You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
Yes, unfortunately they are. I say unfortunately because they are often connected with trauma. When something goes very badly, those memories can go cycling around one's head. PTSD can do that too. Some people relive wars years after they happened. It's very real.
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult.
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions.
I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.
I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
I didn't realize they were correlated. I have total visual and auditory aphantasia and can count childhood memories on one hand. But I have great semantic memory and could probably win a game of jeapordy.
We strongly suspect we have SDAM as well and only more so after reading your description here. Only got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and as on the autism spectrum this year, here in our forties as well.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
Visualizing a sheep is not something I can even do once. Let alone repetitively until it gets boring. Being asked to visualize is quite frustrating and confusing - especially to a little kid not sure exactly what he's supposed to be "seeing". Hardly relaxing.
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
Oddly, it keeps shifting to cutting a slice out of the apple instead. But with a bit more focus, yes. Even with the specific peeler I have in the kitchen, which has a blue handle. Maybe I'm not actually below average.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
I don't navigate by visualizing the road ahead, I mostly navigate by recalling what I saw on Google Maps. Yes, always with north at the top and if I rotate the map 90 degrees it'll be completely unfamiliar - I have tried that - I think that's fairly normal though.
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
Neither, they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
That's so bizarre to me. I can "picture" an apple, but I'm not literally seeing something resembling an apple in my mind. It's closer to the classic object-oriented example of "Apple isa Fruit", except not in text but in vague geometric shapes that to me say "appleness".
I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of:
class Cow:
spinning = True
What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading).
OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wouldn't think that people literally imagined an apple, either, and yet here we are. But let's assume that people don't usually literally imagine pictures of the numbers in their mind when they add them.
Take 12. Add 7 do it. Now you have 19, right?
My mental imagery of adding 12 + 7 = 19 is nearly identical to that of picturing a spinning cow. Take a cow. Spin it. Now you have a spinning cow, right?
In both cases, those are just facts. Now, higher math does look like something to me, as does writing code. Those do have geometric shapes for me, kinds of blobby things with curved edges but not colors, except maybe rainbowy shimmers on those curves. I can feel the shapes moving and bending, and that moving and bending makes them makes sense to me. "OK, so I'm trying to do a binary search of this set... Alright, so if I push this shape into there... Oh! That'd work! Alright." But in no case do those shape-like things resemble anything I've ever seen in the real world.
My experience of mental math at the most common and basic is teasing apart the numbers into components and adding/multiplying/dividing their sums. Sometimes that's like the math confusion meme where it's "floating in front of my eyes" (mentally, internally) in the "void", sometimes I'm literally imagining in my minds eye doing the math at a desk on notebook paper with all the feedback that comes with it. Sometimes I use a mental TI-84/89 to do the math, or this one calculator I had when I was a kid. It's usually paper though. Many times I apply a synesthetic association to a number, be it textural, color, attitude, or "shape".
However, I also have the ability to mathematically evaluate an equation and graph it on a mental visualization of a graph. I've been able to do that in 2d and 3d for a range of quadratic, cubic, and quartic graphs since high school. Also asymptotes, hyperbolas, sinusoidal functions. You know those youtube videos where they do the CGI animations to show a rolling cylinder tracing out a sine wave? I've been able to do that in my mind since I was a teen.
In high school I would do calculus rate of change functions in my head with a visualization like a laser going from perpendicular to a wall to parallel with the wall, and how the speed of the point at the end of the beam on the wall approaches light speed as the beam approaches approaches parallel, or the shrinking surface area of a liquid in a vertical conical funnel.
The funnel i imagined is yellow with an equilateral cone and a long neck that tapers to a half inch and has a worn, wrinkled blue white and red sticker from being run through the dishwasher a few times. It's injection molded and not shaved/sanded. Excessive detail for a feature of a math problem, but it's there anyway.
For me a spinning cow can have horns or be a holstein heifer or an angus steer or a dairy calf, or a buffalo. Could be a chik fil a cow. Or the one from Barnyard...right, Barnyard? the Dreamworks movie...
I can go back and read pages of books and documents that I have already read in my mind, which means (with effort) I can retread any sheet music I've ever played, or redo the math that I did in calculus and chemistry and physics classes. For a long time it completely ruined re-reading books for me because I would know exactly what was coming and I didn't need to turn the page.
I used the sheet music thing to teach myself guitar based on what I learned on trumpet through recall of arpeggios and and scales. Notes are also synesthetic and I can make them dance off the page in my head.
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
This is the correct conclusion. We have no shared, objective way to label our visual experience. We will never know the truth here. This is indeed a quirk of human psychology powered by internet trends that encourage people to find reasons to feel their health is special and unique.
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
I would say taste and touch are my strongest recall senses. I can still remember the experience of my favorite sandwich at a local sandwich shop, discontinued around 2009.
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization. For more on the known neurodifferences in imagery experiences, check out these shocking insights. For a deeper dive into how this brain activation can be used to decode mental imagery, you might find this study enlightening."
On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
A boy and his mother are in a serious car accident. The mother dies on scene and the boy is rushed to the hospital where he needs urgent life-saving surgery. But the male surgeon says "I can't operate on this boy - he's my son!" How is this possible?
Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasi just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.
Here's my problem with this: take an fMRI of a bunch of professional jugglers while they imagine juggling. Now take an fMRI of a bunch of non-jugglers while they imagine juggling. I promise you they will be strikingly different, with the professionals having all sorts of real-life coordination areas lighting up.
Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!?
I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.
Learning to juggle involves easily observed objective activities that other people can check, and which can be learned that way--you can watch someone else juggling, read book that describes the tossing of the balls, etc.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
Maybe I misunderstand, Why is it an arguments against qualia? Qualia doesn't deny a neural substrate, just that qualia isn't reducible to the neural activity, being that one is objective and the other is subjective.
It's sort of the difference between logical supervenience and metaphysical, or weak emergence and strong emergence. Qualia being something additional to the neural description.
OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory?
There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims:
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply.
Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.
If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
No, it is nothing like retinal fatigue, which is what they are referencing in that sentence.
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projection screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists almost on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it?
If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
It is definitely different from seeing something. I'd guess it activates a subset of the semantic level neurons that activate when you see a thing. There are no actual pixels. I also guess that something similar happens in dreaming.
When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
Yes. Different people answer this differently: I'm 100% aphantasia while awake, but dream vividly as if it were real life. However, once I'm awake, I can recall the dream but can't visualize it, the same way I can't visualize a previous experience in real life.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.
It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:
- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia
- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)
- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)
- Memory vividness
Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?
It is amazing that humans can communicate at all given the variance. Visualization is also tightly tied to the emotional centers of the brain and serve as an emotional amplifier. Visualize a scenario and you’ll get an emotional reaction on how you’d likely feel in that situation. Some people have normal visualization but don’t get emotional reactions.
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
For me, inner monologue isn’t audio wildly different from imagining / reliving audio. Both exist, it’s the difference between listening to music and having a conversation.
Interesting. Do people not have some sort of sound or inner monologue running at all times? Apparently a quarter of people have no inner monologue at all which is wild. As for music, I can listen to whatever music I want in my mind whenever and even make compositions purely in my head that I can then write down into notes verbatim.
My inner monologue isn’t audio… it’s more like reading.
But yes, with you on composing songs. One reason I can’t fall asleep on airplanes or in other noisy environments: the closer to sleep I am, the less control I have over the tendency to weave audio patterns, and as soon as it gets interesting… I’m awake and thinking about the music. Repeat, for however long the flight is.
Funny you should ask. In high school I was regarded as highly intelligent, I was near the top of all of my classes and widely read, with an excellent memory for facts and figures. (Though no visual memory whatsoever).
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
In my experience with IQ tests involving complete the sequence many of the solutions when I looked up the intent behind them made very little sense to me.
I was good at mechanical drawing in college, meaning I could visualize the view of something from different sides. But, generally there was a perspective to work off of.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
Visualizing for me has always been like touching something with my eyes closed. I can't "see" the object, but I have a feeling for all the shapes and contours. You can feel which way a key is in your hand and where each ridge is without having to see it. I solve geometry problems the same way. I can't see the whole thing at once, but I can move my sense of feeling across arbitrary scenes.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
Hmm I'm pretty sure I have some degree of aphantasia, because I read a lot but I never imagine or remember how characters look.
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national competitions once.
Can't describe the process by which I was solving them though. Perhaps I pattern match the theorems...
I can "visualize" geometry and technical drawings by focusing on parts of them. It was enough for all my school work.
But then I learned about analytic geometry in the 8-th grade. I annoyed every math teacher by just using it to solve all the school geometry problems. And quite a few geometry problems in math competitions.
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane.
That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.
He started by saying he initially couldn't even achieve phantasia (at school) but now can and that validates his experience which is he has made strides on mental imagery department.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
It's not, but you then must admit that there's a variety of experience that you may not experience, and that some people don't need to learn, or vice versa, cannot learn.
Fair enough but we're not discussing all under the heaven here.
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
I think people can experience A, B, and C, he's saying "I was like A, but I learned to be like B, therefore A does not really exist". It's a bad argument. It's like claiming that, because you have dyslexia and learned to read, dyslexia doesn't exist, even though other people who are dyslexic can have a severity where they can't learn to read.
He desribed his own experience of learninig to visualise. That is entirely valid thing to say in the context of "is it learnable or unchangeable or something in between".
He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.
He rejected the idea of it being fixed for anyone else, based on it being changed for himself, which is uncharitable at best. Some people with dyslexia are incapable of learning to read, maybe you should check it out. That doesn't mean every dyslexic is incapable, but that's a real variation. And you're rejecting the idea of that yourself, which also feels pretty uncharitable.
Few people routinely mentally visualize with the same breadth and vividness as dreaming, unless perhaps they have poor dream recall or don't dream very vividly. It's probably more rare than aphantasia.
On the flip side, this means with some introspection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner.
A fascinating thing about dreams I realized as a midlife adult after getting into ML is how coupled brain storage : dreaming is.
Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?
If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.
But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.
Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.
FWIW, I don’t have aphantasia; I can visualize stuff in my head, but it’s nothing like actual vision, and neither is how I see in what I would call vivid dreams. My dreams and my wakeful “mind’s eye” are pretty similar, I would say. The point is, they are only faintly comparable to actual vision, but I would never characterize that difference as aphantasia, or say that I have trouble visualizing things.
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
I can smell phantom smells through my nose directly it seems, like I feel the sensation of detecting some smell directly in the neurons connected to my nose. Not sure if that's the same for you or others. It's not in my mind per se, at least not initially.
Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.
> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
> Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia
Citation needed.
People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.
Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.
That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.
"People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere."
Some/many people who can’t smell actually don’t know that, nor do the people around them. The same can be true for color blindness and actual blindness!
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
This same behaviour does actually persist in other areas. I'm colourblind, even as an adult I have other people argue that perhaps I just don't know which colours are which rather than have a problem with the mechanism within the eye for detecting them.
So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
I have another question I've always wanted to ask. How do you spell words if you can't picture them in your mind?
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
I just know it. And I also think it speeds up certain thinking not having to go through the cycle of visualizing and assessing the visualization. But definitely impairs other things like thinking about geometric relationships.
For spelling, I memorize pseudo-Latin letter pronunciation.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
It wasn't until this site did I know there are people with aphantasia but also have the ability to dream with at least some imagery details.
To answer your question. Nothing. It is just black. Not even a slight hint of shape of Eiffel Tower or even a tall rectangle or just outline of the structure. It is just nothing.
I sometimes think or wonder people who can dream and close their eyes and actually see things must have so much fun.
I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
I'm aphantasic, but I can relate to almost going blind with inattention. Not like I now have a black visual field, but just losing awareness of what is actually in it, like it is some sort of matte painting put up during intermission. But there remains some lower-level processing, because I may reflexively kick back into full seeing due to some unexpected change.
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
At best, what you're describing seems like a skill issue with the people describing it. Using multiple different metaphors that imply the thing you're saying is unrelated (mind'seye, visualization, image, etc) is just bad communication.
I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing.
Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.
We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
It's not the question of if objective physical green pigment is objective physical green pigment, but rather if what I see when I look at it is what you see (and not in the color blind sense, assuming neither of us are).
> At the end of the day, it's the "Is your green my green?" question and is unknowable.
It sounds like you're equating the comment I responded to with a question about colorblindness is a skill issue. I'm guessing that's not what you're actually arguing, but it's not clear to me what the actually analogy you're trying to make is.
I realized I have aphantasia after reading an HN thread about it a few years ago. I talked to my daughter about it and I realized she has it too.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
Yes, some of it can be quite wild, especially dreams but most of it isn't. The fun part of it is being able to place people in funny situations. Many people just do a rewind and visualise real life events from earlier.
I _HATE_ reading books that spend pages and pages explaining how things look to a very detailed degree even when it's not relevant to the plot in any way - it's just set dressing.
I can't see that. It's just word noise to me.
Now I noticed my kid has the same thing, they like other books and actively dislike others. It's the same as me, without me affecting their judgement in any way. Any book that spends too much explaining the environment is boring, books that just get on with the plot are a bit hit.
For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.
I have multisensory aphantasia. I assumed everyone was like this until I read an HN thread a long time ago. I have a very strong inner monologue. For example, I can hear part of a song in my head. Ie the guitar but it's my inner voice initiating the sound of a guitar. But I cannot hear a whole song. Maybe it's what rhythm had always been a challenge for me with guitar and piano.
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
> Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia.
Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.
It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
There is a full visual memory, just not any sense of an image or sound nor smell in my case.
I am very sure there is a difference after interrrogating multiple people about it.
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.
I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
Completely opposite on that front, here, as well. I can't even really associate, I have visual memory all the way back to my earliest childhood memories (specifically, 3-4 years old, stepping on the track of a sliding door in San Diego, I believe, it hurt, I wanted to go see the pool outside), and my memory is so visual that sometimes I can see people's face, and what they were wearing and where we were standing, in the conversations we had but not necessarily hear what they're saying. I also have some semantic memory, something like "we talked about x for a while, and then I think we did y", but it's much hazier.
Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.
After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.
Those people here (not you) telling all of us what is and what is not possible have their view based on how they see things. That's it. I hear they don't see things in mind, visually like a phone or a screen. Or do overlays. I remember finding out and being incredulous about whether others did something I don't.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
If "at will" is the hinging point then maybe not because the scenario to trigger the behaviour isn't clear to me still, but this is definitely possible.
I have had the superimposed belief-image confuse my spatial brain until I moved my point of view (in which the real world obviously reorients while the brain conjured image doesn't) to clear it before. This happened far more when I was younger than now as an adult, but it very much still happens.
The very last time I recall this happening was at my former home during a strenuous house move. I was on my back for a breather between boxes and a delay getting the car around gave me some time for my mind to wander, which it did on that occasion to thoughts about how very old buildings with column supports used to look. By the time I needed to move the next box I had to shake my head to de-conjure the little stone plinths that had appeared in my vision from my imagination trip.
"Exist" is probably the wrong framing. It doesn't seem unreasonable that such a phenomenon could occur after a traumatic brain injury, for instance. I'm sure there's some evidence of it, neurologically (like split-brain syndrome). But it's also true that people who say they "aphantasia", in 99.9% cases, don't experience that phenomenon.
Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.
When I dream I see the dreams just fine but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing.
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, in internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
This is why the denialism about differences in visual experience are so indefensible: they basically require an assumption that the whole world is out to lie and deceive.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
This is such a weird response, what do I have to gain by lying about such an event? Why would you want to "verify" it? I am sharing a lived experience: my visual experience of the image of the dystopian landscape was so strong that my cognitive experience was consumed by the image in my mind, to the extent that I no longer saw the image conveyed by my eyes.
I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.
I think I may share the same experience as you, but I've never known if what I have is closer to aphasia or hyperphantasia.
From the way people describe their experiences, it's difficult to know what they truly mean. I don't think anyone is lying, but it must be hard to convey these experiences with our language as it is.
In your first post, I thought "that's definitely not me", but in your second post I thought, "oh, that's actually 100% me"
To me, everything I imagine is on a different mental plane. This is what I thought people meant by a "minds eye". You don't see it literally, but it's there in your imagination.
What confuses me though is that for some people, it sounds like it's an overlay on their actual visual perception, something so vivid they could practically rotoscope it. I could never do that; I imagine I'd be a better artist if I could.
My imagination on this plane is so vivid that I'll get lost in it, and not see what's in front of me, as you describe it, simply because I'm "not paying attention" until some immediate danger jolts me "awake". I colloquially call this "zoning out" or "daydreaming"
Actually, I think my imagination might be part of what makes it so hard for me to read books. I'll get distracted by the world building, playing the different scenarios in my head, that I'll forget about the words in front of me, and minutes will go by before I remember I'm supposed to be reading a book.
I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.
I think "visual hallucination" is something very different from the minds eye. The imagination is one source of visual experience, the eyes are another. A visual hallucination is when something goes wrong and the data from your eyes is contaminated or distorted in some way. In my case, my imagination can produce photo-realistic visual experiences which are strong enough to block out the data from my eyes. They don't mix, but I can supplant one for the other at will. If they did mix I think that would be a disorder and we'd be talking about something other than aphantasia and imagination.
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
I think the poll itself is faulty. You appear to be suggesting that the two things - seeing an afterimage and being able to consciously superimpose an imagined image into your visual field are related. An afterimage is literally a physical phenomenon as I explained before, and it passes quickly. There is an explanation of this, in an article that somebody posted a link to the other day in the discussion about Olo. https://dynomight.net/colors/
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
> If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
That's how it went for me. I thought of the correct shape of a bicycle frame (I think I've seen this art thing before) but didn't "pull up" the little pieces like gears and seats until you actually mentioned them.
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
> If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
>they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
I think by any reasonable definition everyone has aphantasia, which is why it's a nothing burger.
Can you explain why people who report aphantasia don't show physical responses (like sweat or pupil dilation) in response to imagined visual stimulus (like being described a scary scene), while people who report mental imagery do show these physical responses to the same stimulus?
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
aaw, touched a nerve have I because I'm suggesting you're not special?
>Prove it.
Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense.
>You can't keep track of your own argument
MY argument is this: people don't actually see things or even have imagery inside their head, which is normal, and self-proclaimed aphantasiacs are attention seekers who think they have a disability or special characteristic...there is no logical inconsistency in my argument.
Not sure what could be motivating your reasoning here, but you've ignored several times the physiological evidence of differences in visual cognition between self-reported aphantasics and non-reporters that shows up in: fMRIs, skin conductivity tests, visual priming tests, and pupil dilation tests.
Agreed no logical inconsistency, just very strange laziness and prickishness.
He doesn't even know what an argument is ... he says "MY argument is this:" and then just makes an assertion, not an argument. Of course there's no logical inconsistency in his raw assertion -- there's no logic of any sort. But what I pointed out about his previous comment is that he asserted that no one "sees" objects in their minds -- implying that it is those who claim that they do who are lying -- and then he attacked aphantasics as attention seeking and angling at it being some sort of disability. So his whole "argument" is inconsistent in its framing and presentation and who he is criticizing. It's hard to call it logically inconsistent because there's no logic ... his claims don't flow from reason or evidence, just sheer emo.
I am able to see stuff in my head all the time. It is a matter of degree, i.e. some people see things more clearly than others. But the same could be said of real eyesight.
Very few of us have 20/20 vision but that doesn't mean we're blind.
It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
Well. Today I learned something new about myself. I can't visualize a thing, but I can pull up something vaguely visualish that represents its inherent thingness, while not at all resembling the thing. For instance, the way I might picture program code looks nothing like lines of text, but more like something black on a black background moving through something algorithm-shaped that bends it. I realize I couldn't make that sound more vague if I tried, but it's still accurate.
Meanwhile, I can hear every sonic detail of every song I enjoy whenever I want to. Want me to imagine the drum break in "In the Air Tonight"? I can imagine every little bit of the gated snares and the reverb on them, and exactly the way Phil's voice kinda shreds immediately afterward.
Go figure.
But wow, that bit about meditation hits close to home. I love meditating and try to do it daily. Guided meditations like "imagine you're on a beach..." drive my batty, though. OK, I'm on a beach. I can feel the sand. The sun is nice. But I'm pressed to imagine the sun shining on the waves, it's probably going to resemble something out of The Matrix more than a drawing of the ocean.
One thing that I have always noticed about my own internal images (yes, I am not an aphant) is that when I am perceiving something in my mouth (such as a sore spot or tooth), my perception of it visually in my mind is wildly different than if I actually look in my mouth using a mirror. Objects look and feel much larger and more detailed in my mind than they actually are.
You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind.
E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 13.2 ms ] thread- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked - Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast - Undressing someone with your eyes - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult.
I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.
I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SDAM/comments/nkolwi/my_attempt_at_...
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92...
including:
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of:
What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading).OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wouldn't think that people literally imagined an apple, either, and yet here we are. But let's assume that people don't usually literally imagine pictures of the numbers in their mind when they add them.
Take 12. Add 7 do it. Now you have 19, right?
My mental imagery of adding 12 + 7 = 19 is nearly identical to that of picturing a spinning cow. Take a cow. Spin it. Now you have a spinning cow, right?
In both cases, those are just facts. Now, higher math does look like something to me, as does writing code. Those do have geometric shapes for me, kinds of blobby things with curved edges but not colors, except maybe rainbowy shimmers on those curves. I can feel the shapes moving and bending, and that moving and bending makes them makes sense to me. "OK, so I'm trying to do a binary search of this set... Alright, so if I push this shape into there... Oh! That'd work! Alright." But in no case do those shape-like things resemble anything I've ever seen in the real world.
However, I also have the ability to mathematically evaluate an equation and graph it on a mental visualization of a graph. I've been able to do that in 2d and 3d for a range of quadratic, cubic, and quartic graphs since high school. Also asymptotes, hyperbolas, sinusoidal functions. You know those youtube videos where they do the CGI animations to show a rolling cylinder tracing out a sine wave? I've been able to do that in my mind since I was a teen.
In high school I would do calculus rate of change functions in my head with a visualization like a laser going from perpendicular to a wall to parallel with the wall, and how the speed of the point at the end of the beam on the wall approaches light speed as the beam approaches approaches parallel, or the shrinking surface area of a liquid in a vertical conical funnel.
The funnel i imagined is yellow with an equilateral cone and a long neck that tapers to a half inch and has a worn, wrinkled blue white and red sticker from being run through the dishwasher a few times. It's injection molded and not shaved/sanded. Excessive detail for a feature of a math problem, but it's there anyway.
For me a spinning cow can have horns or be a holstein heifer or an angus steer or a dairy calf, or a buffalo. Could be a chik fil a cow. Or the one from Barnyard...right, Barnyard? the Dreamworks movie...
I can go back and read pages of books and documents that I have already read in my mind, which means (with effort) I can retread any sheet music I've ever played, or redo the math that I did in calculus and chemistry and physics classes. For a long time it completely ruined re-reading books for me because I would know exactly what was coming and I didn't need to turn the page.
I used the sheet music thing to teach myself guitar based on what I learned on trumpet through recall of arpeggios and and scales. Notes are also synesthetic and I can make them dance off the page in my head.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
- need one for alzheimers
Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization. For more on the known neurodifferences in imagery experiences, check out these shocking insights. For a deeper dive into how this brain activation can be used to decode mental imagery, you might find this study enlightening."
(edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!?
I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
It's sort of the difference between logical supervenience and metaphysical, or weak emergence and strong emergence. Qualia being something additional to the neural description.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projection screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists almost on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.
It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:
- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia
- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)
- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)
- Memory vividness
Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
But yes, with you on composing songs. One reason I can’t fall asleep on airplanes or in other noisy environments: the closer to sleep I am, the less control I have over the tendency to weave audio patterns, and as soon as it gets interesting… I’m awake and thinking about the music. Repeat, for however long the flight is.
Then one day we did a IQ test in science class. I scored near the bottom of the class. All of the geometry based "what comes next" puzzles left me flummoxed. Because I couldn't visualise, I couldn't rotate images in my head to identify patterns and so many of the questions were like that.
I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.
I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.
My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.
Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…
Not the other guy, but I can think about how they look without actually 'seeing' them in my mind.
However, back in school when we did elementary geometry I had no problem solving everything, to the point I even qualified for the national competitions once.
Can't describe the process by which I was solving them though. Perhaps I pattern match the theorems...
But then I learned about analytic geometry in the 8-th grade. I annoyed every math teacher by just using it to solve all the school geometry problems. And quite a few geometry problems in math competitions.
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
He literally said he HAS the ability. He can actually do it. It is just that he learned it at some point.
He was neither rude nor dismissive. You was dismissive.
On the flip side, this means with some introspection most people can appreciate how those with aphantasia think; most people use a mix of mentalisms for cognition, it's just not as apparent as visualization. And unless it's happening subconsciously, I'd venture to say visualization is the exception, it just stands out because it's more common when you're deliberately thinking in a self-aware manner.
Example: If you appreciate a good sunset, have you ever had a dream about just a sunset? With the full color experience and wonder?
If not (I haven't, and most people I ask haven't), isn't that weird? Because presumably you've seen hundreds and can imagine exactly what they look like if you focus.
But you know who do seem to dream of sunsets in their fullness from time to time? Professional artists who work with colored media.
Crazy how our jobs and most repetitive experiences influence our neurology and our dreams.
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
Citation needed.
People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere.
Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is a thing. Hell, it's not even in my phones dictionary.
That might seem like a nitpick, but most of your comment seems to rely on aphantasia being widespread.
https://worldmetrics.org/aphantasia-statistics/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
I certainly never could…
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Perhaps I’m the odd one then. It’s certainly a difficult topic to discuss with other people.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
[1] https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq...
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
> Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word?
Yes—I wasn't aware that there was another way.
To answer your question. Nothing. It is just black. Not even a slight hint of shape of Eiffel Tower or even a tall rectangle or just outline of the structure. It is just nothing.
I sometimes think or wonder people who can dream and close their eyes and actually see things must have so much fun.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
I would love to know what that is called.
I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
You cannot describe something that someone lacks or has a substantially different subjective experience with, truly.
The best we can do is show that the effects of your seeing green are the same as mine (biologically, behaviorally, etc).
If you're curious about the broader subject, would highly recommend reading An Anthropologist on Mars.
Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.
We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
It sounds like you're equating the comment I responded to with a question about colorblindness is a skill issue. I'm guessing that's not what you're actually arguing, but it's not clear to me what the actually analogy you're trying to make is.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
I _HATE_ reading books that spend pages and pages explaining how things look to a very detailed degree even when it's not relevant to the plot in any way - it's just set dressing.
I can't see that. It's just word noise to me.
Now I noticed my kid has the same thing, they like other books and actively dislike others. It's the same as me, without me affecting their judgement in any way. Any book that spends too much explaining the environment is boring, books that just get on with the plot are a bit hit.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.
It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
If "at will" is the hinging point then maybe not because the scenario to trigger the behaviour isn't clear to me still, but this is definitely possible.
I have had the superimposed belief-image confuse my spatial brain until I moved my point of view (in which the real world obviously reorients while the brain conjured image doesn't) to clear it before. This happened far more when I was younger than now as an adult, but it very much still happens.
The very last time I recall this happening was at my former home during a strenuous house move. I was on my back for a breather between boxes and a delay getting the car around gave me some time for my mind to wander, which it did on that occasion to thoughts about how very old buildings with column supports used to look. By the time I needed to move the next box I had to shake my head to de-conjure the little stone plinths that had appeared in my vision from my imagination trip.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
When I dream I see the dreams just fine but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, in internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.
From the way people describe their experiences, it's difficult to know what they truly mean. I don't think anyone is lying, but it must be hard to convey these experiences with our language as it is.
In your first post, I thought "that's definitely not me", but in your second post I thought, "oh, that's actually 100% me"
To me, everything I imagine is on a different mental plane. This is what I thought people meant by a "minds eye". You don't see it literally, but it's there in your imagination.
What confuses me though is that for some people, it sounds like it's an overlay on their actual visual perception, something so vivid they could practically rotoscope it. I could never do that; I imagine I'd be a better artist if I could.
My imagination on this plane is so vivid that I'll get lost in it, and not see what's in front of me, as you describe it, simply because I'm "not paying attention" until some immediate danger jolts me "awake". I colloquially call this "zoning out" or "daydreaming"
Actually, I think my imagination might be part of what makes it so hard for me to read books. I'll get distracted by the world building, playing the different scenarios in my head, that I'll forget about the words in front of me, and minutes will go by before I remember I'm supposed to be reading a book.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
Not only people. LLMs too.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
I think by any reasonable definition everyone has aphantasia, which is why it's a nothing burger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473050
Intellectually lazy, to be honest.
Prove it.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I won't respond again.
>Prove it.
Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense.
>You can't keep track of your own argument
MY argument is this: people don't actually see things or even have imagery inside their head, which is normal, and self-proclaimed aphantasiacs are attention seekers who think they have a disability or special characteristic...there is no logical inconsistency in my argument.
Agreed no logical inconsistency, just very strange laziness and prickishness.
Very few of us have 20/20 vision but that doesn't mean we're blind.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Here’s a helpful overview of anendophasia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/anendophasia
And a few active communities for anyone interested:
Aphantasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
Anendophasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anendophasia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/silentminds/
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
Meanwhile, I can hear every sonic detail of every song I enjoy whenever I want to. Want me to imagine the drum break in "In the Air Tonight"? I can imagine every little bit of the gated snares and the reverb on them, and exactly the way Phil's voice kinda shreds immediately afterward.
Go figure.
But wow, that bit about meditation hits close to home. I love meditating and try to do it daily. Guided meditations like "imagine you're on a beach..." drive my batty, though. OK, I'm on a beach. I can feel the sand. The sun is nice. But I'm pressed to imagine the sun shining on the waves, it's probably going to resemble something out of The Matrix more than a drawing of the ocean.
Then I wonder what it must feel like for that person to read sighted people on the Internet debate their supposed lack of visualization abilities.
E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.