(By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from almust fully auditory complete with specific voice characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully abstract)
As someone with recently diagnosed aphantasia - it’s surreal
that 99% population sees things that aren’t there / literally halucinates, and that it’s
considered normal!
I'm not completely aphantasic, but the way you phrase the rhetorical contains exactly the massive divide that exists in experience. You believe that such an act is obviously easy, whereas for myself, it is difficult and less an image than a fleeting impression that is more conceptual than it is visual.
Yeah, it's quite peculiar how inaccurate the classic discourse around "seeing things" and "hearing voices" turned out to be. Rather than seeing/hearing vs. not seeing/hearing things the dichotomy should probably be something like "having the sense that what you're seeing/hearing is part of your own thoughts vs. externally imposed".
Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal, but also why I thought I don’t have aphantasia. I even have lucid dreams.
Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having seen something.
Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to still describe parts of it, but I see nothing.
Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen a child’s water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun, roughly.
Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I can’t see any of it. Now descriptions of things happening, I can totally get into that. But I don’t see anything.
For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn’t realize anyone would actually see something.
For the record, I love Lord of the Rings. But yes, there is something about detailed description of objects in books that rarely lands for me. The words have to in and of themselves convey a kind of conceptual beauty, or call upon a great metaphor or the like, otherwise they will bore me since I see very little and will mostly just get annoyed trying to keep all the details in my head.
Not the person you're replying to, but I would call myself "near aphantasic" and the answer to all these is that they are almost entirely conceptual rather than visual. What little visual impression I can form is extremely fleeting, incomplete, low fidelity, and in short nothing like actually seeing something. At some level I can tell my visual system gets activated, but it's completely different from truly seeing something.
Recalling memories for me has the detail of a short journal entry. It's not first person, I don't relive the emotions I felt at the time, and compared to my others the detail isn't there.
For example, when discussing my graduation with my father, I could recall the building, the general layout of the room, and parts of the ceremony's sequence. However, I can't recall walking across the stage, even though I know it happened. In contrast, my father could describe where he was seated and even what people in front of him were wearing.
Media I remember the concepts of what was covered and images or videos are familiar when I see them again, but I can't rewatch a moment in my mind.
Likewise for reading, I remember as a child not understanding what people meant when they said Daniel Radcliffe didn't match up to the Harry Potter they imagined.
I haven't been formally diagnosed but I'm definitely on the very low end of visualization. But I'll answer for myself:
While I'm dreaming and unaware that I'm dreaming, it's like I'm in real life. As soon as I start to wake up at all, everything fades to black almost instantly. I recall the experience as if I lived it though dreams are strange so it's far less consistent than a normal narrative.
What kind of memories? I often completely fail to encode and remember highly visual details - like what color hair someone has, what shirt they were wearing, and so on. But I could recall the name of the building in which my college showed the Matrix in the fall of 1999 because I could remember which way I walked there.
I recall audio strongly and can hear the voices of various characters in my head. I can do passable impressions of quite a few characters. I can tell you the story in detail, but if something hinges on a visual cue I will completely fail there.
I mostly talk to myself in my head. It's a running narrative. If you'd like a specific example, give me something more meaningful than "imagining".
If I want to read something and retain it well, I will hear it in my head in my internal voice as I'm reading.
This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.
The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.
I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.
I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.
I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.
I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.
I’m a prolific consumer of fiction. For me reading isn’t about the scenery so much as the ideas and messages within a work. I can appreciate character growth without the visual imagery involved. I hate fluffy details added to books. I don’t need an item by item run down of their entire wardrobe or the place settings on the table. That’s mostly just noise to me and books that feature those details prominently are a slog.
“He was all jowls and scowls”
Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean on.
It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-piece. I would characterize myself as having a running interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I gather it is for some.)
I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.
I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of characters because I have no strong sense of what they look or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)
A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the rest is about ~ideas and personalities.
Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around reading.
I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much more likely to retain some picky detail when it's integrated into my broader understanding than if it's effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like dates.
Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first resource I reach for.)
Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.
All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.
Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.
If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).
If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."
Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.
I will lightly defend a lot of this description in American Psycho.
I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense?
That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.
I'll add another data point as I believe I'm on the extreme end of complete aphantasia:
Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading. Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling," but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams.
Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly they remember the events of my own life. I really do not recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old. At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong. Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the motivating details of the plotline itself, and then subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course, none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not imagery.
Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense, but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even replaying video games unless there is something novel (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because there is a much higher amount of content from a logical plotline/story point of view.
Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings. Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do with my family, etc.
Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces, even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book, watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I tend not to remember details of an author's physical description of their characters. I c...
It is very much a spectrum. People that literally halucinates things are just as rare. I am much closer to the aphatasia side of things. I can picture things in my mind but is extremely different from "seeing" things. It more like remembering how something looks. Also, all the stats on this are kind of bullshit because of how hard it is to describe. People just map on "picturing" to whatever they do.
"Seeing" something in your imagination isn't a literal hallucination. It's an altogether separate form of visualization that doesn't interfere optically.
Anecdotally (can't remember the old book references), this had been observed in "new age" and "spiritual" groups in the 1960s, with the conclusion that people could be trained out of it.
I’d be careful about trusting spiritual/Word Of Faith groups too much, especially when the condition can’t actually be tested for. An individual in the movement can easily say they were “healed” to bolster group confidence, and a third party individual might say they’ve been “healed” after being requested to stand around in a circle of prayer for five minutes as an easy out from the situation. I’ve certainly been in the latter case, and the former is fairly well documented.
I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's estimated to be 1-4% of the population.
I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.
When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations
On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it.
Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)
Have you considered explicitly using weed or shrooms as an on-ramp to exercising this ability? You could devote some time and slowly build up your ability.
Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same amount of effort.
I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire kasina".
I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1 week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too intense and immersive.
It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.
I have definitely gotten it back from intense meditation. I went to an intense meditation retreat which had us meditating all day (a vipassana 10 day course). For unrelated reasons I left after a few days, but my aphantasia was replaced with something very different after like a day and a half and I couldn't stop seeing things everywhere
Still a bit weird, health-wise, but a lot more in your control than drugs.
I remain fairly convinced that the ability to visualise things in your imagination is a skill like any other and people don’t so much have aphantasia as an inherent condition that they probably started with little innate capacity and lost most of it through disuse.
If that’s the case, you can probably improve it simply by repeatedly using what you have. I say that because my ability to think visually improved greatly when I started drawing. Also I’m still not very good at conjuring well proportioned and shaded objects from nothing but I can pull them out of my memories.
I think most people literally can't imagine the range of difference here. As far as I can tell, "what I have" is zero for visual imagination, and I have no recollection of that ever being different. You might as well be telling me that I need to lift weights with my third arm.
I’m fairly sure you can try drawing something, eventually directly from what you see to the paper (that’s how you learn to draw). I’m actually curious to know what would happen if you stuck at it.
My hypothesis is that you would get some ability to visualise at some point. That’s an experience which would be cool to carry actually.
They imagine a simulation of themselves, but this simulation isn't necessarily realistic. They run the simulation, and the words the simulation uses to describe itself "visualzing" they just repeat verbatim. Human consciousness and self-awareness are so dim that they mistake this for themselves being able to do the same.
If someone didn't have this "skill", they could prompt an LLM to "visualize", then repeat the words off the screen, and but for the clues that they're cheating bystanders wouldn't be able to tell much difference. I assert that there is no additional insight gained by the "visualization" that isn't available from the verbalization because these are, in fact, essentially the same thing.
> When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
I experienced exactly this! It turned out that, for me, the root cause was multiple B vitamin deficiencies; correcting them caused my internal vision to become INCREDIBLY vivid. B vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production (ex. [0]) -- particularly serotonin, which is known to interact with vision[1] -- and it's been amazing realising what I've been missing out on. Psychedelics[2] and cannabis[3] "improving" the condition makes sense since both have serotonergic activity (5HT2A specifically).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Neurological_disorders "[...] the bioactive folate, methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), a direct target of methyl donors such as S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe), recycles the inactive dihydrobiopterin (BH2) into tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), the necessary cofactor in various steps of monoamine synthesis, including that of dopamine and serotonin."
I’ve experienced this too (only twice!) with strong weed (sativa) and it really took me by surprise. It was nothing like hallucinating - seeing objects in front of me morph / appear - but rather when I closed my eyes I could _imagine_ things.
I could picture myself on a beach or walking through a forest, something I’ve always felt frustrated I could never create in my mind. I’ll admit it was a slightly scary experience…
By contrast I have a friend with a wonderfully vivid imagination. He’s a photographer by trade and spontaneously captures moments / scenes on his phone while we’re walking along. We’re always asking questions about the other’s brain :)
It’s different when you sober. Weed not only helps with imagining, it makes a mind hyperfocused and forgetful, so to say. As this can bring you far away from where you are, the visions are also more stable-ish because you don’t remember what was there a minute ago (unless you’re trying to) and live in a moment.
+1, shrooms doesn't do it for me, but if I do a high dose of THC (20-30mg) and then listen to music, I can close my eyes and get some kind of visualization. It's still fleeting, but I can feel my mind react to it as super novel stimulus (otherwise 100% visual aphant).
I did get pretty strong visual experiences from Ketamine therapy, but it's completely different from mental images. I felt transported to a different "head space" where there was abstract visual imagery that felt "real" but completely disembodied and not related to day-to-day experience.
I really can't comprehend what it's like to have normal visual imagery or be a hyper-visualizer.
As a possibly interesting data point I also have no visual imagination, and I did a lot of mind-altering substances in a past era of my life. However the only interior mental imagery I ever saw was seemingly random and intense fractal patterns. Never could relate it to any conscious thought like imagining an apple. I also ~never experienced much in the way of eyes-open visual hallucinations, even on rather high doses of LSD. One exception to this was DMT but it was still just a “fractal tunnel”, similar to what I could see with my eyes closed on other chemicals.
It wasn’t until much later (after I stopped tripping) that I learned about aphantasia as a name for my daily experience and I’ve always assumed that it was why my experience on hallucinogens varied so much from more common descriptions. It’s interesting to hear that they might “unlock” the experience of imagination for others.
I experienced this recently for the first time (in 44 years) while in the hospital. Probably caused by the strong antibiotics I was on or the high fever I had a few hours earlier.
It was interesting! Didn't sleep all night, how do you phantasts do that? :-)
Use it as a strength you are not bound by preconceived imagery of what should be. Use the way you recall and collect information to be creative, solve problems and bring a different perspective to things.
>Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.
I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say they "see" things, I want to say "with what?"
To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing?
I can imagine things and have vague visual imagery appear in my head, but I can't see them as "floating like holograms".
I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.
It makes me wonder how much of this is pseudoscience, especially internet discourse around it.
How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?
How much of this is just people having a normal human experience of not seeing literal visuals getting confused by people who are a much more figurative in the description of their own experience?
Kinda reminds me of smoking weed in high school and there was always the kid who roleplayed that he was seeing a bunch of green men in the room.
>How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?
The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.
There is obviously a spectrum at work, as some people seem to be better at visualizing things in their mind than others. This does not surprise me at all.
What does surprise me is that most discussions on aphantasia are very similar to those on religious experiences. Some of us can talk to God, while others are pretty sure He does not exist, because they never get an answer.
Most scientists have given up on trying to prove that God does or does not exist. But quite a lot of ink had been spilled to get to that point. And it seems we still have some bytes to go in the phantasia discussion.
There are now three distinct methods to measure visual imagery objectively, without relying on someone's description of the vividness.
Here is a video in which prof Joel Pearson describes them: https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0 , IIRC Joel Pearson was involved in developing each of the methods, so I'm sure you can find his publications on the subject as well.
Aphantasia is one end of a spectrum, Hyperphantasia [0] is on the other end. You might simply have a more normal mind that can imagine things, but not have something akin to a manipulable hologram. As I have aphantasia, though, I can’t for sure say if that’s really on that end of it ;)
Seeing most likely takes place deeper in the brain, not in the eyes.
One hint for this is that we see the world upside-down by default. Another is the evidence that visual evidence cannot be trusted in a court case.
It then seems likely that the responsible brain areas can be activated by memory, as well as by the eye sensors.
The level of reality at which all this is possible in different individuals is obviously an open question. Whether one can train this is also not entirely clear to most.
No one has ever seen anything with anything but their brain. It hardly makes much difference how some info got to the part of the brain that creates what we call an image, delivered direct from a retina or fabricated from memory.
When I "see" an object what I'm doing is imagining a picture (or movie) of the object. That image that I imagine is remotely in my actual eyesight -- there's no object floating in front of me. But I do imagine it as if it was in front of me, "floating like a hologram" in a way. It's like recalling a memory of a photograph.
(Based on the rest of the comment I think you left out a word and meant "that I imagine is not remotely in my actual eyesight")
I suspect this is what's going on, and they're not describing it well.
There's a test used for perfect eidetic memory that as far as I remember no one has ever passed. The primary requirement for passing it is to be able to project what you've previously seen, "floating like a hologram", on top of a second image you're currently looking at. The two patterns combine to reveal a message or image.
But kids will often describe what they're imagining as if they're doing exactly that, because they don't yet have the words or context to be precise.
I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding, yes I can see the apple in my minds eye in all of its glory and color, but yes it’s still black “behind my eyes”, it all depends on where I am focusing, on my eyes or on the apple.
Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are experiencing the same thing.
I can’t. There is no apple. I remember how apples look from seeing them before. But I can’t see it. I can’t turn it, it’s a completely abstract thing in my mind.
I don't think it's agreeing. I can't "see" anything my any means just from thoughts. Either I see or I don't. There is no visual part I'm remembering stuff. Not that I can really describe how I memorize things ... but from all I read about there is a big difference between people. Not just disagreement.
I would absolutely never write what you wrote though..
What "glory" do you speak of? For me, the apple is more of an idea and I can VERY faintly "see" fuzzy attributes about its geometry. And there is no color.
>I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding...this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing
The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.
I agree, not saying aphantasia isn't real but I think a lot of it is misunderstanding of those who think phanatasia is closing your eyes and "seeing" things. In an engineering class where I had to make drawings from multiple angles I would rotate it in my mind and draw it, I can can close my eyes and visualize walking around my childhood home, and I can visualize snap shots of important memories of my life. However, I don't "see" it in any sense of what it is like when my eyes are open, not even close really.
I think I'm pretty far out on the aphantasia spectrum. Mostly the spatial and abstract qualia of a scene, not like seeing. Even an afterimage of a strobe is more visual than my imagination. I can't really picture faces of loved ones, though I can sense strong recognition and/or anticipation of features or mannerisms when seeing an actual person.
But I have a variable audio and proprioceptive imagination that is something in between, like many people have described above for visuals. Not like a hallucination or waking dream with perceptions equivalent to real senses, but with way more qualia than just an abstract idea. A distinct category of simulation that lies somewhere in between.
So, I can believe that others have things more like this, but visually. And I have observed mentally ill people with full on hallucinations and delusions, and can also believe that there are other stages along this spectrum, more vivid but still distinguishing self-generated from sensory-generated perceptions.
For imagery, I have the most tenuous topological or spatial perceptions that, if anything, connect more to my proprioceptive sense. Like as if I could imagine myself being some sort of tentacled animal and reaching all over to feel a complex structure in an instant. Or at times of extreme focus, I can almost feel myself as an amorphous charge spreading out (breadth-first) through a complex graph or maze.
I'm not sure I picture an apple if someone asks me to imagine one. I'm not sure it has a particular color neither.
If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a conscious process.
So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by default.
I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by definition.
I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something detailed, maybe it would come with training.
Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things to try guessing I'm dreaming xD
First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.
With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.
- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.
- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.
Yes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time. Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless). I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit. There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these thoughts though.
I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.
Sorry but, your list of examples feels like a list produced by an AI from a set of articles about aphantasia, or it's like you're too influenced by these articles.
Rotating 3d objects, doing multiple visual operations on a rubik's cube or mental abacus are not operations that even people with hyperphantasia will be able to do naturaly.
If you gave more examples of every day situations, or if you told us that you tried to train for thoses operations for 3 months and failed, we could conclude something else.
Command line vs GUI. (Or, for most people, a combination)
In my case I'm approximately typical but there are things I'm better or worse at visualizing. I've never successfully worked a mind palace, I find myself too distracted and unable to hold the image, as if in a dream. But I'm quite good at mentally navigating routes and can build a pretty large visual model of roads I drive. (Oh. Maybe I should make a "mind city" instead.)
I've always struggled with descriptions of aphantasia and I don't know if I have it myself because I don't know what's "normal". This article also didn't clarify it.
When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual vision stays completely black.
As far as I understand yes, most people actually see something.
At some point I figured out this "test" to explain aphantasia to people: ask someone to imagine a car. After that, ask them about visual details of the car: what color is it? what type of car is it? (Other objects might work better than a car; In my experience color is the attribute that will be the most surprising, vwry clear for some completely absent for others.)
Most people are going to answer with whatever they "saw". For me these follow-up questions don't make sense.
Not see, but visualize. It's like a different sense. Can you recall what something you touched felt like, what something smelled like, what something tasted like, or sounded like? The recollection of the experience is different
than the sensory experience itself, but there's still something of the original sensory experience to it. Visualization is like being able to recall what something looked like in this way, as if you had seen it even though you didn't.
Your vision can feed your visualization, but it doesn't go the other way, which would be a hallucination.
By default I'm like you, roughly a 4 or 5 - a platonic ideal, no actual form, because I don't need to go further for being told that. But if I have any reason to go further, I have no trouble with being around a 1 or 2, depending on the object.
A lot of these simple tests don't seem to take into account "default" vs "capable of".
it would be a hallucination to see something appear in vision. it’s in that internal space that images appear. for some people, it’s not impossible for these two spaces to overlap, but i guess most of them we would consider psychotic.
notice how a person daydreaming looks spaced out. they’re not looking through their eyes then. no, people do not augment their reality, unless hallucinating.
I can see and then overlay visualizations on top of that, but it’s still not a hallucination. E.g. I’m in bed and a green apple lies to the left. This works by “capturing” reality and transferring it to the inner screen then visializing on it. Akin to switching between your primary/secondary eye and being stuck in between, you’re both there and spaced out.
I'm in the same boat. I can't see things as though they're physical objects but I can sense them in some other way.
I can also draw outlines with my eyes closed - e.g. I can point my finger out and trace the positions of my desk, table, windows, etc.
But when explaining the concept of aphantasia, my go to explanation is to look directly at a person, close my eyes, and say "I have no idea what you look like." I can still sense where they are - height, weight, - and I can state facts about their beard or hair colour, but I'm not seeing it in any way I'd normally use the word 'see'.
But with all that, I feel like it could be close enough that that might be how others sense things and we just lack the terminology to express it, so I tend not to say I'm aphantasic as a definite term.
Do you have an inner monologue? If you can hear your inner voice, you'll know that your inner voice is less of a voice and more of a speaker that can play anything you like. The only limits are my own knowledge, experience and creativity.
Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
* (1) Seeing inside your head.
* (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else.
* (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes)
* (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.
People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.
There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.
EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.
It's a spectrum, so it's not whether or not you experience aphantasia but to what degree.
Also, my experience is that I can imagine very detailed objects and scenes, but the happen in a second mental space, not the current visual field. To imagine something, I have to stop paying attention to the sensory input of the world around me and mentally turn aside to the second space where imagination happens.
I struggle to impose imagined objects on the visual field. I end up imagining what it would look like if I could, but this happens in the second space, in an imagined copy of the visual field.
Okay, explaining personal experience is notoriously difficult - but here we go:
This is a story - this is not literally true, but is a roughly similar shape of things.
My experience is that I am a little thing piloting a giant thing (my body) - I sit in a seat and watch a screen. That screen shows me what my eyes see, and to the edges and beyond are empty. In front of me - between the screen and me - is an empty space. In that space I can draw lines, color things, move things, rotate things.
If I concentrate hard enough I can overlay (by seeing the space while I have my eyes open) an imagined thing in real space (The imagined item is still originating from that space - not the screen - but the screen and that space...mix). The screen from my eyes is an order of magnitude brighter - so I have to focus in order to do that.
I can imagine things with my eyes open... but when I do, I am not facing the 'eye-screen' inside my head, I'm looking down and away from it and only at that space of imagination.
I recently starting drawing: It seems to solidify this space/ability more than any other mental exercise I've tried. I have noticed a distinct improvement when I started deconstructing what I was seeing in real live down to basic shapes (In that imagined space and overlaying it on what I was seeing).
When I was doing forms and rehearsing techniques in martial arts, I would imagine wireframe fighters coming at me. Normally they were yellow, but a successful strike against "hitboxes" in their limbs, torso, or head would turn the corresponding part red. I couldn't see them as such like a HUD, but I could visualize them, and it noticeably improved my technique.
I've adopted the "tiny pilot controlling a meat mech" perspective before, but the "screen" is wrap-around and very close, there's no space outside or between me and it.
Now consider that the idea that there is a "me" perceiving the screen is only an un-investigated assumption, and that this "me" is actually only implied by whatever object appears on the screen.
Can any such separate entity actually be found?
Or is the thinker implied by the thought, the listener implied by the sound, the feeler implied by the feeling, etc.
To kind of piggyback on here since you described your experience very well, I'll give my own as a contrast to yours:
Mine seems similar. Instead of piloting a body I just am my body, and I don't perceive any screen. Instead of an "area between me and the screen" I just have a completely separate workspace of sorts where I can visualize things. But - and this is where I differ from you the most I think - in my mind that workspace is quite separate from my field of real vision. If I concentrate I can kind of overlay them, but it feels very artificial.
Likewise, this mirrors my experiences near exactly. In a very real sense, I am/embody the contours of my senses.
On a possibly related note, when I was very young there was a moment I distinctly remember 'pulling away' from this sense-surface-of-self, and a bone deep certainty that if I did so I would be lost and/or have done something unrecoverable. Spooked me thoroughly at the time, but now I wonder if doing so would have formed that intermediary-type viewpoint.
I describe it as two separate screens because I can't really overlay them (imagine putting one monitor in front of the other and trying to see through the first one; not going to happen), but otherwise don't have much issue imagining things.
Another good comparison might be that my eyes are 4k but my imagination is like 480p.
It's probably not linked because it is just "do you have aphantasia" rephrased various ways. This test is very poorly designed and comes off like a facebook quiz.
> No image at all, you only “know” that you are thinking of the object
> Dim and vague; flat
> Moderately clear and lively
> Clear and lively
> Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing
All of the examples are not necessary if they can all be answered with the same answers.
Not at all. Having taken it, despite also thinking that it looked absurdly simplistic, I was surprised my answers were different depending on the subject. Nor is the result a boolean "yes/no" at all, which should be obvious from the more-than-two answer choices to the questions - phantasia is a spectrum.
Thinking about it is not the same as seeing it. I can like 'see' e.g. my house in my imagination. But it is more like a fast glimpse or looking past it. There is nothing to focus on. I can't count the windows without remembering them one by one. I need to rethink about the door to 'zoom in' on it etc.
Do you see things when you have a dream or how about in the intermediary when you’re falling asleep? people claim they can visualize things like that at will.
I’m of the mind to think that people are unreliable narrators of their internal world and are not to be trusted on either side of the spectrum.
> It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity.
It's like having a second visual sense, but it's not strictly the same as standard vision. It often does lack clarity, but as with any other sense, you can sharpen specific details by focusing on it. Your real vision can feed into this secondary vision, but not the other way around, which would be a hallucination.
Aphantasia might occur with other senses too. I'm almost certain I have aphantasia in taste and smells. I simply cannot conjure any in my head, even for extremely common ones like taste of apple or sun dried sheets. When people ask me about my opinion of food I just had, I'm simply recalling facts from my assessment made during the meal. It's very different from how I do it if I had to recall something visual like a painting, because I do have a vivid mental image.
There's a theory that people are in general bad at doing this with taste and smell because we don't have a lot of words specifically for taste/smell to attach the concepts to. Colors, for example, have their own words, but tastes and smells are in the context of objects they come from instead of standing on their own.
I asked around and a few people seem to have no problem "visualizing" tastes and smells, especially for common ones. I can imagine sense of touch too, I just assumed it's normal to be able to imagine all senses.
I can see, taste and touch in my mind. Smell not so much. Its weird because food taste is strongly related to smell. But a fragance alone is very difficult to me.
For those who cannot visualize things: try the same experience with your eyes open. I can't visualize anything with my eyes closed - maybe black-and-white shadowy outlines if that - but with my eyes open I can visualize things kind of up above my head outside my visual field.
(There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older, perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very things that are you start to become threadbare.)
I recently learned that people are on a spectrum of thoughts visualization - not everyone _thinks_ the same. If you want to check your personal mix of “visualization” characteristics this questionnaire by Uni of Wisconsin-Madison is useful (you also get your position on the distribution curve):
I have this, as does my wife. We both thought it was normal up until about a year ago, until our kids informed us that they actually see the things they imagine.
I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by looking and imagining).
But yeah, no mind's eye.
I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)
Discussion pages like this one are constantly filled with people saying "Aphantasia doesn't exist, it's just differences in how people describe the same thing," when the science in this paper and others is clear.
Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.
The science isn't clear at all. The question "To what extent do you actually see an apple?" is completely unscientific. You can't simply ask people questions, that's not science.
It's also a question about qualia, which is notoriously a field of study resistant to science.
People who report as aphantasia light up differently in an fMRI than those who do not report as aphantasia, and do so in consistent ways. They also have predictable differences in autobiographical memory and a number of other areas.
This reminds me of something that might be related. Someone recently told me that if you look at any object, you can imagine what it feels like to put your tongue on it. (With all kinds of subsequent hilarious and disgusting suggestions.)
And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true for most?
We have a lot of experience touching things with our fingers (in daily life) and tongues (more when we're younger), and can extrapolate from this experience.
In my own experience, this extrapolation is overconfident - I tested licking a few random items, and while my expectation was close to reality, I was always just a little off for the truly novel items. Of course for something gross, most people won't (and shouldn't!) test their expectation, so they go on with the confirmation bias that they got it right.
First example that comes to mind is that the roof of my mouth feels much smoother to my tongue than it does to my fingers.
Which is why I thought I was completely normal, because when I remember them, I have very vivid dreams. When I found out about that, I did get a bit sad and jealous that there are people who can essentially do that at will, while awake. Sounds close to magic to me.
As far as I know, I have a very good ability to visualize things mentally. I can picture objects and scenes vividly, with good detail, rotate objects in my mind, etc.
However, there's one critical aspect of this that I don't see people talking about - if I picture a scene that is "pleasing" to look at, like a beautiful sunset - I get absolutely no pleasure or enjoyment from doing so, like I would if I saw it in real life. Somehow the fact that it is a deliberately imagined scene bypasses whatever part of my brain would react with pleasure. Part of this is that there's no novelty to it - I know what I'm imagining, so there's no sense of "Oh wow, look at that!"
So for me, this is a purely practical ability - I can go to Ikea, look at lawn furniture, and pretty easily picture how it will look in my backyard - but that's it.
If I lost this ability, I do think it would make some everyday tasks difficult that I take for granted, but I wouldn't be sad about losing the ability itself.
I believe I have complete aphantasia - I can't form any images at all with any detail. When I dream, it's conceptual with no images, like reading a story out.
This ability varies with our health and exhaustion. A year or two ago I had less control of conjuring images like these by choice. Only a week or two ago I regained more control of depth, not that it wasn’t 3d before, but making it really pop makes a big difference. The key has been long distance cycling, cardio is important for a clear mind.
Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.
It's honestly more confusing to me that most people are bad at drawing but supposedly most people don't have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images.
When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I can anticipate which strokes will make sense.
It’s similar for me. It has to be a very iterative process where the image emerges rather than me having a solid idea in my head and bringing it to life.
It’s more of an artisan muscle memory thing. You can definitely tell sometimes, that someone has the right hand movements to sum up all the details that make a complete painting, but the overall composition is lacking in the coherence or planning or perspective. The result being something like medieval manuscript animals. There are still rules such as perspective lines and so on that can compensate. How can someone code without planning the architecture beforehand? Line by line, but spaghetti structure arises subtly. If you just start drawing, you have a sense of the next stroke, and next stroke. But yeah, drawing by markov process can lead to shoddiness without a clear guiding visualisation.
I think that sculpting would be much better suited as the properties and relationships of an object hold true. When making a 2d drawing it's a projection which has very different relationships.
Maybe this is why I am terrible at drawing lol. If I try to draw a dog there is a good chance most people wont be able to tell it's a dog.
I can try to draw one because I know the characteristics of a dog and I can fulfill them as I am creating the shape on the paper. But I don't think I see it ahead of time.
I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good at mental math.
Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)
Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).
Sample size of one. I have aphantasia and cannot picture images at all. I had a “natural” affinity for math and would often zone out extrapolating mathematical patterns in my head during school. Like the trick with multiplying 9s where you hold your fingers up. I remember spending days of class time working on a more generic rule to allow me to multiply any number by 9 in my head. This came to a crashing halt for calculus as I was not able to develop a mental model for it at all during high school. Everything that had been easy and interesting before just disappeared when it came to memorizing formulas with no rhyme or reason.
> Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well.
Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize doing the problem with an abacus [1].
A couple of things I noticed while teaching drawing to students (who were quite good) and i was a bit obsessed by Aphantasia..
It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable characteristic that isn’t present in drawings from imagination.
This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could from life/photo than anyone else.
Few cameras have the same focal length as the human eye. I wonder if your observation would hold if that were accounted for. Same as the difference between 'attractive' faces and 'photogenic'.
I don't actually "see" mental images, but I "feel" them. For example, I can remember a friend's or a celebrity's face — clearly recalling the "feel" of that face — the exact qualia I experience if I actually saw it — but there is no "overlay image", my eyes see pitch black that moment! It is a very high level qualia, totally decoupled from visual perception. But I swear it is the same as if I actually saw a certain face. It is so strange.
Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or more imagination than others.
When I do mushrooms I like closing my eyes and watching my brain attempt to maintain the image as it swirls and contorts into analogous yet increasingly orthogonal forms
This is a smug non-reply to the parent post. People with imagination might not always “replace” vision, but they can summon images to the mind’s eye other than complete darkness. And personally, I feel I can obscure the world around me if focused on a particularly powerful daydream.
For me to do it for long periods of time in high fidelity, I need to either close my eyes or do this blurring/out of focus thing I don't know how to describe. So in a sense, it does have to replace my vision literally. I regularly lead high level strategy meetings with my eyes fully closed so I can use my memory and imagination fully, I've seen other people do this also so I presume I'm not alone.
That is literally how it's presented in the article.
>Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.
For me, that is the intermediary step before the drawing. I think the image is just my imagination of that feeling you discribe + some specific memory of aspects of the thing? I have very vivid mental imagery. I don't believe it's specifically drawn from memory, more generally drawn from that qualia you talk of + the attributes I know of the thing + situational memory.
Wow! Me too. When I go into apartments and think about how my furniture would fit inside, it's like it turns into a little dollhouse (or do I become giant?) and I'm physically running my hands over where the couch, table, TV, etc. will go, and I feel the couch juddering on the floor as I slide it into place, all without actually seeing the items. Like they've got an invisibility cloak on or something.
This. I’m convinced this should be one of the observable differences between aphant’s and others. I have this aphantasia, and I could always do great on those rotate the object style IQ puzzles, but get me to estimate whether a box can fit in a shelf; hopeless. Makes packing the boot (trunk) of a car difficult. My wife, who has hyperphantasia, is never wrong. I’m much better at looking at the things and arranging the group of items, but not being able to tell if things will fit.
Somehow I just won’t learn though. “It won’t fit”, “sure it will… Oh…”.
I have aphantasia. I relate to what you say about how "feel" a face when I remember it. I'd compare it to a neutral nets embedding. I'm not storing every "pixel" of an image but instead a "vector" that corresponds to the key features (although I'm not consciously aware what those features are). I couldn't describe on demand the faces of my colleagues I see every day but I know them when I see them.
It’s not like: visual stimulus. It’s more like when you see something, that experience eventually translates into a picture in your mind.
When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input.
I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.
Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple".
>She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.”
What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here.
So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.
It’s definitely different when you’re dreaming or when you’re falling asleep, I mean the vividness of one’s imagination so people are claiming they have the same level of vividness all the time it seems that you must take their word on this, no?
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] thread(By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from almust fully auditory complete with specific voice characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully abstract)
It's not the same as hallucination.
What is your experience of dreaming like?
What is your experience of recalling memories like?
What is your experience of recalling media you've watched like?
What is your experience of imagining like?
What is your experience of reading like?
Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal, but also why I thought I don’t have aphantasia. I even have lucid dreams.
Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having seen something.
Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to still describe parts of it, but I see nothing.
Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen a child’s water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun, roughly.
Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I can’t see any of it. Now descriptions of things happening, I can totally get into that. But I don’t see anything.
For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn’t realize anyone would actually see something.
There is also a fantasy writer, Mark Lawrence, who has aphantasia and wrote about it: http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/
Recalling memories for me has the detail of a short journal entry. It's not first person, I don't relive the emotions I felt at the time, and compared to my others the detail isn't there.
For example, when discussing my graduation with my father, I could recall the building, the general layout of the room, and parts of the ceremony's sequence. However, I can't recall walking across the stage, even though I know it happened. In contrast, my father could describe where he was seated and even what people in front of him were wearing.
Media I remember the concepts of what was covered and images or videos are familiar when I see them again, but I can't rewatch a moment in my mind.
Likewise for reading, I remember as a child not understanding what people meant when they said Daniel Radcliffe didn't match up to the Harry Potter they imagined.
Imagining is all about the idea, best explainer would be: https://aphantasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Imagine-a-horse.pn...
While I'm dreaming and unaware that I'm dreaming, it's like I'm in real life. As soon as I start to wake up at all, everything fades to black almost instantly. I recall the experience as if I lived it though dreams are strange so it's far less consistent than a normal narrative.
What kind of memories? I often completely fail to encode and remember highly visual details - like what color hair someone has, what shirt they were wearing, and so on. But I could recall the name of the building in which my college showed the Matrix in the fall of 1999 because I could remember which way I walked there.
I recall audio strongly and can hear the voices of various characters in my head. I can do passable impressions of quite a few characters. I can tell you the story in detail, but if something hinges on a visual cue I will completely fail there.
I mostly talk to myself in my head. It's a running narrative. If you'd like a specific example, give me something more meaningful than "imagining".
If I want to read something and retain it well, I will hear it in my head in my internal voice as I'm reading.
This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.
The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never thought it could be any different for other people.
I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to learn for people.
I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember via other means are more effective.
I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical locations.
I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.
“He was all jowls and scowls”
Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean on.
In many of his novels characters are either non-human, post-humans, or AIs.
Many folks criticize the character development, etc. My only assumption that that Greg's writing style strips out all the cruft that I find a slog.
Because it doesn't have the cruft and focuses on ideas and messages, I love it.
It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-piece. I would characterize myself as having a running interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I gather it is for some.)
I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.
I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of characters because I have no strong sense of what they look or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)
A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the rest is about ~ideas and personalities.
Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around reading.
I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much more likely to retain some picky detail when it's integrated into my broader understanding than if it's effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like dates.
Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first resource I reach for.)
Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.
All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.
Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.
If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).
If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."
Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.
There's just no rich visual experience.
I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense?
That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.
Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading. Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling," but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams.
Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly they remember the events of my own life. I really do not recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old. At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong. Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the motivating details of the plotline itself, and then subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course, none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not imagery.
Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense, but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even replaying video games unless there is something novel (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because there is a much higher amount of content from a logical plotline/story point of view.
Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings. Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do with my family, etc.
Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces, even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book, watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I tend not to remember details of an author's physical description of their characters. I c...
I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.
When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
There is some research into visuals that seems elucidating.[0]
[0] https://zugzology.com/blogs/myceliums-gambit/exploring-psych...
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations
On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it.
Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)
Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same amount of effort.
I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire kasina".
It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.
Still a bit weird, health-wise, but a lot more in your control than drugs.
If that’s the case, you can probably improve it simply by repeatedly using what you have. I say that because my ability to think visually improved greatly when I started drawing. Also I’m still not very good at conjuring well proportioned and shaded objects from nothing but I can pull them out of my memories.
My hypothesis is that you would get some ability to visualise at some point. That’s an experience which would be cool to carry actually.
If someone didn't have this "skill", they could prompt an LLM to "visualize", then repeat the words off the screen, and but for the clues that they're cheating bystanders wouldn't be able to tell much difference. I assert that there is no additional insight gained by the "visualization" that isn't available from the verbalization because these are, in fact, essentially the same thing.
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
I experienced exactly this! It turned out that, for me, the root cause was multiple B vitamin deficiencies; correcting them caused my internal vision to become INCREDIBLY vivid. B vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production (ex. [0]) -- particularly serotonin, which is known to interact with vision[1] -- and it's been amazing realising what I've been missing out on. Psychedelics[2] and cannabis[3] "improving" the condition makes sense since both have serotonergic activity (5HT2A specifically).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Neurological_disorders "[...] the bioactive folate, methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), a direct target of methyl donors such as S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe), recycles the inactive dihydrobiopterin (BH2) into tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), the necessary cofactor in various steps of monoamine synthesis, including that of dopamine and serotonin."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Effects
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Ligands
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3552103/
I take a Vitamin B Complex every day from Nootropics Depot
I could picture myself on a beach or walking through a forest, something I’ve always felt frustrated I could never create in my mind. I’ll admit it was a slightly scary experience…
By contrast I have a friend with a wonderfully vivid imagination. He’s a photographer by trade and spontaneously captures moments / scenes on his phone while we’re walking along. We’re always asking questions about the other’s brain :)
I did get pretty strong visual experiences from Ketamine therapy, but it's completely different from mental images. I felt transported to a different "head space" where there was abstract visual imagery that felt "real" but completely disembodied and not related to day-to-day experience.
I really can't comprehend what it's like to have normal visual imagery or be a hyper-visualizer.
It wasn’t until much later (after I stopped tripping) that I learned about aphantasia as a name for my daily experience and I’ve always assumed that it was why my experience on hallucinogens varied so much from more common descriptions. It’s interesting to hear that they might “unlock” the experience of imagination for others.
It was interesting! Didn't sleep all night, how do you phantasts do that? :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023
I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say they "see" things, I want to say "with what?"
To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing?
I can imagine things and have vague visual imagery appear in my head, but I can't see them as "floating like holograms".
I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.
When you say "understand", I want to say "with what?" The mind you're borrowing?
How do we know that we don’t have the same experience vs we just describe our experience differently?
How much of this is just people having a normal human experience of not seeing literal visuals getting confused by people who are a much more figurative in the description of their own experience?
Kinda reminds me of smoking weed in high school and there was always the kid who roleplayed that he was seeing a bunch of green men in the room.
The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.
What does surprise me is that most discussions on aphantasia are very similar to those on religious experiences. Some of us can talk to God, while others are pretty sure He does not exist, because they never get an answer.
Most scientists have given up on trying to prove that God does or does not exist. But quite a lot of ink had been spilled to get to that point. And it seems we still have some bytes to go in the phantasia discussion.
Here is a video in which prof Joel Pearson describes them: https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0 , IIRC Joel Pearson was involved in developing each of the methods, so I'm sure you can find his publications on the subject as well.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
"Vague visual imagery appear in my head" resonates with me.
Edit: typo
One hint for this is that we see the world upside-down by default. Another is the evidence that visual evidence cannot be trusted in a court case.
It then seems likely that the responsible brain areas can be activated by memory, as well as by the eye sensors.
The level of reality at which all this is possible in different individuals is obviously an open question. Whether one can train this is also not entirely clear to most.
I suspect this is what's going on, and they're not describing it well.
There's a test used for perfect eidetic memory that as far as I remember no one has ever passed. The primary requirement for passing it is to be able to project what you've previously seen, "floating like a hologram", on top of a second image you're currently looking at. The two patterns combine to reveal a message or image.
But kids will often describe what they're imagining as if they're doing exactly that, because they don't yet have the words or context to be precise.
Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are experiencing the same thing.
I believe that there is something past just a disagreement on definitions.
What "glory" do you speak of? For me, the apple is more of an idea and I can VERY faintly "see" fuzzy attributes about its geometry. And there is no color.
The article makes clear there are significant differences in how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have aphantasia" spectrum.
But I have a variable audio and proprioceptive imagination that is something in between, like many people have described above for visuals. Not like a hallucination or waking dream with perceptions equivalent to real senses, but with way more qualia than just an abstract idea. A distinct category of simulation that lies somewhere in between.
So, I can believe that others have things more like this, but visually. And I have observed mentally ill people with full on hallucinations and delusions, and can also believe that there are other stages along this spectrum, more vivid but still distinguishing self-generated from sensory-generated perceptions.
For imagery, I have the most tenuous topological or spatial perceptions that, if anything, connect more to my proprioceptive sense. Like as if I could imagine myself being some sort of tentacled animal and reaching all over to feel a complex structure in an instant. Or at times of extreme focus, I can almost feel myself as an amorphous charge spreading out (breadth-first) through a complex graph or maze.
If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a conscious process.
So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by default.
I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by definition.
I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something detailed, maybe it would come with training.
Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things to try guessing I'm dreaming xD
First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.
With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.
- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.
- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.
- When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
- I can't mind palace really much at all.
- I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.
Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio.
Interested in other people's experiences.
Interesting, I can reason how it should look and figure it out that way, but I never could just select one from seeing another version of it.
I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.
Like if I ask you to think of a car brand, one just jumped into your head. Does the correct rotation just come into your head too?
For me to do rotations I have to visualize the object in my "minds eye" and then I watch it rotate. I can't imagine doing it any other way.
In my case I'm approximately typical but there are things I'm better or worse at visualizing. I've never successfully worked a mind palace, I find myself too distracted and unable to hold the image, as if in a dream. But I'm quite good at mentally navigating routes and can build a pretty large visual model of roads I drive. (Oh. Maybe I should make a "mind city" instead.)
When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual vision stays completely black.
You don't have aphantasia. In people with aphantasia, there is no "it" to describe.
At some point I figured out this "test" to explain aphantasia to people: ask someone to imagine a car. After that, ask them about visual details of the car: what color is it? what type of car is it? (Other objects might work better than a car; In my experience color is the attribute that will be the most surprising, vwry clear for some completely absent for others.)
Most people are going to answer with whatever they "saw". For me these follow-up questions don't make sense.
Your vision can feed your visualization, but it doesn't go the other way, which would be a hallucination.
I imagine the platonic idea of an apple and not a specific apple.
Asking “what color was the apple” is a category error for me!
Just wild how everyone is living such different internal lives.
By default I'm like you, roughly a 4 or 5 - a platonic ideal, no actual form, because I don't need to go further for being told that. But if I have any reason to go further, I have no trouble with being around a 1 or 2, depending on the object.
A lot of these simple tests don't seem to take into account "default" vs "capable of".
notice how a person daydreaming looks spaced out. they’re not looking through their eyes then. no, people do not augment their reality, unless hallucinating.
I can also draw outlines with my eyes closed - e.g. I can point my finger out and trace the positions of my desk, table, windows, etc.
But when explaining the concept of aphantasia, my go to explanation is to look directly at a person, close my eyes, and say "I have no idea what you look like." I can still sense where they are - height, weight, - and I can state facts about their beard or hair colour, but I'm not seeing it in any way I'd normally use the word 'see'.
But with all that, I feel like it could be close enough that that might be how others sense things and we just lack the terminology to express it, so I tend not to say I'm aphantasic as a definite term.
Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
* (1) Seeing inside your head. * (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else. * (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes) * (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.
People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.
There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.
EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.
Also, my experience is that I can imagine very detailed objects and scenes, but the happen in a second mental space, not the current visual field. To imagine something, I have to stop paying attention to the sensory input of the world around me and mentally turn aside to the second space where imagination happens.
I struggle to impose imagined objects on the visual field. I end up imagining what it would look like if I could, but this happens in the second space, in an imagined copy of the visual field.
This is a story - this is not literally true, but is a roughly similar shape of things.
My experience is that I am a little thing piloting a giant thing (my body) - I sit in a seat and watch a screen. That screen shows me what my eyes see, and to the edges and beyond are empty. In front of me - between the screen and me - is an empty space. In that space I can draw lines, color things, move things, rotate things.
If I concentrate hard enough I can overlay (by seeing the space while I have my eyes open) an imagined thing in real space (The imagined item is still originating from that space - not the screen - but the screen and that space...mix). The screen from my eyes is an order of magnitude brighter - so I have to focus in order to do that. I can imagine things with my eyes open... but when I do, I am not facing the 'eye-screen' inside my head, I'm looking down and away from it and only at that space of imagination.
I recently starting drawing: It seems to solidify this space/ability more than any other mental exercise I've tried. I have noticed a distinct improvement when I started deconstructing what I was seeing in real live down to basic shapes (In that imagined space and overlaying it on what I was seeing).
I've adopted the "tiny pilot controlling a meat mech" perspective before, but the "screen" is wrap-around and very close, there's no space outside or between me and it.
Now consider that the idea that there is a "me" perceiving the screen is only an un-investigated assumption, and that this "me" is actually only implied by whatever object appears on the screen.
Can any such separate entity actually be found?
Or is the thinker implied by the thought, the listener implied by the sound, the feeler implied by the feeling, etc.
Mine seems similar. Instead of piloting a body I just am my body, and I don't perceive any screen. Instead of an "area between me and the screen" I just have a completely separate workspace of sorts where I can visualize things. But - and this is where I differ from you the most I think - in my mind that workspace is quite separate from my field of real vision. If I concentrate I can kind of overlay them, but it feels very artificial.
On a possibly related note, when I was very young there was a moment I distinctly remember 'pulling away' from this sense-surface-of-self, and a bone deep certainty that if I did so I would be lost and/or have done something unrecoverable. Spooked me thoroughly at the time, but now I wonder if doing so would have formed that intermediary-type viewpoint.
Another good comparison might be that my eyes are 4k but my imagination is like 480p.
I’m of the mind to think that people are unreliable narrators of their internal world and are not to be trusted on either side of the spectrum.
It's like having a second visual sense, but it's not strictly the same as standard vision. It often does lack clarity, but as with any other sense, you can sharpen specific details by focusing on it. Your real vision can feed into this secondary vision, but not the other way around, which would be a hallucination.
Can people just imagine all of their senses?
(There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older, perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very things that are you start to become threadbare.)
https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by looking and imagining).
But yeah, no mind's eye.
I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)
Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.
It's also a question about qualia, which is notoriously a field of study resistant to science.
Pretty sure that counts.
But meanwhile on the Internet we have endless people claiming to they have aphantasia because they "only see black when they close their eyes".
I don't think we should conflate these two.
And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true for most?
In my own experience, this extrapolation is overconfident - I tested licking a few random items, and while my expectation was close to reality, I was always just a little off for the truly novel items. Of course for something gross, most people won't (and shouldn't!) test their expectation, so they go on with the confirmation bias that they got it right.
First example that comes to mind is that the roof of my mouth feels much smoother to my tongue than it does to my fingers.
As far as I know, I have a very good ability to visualize things mentally. I can picture objects and scenes vividly, with good detail, rotate objects in my mind, etc.
However, there's one critical aspect of this that I don't see people talking about - if I picture a scene that is "pleasing" to look at, like a beautiful sunset - I get absolutely no pleasure or enjoyment from doing so, like I would if I saw it in real life. Somehow the fact that it is a deliberately imagined scene bypasses whatever part of my brain would react with pleasure. Part of this is that there's no novelty to it - I know what I'm imagining, so there's no sense of "Oh wow, look at that!"
So for me, this is a purely practical ability - I can go to Ikea, look at lawn furniture, and pretty easily picture how it will look in my backyard - but that's it.
If I lost this ability, I do think it would make some everyday tasks difficult that I take for granted, but I wouldn't be sad about losing the ability itself.
I think the percentage of people who can't do that is way higher than 1%. I'm not great at it myself.
But the answer is definitely 'not very well'.
I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images.
When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I can anticipate which strokes will make sense.
I can make little play dough models though? I know the shapes I just can’t see them in my mind.
I can try to draw one because I know the characteristics of a dog and I can fulfill them as I am creating the shape on the paper. But I don't think I see it ahead of time.
Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)
Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).
Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize doing the problem with an abacus [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable characteristic that isn’t present in drawings from imagination.
This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could from life/photo than anyone else.
Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or more imagination than others.
>Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.
Somehow I just won’t learn though. “It won’t fit”, “sure it will… Oh…”.
Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it black)
I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!
When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input.
I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.
>She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.”
What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here.
So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.