a vague image onto that's visual in nature but distinctly different from literally seeing out of your eye and not in real space. If you are able to recall and play a song you heard in your head - it's reminiscent of that, but visual. I often do both. When I was younger I often visualized words in my head as I said or thought them.
I can't imagine doing math or electronics in my head without some concept of internal visualization. Assuming you do those things (if not there is likely something else that applies): When you rearrange equations in your head, are you not having some visual representation of them (actual equations in an otherwise empty space for me) that you manipulate? When you think about a circuit, don't you mentally think about where the current goes in an actual visual representation of the circuit?
What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or whatever was?
I think the answers to these questions might help me at least to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a different description.
For me it feels a lot more like proprioception. I understand the relationship of those things in the same way I understand where my arm is if I raise it over my head with my eyes closed. I have a very good directional sense, and I feel the same way about maps, etc. I can't visualize them at all, but I understand where things are in relation to each other.
I am 100% sure I cannot visualize things. I have been able, with _lot_ of concentration, "visualize" a blob of color. I was unable to control the shape or size, but could (kind of) control the color (between the choices of red, green, and purple). It was incredibly vivid, and I'm convinced that's what "visualizing means, and that people can do it with actual objects and scenes.
Not sure if this is helpful, but that doesn't sound to me like just different words.
I use the word "see" because it's the best word to describe what is happening in my head. It's not literally seeing, but... it's very close, it's not just me remembering details about what something looks like, it's "visualizing".
I'm sorry, I don't know how to put into words the difference between the vision happening in my eyeball and the vision happening inside my head. There are differences, but they are very hard to articulate and there are fewer differences than there are similarities. The mental and eyeball "vision" are definitely at least running many of the same subroutines.
My feeling is that when someone says that they think words like "picture" or "see" are just social conventions, I suspect they're having a different experience than me. I would probably have settled on a phrase like "picture something in my head" even if no one else used that phrase, I can literally mentally trace out the outlines of the thing I'm imagining in the head. It's not just a list of attributes or descriptions, it's a thing that I am... again, for lack of a better word, "seeing", even though I'm not literally seeing it via my eyes in front of me.
What sticks out to me is that I literally can't think of any word that could be closer to what's happening then the words "vision", "seeing", "picture". Calling it a description is less accurate, it captures less of the experience than the word "seeing" does. Phrases like "replaying a scene in my mind", "remembering a sound", "an image popping into your head", etc... those are not rough poetic analogies, those are descriptions that are extremely close to what is literally going on inside my head.
> I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me
I am not going to try and diagnose anyone over the Internet, I'm not an expert on anything, but yeah, if you're curious about it that sounds to me a lot like aphantasia, at least as far as I understand aphantasia. You say the concept of comparing what's going on in your head to a picture doesn't make any sense at all to you? At that point I suspect it's not a difference in language; I'm not talking about being able to draw something or describe attributes about what it looks like, I'm talking about being able to... see it.
I don't know for certain, but I feel like picturing something in your head is (again, while not literally exactly the same as seeing something in real life) still not an analogy I would need to explain to someone who didn't have aphantasia.
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Articles like this are so fascinating to me, there are a couple of different parts of my experiences (ADHD, asexuality) that I always assumed were completely universal and then later in my life found out weren't. Whenever stuff like that happens to me it's always a surprising experience, and for some weird reason I'm always excited when I see it. Once you realize that certain things that you think are unique about you aren't, and that certain things that you think are universal aren't, and more than that you realize how easy it is to be in a situation where you'd never discover that -- for me it makes me feel like the world and the people around me are more interesting, and it makes me want to learn more about them.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if someone has aphantasia, it doesn't mean their life is going to get turned upside down. But I think sometimes it's just fun to learn about things and to think about how experiences shape people.
If I close my eyes and try to consciously see something, I see only black or maybe shifting colours. With my eyes open, and not consciously trying to form an image, I think I can see things I'm thinking about, though not in colour, but as soon I try to form an image, it slips away. It's odd - I'm not even certain I can see things unconsciously this way - I think I can, but I'm not really quite sure - the images are just on the very edge of conscious reach. This doesn't stop me being able to draw or paint reasonably well, and I'm really good at thinking about how three dimensional mechanisms work - I don't so much as form an image as just understand complex shapes without seeing them - but I still cannot just form an image consciously. To the extent I can, I'm more figuring out how I'd draw it than recalling the image itself.
The test from the linked article seems to assume people can visualize an actual image more than fleetingly, but that's not me. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is very good at visualization (I certainly can when I'm dreaming), but it's not a conscious thing for me, and the very act that the test asks for - think of a scene - is what causes any half-images to disappear.
I do not as a general rule see anything but rather just have an understanding of the concept elephant - I think of the word, also if someone tells me don't think about X I can, so the whole now you can't stop thinking about X joke falls flat.
But I can make myself visualize it at different levels, I can do a quick command visualize in which I have sort of a flash of what is meant but it isn't a continuing image in my mind. Right now when I did the visualize Elephant thing I got a bit of an image that looked like the center elephant off the cover to Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr
If I do a much longer close my eyes and visualize I can make that image I flashed on more concrete in my head.
As a general rule I do not consider myself a visual thinking but a language oriented thinker. I understand things better by reading than I do by looking at images.
You are definitely experiencing things differently from me. There is no question or ambiguity for me that I am 'seeing' something in my mind. It is nearly as close to seeing as I do with my eyes; there is no way that if you had this sense you would be unaware of it. I am not seeing the blackness of my eyelids at all. I'm completely unaware of the blackness. I'm seeing something as though it were in my vision. I can rotate it around and view it from any angle. It's as though the vision processor gets unplugged from the eyes and gets plugged into some part of the brain; different input source, but the output, that of experiencing sight, is nearly the same.
I expect that the clarity of this sense varies on a spectrum, with some people low enough that they don't have it at all, and others kind of having it but not very clear. I expect that the latter group are the ones commenting things like "I'm not sure if I count or not." But from what I can tell, I'm toward the higher end of clarity, and the sense is by no means uncertain.
For me, it’s very specific. I can visualize a generic elephant, a generic apple or other generic or static object. However, I could never visualize a person’s face for more than a split second. I can describe the person’s features, but never maintain an image of a person’s face for any length of time. If I think of their picture, I can imagine that picture. I’m not sure how else to describe it. It’s kind of weird, but I never really think about it.
I think of it like an offscreen rendering. I can see it in my mind and if I space out I begin focusing on the second screen instead of the first. In those fleeting moment I can only describe it as not seeing anything with my eyes, only my mind. When I realize it is happening, it is gone.
I think aphantasia is a sign of a weak skillset - I think you can practice it. I try to create wireframe versions of the rooms I am in sometimes, but I suck at it. Ask me to visualize something and I almost cannot - but for some reason I can do wireframes. It's my lame version of trying I guess.
That is called aphantasia, which I learned about through previous HN threads - there are many but here's a comment with a link to the VVIQ test https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20268557
Is there a more practical test for this than trusting what the person answering says? Like the aphantasia equivalent of one of those colorblind pictures where different people see different numbers.
I struggle to determine if I can visualize imagery or not. I don't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route based on the shortest map distance? Because I can do that..
Thanks. A couple of ideas mentioned there for anyone else: "measuring cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex" and measuring skin perspiration/fear response in a situation where a story that triggers mental imagery is followed by imagery that might "amplify" the former. These both seem rather limited to measurements in study groups and both require equipment, but interesting nonetheless!
It's weird, I always considered myself as having a photographic memory and now I'm wondering if I have aphantasia. I believe I could draw a scene from memory with quite high resolution and accuracy. But it's not anything like the experience of seeing with my eyes. In fact, closing my eyes barely helps me visualise. I just assumed it was like that for everyone.
I tried the linked test mostly with my eyes closed. I don't 'see' anything, just black. It improved very slightly if I kept my eyes opened and stared at nothing (blank wall, desk surface etc). Not to the point where I could suddenly 'see' things, but I was able to come off the 1 scale of "knowing" I was thinking of an object.
I have a sort of similar thing. I do not dream. That is, I am nearly 50 years old and I have never woken up having any recollection of anything happening from the time I fall asleep until I wake up. I understand that other people remember seeing or hearing things while they sleep (from what people describe, things like falling is a common dream theme). I've never experienced this. People say, "Oh, you do dream, you just don't remember it." After reading this article, would they also try to tell this person that he can see things in his mind's eye but can't remember them?
I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my inability to derive pleasure from music.
Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music. I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadI can imagine the apple, but I can't literally see it. Nothing I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia actually the inability to even imagine the apple?
It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's really hard for someone with it to understand what's being asked of them. :)
I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly not sure, just like the GP.
But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else would use these words to describe thoughts.
If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what?
I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count?
When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?
Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in front of them, that would be a hallucination.
From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism.
A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.
The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or different facial expressions she makes.
If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up with something vague. I remember he was wearing large earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at his face, there are parts that simply won't come into focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way).
So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction between visualizing things clearly and not.
It was in response to the complaint that the "Vividness of Visual Imagery" test is ambiguous, because people can't decide whether their visualization is clear or not. I'm saying that, for a person with a good ability at visualizing, the distinction is fairly clear.
And it's not just fuzzy memory, the fuzzy memory causes a non-clear picture. But I can't transfer my phenomenological experience to you, so you'll either have to accept that some people can have both clear or non-clear imagery, or not.
In answer to your question, I can certainly produce a mental image of an imagined barista. I can imagine very fine details in, say, the handlebar mustache I invent. Yes, those details will probably have come from reality, but I don't know from where, and I can visualize it very clearly if I choose to.
In answer to a question you didn't ask, when I read books I rarely have a detailed image of a character. They're kind of faceless people, roughly sketched. I actually discussed this last week with my either-year-old, and she had the exact same experience, but had never really stopped to think about it. (Like what I was saying before about the nose missing not being weird.)
The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source didn't matter to the rest of my brain.
People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing on.
No. See this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277.
1. Ability to visualize
2. Accuracy of memory
3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings
Those aren't one thing, it's a combination of things. The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save their lives. It says nothing about their ability to visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and ability to draw.
Same with visualising a bicycle. I've seen many bicycles and I know what parts a bicycle has and roughly how they fit together, but unless I've paid attention to the exact shape and position of each part, I could at best visualise a rough approximation of a bicycle.
I'm not aware exactly what is wrong, just as I would not be aware of what part of the paragraph I changed. But in many ways it doesn't matter, because the high-level idea is there mostly unchanged, just as with the text. The difference is that if you don't fit the parts in exactly the right way, the bicycle will not work, but I'm unlikely to completely change the paragraph by substituting a few synonyms.
This is not even getting into the jump from visualising to drawing, which would depend on my ability to draw.
They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the scene and draw up the details.
I think it's interesting that the author of the article suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are definitely advantages for both types of thinking.
I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without externalizing everything.
So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not.
Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question. I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or weak.
But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g. But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now remembering it.
I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to remember images at all.
No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant turning and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776
The most notable difference is that there's no "visual" encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"--and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can tell you if that shade is "color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color. It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green square, but something like a color gradient just makes my "mind's eye" go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
[1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail. Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.
In the case of the red-green gradient, I'm not exactly computing the colors intentionally; I've just seen quads with interpolated coloring often enough that those memories feed my mind's eye. I can fairly easily visualize a blue-purple or orange-teal gradient, too, but I can't attest to their accuracy.
> But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.
That's my experience, too. Reading your description of somebody driving away in their car, I was able to easily reconstruct an imagined scene in my mind's eye, but I naturally filled in the missing details with a kind of "default" -- camera position and angle, whether the parking is covered, the car is like the one Dexter's dad drives in Dexter's Laboratory (but not a cartoon), etc. The details are... there-ish, if I care to query them, but for a simple replay of the scene, my imagination doesn't bother rendering them to any significant fidelity unless I intend to.
It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it is.
Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and mathematics.
But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write-only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well.
Now, my dreams are usually pretty vivid, but I see that's "normal" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since.
On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is missing for me.
Customers will sometimes comment that it's strange I need to get a menu, but the staff seems to agree with the method.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
(IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you want citations.)
My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a lot of steps that younger me couldn't. I generally like to describe the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer and a library of models on your brain".
I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding aspect.
Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD:
https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill (Low-poly Rose Twist Vase)
https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise (just a neat keycap)
https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium (an entire keyboard: Switches, stabs, case, keycaps, etc were all made with OpenSCAD)
Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I hate the ternary operator! It's so obtuse.
I think I might have "aphantasia" (or I am not trying hard enough :)), but I can perfectly well find things I left somewhere in the dark. I could also easily find that place I got to once through a maze of one-way streets following instructions by someone else weeks ago by kinda-recognizing buildings and houses where I need to make turns. I couldn't describe what those houses looked like for the life of me, but I could perfectly recognize them once I saw them.
All of these are things I've noticed in the past, but never put a name to it (not that I looked).
I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind. I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element.
I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in true 3D. I thought it was because of this--and my long term memory issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces (or names). I am not the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind in one eye that are absolutely fantastic at remembering people's faces (and names, obviously).
So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason haha).
Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is a question like this? https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg
I can't see images in my head. But at least I can try to fold it within my imagination. I can at least rotate it like in 3D computer program. But void is all I "see" in my imagination.
What about you?
For reference, that particular cube folding question is easier than others because you can take the "shortcut" and just pay attention to the orientation of the numbers. The ones that I have to stop and think about the most are the ones with nothing but colors or (minor) shading. For whatever reason I find sides with shapes the easiest to visualize... Even if the shape is the same no matter the orientation (e.g. a circle).
Interesting tidbit: I love 3D puzzles and I always try to visualize what it looks like inside (if it's the type where you can't see the inner workings) while I'm figuring it out. I'm almost always way off with what I thought the inside would look like. Different kind of visualization I think. Probably has something to do with the ability to turn physical sensations (i.e. "what you feel") into a mental image.
Interesting. This question is not hard to solve for me, but I can't solve it by visualizing the cube rotating despite having no trouble visualizing the cube in its initial position. More specifically, when I try to rotate the cube in my mind's eye, to get it "started" rotating, I have to anchor my focus on one particular side of the cube, which I can then rotate correctly. However, this causes me to lose focus on the other sides of the cube, and I can no longer simply look back at them to see how their numbers are oriented after the rotation completes.
When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times? Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then look back at the others and see that they are still correct?
I visualize the entire flat object and fold it (all at once) in my head, paying attention to where all sides end up. I can then rotate it around in any direction (some are easier than others though; not sure why). Basically I visualize animating the flat object so that it folds into a 3D object at the edges. Just as if you were to do it with something like Blender.
I have a very easy time turning the flat object into a 3D object (accurately) but remembering which markers/colors were on which side is where my visualization often falls apart, haha.
I am the same way. I'm also highly myopic (I got glasses at age 4). There are times I've failed to recognize old friends until they started speaking to me (they did look a little different from the last time I'd seen them).
I always assumed that not seeing very well as a little kid is part of why I sometimes have visual recognition problems, too.
My last job was 100% remote, and I started a week before one of the twice-yearly retreats where everybody gets together in person. Knowing that I'm poor at recognizing faces and poor at remembering names, I threw together https://github.com/philsnow/slanki and was able to put a name to about 50% of the 250 faces I met at that retreat, which felt absolutely like a superpower to me at the time.
...but then it took me more than a minute to figure out why the test wasn't responding no matter how many times I clicked on the answer, and then other answers, and then even other buttons on the form.
There's definitely many different spectra of perception out there! :D
But could you describe your wife's features?
And if so, do you think it's because you're reciting a list of memorized facts ("she has brown hair" etc) or because you're drawing on your memory, even if not visually?
Could you describe (at all) any major pieces of art, such as the pose of the Mona Lisa?
And as I read that over, I realize it's a terrible explanation. I have no clue how to respond usefully.
There are standard "algorithms" how to draw people. You kind of draw standard shapes and then make differences against "standard". Proportions of peoples heads, eyes, noses and other features are surprisingly similar among people.
Sketch artists basically learned very well how to draw peoples faces specifically and what are important features people notice.
When I realized many people actually can recall a snapshot of things, I realized (part of) how they manage to be so much better at drawing than I am.
Truly hard to walk a mile in anyone else's shoes.
I recognize people just fine, but if you sat me down with a sketch artist (or indeed the sketch-artist sub game in Police Quest II), I'm at a loss to say whether someone's eyes are wider or narrower-spaced, whether their mouth is higher or lower, etc. Sometimes I do notice people's noses in the abstract and I may have a describable memory of that, and I think I remember most people's hair shape if not the color. But "A face with a small nose and long hair" is not really much to go on.
Smells, too. I smell just fine, and sometimes smells evoke instant memories, but I can't name a smell that I'm smelling. I'm absolutely at a loss to figure out what herbs are missing from food I'm making, or what I've added too much of. I can't describe tastes or smells beyond a very basic level.
I think I can kind of imagine what it's like not to be able to picture images in my head but I always have a very hard time imagining what people without internal narrative feel like (as I assume it must be to imagine what it's like to have one when you don't)
As he moved through the large world of the server he would repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some trait or role that you can have in the game.
Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision played there, using screen readers.
Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a wall of ASCII.
Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD A MUD (/mʌd/; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
I have normal vision, and have played on MUDs only for a few years, in my late teens / early twenties.
On another note, does anyone know if screenreaders read advertisements? I got so upset the other day when I realized that blind people might have to deal with screenreaders narrating advertisements.
I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug fixes that.
It's VERY distracting.
It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing' it.
I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also experience.
https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html says that
> Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in which the nerves do not function properly and patients may experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax.
> ...
> This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask your doctor or pharmacist for more information.
I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to follow/copy bits of it :)
I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg recreational options) to shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost to helping me reset stuff.
One side effect of tizanidine at higher doses is hallucinations, so it would seem to do SOMETHING with your visualization center, but idk what.
For your autistic difficulties, I'm curious if finding resources for people that have gone blind/deaf might help. I know it sounds weird, but as a visually impaired person, we thought I had Asperger's for a while because I literally couldn't see body language well enough to read social cues, and I found it really helpful to look up information on how to 'read' that information elsewhere. Likewise, if somebody goes deaf, I'm sure there are lessons on how to do things like read more into body language. It just might help explain a lot of things that neurotypical people take for granted.
Also biology: I find it really helps me to remember that humans are sacks of hormones and that sometimes when they're silly it's not me being wrong. They might just have gotten a surge of adrenaline and had a knee jerk reaction, or they might be overstimulated. I know I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies will allow.
"I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies will allow."
Thanks for today's smile.
The consideration to consider blindness/deafness as a source of insight to reading social cues is definitely not something I would've thought of anytime soon. I think I might just follow up on that.
Regarding the "actually-relevant implementation detail" perspective of (neuro?)biology, I echo the sentiment of the other comment :) - I also find it all too easy to lose sight of the bounds of the bounding box and forget how important it can be to correct for them.
If you can answer at least one of those questions you probably don't have aphantasia.
This seems like wild speculation. The single cited study is also riddled with problems, including comparing 2,000 people with self-reported aphantasia to a set of 200 control individuals from an entirely different study.
I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!".
I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people - for starters, people vastly overestimate their ability to picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. Even if they didn't have the artistic skill to make a "good" drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has the handlebars in front of the front wheel).
My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my brain is recalling apples it's seen before and telling itself to process that information as if it were coming from my eyes. Even though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I visualize it in my head, it feels like I'm seeing it. She chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same vividness anymore (she's since "recovered").
I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring each other that we weren't really mind-blind - but that would either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that make them more likely to be friends :)
You could say that about any sort of human trait: People who <share trait X> tend to enjoy each other's company. Some traits having more influence than others (obviously).
This ability evolved from lucid dreaming I learned in high school. After eighteen years of deliberate practice (several times per week), I can drop into this state at will. My real senses are dimmed, but not gone. If my phone beeps, I will hear it and likely lose what I'm imagining.
Despite all of this, I couldn't draw any of it. I can't draw and I lack the ability to keep a single image in for a prolonged period. But I can write it. Finding ways of describing smells or sensations in a way other people can understand is fun. (My virtual machine can also run approximations of other people.)
Agreed with your comparison to your wife as being better at visualization: I think in general "aphantasia" is on a spectrum, with some people being completely unable to visualize things, and others hearing about people who can visualize incredibly well and thinking "If I don't have that, then I must have aphantasia!"
It's also a skill: I used to think I had aphantasia. Over the last ~3 years I've been practicing visualization -- nothing fancy, just trying to close my eyes and visualize things every so often for a few minutes. With that low-level practice, my ability to visualize things has improved a lot: before I had nothing, now I can get black-and-white shaky images, and manipulate them, rotate them, etc.
Still can't do faces though, I can imagine the rest of a person but their face is just missing. Still working on that :)
You'd think it would be a simple hop years ago from sight to the other senses and which ones work in my head and which don't. But no, smell and taste are "out of sight, out of mind" for me in a way that sight isn't. When they aren't present I don't have a good way of thinking about them and don't really think about them much at all.
What about the other senses, can people imagine kinaesthetic body positions of poses they aren't currently doing? Can people imagine balancing on a high-wire or being off-balance on a moving boat, while sitting on steady ground?
For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also have to be true:
- He never heard anyone talk about dreams
- He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
- He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art
- He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used and people describe what they see in their memory of an event
- He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something was demonstrated visually
- He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image
- He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
- Etc.
It just strikes me as entirely implausible.
You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath).
Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?
You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them.
This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums.
Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.
There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can find examples in this very thread.
Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" while you do that.
I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image in my head.
All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, just on the other end of the curve).
I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly differently.
So in short, I could notice that there are some special things about my brain, but I did not know that this might be "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it).
I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that you find it implausible that adults would only learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a miniscule part of them.
Try reading “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks.
Most of your examples don’t have any obvious connection to what was posted.
E.g. most people don’t have a photographic memory and we all know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head doesn’t require you to visualize anything. It just requires you not to say what you read out loud.
I recommend reading the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is incomplete).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets.
> - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it to myself.
> - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art
I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the real thing.
> - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image
When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to remember the underlying information.
> - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen Wiltshire[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp...
>Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) because they can ‘see’ the person’s face in their memory.
Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet another colourful metaphor.
And then you have people like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or deluded.
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in that article?
I have found differences between myself and others, though. When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note about it.
It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly tell me they "see" something.
So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason!
The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT".
When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.
I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two."
If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology.
Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.
It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.
(To say nothing about the other meaning of the word "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it" without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because that pun was also too good to pass up).
You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is going, people with bad imaginations would be people with an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking.
I mentioned the s-plane earlier: We talk about poles and zeros in the s-plane, because they form poles and zeroes visualized in an actual plane, a 2-dimensional plate with protrusions into the 3rd dimension. The poles pulling the plane upwards into infinity, the zeroes tacking it down to the "floor". In the z-plane, we talk about getting the spectrum of a signal or filter by tracing the unit circle, because you can imagine tracing a literal circle in the plane. We "shift" signals up, down, left, right, we "flip" spectrums, we "cross" the origin.
To know whether a z domain transfer function is stable, I don't read "the complex roots of the denominator have to have a magnitude < 1" past some initial textbook definitions, it's just "the poles have to be inside the unit circle". In the s-plane, we instead talk about the poles being on the left half.
And yet the subject matter, signals and filters, has nothing to do with "visual objects" per se (like geometry would, for example). Even if the signal is a video signal, what we are manipulating here has nothing directly to do with what the video signal shows. And the signal might be an audio signal or just some nondescript digital data to begin with.
It just amazes me that someone can grasp such a complex subject without working with its ubiquitous visualization, so pervasive that its objects were named accordingly. It's true that I can build enough intuition to say things like "okay, if I put a capacitor there I'll have another pole" and not think about the actual plane for that instant, but as soon as it's something more complex that I don't immediately "know", I have to resort to my visualization again. I probably speak out of envy, because this also means I can never fully have the feeling of "grasping" higher dimensional problems for example, especially when familiar properties that are true for n<=4 break down there. I always only feel my understanding is working with a "shadow" of what's actually happening, to use another visual metaphor.
As for higher dimensions, yes, when you can barely visualize R3, R4 doesn't seem much harder, but that's hardly a superpower, it's just a pair of equal inabilities. I find it easy to accept the principles of noneuclidian geometry, but that comes with the side effect that if I was told they applied to euclidian space, that'd come "naturally" too.
I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than others and I think it's because most people were trying to visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it was just another equation to work with.
But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned.
I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.
I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while.
Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer.
Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.
I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious. Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair, square face, just standing there watching things". It helps me to remember in case it's important later.
And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what that is like. I don't have that kind of experience otherwise.
My mind is a dark, quiet place :)
I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept.
Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.
Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.
I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain:
I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought.
So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.
I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable.
When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training?
I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.
I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like that.
Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.
In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.
ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow.
How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that?
These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme
That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.
If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination:
* I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery.
* The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part.
* The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail.
* There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update.
It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation.
It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.
My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.
Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.
I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape.
It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself.
The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.
I never felt like missing something and those images dont add much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.
I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of things and much better at noticing properties of objects around me.
Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.
I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.
Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.
Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic.
Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is.
(Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.)
Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition.
Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.
This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops.
It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.
> or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition
Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.
Oh sure, that too. I was just going for brevity in that part. As per my first paragraph, I'm not convinced that aphantasia is a natural category, which would be necessary for framing it as a condition.
(Although I'd maybe say I'm more "on the fence" than "convinced its absurd" -- I'm open to the possibility someone can come up with a clear test, I just don't see it and don't expect anyone to.)
> Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.
Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or focusing attention on an image in your head in order to describe it, the way I explained above?
It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's why I think it may have more to do with the language people are using to describe the experience than the experience itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.
If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks like, I still only see black/darkness… but I can still describe the features of the room in very much detail. I definitely can’t conjure up a vivid image in my head, I would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly visual experience. Same with recalling what someone’s voice sounds like… I can imagine what someone’s voice sounds like, but definitely can’t hear their voice in any meaningful level of detail, yet I’m still able to describe the voice - it’s more of a feeling than a literal audio/visual experience.
I definitely wouldn’t describe my own experience as anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see black/darkness… (I think) it’s uncommon to literally see things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is abnormal?
When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text file got me thinking about what it would look like if my eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would look like (given what information I had about things like whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not, whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind of thing).
Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I keep track of whether I'm running out of various things (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so, it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent reality, with more familiar things being represented more accurately.
It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing it (my parents called it "staring off into space").
I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once. And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different sense.
I want to say that some won't work, since I know there are some that rely on design flaws in our eyeballs (placement of the optic nerve). I'm thinking specifically about the ones where you are directed to look at some part of the figure and notice that some other part has vanished.
One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the elephant or apple in the article.
I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.
That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.
When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to sketching and ordering.
(environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-... )
Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who would arrange for a delivery the next day.
I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put them together. After running it through the fax machine to get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was probably the best place for me.)
The majority of installers in the field could do this, though some were certainly better at it than others. Most would start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight out.
I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head was the anomaly.
> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space
I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely flustered my brain to the point of switching majors.
I can do this too, but it is not literally a visual experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual perception, not visual sensation in the way that a hallucination does.
Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of something in my literal vision. Which is what some people are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing to talk about.
I don't know how best to express it, but it's extremely visual. It's not just that I am recalling and describing - I am viewing and describing.
Ironically, I am terrible at drawing things because I can't see past the "big picture."
I'm terrible at drawing, but could describe any scene I'm imagining have a near-perfect idea of how it should look if someone drew for me.
I'm an aphant with low spatial skills.
Though, FWIW, it sounds like you have more internal visuals than I do.
But I can identify most closely with the other commenters here who describe their experience as more proprioceptive or spatial than visual per se.
Not everyone can. That's the difference people are talking about.
I can rotate things in my head, but I get a very low framerate - roughly 1fps. Its easy for me to imagine the keyframes, but the interpolation between them is much harder.
I also tend to have a small rendering resolution - ex. I can render keyframes of details, but holding the entire image in my head simultaneously is difficult
However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to recall it, the more blurry it becomes.
Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real. I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind, but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird.
The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament to the neuroplasticity of our brains.
However some sort of abstract higher dimensional thing that doesn't have a physical analog I can't imagine at all. If there's really a difference in how people perceive these things than I imagine for OP there is no difference between visualizing any object but for others there is.
It's not a hallucination because that would imply it interferes with your eye vision. It's like a third eye, independent of the other two, so it doesn't interfere.
I actually have a thing where I can't process math without seeing geometry in my head. But I was never naturally good at perfectly visualizing real world objects. Instead of math and code, which came naturally, I pursued art college because I considered it a weak spot for me. And indeed, I wasn't very good at it... but years of classes and practice made me better, and strengthened my visualization skill. I think it can be learned and exercised, like any other part of the brain. Just like musical recognition can be learned, if not perfect pitch.
This. It is a mashup of both. I can clearly visualize many 3D objects in my mind, as well as zoom, pan, scale, rotate, recolor, animate, distort them, etc. But it is not purely visual, because I often "see" opposite side of a cube momentarily, which I should not be able to from this perspective.
So, it is not a rendering engine. It is not physically, spatially and temporally stable. Stability is lost especially as your focus shifts (e.g. "seeing" behind objects as your attention slips there)
The best way I know to describe this is by old and new Tesla FSD predictions which are sampled here: https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=3768
Improved version is how people talk about visualization, but the old unstable version is how (at least for me) it mostly is.
I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way :)
Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I ‘visualize’ a tiger, it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read your comment I said ‘oh, wtf!’ out loud
If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, or am asked a question about it, more details will come to mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a scene, like from a commercial.
Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.
Never though that this was different of anyone else.
Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things i realised that apparently i can have this image only for about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of other people aswell.
Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class, despite trying.
It's depressing in a totally different sense, because I can never capture on paper the things that I visualize -- I just don't have the knack for art.
Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite like reading from paper, but very similar.
I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend.
When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ?
And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.
For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
> For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a mental narrative voice.
Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.
My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my head without me realising I was actually saying it out.
If so, that is truly fascinating. What happens when you try to speak a sentence in your head?
Are you consciously thinking about every word you say before you say it?
When I think, it’s a mixture of 1) hearing my voice and 2) thinking in purely abstract concepts and relationships without putting English to it.
When I want to think in English, I can hear it plain as day, as if I’m saying the words aloud, with their exact cadence and accent. I can also “speak” with someone else’s voice and hear them say anything as clearly as if they were speaking in front of me.
Thinking in English can help me find the holes and gaps in my abstract thoughts, because I’m forced to formalize each logical leap and conclusion.
Zero. Zip. Dead Silence.
It may be fascinating but at the same time I felt I am sort of having some disability. Quite depressing now I know many people can do it.
How do you put your pants on without words? Serious question. It's like that.
What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or whatever was?
I think the answers to these questions might help me at least to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a different description.
I am 100% sure I cannot visualize things. I have been able, with _lot_ of concentration, "visualize" a blob of color. I was unable to control the shape or size, but could (kind of) control the color (between the choices of red, green, and purple). It was incredibly vivid, and I'm convinced that's what "visualizing means, and that people can do it with actual objects and scenes.
I use the word "see" because it's the best word to describe what is happening in my head. It's not literally seeing, but... it's very close, it's not just me remembering details about what something looks like, it's "visualizing".
I'm sorry, I don't know how to put into words the difference between the vision happening in my eyeball and the vision happening inside my head. There are differences, but they are very hard to articulate and there are fewer differences than there are similarities. The mental and eyeball "vision" are definitely at least running many of the same subroutines.
My feeling is that when someone says that they think words like "picture" or "see" are just social conventions, I suspect they're having a different experience than me. I would probably have settled on a phrase like "picture something in my head" even if no one else used that phrase, I can literally mentally trace out the outlines of the thing I'm imagining in the head. It's not just a list of attributes or descriptions, it's a thing that I am... again, for lack of a better word, "seeing", even though I'm not literally seeing it via my eyes in front of me.
What sticks out to me is that I literally can't think of any word that could be closer to what's happening then the words "vision", "seeing", "picture". Calling it a description is less accurate, it captures less of the experience than the word "seeing" does. Phrases like "replaying a scene in my mind", "remembering a sound", "an image popping into your head", etc... those are not rough poetic analogies, those are descriptions that are extremely close to what is literally going on inside my head.
> I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me
I am not going to try and diagnose anyone over the Internet, I'm not an expert on anything, but yeah, if you're curious about it that sounds to me a lot like aphantasia, at least as far as I understand aphantasia. You say the concept of comparing what's going on in your head to a picture doesn't make any sense at all to you? At that point I suspect it's not a difference in language; I'm not talking about being able to draw something or describe attributes about what it looks like, I'm talking about being able to... see it.
I don't know for certain, but I feel like picturing something in your head is (again, while not literally exactly the same as seeing something in real life) still not an analogy I would need to explain to someone who didn't have aphantasia.
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Articles like this are so fascinating to me, there are a couple of different parts of my experiences (ADHD, asexuality) that I always assumed were completely universal and then later in my life found out weren't. Whenever stuff like that happens to me it's always a surprising experience, and for some weird reason I'm always excited when I see it. Once you realize that certain things that you think are unique about you aren't, and that certain things that you think are universal aren't, and more than that you realize how easy it is to be in a situation where you'd never discover that -- for me it makes me feel like the world and the people around me are more interesting, and it makes me want to learn more about them.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if someone has aphantasia, it doesn't mean their life is going to get turned upside down. But I think sometimes it's just fun to learn about things and to think about how experiences shape people.
The test from the linked article seems to assume people can visualize an actual image more than fleetingly, but that's not me. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is very good at visualization (I certainly can when I'm dreaming), but it's not a conscious thing for me, and the very act that the test asks for - think of a scene - is what causes any half-images to disappear.
But I can make myself visualize it at different levels, I can do a quick command visualize in which I have sort of a flash of what is meant but it isn't a continuing image in my mind. Right now when I did the visualize Elephant thing I got a bit of an image that looked like the center elephant off the cover to Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr
If I do a much longer close my eyes and visualize I can make that image I flashed on more concrete in my head.
As a general rule I do not consider myself a visual thinking but a language oriented thinker. I understand things better by reading than I do by looking at images.
I expect that the clarity of this sense varies on a spectrum, with some people low enough that they don't have it at all, and others kind of having it but not very clear. I expect that the latter group are the ones commenting things like "I'm not sure if I count or not." But from what I can tell, I'm toward the higher end of clarity, and the sense is by no means uncertain.
I found the test difficult.
I struggle to determine if I can visualize imagery or not. I don't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route based on the shortest map distance? Because I can do that..
I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my inability to derive pleasure from music.
Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music. I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming.