[HN Gopher] I Can't See You but I'm Not Blind
___________________________________________________________________
I Can't See You but I'm Not Blind
Author : rognjen
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-12-14 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (steveblank.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| petercooper wrote:
| Is there a more practical test for this than trusting what the
| person answering says? Like the aphantasia equivalent of one of
| those colorblind pictures where different people see different
| numbers.
|
| I struggle to determine if I _can_ visualize imagery or not. I
| don 't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that
| is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a
| (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or
| something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route
| based on the shortest map distance? Because I _can_ do that..
| pseudalopex wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research
| petercooper wrote:
| Thanks. A couple of ideas mentioned there for anyone else:
| "measuring cortical excitability in the primary visual
| cortex" and measuring skin perspiration/fear response in a
| situation where a story that triggers mental imagery is
| followed by imagery that might "amplify" the former. These
| both seem rather limited to measurements in study groups and
| both require equipment, but interesting nonetheless!
| heynow0 wrote:
| I attribute my inability to draw on this.
|
| If I try to imagine what a mouse looks like, I have no idea. And
| thus trying to draw it results in a disaster.
|
| My mom and brother can draw very well. I should ask them about
| aphantasia. But im pretty sure my aphantasia is cause of my
| inability to sketch anything even remotely well.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I remember reading about aphantasia while I was in art school. It
| made me wonder if the opposite also might exist: being _really
| good_ at visualizing images in your head, and whether or not some
| of the people in my school might have it. The few classmates I
| asked thought I was being ridiculous, so I dropped the subject. I
| still wonder how one might test this though.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| VVIQ covers low and high ability.[1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
| egypturnash wrote:
| There is a story that one of the animators in the 1940s Warners
| studio got into a car accident, and suffered a mild concussion.
| When he recovered, he found that his visualization was much
| improved - suddenly he could visualize the simple construction
| of the characters, and "trace" it directly onto the paper. This
| resulted in him being able to draw a lot faster, so that's a
| pretty obvious test.
|
| (IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you
| want citations.)
|
| My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of
| marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost
| into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to
| improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a _lot_ of
| steps that younger me couldn 't. I generally like to describe
| the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer
| and a library of models on your brain".
| woopwoop wrote:
| I remain very confused about what aphantasia is. Let me give a
| concrete example. If you ask me to describe my mother's
| appearance to you, in as much detail as I can, the output is
| pretty meager. She's a woman in her early 70s. Tall, about 5'9".
| Slightly overweight. She has brown hair with streaks of grey. And
| that's it. I'm embarrassed to note that I cannot recall her eye
| color from memory.
|
| Does this mean I have aphantasia? From what I have read, I would
| say the opposite. Though their are many, many people fitting the
| above description, I'm confident I could pick her out in a lineup
| of hundreds of them. There is visual data in my head that I
| cannot articulate about, e.g., bone structure, skin texture,
| gait, etc. On the other hand, I cannot summon a picture of her in
| my head with high enough fidelity to be able to recall her eye
| color. If you are aphantasic, what is your experience recalling
| someone's face? Is it like this, or is everything you remember
| verbal, or verbalizable?
| scotu wrote:
| I would start with the fact that not much in the world is
| either one thing or another, so also with aphantasia I don't
| think you either "have it" or you don't. One might have varying
| degrees of it. I feel I can almost visualize a simple shape
| like a square, but a face is something I'm sure I cannot
| visualize.
|
| Then I'd say, in my self-diagnosed experience, I can describe
| things I remember, maybe not in painstaking detail but I can.
| I'm not able to see an image of the same thing if I close my
| eyes and try to imagine it.
|
| I feel like the difference is, I can recognize your face if I
| see it again, but if I need to recall what you look like I get
| a list of features written in words out of my brain, not an
| image.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Is your typical verbal description of a face you remember as
| sparse as the one I gave? Are their other things about the
| face you remember that you cannot put into words, or is
| everything you remember verbal?
| scotu wrote:
| yeah, I'd say my description could be pretty similar. But
| when it comes down to sparse descriptions, I think memory
| also has a role. My memory is not fantastic, so I might
| have just dropped the memory of eye colors, unless that
| came up a few times for some reason for me to fix that
| memory.
|
| But thinking about coming up with an unknown, generic face
| (GAN style, if you will): I cannot see it. Or something
| simpler, an apple: very foggy visual+takes a lot of effort
| to keep seeing the vague blurry image I might be able to
| come up with.
| rietta wrote:
| Wow, this is interesting. And I am now wondering if describes how
| I process visual information mentally. Outside of dreaming I do
| not specifically see anything visually if I close my eyes and
| think about something. I can describe. I can attempt to draw
| badly (more of a comment on my low artistic ability).
| Lealen wrote:
| On the other hand it seems that I have hyperphantasia (I can
| visualize anything, animate it, rotate, check any of the details)
| and at the same time I work as an software engineer, but in
| contrary to what people might think it helps me a lot as I can
| visualize and remember all the parts of the code that I work on.
|
| I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks
| (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to
| write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised
| with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I
| think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding
| aspect.
| riskable wrote:
| Have you tried OpenSCAD (https://openscad.org/) yet? If you
| have hyperphantasia _and can code_ getting a 3D printer and
| fooling around in OpenSCAD could become your new favorite hobby
| /addiction!
|
| Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD:
|
| https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill (Low-poly Rose Twist
| Vase)
|
| https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise (just a neat
| keycap)
|
| https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium (an entire
| keyboard: Switches, stabs, case, keycaps, etc were all made
| with OpenSCAD)
|
| Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they
| designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how
| it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to
| use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I _hate_ the
| ternary operator! It 's so obtuse.
| codazoda wrote:
| My boss has this and I believe it's a real thing.
|
| That said, how do you know? If I "close my eyes an imagine the
| apple in the picture" I can both see "black" like the author
| mentioned and I can imagine what an apple looks like. I would
| describe what I see as a photo of that apple but I can't actually
| see the apple. But I don't see a list of facts about it either.
|
| So, is this a language barrier? Are there tests we can run to
| prove that I can see things in my minds eye that others cannot?
| Can I prove that I have the ability and that I don't fall into
| the 2%?
|
| Edit: Apparently, yes, if I would just follow the links. The test
| says I have visual hyperphantasia but I still wonder, is this
| just the way I think about the things I conjure up in my mind? :P
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| What is meant by "seeing in ones mind"? And how can he have that
| disability, but still see images in dreams? How do they test for
| this?
| riskable wrote:
| I believe they test this with the "paper folding test".
| Something like this: https://www.123test.com/spatial-reasoning-
| test/
|
| If you can answer at least one of those questions you probably
| don't have aphantasia.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Is this really testing aphantasia? I would think that to do
| that you'd have to show someone the first image, give them
| time to remember it or whatever, and then ask them which of
| the shapes are possible without reference to the original
| image. I think anyone can look back and forth between these
| things and reason about how they come together ("this is not
| adjacent to that so this folded version is not possible").
| durovo wrote:
| Yeah, I have the same concern as well. However, I felt that
| being able to visualize things in my head allowed me to
| solve some of these problems very quickly (in around 4-5
| seconds). I can make the 2-d image collapse into the 3-d
| object in my head. I guess not having aphantasia would make
| you quicker on these tests? I must admit though, I had to
| look back and forth for some problems as well.
| sethhovestol wrote:
| I am mind-blind in every sense, yet I got a 9/10 on that.
| It's still only checked by qualitative things, how a person
| self reports about it. I know it's not just a language thing
| though. My go to example is that if you knew morgan freedman
| wrote this you could read it in his voice in your head. I
| can't, I'd recognize his voice, but I can't use it in my
| head.
| fieryskiff11 wrote:
| confirmed npc
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I can, and for context I've known about the distinction of people
| who can and cannot for years; even then I didn't notice until
| last year that I can't smell or taste in my imagination and other
| people can. "Lemon" to me is pictures of lemons, to my mum it's a
| lip-curlingly intense sour taste.
|
| You'd think it would be a simple hop years ago from sight to the
| other senses and which ones work in my head and which don't. But
| no, smell and taste are "out of sight, out of mind" for me in a
| way that sight isn't. When they aren't present I don't have a
| good way of thinking about them and don't really think about them
| much at all.
|
| What about the other senses, can people imagine kinaesthetic body
| positions of poses they aren't currently doing? Can people
| imagine balancing on a high-wire or being off-balance on a moving
| boat, while sitting on steady ground?
| yupper32 wrote:
| What's the opposite?
|
| I can vividly picture people. I can recognize and describe most
| people I've ever met in my adult life. I can remember and picture
| our conversation we had the one and only time we met at a bar 3
| years ago. Where we were in the bar, the people around us, the
| drinks we had (at least the type of glass, I can't taste in my
| head).
|
| But your name? No where to be found. Disappears almost instantly.
|
| It's incredibly frustrating.
| rexreed wrote:
| A lot of us are better with faces than names, and can remember
| when and where and what we were doing with someone and forget
| their name at the same time.
| cescobedo wrote:
| hyperphantasia
| obventio56 wrote:
| I'm not sure why I'm the first to point this out on HN (which is
| usually a pretty skeptical group) but "aphantasia" is very poorly
| studied (1). I've met plenty of people who claim to have it but
| it seems more like a failure of language to compare experience.
| That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people
| are wired differently.
|
| (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
| stevebmark wrote:
| I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems
| very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things
| "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5
| pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual
| experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the
| visualization of seeing.
|
| I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think
| being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl
| their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these,
| they're both trainable.
|
| When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm
| shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are
| seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels
| like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or
| recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm
| able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over
| focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make
| something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of
| training?
|
| I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to
| visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind
| works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently"
| outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We
| all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a
| limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly
| variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the
| same.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Some aphantasics weren't born with it. Many have vivid dreams.
| So they can compare their own experiences.
|
| How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical
| excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in
| that article?
| phaedrus wrote:
| I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my
| mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or
| structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of
| the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my
| mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for
| generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I
| write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I
| thought it would.
|
| I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be
| difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being
| just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I
| share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the
| "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let
| me explain:
|
| I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental
| process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around
| and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures
| and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but
| it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete
| with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated
| in some special way with my train of thought.
|
| So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once
| thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I
| did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.)
| But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious
| experience is _actually_ totally nonverbal, or if I am just
| discounting things that are actually there or describe it
| differently.
| godshatter wrote:
| I can understand the skepticism. I have aphantasia and am
| equally skeptical that most people can actually "see" anything.
| When I'm supposed to visualize a beach, for example, for me
| it's merely a list of things I would tell the setup crew to
| make if this were a movie. Chair, umbrella, lifeguard stand,
| ship on the horizon, trail of footsteps along the water's edge,
| film it at sunset.
|
| I have found differences between myself and others, though.
| When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a
| restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal,
| but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only
| thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have
| to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition
| happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very
| often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope
| to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only
| remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the
| edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when
| I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only
| coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking
| visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can
| almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently
| throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note
| about it.
|
| It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the
| vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a
| sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a
| complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a
| wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see"
| it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around
| an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the
| corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if
| it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly
| tell me they "see" something.
| phaedrus wrote:
| I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the
| person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently,
| is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc.
| it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them
| and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON"
| signal.
|
| So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet
| and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite
| reason!
|
| The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of
| worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have
| the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something
| changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I
| can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and
| I get an extreme _jamais vu_ telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So
| I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my
| brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT".
|
| When by elimination I realize no this really must be the
| correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this
| Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in
| my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and
| consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing
| yourself up a ladder with vertigo.
| axby wrote:
| Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an
| imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of
| being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits
| like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any
| trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some
| brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape.
|
| But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen
| often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can
| conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past
| and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every
| now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently),
| I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and
| only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I
| see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as
| you mentioned.
|
| I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a
| decent description of a criminal or something like that
| (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might
| struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for
| an hour, at least days later.
| godshatter wrote:
| > I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give
| a decent description of a criminal or something like that
| (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might
| struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for
| an hour, at least days later.
|
| I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the
| police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe
| someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious.
| Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair,
| square face, just standing there watching things". It helps
| me to remember in case it's important later.
|
| And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of
| an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my
| mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll
| feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the
| phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to
| describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it
| internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my
| name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what
| that is like. I don't have that kind of experience
| otherwise.
|
| My mind is a dark, quiet place :)
| axby wrote:
| Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment:
|
| I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually
| remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also
| text based content is way easier for me to remember than
| hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times
| then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see
| someone's picture and their name written down, usually it
| sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't
| know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what
| they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of
| numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me,
| I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to
| process one at a time. But if I can see them written down,
| usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy
| and I'll remember it for a while.
|
| Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life
| if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps
| even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in
| my career with software, but if my job required me to keep
| track of a bunch of things without having the chance to
| write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to
| really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something
| simple like that. Going through a large list of data is
| difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself
| making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real
| time consequences. But luckily for software (and school
| assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had
| time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my
| work/answer.
|
| Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely
| relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a
| restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia
| at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this
| is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in
| your head, you do not work with visual representations of
| your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do
| that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you
| trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost
| infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you
| remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember
| where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a
| picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is
| that impossible as well?
| v64 wrote:
| Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for
| others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely
| auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm
| thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of
| chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while
| tuning out the rest.
|
| I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will
| literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two
| ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7
| in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold
| the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is
| twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two."
|
| If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate,
| I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :)
| Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp
| than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry
| and topology.
|
| Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember
| the content, although there are also cases too where I'll
| remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the
| cover or some detail like that, not because I visually
| remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually
| committed that book in my mind as "the book with the
| bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the
| bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in
| my mental description.
| godshatter wrote:
| When I'm working with equations in my head, which I don't
| do often, I think of them as a list of terms and what's
| done with them. No visual representation, just a memorized
| list. For electronic circuits, I would probably remember
| what connects with what, but not how they are laid out
| spatially. For textbooks, I do remember sometimes that the
| specific text I'm think of is found on a left page near the
| top, but I can't see it. That's just where my eyes will
| scan when I look for it again. Most often I don't, though,
| unless I poured over it a lot when learning it.
|
| I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found
| that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than
| others and I think it's because most people were trying to
| visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it
| was just another equation to work with.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't think about the visual representation of equations.
| I think about the equations, not in any specific
| representation, but as what they are. I think my mental
| abilities are roughly average, including my ability to
| picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that
| people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a
| mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only
| for images of written expressions that represent equations.
|
| It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only
| paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the
| persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's
| funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing
| average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary
| inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than
| any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had
| those genes.
| anyfoo wrote:
| And you are able to manipulate complex equations without
| any visual tools, just by "thinking about what they are"?
| For example mentally multiply a term into nominator and
| denominator of a rational function? That's just
| inconceivable to me. Where's your "scratch pad"
| essentially. To me it works pretty much like it works on
| paper, only that the "paper" is in my head, and the
| visuality of it all (being able to "focus" on a
| particular part of the equation etc.) helps in keeping
| the problem tractable, otherwise even a relatively simple
| equation quickly becomes overwhelming to manipulate.
|
| (To say nothing about the other meaning of the word
| "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of
| Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in
| my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it"
| without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because
| that pun was also too good to pass up).
| whatshisface wrote:
| You are able to conceive of it, you're just doing it
| without realizing what you're doing. Someone with a good
| imagination but no math knowledge at all could picture
| the same squiggly lines as you can, but without meaning.
| In your head there exists both the squiggly lines, and
| what they mean. All you have to do is fill in the last
| quadrant, which would be holding the meaning without
| picturing the lines. I would suggest that you might be
| using the meaning scratch space without using the
| imagination scratch space every time you think about
| something that can't be pictured.
|
| You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was
| picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it
| by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is
| going, people with bad imaginations would be people with
| an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking.
| zepto wrote:
| Why? There are seemingly plenty of different ways that people
| are wired. Assuming everyone is wired the same seems like a
| preposterous null hypothesis given how varied we are in every
| observable way.
| Accacin wrote:
| Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it
| makes us that little bit more unique.
|
| I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's
| sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like
| literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that
| happening before I slept.
|
| Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very
| vivid too.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few
| people are wired differently.
|
| Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem
| to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react
| wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how
| varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if
| we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same.
| Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly
| dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just
| like the rest of our bodies.
| ratmice wrote:
| I always wondered to what extent aphantasia affects mundane
| tasks, like setting something down, turning out the lights and
| picking it back up in the dark. I always seem to use a mental
| image of the thing in the space where I left it.
| necovek wrote:
| That's more a spatial awareness and memory, I think.
|
| I think I might have "aphantasia" (or I am not trying hard
| enough :)), but I can perfectly well find things I left
| somewhere in the dark. I could also easily find that place I
| got to once through a maze of one-way streets following
| instructions by someone else weeks ago by kinda-recognizing
| buildings and houses where I need to make turns. I couldn't
| describe what those houses looked like for the life of me, but
| I could perfectly recognize them once I saw them.
|
| All of these are things I've noticed in the past, but never put
| a name to it (not that I looked).
| sneak wrote:
| I've read a lot of stuff about aphantasia but I don't know if I
| can see things in my minds eye or not. I'm not sure if the
| visualizations I can summon are what people are talking about
| when they use the term "mind's eye". I would not describe them as
| "seeing", more like "memory".
|
| This is operating with the assumption that people with aphantasia
| can still remember what things look like (something I can do). I
| guess I can't tell the difference between remembering what
| something looks like and what people mean when they say "seeing
| something in their head".
|
| I can remember what things look like that I haven't seen, such as
| "a life-size elephant made of gold" because I remember what gold
| looks like and what an elephant looks like. I can imagine this
| even with my eyes open and looking at other things, but it's
| nothing like "seeing" with a "mind's eye".
|
| Is this aphantasia?
| torstenvl wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe
| that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind,
| _and_ that he didn 't realize this was odd until adulthood.
|
| For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also
| have to be true:
|
| - He never heard anyone talk about dreams
|
| - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
|
| - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in
| front of the object of their art
|
| - He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used
| and people describe what they see in their memory of an event
|
| - He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something
| was demonstrated visually
|
| - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or
| other code by following their mental image
|
| - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
|
| - Etc.
|
| It just strikes me as entirely implausible.
| _dain_ wrote:
| There are similar experiences reported by many, many people.
| Check out /r/aphantasia, it's full of people saying variations
| on "omg my whole life I didn't realize 'mental images' weren't
| metaphorical!!!" Example:
|
| https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp...
|
| >Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember
| those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features)
| because they can 'see' the person's face in their memory.
|
| Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and
| contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is
| so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have
| thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in
| complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-
| and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb
| activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures
| of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We
| take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask
| whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside
| someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery,
| all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet
| another colourful metaphor.
|
| And then you have people like this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out
| deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or
| deluded.
| Taniwha wrote:
| I'm 63, literally up until 5 minutes ago I didn't realise that
| most people (or any people) actually see images when they
| imagine things, I'm quite flabbergasted, in retrospect it
| explains lots of things
| riskable wrote:
| Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that
| have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that
| surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they
| literally just have a storage location for words/letters and
| that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they,
| "know them when they see (or write) them."
|
| You probably use this same cognitive feature when
| writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it.
| Here's a simple example: When you read some text with
| parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What
| about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly
| don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely
| different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or
| period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a
| breath).
|
| Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there
| who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism
| that the rest of us use for punctuation?
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he
| didn't realize this was odd until adulthood
|
| There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across
| the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their
| experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's
| eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they
| may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can
| find examples in this very thread.
| yboris wrote:
| Many color-blind people do not discover they are color blind
| until teenage years (or even later). You can live without
| realizing you're different even when people use different words
| that to them seem to be describing the same thing.
|
| I recommend reading the classic _The Man Who Mistook His Wife
| for a Hat_ by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways
| brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For
| example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for
| example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and
| putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is
| incomplete).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
| necovek wrote:
| It seems dreams are not affected by aphantasia.
|
| Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice"
| while you do that.
|
| I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things
| I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of
| features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image
| in my head.
|
| All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that
| everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term
| "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I
| rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is,
| just on the other end of the curve).
|
| I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were
| never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like
| them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly
| differently.
|
| So in short, I could notice that there are some special things
| about my brain, but I did not know that this might be
| "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at
| math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed
| other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's
| only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have
| a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at
| the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it).
|
| I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to
| believe that you find it implausible that adults would only
| learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop
| them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but
| I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are
| extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a
| miniscule part of them.
| zepto wrote:
| If you find it implausible, you need to simply read the
| literature on perceptual changes caused by brain lesions.
|
| Try reading "the man who mistook his wife for a hat", by Oliver
| Sacks.
|
| Most of your examples don't have any obvious connection to what
| was posted.
|
| E.g. most people don't have a photographic memory and we all
| know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head
| doesn't require you to visualize anything. It just requires you
| not to say what you read out loud.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he
| couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head.
|
| You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of
| thought way of what you are saying but not hear them.
|
| This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or
| play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the
| feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling
| associated with your eardrums.
|
| Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons
| of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you
| can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear
| absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin
| with some earplugs.
| caymanjim wrote:
| > - He never heard anyone talk about dreams
|
| I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but
| occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets.
|
| > - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads
|
| I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery
| involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it
| to myself.
|
| > - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly
| in front of the object of their art
|
| I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I
| don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to
| draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog,
| even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific
| cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't
| recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of
| Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to
| tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the
| real thing.
|
| > - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN
| or other code by following their mental image
|
| When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about
| how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first
| 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few
| hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10
| now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a
| good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it
| involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks
| to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to
| remember the underlying information.
|
| > - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory
|
| You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all
| the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only
| person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen
| Wiltshire[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
| jfhufl wrote:
| Interesting - I may have hyperphantasia? Most of my thoughts are
| accompanied by images, and I can rotate and unfold things. It's
| so vivid I seem to have two types of synesthesia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-rare-humans-who-see-
| time-and-have-amazing-memories
| sarasasa28 wrote:
| I can only imagine very vaguely and for just 1/2 seconds, is this
| it?
| Borrible wrote:
| Everything you 'see' is just in your mind.
|
| Aphantasia is, some people just can't make their optical qualia
| up willingly or their optical qualia lack the image quality of
| their visual capacity.
|
| A lot more people are convinced, what they 'see' through their
| eyes is outside their mind, because they can't make it up
| willingly.
|
| But, there is no color outside your mind.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Not quite. Color is created in your eyes, by the rods and
| cones. What the mind sees comes from the eyes, and color
| blindness is usually caused by genetic defects causing the rods
| and cones to be differently sensitive than normal.
|
| Those with color blindness have had luck wearing special
| polarized shades turning some color frequencies into others
| that the rods and cones can better sense.
| Borrible wrote:
| So, tell me, what is 'red'? Not the wavelength thingie, I
| mean your subjective experience of this qualia.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Are you asking me about 'a' qualia, or a 'type' of qualia?
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I always thought "picture in your head" was a figure of speech. I
| was also really confused how police sketch artists worked. I have
| zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people could
| somehow describe features of strangers? A lot of things made more
| sense once I learned about aphantasia.
|
| I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind.
| I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing
| visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element.
| SamBam wrote:
| > I have zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people
| could somehow describe features of strangers?
|
| But could you describe your wife's features?
|
| And if so, do you think it's because you're reciting a list of
| memorized facts ("she has brown hair" etc) or because you're
| drawing on your memory, even if not visually?
|
| Could you describe (at all) any major pieces of art, such as
| the pose of the Mona Lisa?
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I guess I'm drawing on memory, but not visually. Try closing
| your eyes. You probably still have a sense of the shape of
| the room you are in, without actually picturing it right?
| Like you know how far away the walls are and where the
| bookshelf is. It's similar with faces. I have some sort of
| "model" of her face in my head, there's just no visual
| component.
|
| And as I read that over, I realize it's a terrible
| explanation. I have no clue how to respond usefully.
| pxc wrote:
| It's like this for me, too. I have collections of visual
| facts but they don't cohere into a single visual
| experience, really
| mercutio2 wrote:
| I, too, always thought this was just a figure of speech! I can
| visualize the geometric outline of things (size, approximate
| shape), but nothing else.
|
| When I realized many people actually can recall a snapshot of
| things, I realized (part of) how they manage to be so much
| better at drawing than I am.
|
| Truly hard to walk a mile in anyone else's shoes.
| tartoran wrote:
| You seem to have some degree of aphantasia. I do too and have
| similar experiences with audio and olfactory recall as you do.
| I had once been robbed and when police showed me a few mugshots
| I completely forgot what the mugger looked like and my theory
| is that since I could not entertain the image in my mind's eye
| it was very weak and quickly got disturbed by seeing all the
| other faces in photos. Id be a terrible eye witness I think
| forty wrote:
| Interesting that it's different for sound, taste and smell! Do
| you have an internal narrative?
|
| I think I can kind of imagine what it's like not to be able to
| picture images in my head but I always have a very hard time
| imagining what people without internal narrative feel like (as
| I assume it must be to imagine what it's like to have one when
| you don't)
| watwut wrote:
| > I was also really confused how police sketch artists worked.
|
| There are standard "algorithms" how to draw people. You kind of
| draw standard shapes and then make differences against
| "standard". Proportions of peoples heads, eyes, noses and other
| features are surprisingly similar among people.
|
| Sketch artists basically learned very well how to draw peoples
| faces specifically and what are important features people
| notice.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Forensic artists learn how to help people describe more. They
| can try different shapes until the witness says it looks right.
| And the successes get more attention than the failures.
| riskable wrote:
| Like many mental traits there's a spectrum: Some people (like
| me) have extreme levels of visualization in our heads. I can
| picture things I'm imagining in intimate detail which is
| (probably) why I'm pretty good at turning code into precisely
| what I'm imagining (e.g.
| https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise it's a keycap).
| However, I have such bad long-term memory that I qualified for
| special needs (mental impairment edition) education (which I
| did not get enrolled in, for reference).
|
| I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in _true_ 3D.
| I _thought_ it was because of this--and my long term memory
| issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces
| (or names). I am _not_ the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw
| the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have
| prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot
| of people look the same _enough_ to me that I have difficulty
| telling them apart without hearing their voices (I 'm fantastic
| with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble
| with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind
| in one eye that are absolutely _fantastic_ at remembering
| people 's faces (and names, obviously).
|
| So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have
| prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a
| spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists
| don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's
| pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason
| haha).
|
| Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is a
| question like this?
| https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg
| jve wrote:
| Not parent commenter, but took me maybe 20-30 seconds to come
| up with the answer with validating by comparing how each
| character stands to each other.
|
| I can't see images in my head. But at least I can try to fold
| it within my imagination. I can at least rotate it like in 3D
| computer program. But void is all I "see" in my imagination.
| alecst wrote:
| Not that it makes me a genius or something, but it's not that
| hard for me to picture that cube folding. Or to imagine it
| folded and rotated. I did have to slow down a little to make
| sure I wasn't making a mistake about the orientation of the
| characters.
|
| What about you?
| riskable wrote:
| I'm great at paper folding visualization. I know this
| because I was given tests like that (by professionals)
| twice in my life (99th percentile =).
|
| For reference, that particular cube folding question is
| easier than others because you can take the "shortcut" and
| just pay attention to the orientation of the numbers. The
| ones that I have to stop and think about the most are the
| ones with nothing but colors or (minor) shading. For
| whatever reason I find sides with shapes the easiest to
| visualize... Even if the shape is the same no matter the
| orientation (e.g. a circle).
|
| Interesting tidbit: I love 3D puzzles and I always try to
| visualize what it looks like inside (if it's the type where
| you can't see the inner workings) while I'm figuring it
| out. I'm almost always _way_ off with what I thought the
| inside would look like. Different kind of visualization I
| think. Probably has something to do with the ability to
| turn physical sensations (i.e. "what you feel") into a
| mental image.
| pxc wrote:
| > a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me
| that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing
| their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes
| naturally when you have trouble with faces haha).
|
| I am the same way. I'm also highly myopic (I got glasses at
| age 4). There are times I've failed to recognize old friends
| until they started speaking to me (they did look a little
| different from the last time I'd seen them).
|
| I always assumed that not seeing very well as a little kid is
| part of why I sometimes have visual recognition problems,
| too.
| philsnow wrote:
| Very interesting, I got glasses at age 5 and I'm exactly
| the same, including not being able to clearly visualize
| even my wife's face.
|
| My last job was 100% remote, and I started a week before
| one of the twice-yearly retreats where everybody gets
| together in person. Knowing that I'm poor at recognizing
| faces and poor at remembering names, I threw together
| https://github.com/philsnow/slanki and was able to put a
| name to about 50% of the 250 faces I met at that retreat,
| which felt absolutely like a superpower to me at the time.
| boole1854 wrote:
| > Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is
| a question like this?
| https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg
|
| Interesting. This question is not hard to solve for me, but I
| can't solve it by visualizing the cube rotating despite
| having no trouble visualizing the cube in its initial
| position. More specifically, when I try to rotate the cube in
| my mind's eye, to get it "started" rotating, I have to anchor
| my focus on one particular side of the cube, which I can then
| rotate correctly. However, this causes me to lose focus on
| the other sides of the cube, and I can no longer simply look
| back at them to see how their numbers are oriented after the
| rotation completes.
|
| When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times?
| Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then
| look back at the others and see that they are still correct?
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| Very difficult. I can't fold the cube up in my mind. I tried
| for a few minutes and just felt frustrated. Instead I needed
| to look at angles of the numbers relative to each other and
| eliminate wrong answers.
| perennialmind wrote:
| Same here: it reduces to a logic problem. I can imagine the
| transformation, the space, the cube, the rotation
| individually as concepts, but all of it is more memory than
| visualization and carrying through the shape and
| orientation of the numbers seems like magic.
| myself248 wrote:
| This is an interesting point, because while I find it trivial
| to work with geometric objects in my head (see my other post in
| this thread), I find it very hard to recall a face as anything
| other than "a face".
|
| I recognize people just fine, but if you sat me down with a
| sketch artist (or indeed the sketch-artist sub game in Police
| Quest II), I'm at a loss to say whether someone's eyes are
| wider or narrower-spaced, whether their mouth is higher or
| lower, etc. Sometimes I do notice people's noses in the
| abstract and I may have a describable memory of that, and I
| think I remember most people's hair shape if not the color. But
| "A face with a small nose and long hair" is not really much to
| go on.
|
| Smells, too. I smell just fine, and sometimes smells evoke
| instant memories, but I can't name a smell that I'm smelling.
| I'm absolutely at a loss to figure out what herbs are missing
| from food I'm making, or what I've added too much of. I can't
| describe tastes or smells beyond a very basic level.
| olalonde wrote:
| It's weird, I always considered myself as having a photographic
| memory and now I'm wondering if I have aphantasia. I believe I
| could draw a scene from memory with quite high resolution and
| accuracy. But it's not anything like the experience of seeing
| with my eyes. In fact, closing my eyes barely helps me visualise.
| I just assumed it was like that for everyone.
| giarc wrote:
| I tried the linked test mostly with my eyes closed. I don't
| 'see' anything, just black. It improved very slightly if I kept
| my eyes opened and stared at nothing (blank wall, desk surface
| etc). Not to the point where I could suddenly 'see' things, but
| I was able to come off the 1 scale of "knowing" I was thinking
| of an object.
| kraemahz wrote:
| Hypophantasia is what limited visualization is called. As with
| all things biological it is a spectrum of experiences.
| thayne wrote:
| I wonder if there is a continuum here. I think that I can
| visualize things in my head, but doing so is difficult for me,
| and definitely doesn't look exactly the same as if I saw it. And
| certainly if you tell me to think about an elephant my first
| instinct would be to think of words that describe an elephant,
| not summon up images of an elephant. But if pressed I could
| visualize a shadowy silhouette of an elephant. And I definitely
| think I can visualize movement and actions, although it is
| different than normal sight, and there generally isn't a lot of
| detail in what the things moving look like. I definitely relate
| to not being able to describe what people look like, because
| unless I specifically take note of details like what they are
| wearing, what color their hair is, whether they are wearing
| glasses etc. or I don't remember those details.
| causality0 wrote:
| _The way I'm wired has given me (and likely other founders and
| those in other fields) an edge._
|
| This seems like wild speculation. The single cited study is also
| riddled with problems, including comparing 2,000 people with
| self-reported aphantasia to a set of 200 control individuals from
| an entirely different study.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I assume that when people close their eyes and see an apple,
| there's an entire spectrum of how richly present that Apple is.
| Some, like me, vaguely see a colourless "idea" of an apple while
| others might even see colour and detail or more.
|
| If this is accurate, it makes me wonder two things:
|
| 1. Is there even a unique condition of not seeing the apple or
| are you just very far off to one end of the spectrum ? (Perhaps
| this isn't an important distinction)
|
| 2. Are the people who can very richly see an apple more likely to
| be artistically inclined?
| pjungwir wrote:
| > This latest recognition of aphantasia as a neurological
| difference is only a decade or so old (although references in the
| literature go back to the 1890's.)
|
| The first time I heard about aphantasia I recalled reading
| someone, one of the semioticians I think, perhaps Saussure,
| criticizing Locke for talking about ideas as visual images in
| your head. "Of course we don't actually see the images," he
| wrote. At the time I agreed with him, but maybe he and I both
| have this condition. :-)
| jstanley wrote:
| > If you want to see what aphantasia is like look at the picture
| of the Apple. Now close your eyes and try to imagine the apple,
| seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you don't see anything,
| you might have aphantasia.
|
| I can imagine the apple, but I can't literally _see_ it. Nothing
| I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory
| of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features
| that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that
| everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering
| having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia
| actually the inability to even imagine the apple?
| jcranmer wrote:
| The way I would describe things (being a programmer) is that my
| actual eye and my "mind's eye" are using different display
| devices. The actual eye comes out as a PNG in its full
| vividness, but the "mind's eye" only "sees"... something like
| an SVG? It definitely comes across that the "mind's eye" is
| encoding visual information differently, and words like
| "wireframe" or "storyboard" (for entire scenes) seem to be a
| better way of describing it than anything else, although I
| wouldn't call them great descriptions [1].
|
| The most notable difference is that there's no "visual"
| encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this
| thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"--
| and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can
| tell you if that shade is "color
| 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd
| struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color.
| It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in
| encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green
| square, but something like a color gradient just makes my
| "mind's eye" go -\\_(tsu)_/-.
|
| [1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be
| very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on
| their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of
| their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this
| through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye
| without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a
| minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient
| detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail.
| Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some
| piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed
| image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually
| doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail
| unless prompted.
| causality0 wrote:
| _Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people
| confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing
| it?_
|
| No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't
| consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate
| predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the
| article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant turning
| and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how
| significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the
| size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare
| their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've
| never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case.
| perennialmind wrote:
| Oh that's fun. I imagined a distressed elephant walking
| through the office and pulling down ceiling tiles, the wood
| floor splintering under the weight. Didn't think about ears.
| Attitude, mass, height, and building materials: yes. Ears:
| no.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Take this test: https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
| illwrks wrote:
| "You have hyper-aphantasia". Makes sense as I'm a designer
| and can very easily visualise things, objects etc in my head.
| ud_0 wrote:
| The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it
| to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because
| it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of
| mental images are.
|
| If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what
| it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted
| version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the
| way to the left, or to the center, or what?
|
| I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels
| like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never
| as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that
| count?
|
| When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never
| a danger of me _not realizing_ that my eyes are currently
| closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed
| to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?
| drcongo wrote:
| Same here. I didn't think I had aphantasia at all until I
| tried this test and then realised that me "visualising"
| something doesn't really bear any relation to being able to
| see a visual representation of that thing. Mostly it just
| felt like pulling up memories, and in fact when it asked me
| to visualise a rainbow I simply couldn't, though I could
| "see" one when I thought about a photo of a rainbow I took
| not so long ago. But again, that feels more like simply
| remembering.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Hallucinations and visualizing are completely different
| things. Even in my worst psychotic episode, I knew the
| difference between real and not-real.
|
| The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the
| real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source
| didn't matter to the rest of my brain.
|
| People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing
| on.
| tartoran wrote:
| Similar problem here. I actually notice that the imagery is
| a fleeting caricature trying to capture what Im attempting
| to observe, some kind of CGA resolution image of a lake,
| trees and so on. It's also very confusing that I can
| actually transpose myself within my imagination where I
| barely notice Im blind because I can feel it all around.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is
| never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are
| currently closed.
|
| Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People
| without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their
| mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in
| front of them, that would be a hallucination.
| ud_0 wrote:
| I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the
| way visualization is described.
|
| From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one
| could assume that the difference is just how much control
| people have over the content of the image, as opposed to
| the degree of realism.
|
| A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels
| indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control
| what the experience entails. From this test, I gather
| that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic
| image in front of them, but they are completely in
| command of what is shown.
| SamBam wrote:
| I do think there's a difference between visualizing
| something clearly and not clearly, though, and this is
| what the test is asking.
|
| The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend
| or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's
| face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or
| different facial expressions she makes.
|
| If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who
| served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up
| with something vague. I remember he was wearing large
| earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a
| blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at
| his face, there are parts that simply won't come into
| focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the
| same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind
| spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but
| in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way).
|
| So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction
| between visualizing things clearly and not.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That's also just memory. I couldn't describe most servers
| I've had after a few hours if it was the only time I saw
| them. Try to imagine _a_ barista. Imagine a scene in a
| coffee shop, it will get filled in with your actual
| memories of places you 've been and people you've seen.
| Can you produce a detailed (but not accurate to reality)
| mental image of such a place or a barista working there
| that is comparable to your recall of your wife's face?
| (maybe not as detailed, but not as fuzzy as trying to
| recall a specific barista)
| fsflover wrote:
| Or try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367989.
| necovek wrote:
| Not the GP, but it was hard for me to take that test: I can
| describe features of a thing I am trying to imagine, but it
| does not show as a visual image at all. So it's all "nothing
| at all" all the way in the test. My first thought is "am I
| trying hard enough?"
|
| It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's
| really hard for someone with it to understand what's being
| asked of them. :)
|
| I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly
| not sure, just like the GP.
| jstanley wrote:
| Huh, maybe I have aphantasia too, thanks. The lowest level
| above "no image at all" is "Dim and vague; flat", which are
| not words that I would ever use to describe thoughts.
|
| But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else _would_ use
| these words to describe thoughts.
| timvdalen wrote:
| That was my experience as well. The things in that test are
| not how I relate to thoughts.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Most people can see things in their mind that they don't
| consciously remember as discrete facts. For example, many
| people have a visual and motor memory of things like passcodes,
| but do not consciously and discretely remember the digits. A
| fun example from my own life: when I was a child, during a
| spelling test, I couldn't remember where to put the "h" in
| "ghost" until I called to mind the cover of this book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776
| fsflover wrote:
| > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people
| confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing
| it?
|
| No. See this recent discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277.
| jstanley wrote:
| That thread seems to indeed suggest that people are confusing
| seeing something with imagining seeing something. The point
| about the common inability to draw an accurate bicycle seems
| to prove it.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I see why you'd think that but it's not how it works for a
| lot of people. As others have tried to explained to those
| that think no one can visualize in their head, for most of
| us that can visualize it's not a photograph in your head.
| And besides, drawing from imagination takes practice. Heck,
| even drawing something that is literally right in front of
| you takes practice.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That point actually proved nothing. It demonstrated that
| there's a distinction between:
|
| 1. Ability to visualize
|
| 2. Accuracy of memory
|
| 3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings
|
| Those aren't _one_ thing, it 's a combination of things.
| The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which
| people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster
| their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends
| who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could
| produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some
| friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save
| their lives. It says nothing about their ability to
| visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and
| ability to draw.
| jstanley wrote:
| The people who had trouble drawing a bicycle from memory
| would presumably have no problem connecting the right
| parts if they had a bicycle in front of them, which
| suggests they are not accurately visualising a bicycle.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| If I read a paragraph of text and then try to write it
| down from memory, I would probably produce something
| vaguely similar but not quite exact. Maybe I would change
| some words or phrases with similar ones, or miss a part
| entirely. The better I understand the underlying idea,
| the closer it is likely to be to the original, but unless
| I reread the paragraph many times with the specific goal
| of memorising it, I'm unlikely to reproduce it exactly.
|
| Same with visualising a bicycle. I've seen many bicycles
| and I know what parts a bicycle has and roughly how they
| fit together, but unless I've paid attention to the exact
| shape and position of each part, I could at best
| visualise a rough approximation of a bicycle.
|
| I'm not aware exactly what is wrong, just as I would not
| be aware of what part of the paragraph I changed. But in
| many ways it doesn't matter, because the high-level idea
| is there mostly unchanged, just as with the text. The
| difference is that if you don't fit the parts in exactly
| the right way, the bicycle will not work, but I'm
| unlikely to completely change the paragraph by
| substituting a few synonyms.
|
| This is not even getting into the jump from visualising
| to drawing, which would depend on my ability to draw.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Right, but accuracy _with respect to reality_ is not the
| distinction between aphantasia and non-aphantasia, that
| 's more about memory or technical knowledge than about
| the ability to visualize itself. Someone without
| aphantasia can also visualize fantastical scenes with no
| connection to reality, either because it is fully
| fantastical (dragons and dwarves) or not a real memory
| (imagining meeting with someone, but it hasn't happened
| yet for you to be able to recall). They could visualize
| cartoonish scenes or cel shaded scenes or animated XKCD
| stick figures. None of those are realistic, but they
| could still be visualized in detail.
| fsflover wrote:
| I don't see why one can't imagine a wrong bicycle.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| I'd slightly trollishly say nobody has aphantasia, it's just
| that some people make a false distinction between remembering
| what something looks like and seeing it. Same as what you're
| saying really, but makes people feel better about themselves,
| rather than worse.
|
| It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions
| always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the
| distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about
| a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest
| because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it
| is.
| jhedwards wrote:
| > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people
| confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing
| it?
|
| Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and
| watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really
| any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a
| video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the
| scene and draw up the details.
|
| I think it's interesting that the author of the article
| suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking
| about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well
| with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a
| system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me
| do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II
| book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the
| equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my
| visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me
| to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are
| definitely advantages for both types of thinking.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > I've found that I can work well with software because I can
| visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and
| machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra.
|
| I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing
| an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math
| notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It
| requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without
| externalizing everything.
| alecbz wrote:
| > it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people
| confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing
| it?
|
| So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind
| is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if
| that means I have aphantasia or not.
|
| Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how
| vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or
| at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question.
| I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to
| describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more
| like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing
| this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or
| weak.
|
| But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen
| IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g.
| But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers
| is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now
| remembering it.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my
| mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not
| sure if that means I have aphantasia or not.
|
| I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to
| remember images at all.
| DoktorDelta wrote:
| That sounds like antaphasia based on what I've read. You might
| be interested in the materials available at
| https://aphantasia.com/
|
| They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of
| Visual Imagery Questionnaire
| necovek wrote:
| Ok, I didn't need to learn that I might have aphantasia too :)
|
| Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and
| mathematics.
|
| But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write-
| only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I
| also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well.
|
| Now, my dreams are usually pretty vivid, but I see that's
| "normal" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
| arkj wrote:
| If the condition of Aphantasia intrigues you then you should
| check out Blidnsight[1] and Visual Agnosia[2]. Oliver Sacks
| book[3] had a humbling effect on the science-knows-it-all
| teenager in me. I really thing some of the next paradigms in
| computing will come from a deeper understanding of how human
| brain handles sensory information. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_agnosia [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
| lkbm wrote:
| SSC has an interesting post about this and similar things:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e...
|
| If you lacked some common internal mental experience, would you
| know? This guy didn't. In the SSC piece, there's someone who
| didn't realize he lacked a sense of smell until high school.
|
| I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have
| some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre"
| and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to
| me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a
| real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of
| right and wrong. Make me wonder about how sometimes media will
| portray an angel and devil on your shoulders urging you to do
| right or wrong. (No one hallucinates _those_ , do they? I've
| always just assumed it's a metaphor, but so did the "no sense of
| smell" guy!)
| pxc wrote:
| > I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have
| some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre"
| and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to
| me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a
| real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of
| right and wrong.
|
| Can you find that tweet?
| lkbm wrote:
| Original tweet/thread:
| https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1467359243431215106
|
| It was QT'd by someone where I then saw a few replies
| suggesting this is a conscience (not "conscious", as I wrote
| earlier, oops):
| https://twitter.com/Scruffff/status/1467979777038438402
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I didn't realize I was lactose intolerant until adulthood. I
| honestly never knew having to violently crap within minutes of
| eating most meals was abnormal since I'd been doing it my
| entire life and not really paying attention to whether anyone
| else was.
| marstall wrote:
| I have vibrant dreams with very detailed renderings of
| landscapes, particularly non-existent cities that sprawl out
| block after block and mile after detailed mile as I move through
| them. In these places, I also experience intense interpersonal
| drama, highly detailed other characters, emotions, physical
| sensations, thoughts in my head about everything that's
| happening, empathy for others, anxieties, desires etc. And the
| rules of the reality change, inception-style, every few seconds,
| with themes and obsessions that recur.
|
| but this ability is completely lacking for me in reality. If I
| try to picture some of the obvious things mentioned in this
| thread - my wife's face, an apple, an elephant - I can, but it's
| a fairly muddy 2d image and I couldn't tell you what direction
| the elephant's trunk is pointing for example ...
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| I had this ability vividly when I was <16. It diminished with
| age, physiological anxiety condition, sleep disturbances, and
| failing antidepressants. I basically lack it completely now.
| eloeffler wrote:
| A friend of mine spent much time on MUD[1] servers playing and
| interacting with strangers. The game theme was fantasy-ish.
|
| As he moved through the large world of the server he would
| repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer
| (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some
| trait or role that you can have in the game.
|
| Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work
| as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common
| on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision
| played there, using screen readers.
|
| Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to
| talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I
| do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual
| image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a
| wall of ASCII.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume
| that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD A MUD (/m^d/; originally
| multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and
| multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual
| world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing
| games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction,
| and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms,
| objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions
| performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with
| each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a
| natural language.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| What a great story to read. I would be really curious to know
| more about that particular MUD.
|
| I have normal vision, and have played on MUDs only for a few
| years, in my late teens / early twenties.
| Taniwha wrote:
| oh see-er
| ghostly_s wrote:
| I have aphantasia...but I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the
| first time this year, and since then have had a few moments--I
| believe they are hypnagogic states, where I have actually for the
| first time in my life been able to _see_ in my imagination. Truly
| wild experience.
| k__ wrote:
| Interesting, I thought there were some discussions lately that
| this much more common than people think (i.e. >2%).
| toss1 wrote:
| This is fascinating to me and it never occurred to me before
| reading about it a long time ago.
|
| My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing.
| In those sports it is critical to have a deep visualization of
| the course. For ski racing, you will see racers waiting around
| the starting gate for their start time with eyes closed lightly
| swaying their head and moving their hand in visualizing their
| ideal path down the course (we even sometimes crash in those
| simulation runs and shake our head and restart...)
|
| In sportscar racing, an important drill is to drive the course in
| your head, making every shift, turn-in point, apex, and track out
| point, visualizing and feeling your attitude, balance, the
| forces, at every point on the track ---- and do it under a
| stopwatch so you know you have a realistic timing of the track
| with your car. I could typically come within a second of the real
| times, and it was quite vivid, and for 'fuzzy' sections, I could
| go back and sharpen the visualization.
|
| These seemed to me and my coaches as essential skills for the
| sport, and I never heard of anyone in either sport without that
| ability.
|
| I want to know if people without that innate capability just get
| filtered out early, or if it is trainable. Does anyone have any
| data on that?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Aphantasia has non-visual forms as well.
|
| Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a
| pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority
| of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a
| year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since.
|
| On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about
| the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I
| can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling
| a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is
| missing for me.
| gamerDude wrote:
| And I have audio aphantasia. I can't remember the sound of
| anyone's voice and can't recall music. Never had a song stuck
| in my head. But I can remember the words and content just no
| tones/sounds/etc.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Do you like listening to music?
| gamerDude wrote:
| I listen to music, but only as background. It has caused
| some odd dating issues in the past because I don't care
| about concerts nor can I recall "our song". But I am also
| comfortable in silence and I generally won't notice if the
| background music stops.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| do you have high-fidelity recall of other senses? i've
| wondered since i have no olfactory, but high audio and
| spatial recall
| gamerDude wrote:
| I do seem to have a high quality memory in general for
| other things. So, maybe that counts? But I haven't really
| done a comparison with others for higher ability to recall
| different senses. I think its hard to judge due to language
| barriers in describing our own personal experiences
| compared to others.
| totetsu wrote:
| Me neither. I realised very young, well before I even knew
| visual aphantasia existed. I get where the people lacking
| visual are coming from. It's hard to even imagine imagining a
| smell.. where in one's head does the minds nose feel like it
| is? What's to stop people just imagining nice smells all day..
| Kinrany wrote:
| Tried smelling coffee and tea just now. I can recognize them
| perfectly, but I can't remember what coffee smells like after
| smelling tea. Repeating the process doesn't seem to help
| either.
| drcongo wrote:
| People can imagine smells?! I had no idea!
| cryptica wrote:
| I think maybe people with this condition over-idealize what it
| means to visualize something.
|
| I think I'm very good at visualization. I can visualize things
| and recall visual scenes from my past but it doesn't look
| anywhere near as vivid or detailed as the real experience...
| Except when it comes to emotions; my emotions are heightened when
| visualizing things (especially memories from my past) - I'm
| pretty sure that I didn't feel as strongly back then as I feel
| recalling the memory (I suspect so because I rarely feel very
| strongly about anything in the present). Emotions help make the
| visualizations seem real in spite of the lack of detail. For me,
| even the appearance of an inanimate object or a movement has a
| distinct feeling associated with it.
|
| My mind doesn't separate emotions and logic. When I react to
| things strongly (which is very rare), there is a logical reason
| behind it and I always know why I'm doing things and why I'm
| feeling a certain way. I'm immune to depression because I can
| always enumerate everything that makes me sad and when I resolve
| these issues, I always feel happy... Until new issues arise.
|
| I never got into situations whereby I thought something would
| make me happy but it didn't or I started to take it for granted.
| If I think something will make me happy, it will make me happy
| 100%.
|
| I usually run scenarios through in my head before I make any
| decision; I guess that's also a form of visualization. When I'm
| looking at the menu at a restaurant, I visualize myself eating
| each dish on the menu (and imagine the smell and flavor) in order
| to make a decision. Actually one of my siblings joked that they
| always try to choose the same dishes as me when we go to a
| restaurant together because it almost always turns out good.
| mhb wrote:
| The Secret Sense - Asimov
| https://archive.org/details/TheSecretSense/mode/2up
| harel wrote:
| I am exactly how he describes. I cannot visualise anything and I
| don't have an internal voiceover. I do however recall abstracts
| and concepts. So if I saw an elephant before I'd be able to bring
| up the concept of the elephant. Nothing visual, but conceptual.
| I've discovered this is a thing (that people actually visualise)
| past my 40s. For a while I thought I missed out on some special
| fx, but it had no detrimental effect on my life. Maybe even it
| does help me see complex software as abstracts easier. Who knows.
| It is what it is.
| erganemic wrote:
| Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly-
| impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially
| through a text medium!).
|
| I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are
| artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely
| despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on
| this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7
| people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects
| 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after
| describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife
| corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with
| shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!".
|
| I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people
| - for starters, people _vastly_ overestimate their ability to
| picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a
| bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would
| if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them.
| Even if they didn 't have the artistic skill to make a "good"
| drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain
| to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by
| aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're
| looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the
| affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has
| the handlebars in front of the front wheel).
|
| My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance
| artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is
| significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed
| her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was
| watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I
| picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my
| brain is recalling apples it's seen before and _telling itself to
| process that information as if it were coming from my eyes._ Even
| though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that
| this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I
| visualize it in my head, it _feels_ like I 'm seeing it. She
| chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying
| questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing
| too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability
| than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience
| with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of
| structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really
| remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm
| always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but
| she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff
| with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly,
| after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more
| trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently
| "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-
| fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing
| things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same
| vividness anymore (she's since "recovered").
|
| I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did
| have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring
| each other that we weren't _really_ mind-blind - but that would
| either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting
| questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that
| make them more likely to be friends :)
| riskable wrote:
| As I read your 6/7 dinner party example I couldn't help but
| wonder if it's just a "birds of a feather" bias: People who
| have trouble visualizing things tend to get along well/have
| similar interests/beliefs/realities and just naturally often
| end up hanging out together.
|
| You could say that about any sort of human trait: People who
| <share trait X> tend to enjoy each other's company. Some traits
| having more influence than others (obviously).
| vgel wrote:
| This is a great point.
|
| Agreed with your comparison to your wife as being better at
| visualization: I think in general "aphantasia" is on a
| spectrum, with some people being completely unable to visualize
| things, and others hearing about people who can visualize
| incredibly well and thinking "If I don't have that, then I must
| have aphantasia!"
|
| It's also a skill: I used to think I had aphantasia. Over the
| last ~3 years I've been practicing visualization -- nothing
| fancy, just trying to close my eyes and visualize things every
| so often for a few minutes. With that low-level practice, my
| ability to visualize things has improved a lot: before I had
| nothing, now I can get black-and-white shaky images, and
| manipulate them, rotate them, etc.
|
| Still can't do faces though, I can imagine the rest of a person
| but their face is just missing. Still working on that :)
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I have an extreme ability to visualize, which includes all of
| my senses, to the ability to imagine being an animal. Smell,
| taste, hearing, limited visual senses, instincts, the feeling
| of fur on my skin, and more are all within my ability. For lack
| of a better term, I call it my "mental holodeck", which seems
| to get the point across. It's more of a virtual machine because
| I'm running someone else's brain on my hardware.
|
| This ability evolved from lucid dreaming I learned in high
| school. After eighteen years of deliberate practice (several
| times per week), I can drop into this state at will. My real
| senses are dimmed, but not gone. If my phone beeps, I will hear
| it and likely lose what I'm imagining.
|
| Despite all of this, I couldn't draw any of it. I can't draw
| and I lack the ability to keep a single image in for a
| prolonged period. But I can write it. Finding ways of
| describing smells or sensations in a way other people can
| understand is fun. (My virtual machine can also run
| approximations of other people.)
| caymanjim wrote:
| I don't have any concept of seeing something in my head. I always
| assumed it was a way to say "think about this thing" and never
| thought people could "see" it in any meaningful way. If someone
| asks me to picture an elephant, I don't have any visual
| experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me. I can
| describe what an elephant looks like. I can draw something--
| poorly--that other people would immediately identify as an
| elephant. I can talk about the shape of an elephant, the parts of
| an elephant, colors, textures, and other physical properties. But
| I can't "see" or "picture" an elephant.
|
| I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-
| pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see"
| something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by
| seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant;
| I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like
| that.
|
| Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm
| experiencing things differently or just describing them in
| different terms.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not either or. I went from not never imagining things in
| visual way to having images popping up in my head by
| themselves. The brain started to visualize things, after I
| started to learn to draw. I knew absolutely nothing about
| drawing and used draw-a-box and youtube tutorials to learn.
|
| I never felt like missing something and those images dont add
| much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much
| to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly
| big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.
|
| I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in
| your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But
| from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know
| whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to
| specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I
| noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of
| things and much better at noticing properties of objects around
| me.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Some artists have aphantasia. So it isn't just a function of
| drawing.
| burnished wrote:
| >> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about
| "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.
|
| Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people
| authentically go about the process of thinking in a different
| way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people
| that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was
| a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why
| people would find that stimulating.
| watwut wrote:
| It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only
| this one specific difference in how people think.
|
| I don't see general interest in psychology or other
| people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then
| HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots
| of psychology topics. Try autism.
| SilasX wrote:
| _If_ there were a concrete phenomenon that 's consistently
| observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I
| don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We
| can't directly compare subjective experience, so any
| comparison is going to be filtered through the language of
| how we describe said experience, and so it's that much
| harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category
| and the extent to which people have it.
|
| Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-
| fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic.
|
| Even when people do try to have a productive discussion
| about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish
| whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking
| metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one)
| casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes
| into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is.
|
| (Before you start guessing, I don't think I have
| aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine
| pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily
| the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on
| "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although
| I _think_ I 'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do
| it.)
|
| Now, if we want to talk about _observables_ believed to be
| associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be
| interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or
| casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the
| condition.
|
| Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way
| to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I
| usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in
| nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my
| mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract
| thoughts in visual form.
|
| My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a
| V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view,
| see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a
| complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan
| complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to
| people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they
| left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where
| they want it to go.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know
| where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that
| people ask you to explain how you know where things are.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Fwiw I absolutely can "look" at an elephant in my imagination,
| and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it
| blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind
| can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the
| savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have
| memories of documentaries that "replay" in my head. When I am
| imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I
| can't really see what is in front of me.
|
| In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and
| visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors
| before they happen in the real world.
| codazoda wrote:
| Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real
| elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm
| not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I
| didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost
| acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but
| I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.
| burke wrote:
| What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from
| aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient
| or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities.
|
| If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination:
|
| * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of
| oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and
| significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery.
|
| * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a
| photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything,
| it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force
| it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an
| elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part.
|
| * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague
| sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some
| vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob
| over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way
| and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue
| savanna kind of scene with literally no detail.
|
| * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think
| I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking'
| at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive
| things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5-1fps
| discontinuous scene update.
|
| It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes
| from the same circuits that are able to recognize external
| images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I
| imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at
| fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be
| surprised by the details of that elephant's visual
| presentation.
|
| It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model
| into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like
| there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish
| those models than I have.
| pxc wrote:
| > Fwiw I absolutely can "look" at an elephant in my
| imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it
| does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..)
| the subconscious mind can be wild!
|
| ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever
| happened to me. Wow.
|
| How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of
| research on that?
|
| These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize
| things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions
| of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental
| images is extreme
| drdeca wrote:
| Yeah, that's definitely more vivid than what I see, and I'm
| fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a
| bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have
| trouble "seeing the entire thing at once".
|
| That's not to say that I don't ever have visual images come
| to mind unbidden.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what
| they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can
| count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can _also_ count
| the stripes.
| 1ris wrote:
| Ok, this is mindblowing for me. When I think of a tiger I
| have some kind of visual sensation, but it's extremely low on
| information. Like maybe 12x12 or 16x16 pixels. But not sharp
| pixels, but fuzzy, colored shapes, or very, very simple
| details, like whiskers. Like in a impressionist picture. But
| way simpler.
|
| Never though that this was different of anyone else.
|
| Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things
| i realised that apparently i can have this image only for
| about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of
| other people aswell.
|
| Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class,
| despite trying.
| pxc wrote:
| > When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.
|
| Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I 'visualize' a tiger,
| it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read
| your comment I said 'oh, wtf!' out loud
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Consider sitting outside and looking at a flowering bush or
| tree. At first it's just a tree. Then you realize that
| there are flowers on it (they were always there, but you
| weren't attending to them before). After a little while
| you'll again suddenly realize that there are bees buzzing
| around the flowers, and a nest halfway up and a few feet
| from the center on the right. You, most likely, did not
| have all that in your head on your first glance at the
| tree. It was just a tree. This is how many mental images
| are formed.
|
| If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always
| starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for
| (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up
| Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this.
| For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the
| face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it,
| or am asked a question about it, more details will come to
| mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a
| scene, like from a commercial.
| saberdancer wrote:
| The way it works for me (I can't visualize like that),
| it's like I am writing a story. I can say I see a tiger,
| then think about it and write down more details but I am
| always consciously adding stuff to the tiger. If I want
| details about number of stripes, I need to think about it
| and then "write" it. Never do I see something I am not
| consciously forming.
|
| Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights
| ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to
| a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator
| game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.
| boole1854 wrote:
| For me, and I think for most people, "picturing an elephant" is
| very literal. For example, you could ask me to "picture an
| elephant" then follow up by asking "what is the elephant which
| you pictured doing with its trunk?" To answer the question, I
| focus my attention on trunk in the picture in my head in order
| to "take in" what it is doing (e.g., perhaps "it is curled
| upward but otherwise not doing anything" or it might turn out
| that "it is grasping a branch").
|
| > Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm
| experiencing things differently or just describing them in
| different terms.
|
| Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or
| focusing attention on an image in your head in order to
| describe it, the way I explained above?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Do you have visual experiences while dreaming? For me "seeing
| in my head" is most similar to those: certainly a visual
| experience but with less detail than when I'm actually looking
| at something. I believe some people's are much more detailed
| than mine, as some people can reproduce scenes in exquisite
| detail from memory.
|
| Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I
| don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to
| spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will
| visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite
| like reading from paper, but very similar.
| Accacin wrote:
| Yeah it's confusing me too. When I asked a friend if he could
| picture a red apple he said he could 'see' it visually. If I do
| the same thing, I can't see an apple, but I do think about an
| apple, and I know what it looks like.
|
| I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way
| :)
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm honestly not even sure if someone could describe their own
| experience of thinking about visual things with enough detail
| that I could tell whether my own experience of thinking about
| visual things is significantly different. When you started
| talking about having _no concept of seeing something in your
| head_ I thought "whoa, that's very different from my
| experience." But then what you went on to describe sounds
| precisely like my experience. I can make poor but recognizable
| drawings of commonly-known objects like animals. I can also
| imagine large human spaces I've spent a lot of time in, like my
| apartment building or old Counter-Strike levels, with a fair
| amount of detail (certainly enough to describe how to
| navigate). But now I'm wondering what distinction you're making
| between being able to use your imagination to accomplish these
| tasks and "seeing" or "picturing" these objects in your mind.
| Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual
| hallucination of these objects? Surely that ability is
| extremely rare, and isn't what people mean when they say
| they're picturing something in their head, right?
| myself248 wrote:
| > Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual
| hallucination of these objects?
|
| That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate
| it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might
| draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured
| from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything
| geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it
| appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.
|
| When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching
| equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where
| for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a
| first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers
| admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l
| overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions
| had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to
| other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to
| sketching and ordering.
|
| (environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/08/image-... )
|
| Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those
| onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and
| what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of
| piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer,
| who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who
| would arrange for a delivery the next day.
|
| I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a
| straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like
| having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put
| them together. After running it through the fax machine to
| get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any
| other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind,
| even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go
| do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body
| strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway;
| if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was
| probably the best place for me.)
|
| The majority of installers in the field could do this, though
| some were certainly better at it than others. Most would
| start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on
| the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to
| depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one
| who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and
| pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas
| most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from
| any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight
| out.
|
| I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing
| into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head
| was the anomaly.
| gipp wrote:
| > That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant,
| rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I
| might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant
| pictured from, etc.
|
| I can do this too, but it is not _literally_ a visual
| experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual
| perception, not visual _sensation_ in the way that a
| hallucination does.
|
| Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my
| eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of
| something in my literal vision. Which is what some people
| are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing
| to talk about.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I don't know of anyone who can summon an image such that
| it blocks their literal eyesight. But in my head, I can
| still "see" the image, with definition, color, etc. I can
| vividly recall photographs and "see" the colors, lines,
| and details of those photographs in my head. I am still
| also seeing what is in front of me, though in a more "out
| of focus" fashion - my visual concentration is elsewhere.
| silisili wrote:
| Now I'm curious which is more common.
|
| > That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant,
| rotate it around in 3-space
|
| I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my
| class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and
| quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were
| constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but
| rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like
| this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely
| flustered my brain to the point of switching majors.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm also curious if there is any difference between these
| two experiences other than the words each person uses to
| describe their own experience.
| caymanjim wrote:
| > Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual
| hallucination of these objects?
|
| It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's
| why I think it may have more to do with the language people
| are using to describe the experience than the experience
| itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty
| accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.
| cj wrote:
| If it helps, when I close my eyes I see black/darkness.
|
| If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks
| like, I still only see black/darkness... but I can still
| describe the features of the room in very much detail. I
| definitely can't conjure up a vivid image in my head, I
| would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly
| visual experience. Same with recalling what someone's voice
| sounds like... I can imagine what someone's voice sounds
| like, but definitely can't hear their voice in any
| meaningful level of detail, yet I'm still able to describe
| the voice - it's more of a feeling than a literal
| audio/visual experience.
|
| I definitely wouldn't describe my own experience as
| anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see
| black/darkness... (I think) it's uncommon to literally see
| things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would.
| Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is
| abnormal?
| philsnow wrote:
| I have no idea if I'm in the minority of humans in this,
| but when I picture something in my head, it has colors,
| shapes, and I guess I'm using the same brain hardware as
| when I use my eyes to process the "phantasm" of it. My
| mental model is that this facility is another "source",
| in addition to my eyes, that can be used to pipe sense
| data into the visual processing "sink".
|
| When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The
| exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text
| file got me thinking about what it would look like if my
| eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit
| at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I
| would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would
| look like (given what information I had about things like
| whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not,
| whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind
| of thing).
|
| Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my
| refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I
| keep track of whether I'm running out of various things
| (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so,
| it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I
| have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images
| are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent
| reality, with more familiar things being represented more
| accurately.
|
| It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or
| not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're
| open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing
| it (my parents called it "staring off into space").
| Nzen wrote:
| I'll second the first paragraph here. The demonstration
| I've come up with involves holding a hand closely in
| front of only my left eye. My brain lets me see both
| things, but my hand also has a 'transparent'
| characteristic when I'm focusing on my right vision. Back
| to visualizing, the 'other source' isn't anywhere near as
| crisp as the demonstration, and often is a mix of memory
| / imagination / caricature / labeling it with the
| concept.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's still not clear to me if there's a difference
| between _imagining I 'm seeing something_ and _actually
| seeing something in my head_. When I imagine what it 's
| like to see something, of course it has colors, shapes,
| etc. I can also imagine what a room would look like from
| a particular vantage point (although I may not be as
| skillful as it as someone who has practiced doing it and
| experimented with computer graphics). I guess I'm still
| curious if there's truly any difference in our
| experiences. I wonder if optical illusions work when
| we're picturing things in our head.
| posix86 wrote:
| That's so interesting! I did the test linked to in the
| article, and I noticed that I am able to "visualize"
| object, but have decidedly a hard time to think about how
| I would perceive them if I looked at them - so I guess
| just opposite from you.
|
| I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the
| perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once.
| And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a
| tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many
| things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual
| anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different
| sense.
| martyvis wrote:
| I feel I am the same as this. I often build things from
| wood and steel. In order to plan parts to be made, where
| to do cuts and make joins I need to think and "see" how
| best to do that. I believe I do this quite well, and my
| thoughts work out well once I put my hand to my tools and
| make what I foresaw. But I don't believe I ever had a
| vivid hallucination of what I was making, more a hazy
| wireframe that gets the job done
| lisper wrote:
| Just by way of providing another data point: I was going
| down this exact same rabbit hole and my experience
| matches your description exactly.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| It's certainly hard to describe the inner workings of one's
| mind with adequate detail to compare them to others. However
| I believe this anecdote may provide some insight.
|
| One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide
| I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this
| several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and
| remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of
| someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has
| partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but
| most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems
| to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the
| elephant or apple in the article.
|
| I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own
| experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's
| descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I can close my eyes and see a picture or even video of any
| scene, from any angle, that I have seen before or that I
| could arrange the details of in my head, as if it were real.
| I don't even have to close my eyes, but it's more vivid if I
| do.
|
| However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or
| even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to
| recall it, the more blurry it becomes.
|
| Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real.
| I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental
| image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind,
| but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird.
|
| The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would
| be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with
| concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one
| might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear
| that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind
| people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and
| even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on
| conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament
| to the neuroplasticity of our brains.
| ksec wrote:
| Same here. I could "think" about it, but I couldn't see it. I
| just tested this out in a completely dark room. Both with or
| without my eyes open. I just cant see it. I cant visualise an
| Elephant in my head. Not even the slightest. I never thought
| when someone visualise it they really meant "visualise" it.
| This is shocking!
|
| I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within
| 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour,
| thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least
| dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a
| child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in
| my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be
| "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only
| person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend.
|
| When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something
| similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D
| Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head.
| May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ?
|
| And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.
|
| For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Do you just not hear your voice when you think? Are there
| words? How do you formulate ideas without words? What happens
| when you speak - do ideas just cross some event horizon and
| come out as vocalizations? Do you know what the words are
| going to be before you say them?
| ksec wrote:
| Just like I know I am thinking of an elephant, but I cant
| "see" an elephant. I know I am thinking about a topic and
| precise words I am using like what I am typing out now, but
| I cant "hear" the voice in my head of what I am typing /
| about to type.
|
| My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me
| mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my
| head without me realising I was actually saying it out.
| philsnow wrote:
| > And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it
| either.
|
| > For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
|
| FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental
| narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for
| me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it
| did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a
| mental narrative voice.
| ksec wrote:
| I have "thoughts" or argument flows through my mind. But
| they are definitely silent and messy. So instead of arguing
| about it inside my head, I talked to myself, this makes
| things much clearer.
|
| Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.
| tetraca wrote:
| I would describe it this way: my mind kind of has a scratchpad
| of sorts that's separate from what I see or hear. It's a dream-
| like space that you can conjure a vague image onto that's
| visual in nature but distinctly different from literally seeing
| out of your eye and not in real space. If you are able to
| recall and play a song you heard in your head - it's
| reminiscent of that, but visual. I often do both. When I was
| younger I often visualized words in my head as I said or
| thought them.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I can't imagine doing math or electronics in my head without
| _some_ concept of internal visualization. Assuming you do those
| things (if not there is likely something else that applies):
| When you rearrange equations in your head, are you not having
| some visual representation of them (actual equations in an
| otherwise empty space for me) that you manipulate? When you
| think about a circuit, don 't you mentally think about where
| the current goes in an actual visual representation of the
| circuit?
|
| What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember
| roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or
| whatever was?
|
| I think the answers to these questions might help me at least
| to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a
| different description.
| irrational wrote:
| I have a sort of similar thing. I do not dream. That is, I am
| nearly 50 years old and I have never woken up having any
| recollection of anything happening from the time I fall asleep
| until I wake up. I understand that other people remember seeing
| or hearing things while they sleep (from what people describe,
| things like falling is a common dream theme). I've never
| experienced this. People say, "Oh, you do dream, you just don't
| remember it." After reading this article, would they also try to
| tell this person that he can see things in his mind's eye but
| can't remember them?
|
| I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure
| from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had
| an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my
| inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my
| inability to derive pleasure from music.
|
| Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music
| could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any
| way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in
| any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music.
| I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming.
| [deleted]
| jccalhoun wrote:
| This seems to be a popular topic on HN but I wonder how much of
| this is due to semantics. Before I read a story about this I
| didn't stop to think that people couldn't picture things in their
| mind. But now that I've read a few and seen numerous comments on
| it, I've started to second guess myself. I can imagine a couple
| gears turning and I would normally have said, "yes I can see it
| in my mind" but it isn't really like seeing but it seems visual
| in some way.
|
| So maybe what I consider "seeing" in my mind doesn't really count
| as "seeing" for some because that isn't 100% what it is like?
|
| Maybe I'm just so locked into "seeing" things in my mind that I
| can't imagine how it would work if I didn't.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's not just semantics, but it seems like a hard concept to
| grasp for those who are not affected. And even those who have
| it, when they first learn about it.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| I don't think semantics explains cortical excitability and skin
| conductance differences.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research
| dhon_ wrote:
| I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the author.
| Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if I try to
| recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can "fill in"
| detail by recalling facts about that person (hair/eye colour,
| wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and details fade quickly.
|
| I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have
| a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots
| of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal
| imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a
| different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and
| makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice.
|
| One test for aphantasia goes something like this:
|
| > Imagine a ball sitting on a table. You reach forward and push
| the ball and it rolls off the table. Now without changing the
| scene, what colour was the ball? What about the table?
|
| For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin
| to stainless steel. My wife will describe a colourful beach
| ball on a wooden table with lighting and shadow and describe
| the room it's in in detail. My scene was in a void as no room
| was mentioned.
| saghm wrote:
| > I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the
| author. Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if
| I try to recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can
| "fill in" detail by recalling facts about that person
| (hair/eye colour, wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and
| details fade quickly.
|
| > I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will
| have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head
| with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my
| normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like
| it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically
| use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with
| practice.
|
| Interesting! I relate quite heavily to first part; I also can
| visualize abstract things but have a lot of trouble with
| faces. I'm sometimes not able to recognize whether two photos
| are of the same person or different people, and I always seem
| to think that other people don't look similar when others do
| think they do, and think people look similar that no one else
| seems to. However, I dream _very_ vividly almost every night,
| and I find it so engrossing that it interferes with my
| ability to get up in the morning sometimes because in my
| half-awake state I'm convinced that the "story" in my dream
| is interesting enough that I need to see where it goes. By
| the time I'm fully awake, it generally turns out that the
| dream didn't make much sense, but often it contained enough
| absurdity that telling my friends or family about it is
| entertaining for them.
| magnusmundus wrote:
| This comment is very interesting to me, thank you for
| sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you said, and I feel
| the phrasing "normal imagination lacking detail" is perfect.
| And, (why I decided to respond ->)
|
| > For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something
| akin to stainless steel.
|
| my scene was similar but opposite: Steel/metallic ball on
| smooth white table, ball falls into a colorless void. The
| table doesn't even have dimensions really, just has an edge
| the ball can fall off.
|
| I must read more on aphantasia. If you don't mind me asking:
| did you decide that this is your condition through learning
| about it, or were you "diagnosed" somehow?
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am on the side that this isn't semantics and is a real
| phenomenon. For me, I can hear in my mind very well. I can hear
| so well that I can occasionally confuse things I've hear in my
| mind's ear for a real sound (did you just say something?). It
| very slightly crosses the line into an auditory hallucination.
| I can hear music so well that I don't need a radio to listen,
| just think of the first few seconds of a song and off it goes
| on the jukebox.
|
| My mental images are nowhere near this clear, but they are a
| kind of "darksight" a seeing and a not seeing, ephemeral but
| also real and useful for visualization and problem solving.
| basq wrote:
| I can relate. I'll also get songs viscerally stuck in my head
| that will play nonstop for several days straight. And not
| only music, I'll occasionally get stuck images as well,
| pictures that will sit in my peripheral thoughts for days.
| dougmwne wrote:
| That's the first I've heard of eyeworms. Interesting!
| Mezzie wrote:
| Fun fact: I have no mind's eye UNTIL I take Tizanidine. That was
| a really weird discovery.
|
| I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind
| until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had
| to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense
| didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug
| fixes that.
|
| It's VERY distracting.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| I was practically blind my first years of life too, and have
| aphantasia, how come did you started taking the drug, by chance
| unrelated ? Did it fix it for once or it reverts when not
| taking the drug? I've been only able to "see" in colors and
| details, in a state of half sleep half awake, never awake, and
| very low res when dreaming.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I got diagnosed with MS and I take it for my muscle
| spasticity at night to help me sleep, so it's completely
| unrelated. I have -20 vision with severe astigmatism and was
| completely uncorrected until I had eye surgery at 4 to fix
| some eye muscle issues.
|
| It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a
| little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind
| at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can
| vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not
| more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I
| started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing'
| it.
|
| I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the
| side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also
| experience.
| exikyut wrote:
| Oooh. Do you have any particular references you'd link to for
| more info about this?
|
| https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html says that
|
| > _Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased
| muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in
| which the nerves do not function properly and patients may
| experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and
| problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or
| brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications
| called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in
| the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax._
|
| > _..._
|
| > _This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask
| your doctor or pharmacist for more information._
|
| I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the
| point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to
| follow/copy bits of it :)
|
| I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've
| been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which
| naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of
| subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations
| between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming
| language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to
| unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious
| level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar
| pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I
| can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable
| intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg _recreational_ options) to
| shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost
| to helping me reset stuff.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I don't, sadly. It was a complete accident. I have MS and
| take Tizanidine for my muscle spasticity; being able to
| imagine things is just an odd side effect. I also can't
| imagine there's enough formerly-blind people with MS to test
| this on with science. (I'm a statistical oddity!)
|
| One side effect of tizanidine at higher doses is
| hallucinations, so it would seem to do SOMETHING with your
| visualization center, but idk what.
|
| For your autistic difficulties, I'm curious if finding
| resources for people that have gone blind/deaf might help. I
| know it sounds weird, but as a visually impaired person, we
| thought I had Asperger's for a while because I literally
| couldn't see body language well enough to read social cues,
| and I found it really helpful to look up information on how
| to 'read' that information elsewhere. Likewise, if somebody
| goes deaf, I'm sure there are lessons on how to do things
| like read more into body language. It just might help explain
| a lot of things that neurotypical people take for granted.
|
| Also biology: I find it really helps me to remember that
| humans are sacks of hormones and that sometimes when they're
| silly it's not me being wrong. They might just have gotten a
| surge of adrenaline and had a knee jerk reaction, or they
| might be overstimulated. I know I tend to forget humans are
| embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies
| will allow.
| zafka wrote:
| I really love your understanding of the biological effects
| on human interaction:
|
| "I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic
| out of them than their bodies will allow."
|
| Thanks for today's smile.
| [deleted]
| lavasalesman wrote:
| I don't have aphantasia but if I never learned about the mind's
| eye from other people I think I would have used it almost never,
| just sometimes as a memory aid. Everything I think about is done
| abstractly; ie words in books and conversations take on no image
| in my mind, only the ideas transfer. After learning about how
| imagery springs to other people's minds when they're reading,
| conversing, etc. I've tried to do it myself and it is possible
| but always a conscious effort and usually tiring. The benefit for
| me is that images are more memorable than ideas alone so my
| recall of the things I try to visualize improves if I do it well,
| and has led me to try things like diagramming the things people
| say, also improving recall and understanding.
| jp57 wrote:
| I used to wonder if this was just a difference in semantic
| understanding of the word "to see", just as two people might
| argue whether a color is blue or green or on what side of some
| arbitrary line some liminal experience falls.
|
| The thing that changed my mind was that the aphantasic people
| I've spoken with say their dreams have no visual component. They
| don't have a visual experience when they dream. My dreams are
| intensely visual; I am absolutely seeing things when I dream.
| pxc wrote:
| > the aphantasic people I've spoken with say their dreams have
| no visual component. They don't have a visual experience when
| they dream. My dreams are intensely visual; I am absolutely
| seeing things when I dream.
|
| I don't think my dreams have no visual component, but it's
| often the case that certain visual properties are just not
| filled in. Like someone's shirt might just not have a color in
| my dreams. Not grey, not transparent, and not like everything
| is black and white. Just that it didn't any color in
| particular, just didn't have that feature
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