My second thought is that this whole thing could be down to a two way road between the neo cortex and the visual cortex. Its all the rage in machine learning / neural net to paint images using just concepts / words so perhaps some of us can so the same thing. Personally I think mine is less a two way road and more a one way cul-de-sac.
I suspect that I would classify as one who has aphantasia, as I can't picture images at will.
This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.
I feel like I’m better prepared for the tasks that are too complex to process all at once and must be decomposed and navigated systematically, because I’m well practiced at approaching everything that way, by necessity.
I can't picture images at all, and don't really dream at all either. Wonder if there are any implications, I went through most of my life thinking this is normal.
Yes. I have no visual imagery, either, but I know that I dream. I just have no recall, or very, very little. I've tried the dream log thing, etc. and nothing ever made a difference.
I have a handful of dreams that I can recall from the entirety of my life and a couple from childhood, a couple from adulthood. I know that 1 of them is a recurring dream. 3 of them are actually nightmares.
I could have written that whole comment you make, except I have only one dream I can remember from my whole life and it is a nightmare. Have not had it for at least 10+ years.
I mean how do you do a dream log when you wake up and it is just like I have no idea if I dreamt or not.
I kept journals for several years. One night I woke up from a dream that was particularly interesting, so I turned on the light, found my journal, and wrote down everything I could remember.
I decided then to keep a journal and a pen next to my bed so that recording additional dreams would be easier. I soon found that I had collected multiple volumes of recorded dreams and auxiliary notes about them.
I don't know whether writing my dreams down made it more likely that I would dream, or more likely to remember my dreams--I know that some people say that it makes you more likely to remember your dreams, but I don't know whether that's true. I just know that the number of dreams I ended up writing down was much greater than I expected based on the number of dreams that I had previously remembered.
Also, I needed to write them down very quickly after waking or I'd forget them. Every minute I waited caused me to lose more details.
That still seems to be true years later. I don't keep a dream journal anymore, but I notice that if I wake from a dream, and I want to remember it, I need to write it down or tell someone about it pretty much right away. If I don't, it'll be lost within a few minutes. I might remember that I had a dream, and I might remember what I felt like when I was having it, but most often nothing more than that.
If I write it down or otherwise communicate it, though, I usually remember the parts that I managed to communicate before the rest disappeared.
Maybe if you keep a journal close to your bed as I once did, you'll get lucky one night and wake up from a dream to write it down. Maybe it will then turn out that those people are right: that writing down dreams makes you more likely to remember additional ones.
I can’t picture images at all and thought it was normal. I mean it seems to be relatively common at least so we aren’t total aliens.
It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts.
That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
I am the same way, I explain it as "I think in concepts"
Relationships is a word to explain it that I hadn't thought of before. I think a lot of engineers are probably similar.
When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
A lot of engineering/software stuff is abstract.
Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank:
"thinking in concepts" is exactly how I describe it, but mine is a little different. I still don't visualize anything, but I have a fantastic sense of direction. I can wander through a maze of back alleyways intuitively and end up very close to where I want to be. Similarly, I can fold and unfold shapes in my head, but not visually. If I consider the problem, I become aware of the answer.
Do you have an internal voice/monologue, or lack one? This is another thing I recently found out I don't have and I'm trying to see if the two are related.
(I'm still a bit "excited" from your original comment. I could have written it word for word.)
I got no visuals and no voice. Its dark and quiet on my head.
I found out not all people are like that in my early 40s and to be honest felt like I missed out. I do dream visually, but rarely able to recall dreams, and I did experience visuals on psychedelics in my 20s.
The one plus of seeing in concepts is that I can hold complex software systems in my head pretty easily and code always clicked with me very naturally. But I still am a bit jealous of those with special fx vision
Is it "you" that talks to you? I'm not even sure what an "inner monologue" is in practice. Is it a thought-line different to your "practical thoughts" which narrates your day as you go?
I don't think it sounds like me when I hear my own voice - either when I speak or hear recorded snippets.
I'm not sure what voice it is - but when I read or type I hear it, and I can ask questions internally and kind of look up things to recall a bit. No visualization it it's like a key value lookup.
It's a bit hard to explain but I was bummed when I found people can actually visualize things internally
> When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
Oddly, while I totally get the emphasis on "relationships", I definitely orient those relationships spatially. I used to play a text-only game (a MUD) where the world was laid out as a graph of rooms; the graph was only approximately metric. I initially learned to navigate by drawing my own (roughly Cartesian) maps as ASCII art, giving me a kind of global perspective in my mind's eye, but over time I "learned" the topological structure directly and relied on a less graphical (but no less spatial) local perspective.
I tend to "navigate" codebases in much the same way. Different parts of the codebase cluster more or less closely, and I perceive information flows in essentially the same way that I perceived paths through the MUD's world. I learn a codebase in much the same way, although it's much more local from the beginning (codebases tend to be even less Cartesian than the MUD's world is).
That's very interesting because I also have aphantasia, but I can flip objects and know which answer is correct. I don't know how to explain it, but I can do it. I also have no problem with cardinal directions, and I have no problems with right/left (although my ability to distinguish right/left was a later development than my peers).
> When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
Interesting that you feel this way. I definitely do imagine a codebase spatially, and constantly draw diagrams on paper to orient myself. I find those note taking tools like Dendron that do nothing except make a nice graph of your knowledge very useful.
If you make a graph with services or classes as nodes, and edges as calls between them, you can absolutely get a sense of when a codebase or system architecture is spaghetti, and when it's a neatly organised tree with neatly distinguished layers and no cycles.
In fact, surely that's why people call spaghetti code spaghetti - because the call graph looks like a plate of spaghetti and is impossible to untangle.
> Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank:
Yes. If I ever had to do this for an interview, I am failing. I try to rotate my hand in a similar fashion you might have done if you've ever done physics magnetism calculations.
To solve these I develop a set of rules about the relationship between sides. Like if there is an X on one side then there must be a T adjacent to it and so on. Then I try to eliminate as many answers as possible and then when I'm down to 2 just look for something that is "wrong" (i.e X side cannot be next to V side)
>There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
There 100% is a picture of it. Code itself is a 2D picture of logic. The picture for code is arranged in a specific way with huge limitations that don't take full advantage of 2D space.
3D space is infinite and if logical decisions can map onto 2D space (which is essentially what code is) it can also map onto 3D space.
The "language" of this mapping from logical decisions to some sort of spatial diagram can become more and more complex. Instead of linear lines of symbols (which again is what code is) it can be become a graph, or a literal pipeline of logic in 3D space. Analog computers are essentially 3D "pictures" of "code."
Additionally how the logic is represented in your brain must take up space. Logic itself is not so abstract that it takes up zero space. How ever it is stored in your brain there IS a 3D structure or "picture" of that logic that exists. If you are aware of some logical step of operations then it FOR SURE exists as a picture in your brain. I'm not saying it's a picture you can visualize... But the locations of where and how that information is connected in your brain forms a 3D structure. The essence of all logic starts as geometry in 3D space; taking away that space is the abstraction.
Code doesn't have to be visualized. Many times I don't visualize it at all. I remember it, like you... via relationships. But I have the Option of visualizing it as a picture.
If you have aphantasia it just means your brain lacks the ability to assign spatial coordinates to concepts. So you are aware of "relationships" but you can't arrange those concepts into a 3D grid and see how they are all interconnected. It's more of a disability the a brain type IMO, because people who don't have aphantasia can certainly see relationships without having the need to "picture" it.
If it does lend you advantages, I would say it's similar to how certain blind people can use echo location to navigate the world. It may lend you advantages that arise out of necessity to utilizes other tools to make up for a disability, but oftentimes it may not.
I've read about and seen articles submitted on aphantasia more on HN than anywhere else on the internet. I wonder if it's just more prevalent among the HN population than others.
I've heard of it and still have no idea if I have it or not, if what I picture (basically nothing, but I'd still be able to remember the layout of a room for example) is the same as what most people do, but we describe it differently, if there is some condition where one can picture even less than me, if people can actually close their eyes and "see" a scene as if their eyes are open (this I find dubious), etc.
I think the confusing nd somewhat ambiguous description of aphantasia, and the highly literal nature of many HN folks makes it more common for people to either think they may have it, or so question how others see stuff, so are more curious about it.
I'm like you, I feel I have it but it is so hard to communicate what happens in the brain. Talking to my wife I think people can really see images when they close their eyes. For me it is all black.
I can still remember things like layout of a room, complicated directions etc, but it comes with no visual imagery. I also like to close my eyes when I am trying to think what some complicated code is doing, still nothing visual though.
can you imagine the faces of your loved one's? like, if one of them went missing, would you be able to help the investigators draw up a sketch of their face?
as far as i can tell, most people say "yes". for me, when i imagine my dad's face, i get a brief flash of a grin, where the wrinkles are (but certainly not how many, or in any definition), and the rough cut of his hair. there's no eye color in the imagery, for example. stronger than any visual experience when i imagine his face is something of an emotional/empathetic experience -- what it feels like to be in his presence.
from what i gather, for people like me (and maybe you) who experience "some" visual imagery but not "lots", it's just a skill like any other and there are exercises you can do if you care enough about it to strengthen it.
Would aphants be better served with an academic pipeline that minimizes reliance on visualizing, especially when it comes to classes like geometry or trignometry?
Perhaps a mechanism like this could identify aphantasia in early childhood and use this to provide a more optimized academic pipeline.
I don't think aphants have problems with these classes, at least not from what I read. I think I'd qualify as aphant, but I had no problems at all in Engineering or Physics (at least, not coming from aphantasia)
yeah but classes like geometry? i remember our section on conical slices. like, cool, you can make an ellipse by intersecting a plane with a cone, but (for someone with limited mental imagery: ) isn't that just a really tortured way to go about the task?
I don't think those are good examples. I'm almost certain I have aphantasia but I think spatially. I don't "see" things around me in my "mind's eye", it's more like how you're aware of a nearby hot stove because you feel its heat, or an electrical device that gives off a low hum.
When programming, I have the code "mapped out" around me but likewise not optically but more "intuitively". I might be able to tell you in which direction a given piece of logic exists relative to me but it's more like how you can gauge what direction a sound comes from than having an image in my head that would allow me to tell you a specific place or distance. Note that I use sound to describe this but I don't have particularly exceptional hearing as far as I'm aware (e.g. no musical skills whatsoever).
I suppose I should also add that I don't have an "inner monologue". In fact I always thought references to the "voice in your head" were entirely metaphorical. This often makes it hard for me to explain my thoughts as I first need to try to find the right words to put them in language.
Triangles are super easy to draw (ie see) and the math is usually very simple. If there's an associated formula, working with formula is also very possible without visual skills.
Trickier problems involving several shapes like a puzzle might be harder, though that's not usually curriculum.
The way I have described it is in the movie The Dark Knight they build the machine that uses phones to build something like sonar to see in environments. The way that is depicted in the movie is how I visualize things. I can navigate rooms or areas but I only see this vague representation of objects similar to how it's depicted in the movie. I have no problem with abstract concepts as a software engineer. But I can't visualize a face for example. It's a vague representation in my mind.
I think of two different types of minds in this case, 'functional' and 'stateful.' Functional (like functional programming) minds do not use recall much, but instead build tools to react to situations. Stateful (with reactions in storage already) minds are good at recall and can react to known scenarios with greater precision.
I’ve had this thought as well, though always regarded the “functional” skills to be more of a coping mechanism for the lack of high-throughput state. It’s not that I’m naturally good at systematic thinking, but that I’ve been forced to become competent, and I envy the person who can operate wholistically.
This description reminds me a lot of the fluid vs crystallized intelligence. The way that’s always been described to me is that younger people always have a faster brain but as we age, we can make up for our slowness in having a lot of experience to draw on.
Can you "see" motion? I can. I can easily visualize a ballerina doing a pirouette and a plié and gracefully moving her arms... but I'm seeing actual imagery. It's more like I see the gradient of an image. Frankly, it's like "seeing" pure motion itself, devoid of the image itself of the thing moving. This was quite a surprising realization when I first noticed this ability. I think, by the way, for dancers and sports and others involved in motion activities, this ability is probably natural for them and they don't think about it.
Hello. For me it's monologue (inner dialogue) or vague/shadowy fleeting images.
Or singing songs to myself. I can rarely keep an image in mind for more than a moment, and it's always mostly colorless, not detailed.
Nope, no daydreams here. And I cannot draw, though I am trying to learn (but it's hard to find time with young children), but that doesn't mean much. Famously, at least one of the people who started Pixar is an aphantasiac and, when they ran a survey of animators, IIRC, quite a few of them reported back that they also had/have it.
I daydream, I suppose -- just not in clear imagery.
I can actually draw really well, better than most people. But not super elaborate scenes. And I know that if I could actually visualize, it would be helping me a lot.
I also have excellent musical/audio memory. I can hear back songs almost perfectly in my head, in the right key and in full detail.
I’ve never come across someone who also claims to be able to reproduce songs perfectly in their head. I can do this. It’s mostly involuntary though. I can’t pick and choose which songs I ‘record’ onto my brain.
I don’t see motion, but I can feel/experience motion. I don’t see images at all. The motion aspect is interesting and I can use it to experience outdoor activities or sports on demand.
Aphants - I'm wondering how much you enjoy reading fiction? Seems like a visual imagination would help you enjoy it a bit more. I have seen a youtuber describe her aphantasia and how she doesn't enjoy reading, perhaps for this reason.
I love reading fiction, but books that rely on extensive visual imagery tend to fall flat for me (most recently The Night Circus, but there have been others).
I enjoy reading a lots, but I prefer dialogs over long descriptions. I don't visualize how the characters / places can looks from descriptions. Unless the writing is really clear, I may struggle if the layout of the scene is important (say a crime scene with a description of the room, its exits, ...).
I sometimes skip description of the characters physique because I know that I won't remember it a few page later, and it usually do not matter in the story anyway (and if it matters, it is usually reminded to the reader because aphantasia is not the only reason a reader may not remember how a character is dressed or looks like).
I also prefer heavy dialogue in my reading. Books that are primarily world building an be a struggle. I read a lot, averaging about 40 pages a day, every day, but I also indiscriminately put books down and move on, so it helps to keep me engaged in the habit. I have to maintain a large backlog, though, but it's never been an issue.
edit/ I'm also entertaining the idea of getting into graphic novels and seeing how I respond to them.
I finally realized that I probably experience fiction at a much shittier quality than other people, and have basically given up on it. I mean, most fiction is lame IMHO anyway, but I get nothing out of visual descriptions. The characters play out their scenes basically in voids, or in the barest of sets (a room, a house, the bottom of a mountain).
I always found the most engaging fiction to be the ones that explore really interesting concepts, rather than ones that try to describe rather mundane things happening. I told someone I absolutely loved Asimov's Foundation series and they had a really weird complaint - they said it was just people sitting in rooms talking. Maybe occasionally they'd smoke a cigar.
I said yeah, but they're talking about something really cool! Would those books have really been improved if Asimov described the smoke or the room or whatever? Like who cares?
I don't even have aphantasia, but man, sometimes there's a really long description of something in a book and I can barely get through it.
I've read lots of sci-fi, but never Foundation. Knowing how well-regarded it is among fans of the genre, hearing it described as "people sitting in rooms talking" is the best hook I've heard in a while.
Researching it now, I think Asimov actually had aphantasia, he talks about how he can't visualise at all:
> IA: "I have no talent whatsoever for writing movie scripts."
> Interviewer:"How can this be."
> IA: "Easy. The requirements are different."
> Interviewer: "Writing character or..."
> IA: "Well you have to have a picture in your mind. You can't just tell a story. You have to at all times know what's on the screen."
> Interviewer: "Visual medium."
> IA: "And it's useless to ask me to do that. I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so "talky". One of the reviews of Nemesis says it's talky (oh what do they know) but it's true. It's great talk but he wouldn't know that."
> Interviewer: "But what you talk about is visualizable."
I enjoy reading a lot. However I do not really have complicated imagery in my mind when I do.
Since learning of aphantasia I've had several moments when I am at the edge of falling asleep where I can see clear visual images. I do not have control over the images and they usually relate to something that happened during the day. It's fascinating to see as I usually can't visualize almost anything - the way I would describe it is that I can "talk" about what I see in my mind, kind of like I have a text-based game in my mind and when I am visualizing, I am describing what I want to see, not what I am seeing. There are no details that I notice without consciously bringing in.
I have read literally thousands of science fiction and fantasy books. Something I enjoy is watching the film or TV show versions of a book I had read before — I get to enjoy the same story twice in two different ways. I’ve heard many people complain about such adaptations because it didn’t match what they were visualising while reading the novel. For me this is not a problem so I get more enjoyment out of adaptations.
Even while reading, for me the joy is not about picturing any specific image or scene. It’s about the feeling of immersion in a world. I love stories where I can a idea of what living in that context would feel like. This is an abstract notion without any specific visualisation.
Not everyone can do this, and I think they’re missing out. I can “step into” the shoes of someone and look at the world through their eyes, see their perspective, and feel what they feel. My partner can’t, for example. She just stares blankly at the news about the war in Ukraine. It means nothing to her past the visuals. Burnt out cars, damaged buildings, etc…
I instead “see” the terror, the sleepless nights, the unmaking of everything you have built and the destruction of your children’s future. I imagine hiding in a dark tunnel clutching a heavy gun cold from the winter air, listening to your own breathing — too loud — and hoping you’ll hear the Russians’ footsteps before they hear you. But there’s too many of them, and there’s just you and this antique weapon defending you neighbours.
I can find some enjoyment in books that do not overly rely on visual imagery. I quite enjoyed the Martian because it focused so much on the character’s thoughts and the state of the character’s mind. I enjoyed the first three the Expanse books because of the political world building and character development. Though watching the TV adaptation added a new layer to the story as it could fill out the visual gaps, so to speak, of my reading experience.
But I find myself being drawn in to movies and TV shows as they can render entirely new visual worlds that are unlike anything I can experience on my own. I guess this is also why I don’t mind movie and TV adaptations so much.
i'm sure perception is cool when reading, but arguably it's cool mostly because the imagery leads you to _feel_ certain ways? when an author describes a moonlit scene with the protagonist alone at the edge of a lake watching the patterns of ripples on the water... that instills some meaningful emotion in me. perhaps a feeling of solitude, or that of a calm evening where i feel in-touch with the world. so... to what extent does limited imagery decrease the emotional potency of a scene?
a few people have told me "yes, i still feel something when i read that scene. it's more that i can't imagine any of the character's faces". i haven't met anyone who says they feel literally no emotions when reading any scene, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean the emotional response isn't attenuated.
Some fiction is more poetic and dialogue-y or emotional so it's fine. I loved Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
I never understood the descriptions of environment or anything. I'm just reading the words aloud to myself in my head and not seeing it so it's kinda a waste.
I'm probably aphastasic. Like others here, I struggle to picture things in my mind, and they are very sketchy even then.
I love reading fiction, but I realized a long time ago that I consume books differently than other people. People around me would describe people in scenes in the book as if they'd seen them, and I've never experienced that. I consume the facts, but I don't visualize them.
I also often can't remember if I read a book or watched a movie when someone asks about something. To me, afterwards, they're largely the same thing. I remember what happened, but video or text makes no real difference.
And finally... I think I've got a fair helping of face blindness. I sometimes can't recognize people if they change some major part of themselves, like hairstyle/color or grow a beard. I remember at work, walking by someone's desk and asking myself, 'Who is sitting at X's desk?' Then like 10 steps later, I realized that X is sitting at her desk, she just had a wildly different hair style. That wasn't my first instance of it, but it's a fairly vivid one.
And for fun: When I remember that scene, the outline of the cubical is pretty clear, but what X looked like then is completely missing and so is all of the stuff in her cubicle. I remember what direction I was walking, but I get no visuals of the actual walk. I know she had things like a calendar and a computer, but I don't picture them at all. When I think about that calendar, I see the outline of it approximately where it was in relation to the cubical's outline, but that's it.
Eh, I’m not so sure about what they believe the pupillary response was a proxy for.
Your eyes dilate when you concentrate.
Stare at your eyes in the mirror and start doing simple arithmetic in your head. Adding numbers, multiplication of multi digit numbers. Your eyes will dilate noticeably.
This is discussed in the article, where they used this fact to affirm that aphantastic individuals are indeed attempting to visualize (and failing), vs. simply not attempting. Moreover, they explain that in those who can visualize, pupils both dilated and contracted appropriate to the visualization.
Anecdotally I just tried recording a video of my eyes and started doing calculations in my head, but no dilation in my eyes when watching the recording. Could be my concentration just sucks.
As a regular meditator I'm curious if those with aphantasia are generally more present and in the current moment than those without it. A typical meditation practice involves working with mind wandering, and I'm guessing that visualization makes it easier to get lost in thought.
I feel like that matches my experiences. I don't have commentary or mental projections, or stray thoughts: 'empty mind' is my default state. I'm not sure what tradeoffs this might entail.
Hoping they do a larger study. The methodology is a bit weird though; they change the colour of the screen right when they tell people to imagine stuff. Surely that would only make the effect of imagining harder to pick out? The aphantasia and control graphs also look very similar to my eye, and they didn't show them side by side or anything (though I might have missed it as I only skimmed).
I have this for hearing. And after I realized it, I asked a lot of friends about their memories and experienced and found people who like me also have trouble imagining one of the senses. From remembering taste, they never had cravings and ate super healthy, lucky, to not be able to recreate visuals, touch and me missing auditory imagination.
This is really interesting. I've had similar questions? For vision I'm an "aphant" but I think also for touch/smell/hearing? I could never replay a song in my head. At best I could repeat a few catchy lyrics. Certainty not a beat.
For touch to me it seems impossible? Like I could never remember what touch feels like. I would be genuinely more baffled than visualization if someone could tell me they could remember what it felt like to be touched.
Yeah, similar experience. There is never a song stuck in my head. I can remember the lyrics and often sing along to modern pop songs because the chorus is the same or they use very predictable words.
But I can remember what touch feels like. Like I can re-imagine it and re-feel it from memory. Its like other memories in that it isn't exact or anything, but I can definitely somewhat recreate the sensations.
I wonder if study results would be different for aphantasics on psychedelics. I imagine aphantasia is like most other human differences and exists on a spectrum, so perhaps a mild psychedelic like THC may affect results.
Aphantastic here. I get cool star patterns after drinking booze and laying down with my eyes closed. Like fast changing animation of different aspects of the shape changing-size, color, number of points, length of points, sometimes other types of shapes. Lasts only 20 seconds or so when I first lie down after 4+ drinks sometimes.
Had some interesting visual imagination one time while meditating on LSD. Wasn't much in control of what I saw, but it was interesting to imagine colorful stuff for the first time ever.
Normal LSD trip isn't very imaginative (I don't do psychedelics for years mind you.) mostly visual with my eyes. Same with shrooms.
Marijuana for me never really created visual imagination (used to smoke a lot years ago).
Very interesting! Cool dream too :) That suggests to me it may not be some inherent lack of capacity but more so the path to accessing that capacity that is the issue.
Makes me think that phantasia might be improved through frequent practice in something visual like arts or design. I wonder if any studies on aphantasics have been run that try to assess improvement. If pupillary contraction mentioned in this article is a good enough measure of aphantasia, that may serve as a way to measure improvements through practice.
I'm somewhat on the other end of the phantasic spectrum, I close my eyes and can design things, though the images don't hold super long or can't get too complex. I'm better at it later in the evening and on edibles. I've also been practicing design for ~30 years, and I can say it's definitely gotten easier to visualize some things over time and I attribute it to practice.
'Practice' here perhaps could also be 'noticing'. I remember I used to be really into Magic:TG and spent a lot of time admiring the artwork and design of cards, like being really obsessed with all the details. After doing all this noticing for some time I realized I could sometimes visualize new cards, so I would close my eyes and thumb through a deck, trying to visualize cards as fast as possible as a kind of test. My sense is I wouldn't be able to do that without all the practice I had training my brain on the features of the cards.
I get very geometric/fractal visualizations. Like the best music visualizer. A frame rate of infinity. Very mandlebrot/julia. But nothing "real". On LSD at least.
My dreams I think I can visualize? It's sort of hard to say?
I suspect this has something to do with which parts of your brain are wired into your short-term memory, and the ratio of connections to each. My conscious visual imagination can produce hallucinatory "front-buffer" effects - like a heads-up display in my central field of vision. I also have a severe deficit when it comes to sensing my emotional state or stress levels.
Short-term memory "size" seems fairly consistent between people. It wouldn't surprise me if those with aphantasia have a concomitant awareness of some other mental process that isn't normally consciously accessible. Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.
> Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.
Is that logical? I think the most logical thing would be to ask: does it impair the individual's ability to reproduce, or the health of their children? I don't think it does - people with aphantasia seem to function relatively normally in that respect. Thus I don't think it would be that heavily selected for or against.
Sometimes things evolution produces are bad but not that bad, so they stick around because there's not enough pressure to make them go away.
We're living in a novel environment. Being unable to imagine the juxtaposition of rocks which would shield your turned back from view of the sabertooth tiger, for example, could have very different outcomes depending on which side of the last ice age you were born into.
edit: Also consider "impaired" vs "less fit". The absence of the trait might not be actively harmful to the individual, and yet enhance reproductive success of those who have it. Not having it among a population who do is a kind of cost.
Just to point out it's not simple and any differentiating characteristic could be not only different levels of net negative, but could also be net positive, even something like the absense of a capability.
Lack of a facility seems like it can only be a net negative, almost no matter what the facility is, but life is not simple like that and there could be any number of processes by which an ability creates a net liability in some context or environment.
A crude and not to be taken literally please example would be something like the ability to imagine comes attached to an increased level of distraction or inattention. Maybe the insights and creativity from the imagination pays enough dividends to be worth more than the occasional accident costs, or maybe in some environment the accidents or missed observations cost more.
And the effects from posessing or not posessing any given trait, including an ability, could be something like 600 different positive effects and 600 different negative effects, and they all weigh differently, and most of them no one can even guess at let alone quantify, making it as good as pointless to try to talk about.
In my case I think of it as how a blind person might experience the world, I can model spatial relations very well but don't see anything. I've never had a problem with geometry, math, algorithms, etc, and I can often skip the pencil and paper step. Sometimes I joke that can visualize and see at the same time.
Personally, I have exceptionally good factual recall and an extremely limited memory for personal experiences. I feel like I tend to have an unfiltered experience of the world, without any sort of mental commentary or projections similar to what you describe, and I believe that I read fairly quickly because I don't subvocalize.
To those asking whether people can normally "see" in their "mind's eye" as if one sees in reality, the answer is yes.
We can see the world in our mind and conjure whatever we want, spatially manipulate objects (rotation, translation, scaling) and imagine their interactions with other objects (a ball hitting another in mid air and how it'd bounce off). It's like having a VR environment inside your own mind that you can use at any time and take wherever you want.
I'm not sure about other people, but I can also conjure smells, sounds and tastes as clearly as if I'd experienced them in reality. This might however be more than what most people can do, I suspect I'm on the hyperphantasia part of the spectrum.
I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass those questions, but I can. It's almost an intuitive sense of which one is right.
Elsewhere in this thread people were talking about imagined sounds or music, and a specific impairment in their ability to hear music in their heads. An anecdote: I'm in the middle of learning the bass part for a piece of music. Having listened to it enough I can imagine the sound enough to "hear" the notes, fret noises, pluck and slap sounds. Altogether it's a very high-fidelity simulation. I was practicing right up until, for apparently no reason at all, the song falls out of my short-term memory. Completely gone - can't even remember its name - but I could still work the fingerboard just fine. The muscle memory and intuition of how to play "that song" are still there, and my hands continue to play it almost as well as before.
People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia.
I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.
There was an item on HN and elsewhere, probably reposted every so often, where a researcher asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and not one of them drew something physically reasonable.
So that seems to suggest that about 0% of "normal people" have "visual imagination".
What proportion of people can disassemble a mechanical device and remember how to reassemble it without taking photos? If it is substantial, why do most people who can afford it have professional mechanics do even simple things?
What about people who have vivid visual dreams, but cannot retrieve details of things seen on awakening? Are they "aphantasic" or not?
Surely the vast majority of people cannot draw or paint a familiar object in detail from memory, if put to the test.
It's utterly useless to do "science" that starts with assuming everybody has a clear and consistent definition of a word denoting the subjective experience being investigated.
I have aphantasia. Curious given the audience, how others feel about math? I've done well when I applied myself but definitely not any kind of genius (D- was my first calc 1 grade).
One interesting thing I noticed is when I actually got into math at the university level and engaged with professors there were multiple times where I got the feedback along the lines of "Well yes that is right but kind of weird way to think about or answer the question."
I think for higher dimensional problems it's actually an advantage? Like I have no idea how to visualize something in r^n. Not sure how much people "visualize" functions in r2/r3? To me the difference between r3->r4 is similar to the difference for r2->r3. It's more complex but the way I'd "visualize" something is largely the same.
I think I have aphantasia, and I love math. I always did very well at it.
I don't visualize it at all. It's simply facts that happen.
When people told me they visualize code, I simply assumed they meant they organized it in their head somehow. I don't do any of that. My mental model of code happens automatically and it's just relations between things, no visual at all.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadEvolution is a bitch.
This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.
I have a handful of dreams that I can recall from the entirety of my life and a couple from childhood, a couple from adulthood. I know that 1 of them is a recurring dream. 3 of them are actually nightmares.
I mean how do you do a dream log when you wake up and it is just like I have no idea if I dreamt or not.
I decided then to keep a journal and a pen next to my bed so that recording additional dreams would be easier. I soon found that I had collected multiple volumes of recorded dreams and auxiliary notes about them.
I don't know whether writing my dreams down made it more likely that I would dream, or more likely to remember my dreams--I know that some people say that it makes you more likely to remember your dreams, but I don't know whether that's true. I just know that the number of dreams I ended up writing down was much greater than I expected based on the number of dreams that I had previously remembered.
Also, I needed to write them down very quickly after waking or I'd forget them. Every minute I waited caused me to lose more details.
That still seems to be true years later. I don't keep a dream journal anymore, but I notice that if I wake from a dream, and I want to remember it, I need to write it down or tell someone about it pretty much right away. If I don't, it'll be lost within a few minutes. I might remember that I had a dream, and I might remember what I felt like when I was having it, but most often nothing more than that.
If I write it down or otherwise communicate it, though, I usually remember the parts that I managed to communicate before the rest disappeared.
Maybe if you keep a journal close to your bed as I once did, you'll get lucky one night and wake up from a dream to write it down. Maybe it will then turn out that those people are right: that writing down dreams makes you more likely to remember additional ones.
I don't know if that's true, but maybe.
It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts.
That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
Relationships is a word to explain it that I hadn't thought of before. I think a lot of engineers are probably similar.
When working on a large codebase or trying to plan out something like this -- you can't really go off of visual imagery. There's no "picture" of all the ways that various things in a codebase will interact, design decisions, etc.
A lot of engineering/software stuff is abstract.
Not sure if others are the sameway, but the downside to this is that I have nearly zero spatial-imagery skills. You know the tests where they show you a 3D shape, and ask you which possible rotation is still the same shape? Or the one where they ask you to show what shapes would look like, if folded up from laid out pieces of paper? My mind just goes blank:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation
I also have essentially no geo-spatial awareness. I constantly get lost and have no sense of cardinal directions.
Anyone else out there have a brain like this?
(I'm still a bit "excited" from your original comment. I could have written it word for word.)
What about you?
I can if I consciously put effort towards it, but when thinking or reading I don't notice any sort of voice/sound
The one plus of seeing in concepts is that I can hold complex software systems in my head pretty easily and code always clicked with me very naturally. But I still am a bit jealous of those with special fx vision
I'm not sure what voice it is - but when I read or type I hear it, and I can ask questions internally and kind of look up things to recall a bit. No visualization it it's like a key value lookup.
It's a bit hard to explain but I was bummed when I found people can actually visualize things internally
Oddly, while I totally get the emphasis on "relationships", I definitely orient those relationships spatially. I used to play a text-only game (a MUD) where the world was laid out as a graph of rooms; the graph was only approximately metric. I initially learned to navigate by drawing my own (roughly Cartesian) maps as ASCII art, giving me a kind of global perspective in my mind's eye, but over time I "learned" the topological structure directly and relied on a less graphical (but no less spatial) local perspective.
I tend to "navigate" codebases in much the same way. Different parts of the codebase cluster more or less closely, and I perceive information flows in essentially the same way that I perceived paths through the MUD's world. I learn a codebase in much the same way, although it's much more local from the beginning (codebases tend to be even less Cartesian than the MUD's world is).
Interesting that you feel this way. I definitely do imagine a codebase spatially, and constantly draw diagrams on paper to orient myself. I find those note taking tools like Dendron that do nothing except make a nice graph of your knowledge very useful.
If you make a graph with services or classes as nodes, and edges as calls between them, you can absolutely get a sense of when a codebase or system architecture is spaghetti, and when it's a neatly organised tree with neatly distinguished layers and no cycles.
In fact, surely that's why people call spaghetti code spaghetti - because the call graph looks like a plate of spaghetti and is impossible to untangle.
Yes. If I ever had to do this for an interview, I am failing. I try to rotate my hand in a similar fashion you might have done if you've ever done physics magnetism calculations.
To solve these I develop a set of rules about the relationship between sides. Like if there is an X on one side then there must be a T adjacent to it and so on. Then I try to eliminate as many answers as possible and then when I'm down to 2 just look for something that is "wrong" (i.e X side cannot be next to V side)
There 100% is a picture of it. Code itself is a 2D picture of logic. The picture for code is arranged in a specific way with huge limitations that don't take full advantage of 2D space.
3D space is infinite and if logical decisions can map onto 2D space (which is essentially what code is) it can also map onto 3D space.
The "language" of this mapping from logical decisions to some sort of spatial diagram can become more and more complex. Instead of linear lines of symbols (which again is what code is) it can be become a graph, or a literal pipeline of logic in 3D space. Analog computers are essentially 3D "pictures" of "code."
Additionally how the logic is represented in your brain must take up space. Logic itself is not so abstract that it takes up zero space. How ever it is stored in your brain there IS a 3D structure or "picture" of that logic that exists. If you are aware of some logical step of operations then it FOR SURE exists as a picture in your brain. I'm not saying it's a picture you can visualize... But the locations of where and how that information is connected in your brain forms a 3D structure. The essence of all logic starts as geometry in 3D space; taking away that space is the abstraction.
Code doesn't have to be visualized. Many times I don't visualize it at all. I remember it, like you... via relationships. But I have the Option of visualizing it as a picture.
If you have aphantasia it just means your brain lacks the ability to assign spatial coordinates to concepts. So you are aware of "relationships" but you can't arrange those concepts into a 3D grid and see how they are all interconnected. It's more of a disability the a brain type IMO, because people who don't have aphantasia can certainly see relationships without having the need to "picture" it.
If it does lend you advantages, I would say it's similar to how certain blind people can use echo location to navigate the world. It may lend you advantages that arise out of necessity to utilizes other tools to make up for a disability, but oftentimes it may not.
Aphantasia (and how not to do math in your head) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments)
Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment)
Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments)
Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments)
Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments)
The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments)
What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments)
Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments)
Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
I think the confusing nd somewhat ambiguous description of aphantasia, and the highly literal nature of many HN folks makes it more common for people to either think they may have it, or so question how others see stuff, so are more curious about it.
I can still remember things like layout of a room, complicated directions etc, but it comes with no visual imagery. I also like to close my eyes when I am trying to think what some complicated code is doing, still nothing visual though.
as far as i can tell, most people say "yes". for me, when i imagine my dad's face, i get a brief flash of a grin, where the wrinkles are (but certainly not how many, or in any definition), and the rough cut of his hair. there's no eye color in the imagery, for example. stronger than any visual experience when i imagine his face is something of an emotional/empathetic experience -- what it feels like to be in his presence.
from what i gather, for people like me (and maybe you) who experience "some" visual imagery but not "lots", it's just a skill like any other and there are exercises you can do if you care enough about it to strengthen it.
Perhaps a mechanism like this could identify aphantasia in early childhood and use this to provide a more optimized academic pipeline.
When programming, I have the code "mapped out" around me but likewise not optically but more "intuitively". I might be able to tell you in which direction a given piece of logic exists relative to me but it's more like how you can gauge what direction a sound comes from than having an image in my head that would allow me to tell you a specific place or distance. Note that I use sound to describe this but I don't have particularly exceptional hearing as far as I'm aware (e.g. no musical skills whatsoever).
I suppose I should also add that I don't have an "inner monologue". In fact I always thought references to the "voice in your head" were entirely metaphorical. This often makes it hard for me to explain my thoughts as I first need to try to find the right words to put them in language.
Trickier problems involving several shapes like a puzzle might be harder, though that's not usually curriculum.
But in general I think it would be like optimizing academic pipelines for being left-handed.
I feel like you describe a functional one.
I was just discussing this in terms of "sages" which know things, they recall and store "stateful data"
and "seers" (like in the verb to see); them who don't know things but perceive them and observe them.
I can kind of feel shapes and directions in my mind. When it comes to colours, though, I have to "paint" "manually" over this mental sonar image.
Can you "see" motion? I can. I can easily visualize a ballerina doing a pirouette and a plié and gracefully moving her arms... but I'm seeing actual imagery. It's more like I see the gradient of an image. Frankly, it's like "seeing" pure motion itself, devoid of the image itself of the thing moving. This was quite a surprising realization when I first noticed this ability. I think, by the way, for dancers and sports and others involved in motion activities, this ability is probably natural for them and they don't think about it.
When I was a kid I would spend hours constructing elaborate daydream worlds and plot lines. They were so vivid that I could have drawn them if asked.
While my mind is VERY visual, I have horrible music recall and music doesn't come naturally to me at all.
I can actually draw really well, better than most people. But not super elaborate scenes. And I know that if I could actually visualize, it would be helping me a lot.
I also have excellent musical/audio memory. I can hear back songs almost perfectly in my head, in the right key and in full detail.
Like I'm not seeing anything. I'm just sort of writing a novel where I'm the main character if that makes sense?
It's similar to how I remember things.
I love reading fiction, but books that rely on extensive visual imagery tend to fall flat for me (most recently The Night Circus, but there have been others).
I sometimes skip description of the characters physique because I know that I won't remember it a few page later, and it usually do not matter in the story anyway (and if it matters, it is usually reminded to the reader because aphantasia is not the only reason a reader may not remember how a character is dressed or looks like).
edit/ I'm also entertaining the idea of getting into graphic novels and seeing how I respond to them.
I said yeah, but they're talking about something really cool! Would those books have really been improved if Asimov described the smoke or the room or whatever? Like who cares?
I don't even have aphantasia, but man, sometimes there's a really long description of something in a book and I can barely get through it.
> IA: "I have no talent whatsoever for writing movie scripts."
> Interviewer:"How can this be."
> IA: "Easy. The requirements are different."
> Interviewer: "Writing character or..."
> IA: "Well you have to have a picture in your mind. You can't just tell a story. You have to at all times know what's on the screen."
> Interviewer: "Visual medium."
> IA: "And it's useless to ask me to do that. I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so "talky". One of the reviews of Nemesis says it's talky (oh what do they know) but it's true. It's great talk but he wouldn't know that."
> Interviewer: "But what you talk about is visualizable."
> IA: "I suppose, but that's purely accidental."
From this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparent... although the video linked appears to be dead.
Since learning of aphantasia I've had several moments when I am at the edge of falling asleep where I can see clear visual images. I do not have control over the images and they usually relate to something that happened during the day. It's fascinating to see as I usually can't visualize almost anything - the way I would describe it is that I can "talk" about what I see in my mind, kind of like I have a text-based game in my mind and when I am visualizing, I am describing what I want to see, not what I am seeing. There are no details that I notice without consciously bringing in.
Even while reading, for me the joy is not about picturing any specific image or scene. It’s about the feeling of immersion in a world. I love stories where I can a idea of what living in that context would feel like. This is an abstract notion without any specific visualisation.
Not everyone can do this, and I think they’re missing out. I can “step into” the shoes of someone and look at the world through their eyes, see their perspective, and feel what they feel. My partner can’t, for example. She just stares blankly at the news about the war in Ukraine. It means nothing to her past the visuals. Burnt out cars, damaged buildings, etc…
I instead “see” the terror, the sleepless nights, the unmaking of everything you have built and the destruction of your children’s future. I imagine hiding in a dark tunnel clutching a heavy gun cold from the winter air, listening to your own breathing — too loud — and hoping you’ll hear the Russians’ footsteps before they hear you. But there’s too many of them, and there’s just you and this antique weapon defending you neighbours.
But I find myself being drawn in to movies and TV shows as they can render entirely new visual worlds that are unlike anything I can experience on my own. I guess this is also why I don’t mind movie and TV adaptations so much.
a few people have told me "yes, i still feel something when i read that scene. it's more that i can't imagine any of the character's faces". i haven't met anyone who says they feel literally no emotions when reading any scene, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean the emotional response isn't attenuated.
Some fiction is more poetic and dialogue-y or emotional so it's fine. I loved Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
I never understood the descriptions of environment or anything. I'm just reading the words aloud to myself in my head and not seeing it so it's kinda a waste.
I love reading fiction, but I realized a long time ago that I consume books differently than other people. People around me would describe people in scenes in the book as if they'd seen them, and I've never experienced that. I consume the facts, but I don't visualize them.
I also often can't remember if I read a book or watched a movie when someone asks about something. To me, afterwards, they're largely the same thing. I remember what happened, but video or text makes no real difference.
And finally... I think I've got a fair helping of face blindness. I sometimes can't recognize people if they change some major part of themselves, like hairstyle/color or grow a beard. I remember at work, walking by someone's desk and asking myself, 'Who is sitting at X's desk?' Then like 10 steps later, I realized that X is sitting at her desk, she just had a wildly different hair style. That wasn't my first instance of it, but it's a fairly vivid one.
And for fun: When I remember that scene, the outline of the cubical is pretty clear, but what X looked like then is completely missing and so is all of the stuff in her cubicle. I remember what direction I was walking, but I get no visuals of the actual walk. I know she had things like a calendar and a computer, but I don't picture them at all. When I think about that calendar, I see the outline of it approximately where it was in relation to the cubical's outline, but that's it.
Your eyes dilate when you concentrate.
Stare at your eyes in the mirror and start doing simple arithmetic in your head. Adding numbers, multiplication of multi digit numbers. Your eyes will dilate noticeably.
I do get distracted with thoughts (even ignoring other people sometimes) most likely same as you or anyone.
For touch to me it seems impossible? Like I could never remember what touch feels like. I would be genuinely more baffled than visualization if someone could tell me they could remember what it felt like to be touched.
But I can remember what touch feels like. Like I can re-imagine it and re-feel it from memory. Its like other memories in that it isn't exact or anything, but I can definitely somewhat recreate the sensations.
Had some interesting visual imagination one time while meditating on LSD. Wasn't much in control of what I saw, but it was interesting to imagine colorful stuff for the first time ever.
Normal LSD trip isn't very imaginative (I don't do psychedelics for years mind you.) mostly visual with my eyes. Same with shrooms.
Marijuana for me never really created visual imagination (used to smoke a lot years ago).
But I have powerful visuals in dreams and on psychedelics. On LSD I once spent 15 minutes flying through a Henry Rousseau jungle on a toucan's back.
I can sometimes voluntarily summon images immediately before falling asleep.
Great question, by the way. I wonder if others have similar experiences.
Makes me think that phantasia might be improved through frequent practice in something visual like arts or design. I wonder if any studies on aphantasics have been run that try to assess improvement. If pupillary contraction mentioned in this article is a good enough measure of aphantasia, that may serve as a way to measure improvements through practice.
I'm somewhat on the other end of the phantasic spectrum, I close my eyes and can design things, though the images don't hold super long or can't get too complex. I'm better at it later in the evening and on edibles. I've also been practicing design for ~30 years, and I can say it's definitely gotten easier to visualize some things over time and I attribute it to practice.
'Practice' here perhaps could also be 'noticing'. I remember I used to be really into Magic:TG and spent a lot of time admiring the artwork and design of cards, like being really obsessed with all the details. After doing all this noticing for some time I realized I could sometimes visualize new cards, so I would close my eyes and thumb through a deck, trying to visualize cards as fast as possible as a kind of test. My sense is I wouldn't be able to do that without all the practice I had training my brain on the features of the cards.
My dreams I think I can visualize? It's sort of hard to say?
THC nothing notable.
That would suggest that it depends on your state of consciousness.
And state of consciousness may be more or less constant for any given person. But it can be altered.
Short-term memory "size" seems fairly consistent between people. It wouldn't surprise me if those with aphantasia have a concomitant awareness of some other mental process that isn't normally consciously accessible. Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.
Is that logical? I think the most logical thing would be to ask: does it impair the individual's ability to reproduce, or the health of their children? I don't think it does - people with aphantasia seem to function relatively normally in that respect. Thus I don't think it would be that heavily selected for or against.
Sometimes things evolution produces are bad but not that bad, so they stick around because there's not enough pressure to make them go away.
edit: Also consider "impaired" vs "less fit". The absence of the trait might not be actively harmful to the individual, and yet enhance reproductive success of those who have it. Not having it among a population who do is a kind of cost.
Lack of a facility seems like it can only be a net negative, almost no matter what the facility is, but life is not simple like that and there could be any number of processes by which an ability creates a net liability in some context or environment.
A crude and not to be taken literally please example would be something like the ability to imagine comes attached to an increased level of distraction or inattention. Maybe the insights and creativity from the imagination pays enough dividends to be worth more than the occasional accident costs, or maybe in some environment the accidents or missed observations cost more.
And the effects from posessing or not posessing any given trait, including an ability, could be something like 600 different positive effects and 600 different negative effects, and they all weigh differently, and most of them no one can even guess at let alone quantify, making it as good as pointless to try to talk about.
We can see the world in our mind and conjure whatever we want, spatially manipulate objects (rotation, translation, scaling) and imagine their interactions with other objects (a ball hitting another in mid air and how it'd bounce off). It's like having a VR environment inside your own mind that you can use at any time and take wherever you want.
I'm not sure about other people, but I can also conjure smells, sounds and tastes as clearly as if I'd experienced them in reality. This might however be more than what most people can do, I suspect I'm on the hyperphantasia part of the spectrum.
People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia.
I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
So that seems to suggest that about 0% of "normal people" have "visual imagination".
What proportion of people can disassemble a mechanical device and remember how to reassemble it without taking photos? If it is substantial, why do most people who can afford it have professional mechanics do even simple things?
What about people who have vivid visual dreams, but cannot retrieve details of things seen on awakening? Are they "aphantasic" or not?
Surely the vast majority of people cannot draw or paint a familiar object in detail from memory, if put to the test.
It's utterly useless to do "science" that starts with assuming everybody has a clear and consistent definition of a word denoting the subjective experience being investigated.
One interesting thing I noticed is when I actually got into math at the university level and engaged with professors there were multiple times where I got the feedback along the lines of "Well yes that is right but kind of weird way to think about or answer the question."
I think for higher dimensional problems it's actually an advantage? Like I have no idea how to visualize something in r^n. Not sure how much people "visualize" functions in r2/r3? To me the difference between r3->r4 is similar to the difference for r2->r3. It's more complex but the way I'd "visualize" something is largely the same.
I don't visualize it at all. It's simply facts that happen.
When people told me they visualize code, I simply assumed they meant they organized it in their head somehow. I don't do any of that. My mental model of code happens automatically and it's just relations between things, no visual at all.