[HN Gopher] What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images
___________________________________________________________________
What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images
Author : VHRanger
Score : 106 points
Date : 2024-08-02 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| bondarchuk wrote:
| No article on this topic is complete without mentioning Galton,
| who described the phenomenon in 1880:
| https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
|
| (By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people
| experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from
| almust fully auditory complete with specific voice
| characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully
| abstract)
| kolinko wrote:
| As someone with recently diagnosed aphantasia - it's surreal that
| 99% population sees things that aren't there / literally
| halucinates, and that it's considered normal!
| b800h wrote:
| So you can't picture your mother's face in your mind's eye
| (which may or may not be there?)
|
| It's not the same as hallucination.
| FumblingBear wrote:
| Can only answer for myself, but yes--I am completely unable
| to picture my parents.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I'm not completely aphantasic, but the way you phrase the
| rhetorical contains exactly the massive divide that exists in
| experience. You believe that such an act is obviously easy,
| whereas for myself, it is difficult and less an image than a
| fleeting impression that is more conceptual than it is
| visual.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Yeah, it's quite peculiar how inaccurate the classic discourse
| around "seeing things" and "hearing voices" turned out to be.
| Rather than seeing/hearing vs. not seeing/hearing things the
| dichotomy should probably be something like "having the sense
| that what you're seeing/hearing is part of your own thoughts
| vs. externally imposed".
| notRobot wrote:
| Questions, out of curiosity:
|
| What is your experience of dreaming like?
|
| What is your experience of recalling memories like?
|
| What is your experience of recalling media you've watched like?
|
| What is your experience of imagining like?
|
| What is your experience of reading like?
| Semaphor wrote:
| I also have it.
|
| Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal,
| but also why I thought I don't have aphantasia. I even have
| lucid dreams.
|
| Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it
| as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having
| seen something.
|
| Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to
| still describe parts of it, but I see nothing.
|
| Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More
| like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to
| imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen
| a child's water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun,
| roughly.
|
| Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get
| into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat
| common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed
| descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I
| can't _see_ any of it. Now descriptions of things happening,
| I can totally get into that. But I don't see anything.
|
| For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical
| when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn't realize
| anyone would actually see something.
|
| There is also a fantasy writer, Mark Lawrence, who has
| aphantasia and wrote about it:
| http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| For the record, I love Lord of the Rings. But yes, there is
| something about detailed description of objects in books
| that rarely lands for me. The words have to in and of
| themselves convey a kind of conceptual beauty, or call upon
| a great metaphor or the like, otherwise they will bore me
| since I see very little and will mostly just get annoyed
| trying to keep all the details in my head.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but I would call myself
| "near aphantasic" and the answer to all these is that they
| are almost entirely conceptual rather than visual. What
| little visual impression I can form is extremely fleeting,
| incomplete, low fidelity, and in short nothing like actually
| seeing something. At some level I can tell my visual system
| gets activated, but it's completely different from truly
| seeing something.
| firewizard wrote:
| Not the OP but..
|
| Recalling memories for me has the detail of a short journal
| entry. It's not first person, I don't relive the emotions I
| felt at the time, and compared to my others the detail isn't
| there.
|
| For example, when discussing my graduation with my father, I
| could recall the building, the general layout of the room,
| and parts of the ceremony's sequence. However, I can't recall
| walking across the stage, even though I know it happened. In
| contrast, my father could describe where he was seated and
| even what people in front of him were wearing.
|
| Media I remember the concepts of what was covered and images
| or videos are familiar when I see them again, but I can't
| rewatch a moment in my mind.
|
| Likewise for reading, I remember as a child not understanding
| what people meant when they said Daniel Radcliffe didn't
| match up to the Harry Potter they imagined.
|
| Imagining is all about the idea, best explainer would be:
| https://aphantasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Imagine-a-
| horse.pn...
| joelfried wrote:
| I haven't been formally diagnosed but I'm definitely on the
| very low end of visualization. But I'll answer for myself:
|
| While I'm dreaming and unaware that I'm dreaming, it's like
| I'm in real life. As soon as I start to wake up at all,
| everything fades to black almost instantly. I recall the
| experience as if I lived it though dreams are strange so it's
| far less consistent than a normal narrative.
|
| What kind of memories? I often completely fail to encode and
| remember highly visual details - like what color hair someone
| has, what shirt they were wearing, and so on. But I could
| recall the name of the building in which my college showed
| the Matrix in the fall of 1999 because I could remember which
| way I walked there.
|
| I recall audio strongly and can hear the voices of various
| characters in my head. I can do passable impressions of quite
| a few characters. I can tell you the story in detail, but if
| something hinges on a visual cue I will completely fail
| there.
|
| I mostly talk to myself in my head. It's a running narrative.
| If you'd like a specific example, give me something more
| meaningful than "imagining".
|
| If I want to read something and retain it well, I will hear
| it in my head in my internal voice as I'm reading.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > What is your experience of reading like?
|
| This is want I'm most curious about. I have to imagine
| reading must be very boring for people with aphantasia.
|
| The whole reason I like to read is I automatically visualize
| everything in the book as though it's like a TV show, I never
| thought it could be any different for other people.
|
| I wonder how this effects studying and preferred method to
| learn for people.
|
| I always "see" the slides/textbook page I'm thinking of in my
| minds eye when trying to recall the information (such as
| during a test). I wonder if people who are able to remember
| via other means are more effective.
|
| I also don't like dealing with infrastructure and systems I
| can't "visualize" in my head, same with navigating physical
| locations.
|
| I assumed all of this was pretty standard, then again I was
| surprised to learn some people don't have an inner voice
| either. Ironically, I just can't imagine that at all.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I'm a prolific consumer of fiction. For me reading isn't
| about the scenery so much as the ideas and messages within
| a work. I can appreciate character growth without the
| visual imagery involved. I hate fluffy details added to
| books. I don't need an item by item run down of their
| entire wardrobe or the place settings on the table. That's
| mostly just noise to me and books that feature those
| details prominently are a slog.
|
| "He was all jowls and scowls"
|
| Is infinitely better for me than writing out a list of
| visual characteristics that so many authors seem to lean
| on.
| brotchie wrote:
| It's always stuck with me reading reviews of Greg Egan's
| novels.
|
| In many of his novels characters are either non-human,
| post-humans, or AIs.
|
| Many folks criticize the character development, etc. My
| only assumption that that Greg's writing style strips out
| all the cruft that I find a slog.
|
| Because it doesn't have the cruft and focuses on ideas
| and messages, I love it.
| abathur wrote:
| Not op, but I wouldn't call it boring.
|
| It's a lot like thinking, I guess. (Much of my thinking is
| already roughly abstract-lingual, so reading feels of-a-
| piece. I would characterize myself as having a running
| interior narrative, but this isn't a voice I "hear" as I
| gather it is for some.)
|
| I generally prefer reading to listening since it's easier
| to back up and re-read if my attention has wandered.
|
| I can have trouble staying ~oriented when there are lots of
| characters because I have no strong sense of what they look
| or sound like. (TBH I think this is an asset when it comes
| to adaptations. I may notice plot divergences, but I'm
| rarely bothered by the specifics of a place or character.)
|
| A fair fraction of the enjoyment I get out of reading is
| about wordplay and language aesthetics, and much of the
| rest is about ~ideas and personalities.
|
| Reading tends to drive a lot of synthesis/connection
| between divergent concepts for me. Some of my most
| intellectually-fertile (generative) time centers around
| reading.
|
| I generally can't count on any kind of eidetic memory
| (unlike those I know who can, say, picture a page or replay
| a conversation to extract information from it). Instead, I
| generally lean more on deep conceptual synthesis. I am much
| more likely to retain some picky detail when it's
| integrated into my broader understanding than if it's
| effectively an arbitrary fact. I am the person who would
| rather take an essay exam centered on understanding than a
| picky multiple choice that hinges on arbitrary details like
| dates.
|
| Likewise, I don't really vibe with arch/infra/service maps
| as much as narrative documentation. (This is not to say
| that they aren't sometimes helpful for understanding, but I
| do find them hard to ~grasp in isolation and not the first
| resource I reach for.)
| brotchie wrote:
| I read a lot and have aphantasia.
|
| Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me
| (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated
| to describing what people are wearing). I often even
| visually skip over section of text that express visual
| descriptions.
|
| All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent
| of me thinking about something.
|
| Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as
| some entity "space station" next to some other entity
| "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without
| any associated form.
|
| If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can
| think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere",
| "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more
| the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations
| would look like geometrically (expressed as relations
| between shapes, angles, etc).
|
| If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can
| attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute
| the tags "clouds."
|
| Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things
| in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is
| directing my attention in this manner.
|
| There's just no rich visual experience.
| jdbernard wrote:
| I'll add another data point as I believe I'm on the extreme
| end of complete aphantasia:
|
| Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too
| much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading.
| Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place
| setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even
| feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in
| my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling,"
| but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None
| of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my
| dreams.
|
| Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak
| autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my
| wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly
| they remember the events of my own life. I really do not
| recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old.
| At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong.
| Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened
| basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a
| very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I
| was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how
| recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are
| similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the
| motivating details of the plotline itself, and then
| subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of
| memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I
| can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I
| take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am
| flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course,
| none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more
| of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental
| substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not
| imagery.
|
| Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is
| decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to
| describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense,
| but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will
| immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a
| few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even
| replaying video games unless there is something novel
| (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is
| different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because
| there is a much higher amount of content from a logical
| plotline/story point of view.
|
| Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around
| arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used
| to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This
| is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without
| visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says
| this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings.
| Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I
| spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could
| do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult
| imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do
| with my family, etc.
|
| Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces,
| even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal
| fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast
| as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional
| exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his
| face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book,
| watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice
| because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there
| is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the
| character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their
| face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-
| of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I
| tend not to remember details of an author's physical
| description of their characters. I can't tell you, even now,
| if Aragorn has blue or brown eyes in the books. I think Viggo
| M. haa blue eyes, but that's a fact I'm remembering, not a
| mental image I'm consulting.
|
| Reading: not much to add I haven't touched on already.
| canes123456 wrote:
| It is very much a spectrum. People that literally halucinates
| things are just as rare. I am much closer to the aphatasia side
| of things. I can picture things in my mind but is extremely
| different from "seeing" things. It more like remembering how
| something looks. Also, all the stats on this are kind of
| bullshit because of how hard it is to describe. People just map
| on "picturing" to whatever they do.
| tbrake wrote:
| "Seeing" something in your imagination isn't a literal
| hallucination. It's an altogether separate form of
| visualization that doesn't interfere optically.
| theogravity wrote:
| How do you get diagnosed?
| b800h wrote:
| Anecdotally (can't remember the old book references), this had
| been observed in "new age" and "spiritual" groups in the 1960s,
| with the conclusion that people could be trained out of it.
| aphantastic wrote:
| I'd be careful about trusting spiritual/Word Of Faith groups
| too much, especially when the condition can't actually be
| tested for. An individual in the movement can easily say they
| were "healed" to bolster group confidence, and a third party
| individual might say they've been "healed" after being
| requested to stand around in a circle of prayer for five
| minutes as an easy out from the situation. I've certainly been
| in the latter case, and the former is fairly well documented.
| b800h wrote:
| It wasn't a matter of healing in this case; I trust the
| accounts.
| drooby wrote:
| I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's
| estimated to be 1-4% of the population.
|
| I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this
| is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm
| missing out on something special about the human experience -
| which makes me kind of sad.
|
| When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more
| vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple
| or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading
| fiction books actually becomes captivating.
|
| It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability
| but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms
| do.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Corroborating this anecdata.
|
| There is some research into visuals that seems elucidating.[0]
|
| [0] https://zugzology.com/blogs/myceliums-gambit/exploring-
| psych...
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| TL;DR This is what you're looking for https://firekasina.org/
|
| > It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this
| ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed
| or shrooms do.
|
| On one hand, with enough practice and skill in _doing drugs_
| the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become
| just more ordinary sensations
|
| On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for
| developing _faith_ that it is possible to "get there", but
| they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless
| you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like
| sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up
| it.
|
| Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs
| would be training "how to get back here from there", while
| training Concentration alone would be training "how to get
| there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front.
| Some people find the former to be more effort later on,
| unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons
| which should be obvious (it's free)
| catskul2 wrote:
| Jinx.
| drooby wrote:
| Very interesting. Thank you. I might try this.
| catskul2 wrote:
| Have you considered explicitly using weed or shrooms as an on-
| ramp to exercising this ability? You could devote some time and
| slowly build up your ability.
|
| Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or
| play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring
| new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to
| non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same
| amount of effort.
|
| I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize
| more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of
| meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire
| kasina".
| AQuantized wrote:
| I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After
| having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an
| enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1
| week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too
| intense and immersive.
|
| It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I
| would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability,
| but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same
| 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I have definitely gotten it back from intense meditation. I
| went to an intense meditation retreat which had us meditating
| all day (a vipassana 10 day course). For unrelated reasons I
| left after a few days, but my aphantasia was replaced with
| something very different after like a day and a half and I
| couldn't stop seeing things everywhere
|
| Still a bit weird, health-wise, but a lot more in your control
| than drugs.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| I remain fairly convinced that the ability to visualise things
| in your imagination is a skill like any other and people don't
| so much have aphantasia as an inherent condition that they
| probably started with little innate capacity and lost most of
| it through disuse.
|
| If that's the case, you can probably improve it simply by
| repeatedly using what you have. I say that because my ability
| to think visually improved greatly when I started drawing. Also
| I'm still not very good at conjuring well proportioned and
| shaded objects from nothing but I can pull them out of my
| memories.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I think most people literally can't imagine the range of
| difference here. As far as I can tell, "what I have" is zero
| for visual imagination, and I have no recollection of that
| ever being different. You might as well be telling me that I
| need to lift weights with my third arm.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| They imagine a simulation of themselves, but this simulation
| isn't necessarily realistic. They run the simulation, and the
| words the simulation uses to describe itself "visualzing"
| they just repeat verbatim. Human consciousness and self-
| awareness are so dim that they mistake this for themselves
| being able to do the same.
|
| If someone didn't have this "skill", they could prompt an LLM
| to "visualize", then repeat the words off the screen, and but
| for the clues that they're cheating bystanders wouldn't be
| able to tell much difference. I assert that there is no
| additional insight gained by the "visualization" that isn't
| available from the verbalization because these are, in fact,
| essentially the same thing.
| notamy wrote:
| > When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way
| more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an
| apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine.
| Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
|
| > It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this
| ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed
| or shrooms do.
|
| I experienced exactly this! It turned out that, for me, the
| root cause was multiple B vitamin deficiencies; correcting them
| caused my internal vision to become INCREDIBLY vivid. B
| vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production (ex. [0])
| -- particularly serotonin, which is known to interact with
| vision[1] -- and it's been amazing realising what I've been
| missing out on. Psychedelics[2] and cannabis[3] "improving" the
| condition makes sense since both have serotonergic activity
| (5HT2A specifically).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Neurological_disorders
| "[...] the bioactive folate, methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), a
| direct target of methyl donors such as S-adenosyl methionine
| (SAMe), recycles the inactive dihydrobiopterin (BH2) into
| tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), the necessary cofactor in various
| steps of monoamine synthesis, including that of dopamine and
| serotonin."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Effects
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT2A_receptor#Ligands
|
| [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3552103/
| drooby wrote:
| hmm.. interesting.
|
| I take a Vitamin B Complex every day from Nootropics Depot
| comprev wrote:
| I've experienced this too (only twice!) with strong weed
| (sativa) and it really took me by surprise. It was nothing like
| hallucinating - seeing objects in front of me morph / appear -
| but rather when I closed my eyes I could _imagine_ things.
|
| I could picture myself on a beach or walking through a forest,
| something I've always felt frustrated I could never create in
| my mind. I'll admit it was a slightly scary experience...
|
| By contrast I have a friend with a wonderfully vivid
| imagination. He's a photographer by trade and spontaneously
| captures moments / scenes on his phone while we're walking
| along. We're always asking questions about the other's brain :)
| brotchie wrote:
| +1, shrooms doesn't do it for me, but if I do a high dose of
| THC (20-30mg) and then listen to music, I can close my eyes and
| get some kind of visualization. It's still fleeting, but I can
| feel my mind react to it as super novel stimulus (otherwise
| 100% visual aphant).
|
| I did get pretty strong visual experiences from Ketamine
| therapy, but it's completely different from mental images. I
| felt transported to a different "head space" where there was
| abstract visual imagery that felt "real" but completely
| disembodied and not related to day-to-day experience.
|
| I really can't comprehend what it's like to have normal visual
| imagery or be a hyper-visualizer.
| smokel wrote:
| It may be worth investigating aphantasia from the perspective
| that space is a latent sequence [1].
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023
| djeastm wrote:
| >Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn't actually see
| an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape,
| its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn't see it.
| Behind her eyes, "it was completely black," Shomstein recalled.
| And yet, "I imagined an apple." Most of her colleagues reacted
| differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly
| and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.
|
| I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say
| they "see" things, I want to say "with what?"
|
| To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if
| your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing?
|
| I can _imagine_ things and have vague visual imagery appear in my
| head, but I can 't see them as "floating like holograms".
|
| I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand
| more.
| sctb wrote:
| > I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and
| understand more.
|
| When you say "understand", I want to say "with what?" The mind
| you're borrowing?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It makes me wonder how much of this is pseudoscience,
| especially internet discourse around it.
|
| How do we know that we don't have the same experience vs we
| just describe our experience differently?
|
| How much of this is just people having a normal human
| experience of not seeing literal visuals getting confused by
| people who are a much more figurative in the description of
| their own experience?
|
| Kinda reminds me of smoking weed in high school and there was
| always the kid who roleplayed that he was seeing a bunch of
| green men in the room.
| thornewolf wrote:
| I address the "maybe we describe our experience differently"
| in my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139321
| yodon wrote:
| >How do we know that we don't have the same experience vs we
| just describe our experience differently?
|
| The article makes clear there are significant differences in
| how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at
| different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have
| aphantasia" spectrum.
| smokel wrote:
| There is obviously a spectrum at work, as some people seem to
| be better at visualizing things in their mind than others.
| This does not surprise me at all.
|
| What does surprise me is that most discussions on aphantasia
| are very similar to those on religious experiences. Some of
| us can talk to God, while others are pretty sure He does not
| exist, because they never get an answer.
|
| Most scientists have given up on trying to prove that God
| does or does not exist. But quite a lot of ink had been
| spilled to get to that point. And it seems we still have some
| bytes to go in the phantasia discussion.
| warp wrote:
| There are now three distinct methods to measure visual
| imagery objectively, without relying on someone's description
| of the vividness.
|
| Here is a video in which prof Joel Pearson describes them:
| https://youtu.be/tA_4HNaKsS0 , IIRC Joel Pearson was involved
| in developing each of the methods, so I'm sure you can find
| his publications on the subject as well.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Aphantasia is one end of a spectrum, Hyperphantasia [0] is on
| the other end. You might simply have a more normal mind that
| can imagine things, but not have something akin to a
| manipulable hologram. As I have aphantasia, though, I can't for
| sure say if that's really on that end of it ;)
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
| davejohnclark wrote:
| You've articulated how I'd describe my experience as well. I'd
| not ever describe something in my mind's eye as 'floating like
| holograms'.
|
| "Vague visual imagery appear in my head" resonates with me.
|
| Edit: typo
| smokel wrote:
| Seeing most likely takes place deeper in the brain, not in the
| eyes.
|
| One hint for this is that we see the world upside-down by
| default. Another is the evidence that visual evidence cannot be
| trusted in a court case.
|
| It then seems likely that the responsible brain areas can be
| activated by memory, as well as by the eye sensors.
|
| The level of reality at which all this is possible in different
| individuals is obviously an open question. Whether one can
| train this is also not entirely clear to most.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| No one has ever seen anything with anything but their brain. It
| hardly makes much difference how some info got to the part of
| the brain that creates what we call an image, delivered direct
| from a retina or fabricated from memory.
| cryptonector wrote:
| When I "see" an object what I'm doing is imagining a picture
| (or movie) of the object. That image that I imagine is remotely
| in my actual eyesight -- there's no object floating in front of
| me. But I do imagine it as if it was in front of me, "floating
| like a hologram" in a way. It's like recalling a memory of a
| photograph.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding, yes I
| can see the apple in my minds eye in all of its glory and color,
| but yes it's still black "behind my eyes", it all depends on
| where I am focusing, on my eyes or on the apple.
|
| Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on
| the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are
| experiencing the same thing.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I can't. There is no apple. I remember how apples look from
| seeing them before. But I can't see it. I can't turn it, it's a
| completely abstract thing in my mind.
| b800h wrote:
| Can you describe a blemish on an apple to me?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yes, there's a spot on an apple. Probably brown. I remember
| that.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I don't think it's agreeing. I can't "see" anything my any
| means just from thoughts. Either I see or I don't. There is no
| visual part I'm remembering stuff. Not that I can really
| describe how I memorize things ... but from all I read about
| there is a big difference between people. Not just
| disagreement.
| thornewolf wrote:
| I address the "maybe we describe our experience differently" in
| my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139321
|
| I believe that there is something past just a disagreement on
| definitions.
| drooby wrote:
| I would absolutely never write what you wrote though..
|
| What "glory" do you speak of? For me, the apple is more of an
| idea and I can VERY faintly "see" fuzzy attributes about its
| geometry. And there is no color.
| yodon wrote:
| >I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding...this
| has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe
| what they are experiencing
|
| The article makes clear there are significant differences in
| how multiple areas of the brain are activated in people at
| different ends of the "has aphantasia"/"doesn't have
| aphantasia" spectrum.
| redhed wrote:
| I agree, not saying aphantasia isn't real but I think a lot of
| it is misunderstanding of those who think phanatasia is closing
| your eyes and "seeing" things. In an engineering class where I
| had to make drawings from multiple angles I would rotate it in
| my mind and draw it, I can can close my eyes and visualize
| walking around my childhood home, and I can visualize snap
| shots of important memories of my life. However, I don't "see"
| it in any sense of what it is like when my eyes are open, not
| even close really.
| saltcured wrote:
| I think I'm pretty far out on the aphantasia spectrum. Mostly
| the spatial and abstract qualia of a scene, not like seeing.
| Even an afterimage of a strobe is more visual than my
| imagination. I can't really picture faces of loved ones, though
| I can sense strong recognition and/or anticipation of features
| or mannerisms when seeing an actual person.
|
| But I have a variable audio and proprioceptive imagination that
| is something in between, like many people have described above
| for visuals. Not like a hallucination or waking dream with
| perceptions equivalent to real senses, but with way more qualia
| than just an abstract idea. A distinct category of simulation
| that lies somewhere in between.
|
| So, I can believe that others have things more like this, but
| visually. And I have observed mentally ill people with full on
| hallucinations and delusions, and can also believe that there
| are other stages along this spectrum, more vivid but still
| distinguishing self-generated from sensory-generated
| perceptions.
|
| For imagery, I have the most tenuous topological or spatial
| perceptions that, if anything, connect more to my
| proprioceptive sense. Like as if I could imagine myself being
| some sort of tentacled animal and reaching all over to feel a
| complex structure in an instant. Or at times of extreme focus,
| I can almost feel myself as an amorphous charge spreading out
| (breadth-first) through a complex graph or maze.
| jraph wrote:
| I'm not sure I picture an apple if someone asks me to imagine
| one. I'm not sure it has a particular color neither.
|
| If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus
| on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a
| conscious process.
|
| So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by
| default.
|
| I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they
| happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in
| the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by
| definition.
|
| I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my
| mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not
| conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something
| detailed, maybe it would come with training.
|
| Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things
| to try guessing I'm dreaming xD
| thornewolf wrote:
| I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice.
|
| First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a
| miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience
| but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over
| the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than
| I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a
| difference in communication, but truly a difference in
| experience.
|
| With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do
| many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I
| struggle with many other things too.
|
| - I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.
|
| - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated
| variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
|
| - I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do
| really anything past a single operation.
|
| - When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
|
| - I can't mind palace really much at all.
|
| - I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.
|
| Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never
| had any internal audio.
|
| Interested in other people's experiences.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated
| variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
|
| Interesting, I can reason how it should look and figure it out
| that way, but I never could just select one from seeing another
| version of it.
| catskul2 wrote:
| Do you ever talk to yourself silently? How fast do you read?
| thornewolf wrote:
| Yes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time.
| Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless).
| I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize
| I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit.
| There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these
| thoughts though.
|
| I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I
| do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers
| typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is
| that I often never learn character names in books, since I
| just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a
| similar reading style also has this experience.
| tupolef wrote:
| Sorry but, your list of examples feels like a list produced by
| an AI from a set of articles about aphantasia, or it's like
| you're too influenced by these articles. Rotating 3d objects,
| doing multiple visual operations on a rubik's cube or mental
| abacus are not operations that even people with hyperphantasia
| will be able to do naturaly. If you gave more examples of every
| day situations, or if you told us that you tried to train for
| thoses operations for 3 months and failed, we could conclude
| something else.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| When you do mental object rotations, does the answer just come
| to you?
|
| Like if I ask you to think of a car brand, one just jumped into
| your head. Does the correct rotation just come into your head
| too?
|
| For me to do rotations I have to visualize the object in my
| "minds eye" and then I watch it rotate. I can't imagine doing
| it any other way.
| digging wrote:
| Command line vs GUI. (Or, for most people, a combination)
|
| In my case I'm approximately typical but there are things I'm
| better or worse at visualizing. I've never successfully worked
| a mind palace, I find myself too distracted and unable to hold
| the image, as if in a dream. But I'm quite good at mentally
| navigating routes and can build a pretty large visual model of
| roads I drive. (Oh. Maybe I should make a "mind city" instead.)
| vaindil wrote:
| I've always struggled with descriptions of aphantasia and I don't
| know if I have it myself because I don't know what's "normal".
| This article also didn't clarify it.
|
| When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they
| were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical
| image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine
| something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a
| dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put
| something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual
| vision stays completely black.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| > It's like a dim picture
|
| You don't have aphantasia. In people with aphantasia, there is
| no "it" to describe.
| sebtron wrote:
| As far as I understand yes, most people actually see something.
|
| At some point I figured out this "test" to explain aphantasia
| to people: ask someone to imagine a car. After that, ask them
| about visual details of the car: what color is it? what type of
| car is it? (Other objects might work better than a car; In my
| experience color is the attribute that will be the most
| surprising, vwry clear for some completely absent for others.)
|
| Most people are going to answer with whatever they "saw". For
| me these follow-up questions don't make sense.
| naasking wrote:
| Not see, but visualize. It's like a different sense. Can you
| recall what something you touched felt like, what something
| smelled like, what something tasted like, or sounded like?
| The recollection of the experience is different than the
| sensory experience itself, but there's still something of the
| original sensory experience to it. Visualization is like
| being able to recall what something looked like in this way,
| as if you had seen it even though you didn't.
|
| Your vision can feed your visualization, but it doesn't go
| the other way, which would be a hallucination.
| ulbu wrote:
| it would be a hallucination to see something appear in vision.
| it's in that internal space that images appear. for some
| people, it's not impossible for these two spaces to overlap,
| but i guess most of them we would consider psychotic.
|
| notice how a person daydreaming looks spaced out. they're not
| looking through their eyes then. no, people do not augment
| their reality, unless hallucinating.
| xatax wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. I can't see things as though they're
| physical objects but I can sense them in some other way.
|
| I can also draw outlines with my eyes closed - e.g. I can point
| my finger out and trace the positions of my desk, table,
| windows, etc.
|
| But when explaining the concept of aphantasia, my go to
| explanation is to look directly at a person, close my eyes, and
| say "I have no idea what you look like." I can still sense
| where they are - height, weight, - and I can state facts about
| their beard or hair colour, but I'm not seeing it in any way
| I'd normally use the word 'see'.
|
| But with all that, I feel like it could be close enough that
| that might be how others sense things and we just lack the
| terminology to express it, so I tend not to say I'm aphantasic
| as a definite term.
| BananaaRepublik wrote:
| Do you have an inner monologue? If you can hear your inner
| voice, you'll know that your inner voice is less of a voice and
| more of a speaker that can play anything you like. The only
| limits are my own knowledge, experience and creativity.
| davidhs wrote:
| Sounds like you have hypophantasia.
|
| Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's
| physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
|
| * (1) Seeing inside your head. * (2) Feels like seeing behind
| you or/and somewhere else. * (3) Seeing through another set of
| eyes (mind's eyes) * (4) As if I just saw something, but not
| with my own eyes.
|
| People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's
| thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain
| mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is
| not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia,
| where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's
| eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
|
| Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project
| visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might
| describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the
| visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on
| this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in
| the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being
| able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
|
| When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate
| between these visualization modes.
|
| There are potentially other modes of visualization out there
| that I don't know of.
|
| EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense
| modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily
| sensation, etc.
| stvltvs wrote:
| It's a spectrum, so it's not whether or not you experience
| aphantasia but to what degree.
|
| Also, my experience is that I can imagine very detailed objects
| and scenes, but the happen in a second mental space, not the
| current visual field. To imagine something, I have to stop
| paying attention to the sensory input of the world around me
| and mentally turn aside to the second space where imagination
| happens.
|
| I struggle to impose imagined objects on the visual field. I
| end up imagining what it would look like if I could, but this
| happens in the second space, in an imagined copy of the visual
| field.
| altruios wrote:
| Okay, explaining personal experience is notoriously difficult -
| but here we go:
|
| This is a story - this is not literally true, but is a roughly
| similar shape of things.
|
| My experience is that I am a little thing piloting a giant
| thing (my body) - I sit in a seat and watch a screen. That
| screen shows me what my eyes see, and to the edges and beyond
| are empty. In front of me - between the screen and me - is an
| empty space. In that space I can draw lines, color things, move
| things, rotate things.
|
| If I concentrate hard enough I can overlay (by seeing the space
| while I have my eyes open) an imagined thing in real space (The
| imagined item is still originating from that space - not the
| screen - but the screen and that space...mix). The screen from
| my eyes is an order of magnitude brighter - so I have to focus
| in order to do that. I can imagine things with my eyes open...
| but when I do, I am not facing the 'eye-screen' inside my head,
| I'm looking down and away from it and only at that space of
| imagination.
|
| I recently starting drawing: It seems to solidify this
| space/ability more than any other mental exercise I've tried. I
| have noticed a distinct improvement when I started
| deconstructing what I was seeing in real live down to basic
| shapes (In that imagined space and overlaying it on what I was
| seeing).
| bitwize wrote:
| When I was doing forms and rehearsing techniques in martial
| arts, I would imagine wireframe fighters coming at me.
| Normally they were yellow, but a successful strike against
| "hitboxes" in their limbs, torso, or head would turn the
| corresponding part red. I couldn't see them as such like a
| HUD, but I could visualize them, and it noticeably improved
| my technique.
|
| I've adopted the "tiny pilot controlling a meat mech"
| perspective before, but the "screen" is wrap-around and very
| close, there's no space outside or between me and it.
| electrondood wrote:
| > there's no space... between me and it.
|
| Now consider that the idea that there is a "me" perceiving
| the screen is only an un-investigated assumption, and that
| this "me" is actually only implied by whatever object
| appears on the screen.
|
| Can any such separate entity actually be found?
|
| Or is the thinker implied by the thought, the listener
| implied by the sound, the feeler implied by the feeling,
| etc.
| deciplex wrote:
| To kind of piggyback on here since you described your
| experience very well, I'll give my own as a contrast to
| yours:
|
| Mine seems similar. Instead of piloting a body I just am my
| body, and I don't perceive any screen. Instead of an "area
| between me and the screen" I just have a completely separate
| workspace of sorts where I can visualize things. But - and
| this is where I differ from you the most I think - in my mind
| that workspace is quite separate from my field of real
| vision. If I concentrate I can kind of overlay them, but it
| feels very artificial.
| hexaga wrote:
| Likewise, this mirrors my experiences near exactly. In a
| very real sense, I am/embody the contours of my senses.
|
| On a possibly related note, when I was very young there was
| a moment I distinctly remember 'pulling away' from this
| sense-surface-of-self, and a bone deep certainty that if I
| did so I would be lost and/or have done something
| unrecoverable. Spooked me thoroughly at the time, but now I
| wonder if doing so would have formed that intermediary-type
| viewpoint.
| gadders wrote:
| Yeah, that pretty much lines up with my experience. If I had to
| place the image that I am "seeing" anywhere, it would be inside
| my forehead.
| digging wrote:
| Weird that I don't see any links to this, supposedly the
| definitive test: https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/
| lagniappe wrote:
| It's probably not linked because it is just "do you have
| aphantasia" rephrased various ways. This test is very poorly
| designed and comes off like a facebook quiz.
| > No image at all, you only "know" that you are thinking of
| the object > Dim and vague; flat > Moderately
| clear and lively > Clear and lively >
| Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing
|
| All of the examples are not necessary if they can all be
| answered with the same answers.
| digging wrote:
| Not at all. Having taken it, despite also thinking that it
| looked absurdly simplistic, I was surprised my answers were
| different depending on the subject. Nor is the result a
| boolean "yes/no" at all, which should be obvious from the
| more-than-two answer choices to the questions - phantasia
| is a spectrum.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Thinking about it is not the same as seeing it. I can like
| 'see' e.g. my house in my imagination. But it is more like a
| fast glimpse or looking past it. There is nothing to focus on.
| I can't count the windows without remembering them one by one.
| I need to rethink about the door to 'zoom in' on it etc.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Do you see things when you have a dream or how about in the
| intermediary when you're falling asleep? people claim they can
| visualize things like that at will.
|
| I'm of the mind to think that people are unreliable narrators
| of their internal world and are not to be trusted on either
| side of the spectrum.
| naasking wrote:
| > It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can
| kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or
| clarity.
|
| It's like having a second visual sense, but it's not strictly
| the same as standard vision. It often does lack clarity, but as
| with any other sense, you can sharpen specific details by
| focusing on it. Your real vision can feed into this secondary
| vision, but not the other way around, which would be a
| hallucination.
| BananaaRepublik wrote:
| Aphantasia might occur with other senses too. I'm almost certain
| I have aphantasia in taste and smells. I simply cannot conjure
| any in my head, even for extremely common ones like taste of
| apple or sun dried sheets. When people ask me about my opinion of
| food I just had, I'm simply recalling facts from my assessment
| made during the meal. It's very different from how I do it if I
| had to recall something visual like a painting, because I do have
| a vivid mental image.
| bengale wrote:
| I'm sorry what? pPeople are doing this with taste and smell
| too?
|
| Can people just imagine all of their senses?
| foobiekr wrote:
| For those who cannot visualize things: try the same experience
| with your eyes open. I can't visualize anything with my eyes
| closed - maybe black-and-white shadowy outlines if that - but
| with my eyes open I can visualize things kind of up above my head
| outside my visual field.
|
| (There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older,
| perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the
| feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my
| forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very
| things that are you start to become threadbare.)
| postalrat wrote:
| I find it's a lot easier to visualize vividly when I have a
| real problem to solve and harder when I'm just trying to
| visualize.
| gligorot wrote:
| I recently learned that people are on a spectrum of thoughts
| visualization - not everyone _thinks_ the same. If you want to
| check your personal mix of "visualization" characteristics this
| questionnaire by Uni of Wisconsin-Madison is useful (you also get
| your position on the distribution curve):
|
| https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
| jedberg wrote:
| I have this, as does my wife. We both thought it was normal up
| until about a year ago, until our kids informed us that they
| actually see the things they imagine.
|
| I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so
| real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't
| visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can
| visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it
| happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring
| out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or
| an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by
| looking and imagining).
|
| But yeah, no mind's eye.
|
| I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated
| with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for
| that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)
| yodon wrote:
| Discussion pages like this one are constantly filled with people
| saying "Aphantasia doesn't exist, it's just differences in how
| people describe the same thing," when the science in this paper
| and others is clear.
|
| Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see
| them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a
| hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all
| the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.
| beej71 wrote:
| This reminds me of something that might be related. Someone
| recently told me that if you look at any object, you can imagine
| what it feels like to put your tongue on it. (With all kinds of
| subsequent hilarious and disgusting suggestions.)
|
| And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true
| for most?
| avalys wrote:
| A few months ago I took a mental imagery quiz and one of the
| questions was "Can you imagine what it would feel like to lick
| a brick wall?"
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| We have a lot of experience touching things with our fingers
| (in daily life) and tongues (more when we're younger), and can
| extrapolate from this experience.
|
| In my own experience, this extrapolation is overconfident - I
| tested licking a few random items, and while my expectation was
| close to reality, I was always just a little off for the truly
| novel items. Of course for something gross, most people won't
| (and shouldn't!) test their expectation, so they go on with the
| confirmation bias that they got it right.
|
| First example that comes to mind is that the roof of my mouth
| feels much smoother to my tongue than it does to my fingers.
| TomMasz wrote:
| What I find interesting is that people with aphantasia still
| dream like everyone else but can't _voluntarily_ evoke images in
| their mind.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Which is why I thought I was completely normal, because when I
| remember them, I have very vivid dreams. When I found out about
| that, I did get a bit sad and jealous that there are people who
| can essentially do that at will, while awake. Sounds close to
| magic to me.
| avalys wrote:
| You're not missing much.
|
| As far as I know, I have a very good ability to visualize
| things mentally. I can picture objects and scenes vividly,
| with good detail, rotate objects in my mind, etc.
|
| However, there's one critical aspect of this that I don't see
| people talking about - if I picture a scene that is
| "pleasing" to look at, like a beautiful sunset - I get
| absolutely no pleasure or enjoyment from doing so, like I
| would if I saw it in real life. Somehow the fact that it is a
| deliberately imagined scene bypasses whatever part of my
| brain would react with pleasure. Part of this is that there's
| no novelty to it - I know what I'm imagining, so there's no
| sense of "Oh wow, look at that!"
|
| So for me, this is a purely practical ability - I can go to
| Ikea, look at lawn furniture, and pretty easily picture how
| it will look in my backyard - but that's it.
|
| If I lost this ability, I do think it would make some
| everyday tasks difficult that I take for granted, but I
| wouldn't be sad about losing the ability itself.
| theogravity wrote:
| I believe I have complete aphantasia - I can't form any images
| at all with any detail. When I dream, it's conceptual with no
| images, like reading a story out.
| Frummy wrote:
| This ability varies with our health and exhaustion. A year or two
| ago I had less control of conjuring images like these by choice.
| Only a week or two ago I regained more control of depth, not that
| it wasn't 3d before, but making it really pop makes a big
| difference. The key has been long distance cycling, cardio is
| important for a clear mind.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| .. and then, of course, there's "able to visualize an object when
| rotated in three dimensions."
|
| I think the percentage of people who can't do that is way higher
| than 1%. I'm not great at it myself.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a
| picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't
| mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.
| ajkjk wrote:
| You still know the shape.
|
| But the answer is definitely 'not very well'.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I've heard of artists with aphantasia, just maybe there are
| fewer as a percent than the general public.
| elric wrote:
| Well that would certainly explain why I've always been
| absolutely terrible at drawing...
| drooby wrote:
| It's honestly more confusing to me that most people are bad at
| drawing but supposedly most people don't have aphantasia.
|
| I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images.
|
| When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines
| tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I
| erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I
| can anticipate which strokes will make sense.
| tstrimple wrote:
| It's similar for me. It has to be a very iterative process
| where the image emerges rather than me having a solid idea in
| my head and bringing it to life.
| Frummy wrote:
| It's more of an artisan muscle memory thing. You can definitely
| tell sometimes, that someone has the right hand movements to
| sum up all the details that make a complete painting, but the
| overall composition is lacking in the coherence or planning or
| perspective. The result being something like medieval
| manuscript animals. There are still rules such as perspective
| lines and so on that can compensate. How can someone code
| without planning the architecture beforehand? Line by line, but
| spaghetti structure arises subtly. If you just start drawing,
| you have a sense of the next stroke, and next stroke. But yeah,
| drawing by markov process can lead to shoddiness without a
| clear guiding visualisation.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I think that sculpting would be much better suited as the
| properties and relationships of an object hold true. When
| making a 2d drawing it's a projection which has very different
| relationships.
| bengale wrote:
| I can't really. If I draw I need reference material.
|
| I can make little play dough models though? I know the shapes I
| just can't see them in my mind.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Maybe this is why I am terrible at drawing lol. If I try to
| draw a dog there is a good chance most people wont be able to
| tell it's a dog.
|
| I can try to draw one because I know the characteristics of a
| dog and I can fulfill them as I am creating the shape on the
| paper. But I don't think I see it ahead of time.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about
| a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good
| at mental math.
|
| Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in
| their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm
| pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the
| difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about
| numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation.
| (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of
| imagery.)
|
| Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must
| have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).
| tstrimple wrote:
| Sample size of one. I have aphantasia and cannot picture images
| at all. I had a "natural" affinity for math and would often
| zone out extrapolating mathematical patterns in my head during
| school. Like the trick with multiplying 9s where you hold your
| fingers up. I remember spending days of class time working on a
| more generic rule to allow me to multiply any number by 9 in my
| head. This came to a crashing halt for calculus as I was not
| able to develop a mental model for it _at all_ during high
| school. Everything that had been easy and interesting before
| just disappeared when it came to memorizing formulas with no
| rhyme or reason.
| tzs wrote:
| > Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do
| math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper.
| And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well.
|
| Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize
| doing the problem with an abacus [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
| jibbit wrote:
| A couple of things I noticed while teaching drawing to students
| (who were quite good) and i was a bit obsessed by Aphantasia..
|
| It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a
| drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from
| imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable
| characteristic that isn't present in drawings from imagination.
|
| This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive
| themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who
| describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are
| often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional
| idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could
| from life/photo than anyone else.
| generalizations wrote:
| Few cameras have the same focal length as the human eye. I
| wonder if your observation would hold if that were accounted
| for. Same as the difference between 'attractive' faces and
| 'photogenic'.
| xpl wrote:
| I don't actually "see" mental images, but I "feel" them. For
| example, I can remember a friend's or a celebrity's face --
| clearly recalling the "feel" of that face -- the exact qualia I
| experience if I actually saw it -- but there is no "overlay
| image", my eyes see pitch black that moment! It is a very high
| level qualia, totally decoupled from visual perception. But I
| swear it is the same as if I actually _saw_ a certain face. It is
| so strange.
|
| Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in
| inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall
| something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is
| hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or
| more imagination than others.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Thats just called imagination. Do you think that when other
| people picture something it literally replaced their vision?
| iwontberude wrote:
| When I do mushrooms I like closing my eyes and watching my
| brain attempt to maintain the image as it swirls and contorts
| into analogous yet increasingly orthogonal forms
| cynicalkane wrote:
| This is a smug non-reply to the parent post. People with
| imagination might not always "replace" vision, but they can
| summon images to the mind's eye other than complete darkness.
| And personally, I feel I can obscure the world around me if
| focused on a particularly powerful daydream.
| neom wrote:
| For me to do it for long periods of time in high fidelity, I
| need to either close my eyes or do this blurring/out of focus
| thing I don't know how to describe. So in a sense, it does
| have to replace my vision literally. I regularly lead high
| level strategy meetings with my eyes fully closed so I can
| use my memory and imagination fully, I've seen other people
| do this also so I presume I'm not alone.
| fzzzy wrote:
| It's a spectrum. Replacing their vision is called
| hallucination.
| hhjinks wrote:
| That is _literally_ how it 's presented in the article.
|
| >Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported
| actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly,
| floating like a hologram in front of them.
| neom wrote:
| For me, that is the intermediary step before the drawing. I
| think the image is just my imagination of that feeling you
| discribe + some specific memory of aspects of the thing? I have
| very vivid mental imagery. I don't believe it's specifically
| drawn from memory, more generally drawn from that qualia you
| talk of + the attributes I know of the thing + situational
| memory.
| riiii wrote:
| I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see"
| things.
|
| Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically
| eigengrau but everyone calls it black)
|
| I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!
| schneems wrote:
| It's not like: visual stimulus. It's more like when you see
| something, that experience eventually translates into a picture
| in your mind.
|
| When I close my eyes I "see" black, but I can recall the face
| of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same
| circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual
| optical input.
|
| I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing
| was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense)
| was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge)
| and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract
| concepts such as "beauty". So I don't know if what I said makes
| sense. Hope it helps though.
| kodt wrote:
| This seems to be very similar to the debate on internal
| monologues. No-one can seem to agree on what exactly they
| think it means.
| riiii wrote:
| The internal monologue is interesting. If you are taking,
| who is listening?
| hbosch wrote:
| Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite
| philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article
| describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple".
|
| >She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its
| color, the way light might hit it. But she didn't see it.
| Behind her eyes, "it was completely black," Shomstein recalled.
| And yet, "I imagined an apple."
|
| What is the difference between this, and what another person
| might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to
| confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their
| imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can
| rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I
| can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples
| rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them
| bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am
| imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic
| clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here.
|
| So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of
| us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the
| person in the article is describing the physical reality
| (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as
| someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see
| colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one
| another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black
| sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies
| of imagination.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| It's definitely different when you're dreaming or when you're
| falling asleep, I mean the vividness of one's imagination so
| people are claiming they have the same level of vividness all
| the time it seems that you must take their word on this, no?
| jumploops wrote:
| I have aphantasia, and so does my brother. Neither of our parents
| do.
|
| Both of us are really good at three dimensional thinking, but
| have no "visual" aspect to said thoughts.
|
| The best way for me to describe it, is that, when imagining an
| object (apple, barn, etc.) my mind thinks about the physical
| structure of the object. I can't "rotate" it because there's
| nothing to "rotate" however I can describe it in 3D space using
| my hands.
|
| Again, there's nothing "visual" about the way this works. My mind
| just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Again, there's nothing "visual" about the way this works. My
| mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.
|
| It's hard to imagine (for us visual thinkers) how one could
| think spacially without also visualizing.
| givinguflac wrote:
| The best description I've come across (as someone with
| aphantasia myself, which I discovered after reading this
| article yesterday) is that it's like describing the metadata
| and emotional sensations associated with an image in my mind.
| I really thought people talked about "seeing with the minds
| eye" as a metaphor, until yesterday.
| taberiand wrote:
| I suppose it's all fundamentally just electrical and chemical
| impulses - presumably for most people those pulses pass
| through the visualisation part of the brain, and for others
| it takes another path - yet the end result of the processing
| is more or less the same, just mapped onto maybe smells or
| feelings or something instead of images
| jumploops wrote:
| Yes, it's hard to describe with words.
|
| The spatial thinking is relational in concept, such that I
| can think about distances and angles in relationship to one
| another. I can describe (and build), with my hands, but I
| can't "see" the object from a certain angle.
|
| It's as if there's a bunch of points in virtual space, again
| not visualized, but accessible to my thinking process. I can
| imagine how they relate, and how they can fit together,
| without actually seeing it rendered. Not sure if that makes
| sense or I'm just muddying the waters.
|
| Another example would be Legos, which I played with a ton as
| a kid. I can think about the exact piece I need, and think
| about the larger thing I'm building as a composite of said
| pieces. I keep mentioning my hands, because the way it's
| expressed in my mind is more of a "feeling" than anything
| visual.
|
| Another way to think about it would be like a 3d model of the
| world, where I can think about my route/position/etc. through
| it, without having any concrete view. It's like a 3d file
| without the 2d renderer.
| SeriousM wrote:
| The article made me thinking if my way of "visualizing"
| things is limited. My kids do have a vivid imagination for
| visual things out of nowhere, I on the other hand need a
| spark or idea to get the flow going.
|
| > Another way to think about it would be like a 3d model of
| the world, where I can think about my route/position/etc.
| through it, without having any concrete view. It's like a
| 3d file without the 2d renderer.
|
| That example just fits perfectly my perception of things. I
| habe a very good mental model of everything that fits well
| in my brain but it's sometimes hard to put them into
| words... yet I get better by describing "my view". Funny
| that I have a graphical memory but can't construct any new
| in my mind.
| jsrcout wrote:
| This is so interesting. As a test, I wonder if you could
| make something out of Legos without any issues if you
| blocked your vision so you couldn't see them or your hands.
| Guessing that that you could.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Just close your eyes and rely on your hands for a bit.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| If you're saying to close my eyes and use my hands to
| manipulate some 3D shape, I'm going to be visualizing it
| while I do that.
| toolslive wrote:
| it's like a lidar (I have aphantasia too)
| mondrian wrote:
| Do you remember events visually? Does your memory work
| differently than imagination?
| karmakaze wrote:
| The way I imagine it works is like the weights of a machine
| learning network. The lower-level convolutional layers are
| discarded and only the higher-level feature extracted weights
| _(latent space I believe it 's called)_ are remembered. We can
| then 'think' in that feature space with no associated imagery
| but feel our way around in that space.
|
| There was one time (before the web) where I was trying to solve
| a physical puzzle of balancing many long construction nails on
| the head of a standing one. I couldn't solve it, but must have
| thought about it because when I woke up, I knew the solution
| and demonstrated it _(I already knew it would work)_ as soon as
| I got to the office where the nails were.
|
| I also spend long periods pondering a problem staring into
| space and not thinking of anything specific but during that
| time my mind is mixing and matching and trying different
| arrangements of possible solutions. I can't see any of this
| happening, but every now and then I'll have an idea making
| connections I hadn't considered before. Often one of them will
| pan out well.
| bengale wrote:
| I've always suspected it makes it easier for me to think
| abstractly without having any images to tie concepts to in my
| mind.
| spelunker wrote:
| > "It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation
| as I will ever live in the flesh," Ross wrote in a 2016 Facebook
| post about his personal discovery. All his life, he had thought
| "counting sheep" was a metaphor.
|
| It's NOT a metaphor?? People are actually imagining sheep??
|
| Anyway I've suspected before that I have some form of this.
| mondrian wrote:
| People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual
| field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and
| very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it. An
| imaginary horse pops into your visual field while you're making a
| tricky maneuver on the highway...
|
| Also, presumably ADHD is widespread. But people who don't have
| aphantasia (most people) can reliably persist accurate imaginary
| objects in the visual field? Your attention is fragmented and
| jumping from thing to thing but the horse in your visual field
| persists there for you to visit and revisit? Highly doubtful.
|
| The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in
| their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate
| field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the
| visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing.
| The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly
| dependent on the ability to focus attention.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual
| field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and
| very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it...
| > The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up
| in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a
| separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but
| not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and
| morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary
| object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention
|
| I have on a few occasions woken from a dream, opened my eyes
| and seen the image from that dream persist for a second in my
| visual field. It's a pretty freaky experience - probably very
| much like a hallucination.
|
| I've also been walking, deep in thought and then looked up and
| not known where I was because I had a different picture of a
| different place in mind.
|
| How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any
| visuals? (the article says that some do)
| mondrian wrote:
| > How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any
| visuals?
|
| Pretty sure that they have vivid dreams like everyone else.
| The aphantasia is limited to the topic of conjuring visual
| imaginations while awake.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Nah. Some people don't remember dreams.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| All right, how about when you're tired or drifting off to
| sleep? I can certainly see things vividly in my mind I
| during those times. It seems to me that being awake
| suppresses such visualizations, and that this is adaptive.
| zaphoyd wrote:
| I have complete aphantasia when awake, but I do have
| visuals when dreaming. I can tell when I cross some
| threshold of awake-ness because the visuals of the dream
| I am having disappear (the dream usually continues,
| without visuals for a bit longer until I am more awake).
| It is a weird experience.
| jdbernard wrote:
| No. I replied in a sibling comment, but even in the few
| dreams I remember there is no visual image at all.
| jdbernard wrote:
| I have complete aphantasia. I do dream, but rarely remember
| them. The dreams I do remember have the same quality as my
| imagination when reading a book. Meaning, I don't see
| anything when I dream. I know the story, I can feel the place
| setting, and recognize the actors involved (even to the point
| of knowing their internal motivation like my own), but there
| is no visual component whatsoever.
| jessekv wrote:
| It's more like having a separate eye you can direct your
| attention too. Perhaps like a spider might, with its extra sets
| of eyes? :D
|
| Edit: And yes, better not do that too much while driving.
| Although I do use this faculty when parallel parking, I imagine
| the car and surroundings looking down from the top and simulate
| the optimal parking approach.
| mondrian wrote:
| Yes! Apt description.
| gus_massa wrote:
| When I imagine an object, it doesn't appear in my visual field.
| Anyway, for complex visualization I have to close my eyes.
| mondrian wrote:
| You can imagine an object right now, and it's floating in
| front of your laptop, occluding this text? If so, that's
| wild.
|
| Edit: Oops I read "does appear" instead of "doesn't appear".
| avandekleut wrote:
| It doesnt occlude. It's like "in your mind's eye". I
| imagine its like the perception of it is higher up in the
| visual processing hierarchy.
| __rito__ wrote:
| Yeah, it's more like a parallel reality which you can
| switch into. And sometimes the switching happens
| involuntarily.
| avandekleut wrote:
| I have a strong visuospatial sketchpad (e.g. I sometimes
| imagine building things from lego in my head). When Im driving
| at night on a highway I have to be careful because I can start
| to have complex and involved visual imaginations that take more
| attention than the road in front of me. I have ADHD as well.
| mondrian wrote:
| Yes I can relate to this. I can get deeply sucked into
| imagination while ignoring my actual visual field /
| surroundings.
| __rito__ wrote:
| There is something called "Hyperphantasia" and yes, it is
| what it sounds like. But, there are much less scientific
| studies for this, as opposed to aphantasia.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual
| field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and
| very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it.
| An imaginary horse pops into your visual field while you're
| making a tricky maneuver on the highway..._
|
| Does the image from your left eye occlude the image from your
| right eye? No, it doesn't.
|
| It's the same for mental imagery. It's a third "image buffer",
| alongside the two from the eyes. It coexists in the same
| coordinate system as the other two, but it doesn't occlude
| them.
|
| Can you imagine a song in your head? If so, does it drown out
| the sound of the real world? Again, no.
| mondrian wrote:
| I fully agree, and that is my experience. I am just grappling
| with what looks like quite a bit of misunderstanding around
| aphantasia. Some people make it sound like it involves
| imaginary objects in the visual field, causing other people
| (who probably don't have aphantasia) to start suspecting that
| they too have aphantasia, because when they close their eyes
| they can't see vivid images on the backs of their eyelids.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Does the image from your left eye occlude the image from
| your right eye? No, it doesn't.
|
| I know it's kind of a tangent, but I have double vision; the
| images from my two eyes do not converge, they're not looking
| at the same thing. As such, the images from my eyes overlap
| and I see both of them at the same time. I need to wear a
| fresnel lens on one of the lenses of my eye glasses to
| prevent this. If I'm not wearing them, it makes it
| complicated to interact with the world. It's mentally
| exhausting. Plus I sometimes walk into things because I
| avoided / went around the "wrong one".
| anentropic wrote:
| I haven't tried it but this person claims to have a technique you
| can practice as an aphantasic and learn to visualise:
| https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
| afro88 wrote:
| That's incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm not
| aphantasic but when deliberately picturing something the image
| starts correctly but changes to something else quickly. They
| are also not vivid at all.
|
| However when I think or remember things (consciously or day
| dreaming) the images / video is better. But as soon as I focus
| on it directly it changes and I lose it so to speak.
|
| Gonna give this a try.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I read about something a long time ago, maybe in a lucid
| dreaming context, but it was about a man who was sitting on a
| train in the early 20th century daydreaming, and the shadows
| from trees rapidly passing over his eyes basically kickstarted
| his ability to visualize with his mind's eye. I think he might
| have even gone on create a device with a spinning circle with
| slits on it and a lamp behind it in order to play with the
| effect.
|
| Anyways, I tried it a long time ago, and it definitely enhanced
| my ability to truly "see" mental imagery. Give it a shot! All
| you need to do is close your eyes and relax in front of
| something that is generating a lot of bright/dark areas in
| motion. Even sitting in front of a TV in a dark room with the
| TV muted would probably work.
| brotchie wrote:
| I've tried this for an extended period of time and it hasn't
| yielded a huge improvement.
|
| When I'm laying in bed at night, close to falling asleep, if I
| concentrate really hard, I can sometimes get a little glimpse
| of mental imagery. Like a fleeting moment (perhaps ~500ms) of
| seeing a full scene (a forest, mountains, a city) but then it's
| gone.
|
| I think a mistake people make is trying to "see" things in the
| blackness of their eyes. I've noticed when I get these fleeting
| images it's when I'm kind of not "looking" at the black, but
| kind of relaxing my eyes on turning off my attention to my
| "photon-based" visual system.
| lilyball wrote:
| Trying that right now, when I rub my eyes I can see the
| phosphenes, but they never do anything more than just float
| around for a bit and then vanish. Sometimes when I stare at the
| back of my eyelids hard enough I get the impression of static,
| but that's it, the static doesn't ever turn into anything.
| ghoda wrote:
| I wonder how this related to the phenomenon where people forget
| faces or don't realise that it is possible to remeber faces
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I have aphantasia and I can remember faces quite happily but I
| can't visualise them when thinking about the person. Same as I
| can recognise a tomato, a ship, a train, whatever, but I can't
| visualise them in my mind.
| bengale wrote:
| I have it and I'm terrible with faces. If I spend long enough I
| can sort of pattern match distinct features but a whole face is
| generally lost on me.
|
| Movies where you see a character that has aged or changed style
| are a mystery. My wife has to call out if it's the same person.
| She's pretty good at knowing when I'd have lost track.
| tzs wrote:
| Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play
| chess?
|
| When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they
| do so by visualizing the board and pieces and them moving those
| visualized pieces around on that visualized board. They pretty
| much do with the visualized board what they would do if they had
| access to a physical or computer analysis board that they could
| actually move pieces around on.
|
| I once wondered if top players do it that way too, or if maybe
| the see the position in some more abstract way like a graph with
| pieces as vertices and colored directed edges encoding
| relationships such as "The rook is attacking that night" and
| "that knight is defended by that bishop" and moves are then
| operations that shift edges.
|
| I asked GM Nakamura about it on an AMA he did on Reddit, and he
| said he sees the board just like nearly everybody else does.
| abetusk wrote:
| For what it's worth, there's a study (N=123) on recall for
| people with aphantansia [0]. One of the tests was to take a
| look at a picture, of a living room with furniture in it, say,
| and then have the subject try to redraw the room in as much
| detail as they can. People with aphantansia have better spatial
| accuracy and fewer memory errors.
|
| The basic hypothesis is, I guess, that people with aphantansia
| develop scaffolding to help them memorize so they're better at
| some of the details that other folks that rely too heavily on
| their mental imagery.
|
| I don't know of any studies on chess in particular (though I
| haven't looked) but I would imagine that something similar
| could be at play here, where it might not be obvious that
| people with aphantasia are worse for these types of games.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
| johnfn wrote:
| I have aphantasia and I play chess (albeit not very well...)
|
| Honestly, I think that aphantasia is a bit overhyped; I can do
| virtually all the things that people with normal mental imagery
| can do, except I suppose actually visualize the thing in my
| mind. The way that it works feels akin to a blind man groping
| in a dark room. If I try to visualize a chess board, of course
| I only "see" blackness (or nothing), but if you ask me what
| square is at e2, I can kind of mentally "feel" in that area and
| know that there's a king pawn there. And I can kind of "feel"
| below it that there's a king, and a queen, etc.
|
| Normal people see things in their visual imagery by directing
| their attention at a spot in their mind, seeing it, and then
| registering what they saw. I just skip the middle step.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| Interesting. As an aphant I can perhaps do what you describe,
| what I can absolutely not do is e.g. calculate moves with my
| eyes closed. I can calculate a couple of moves in, but then
| it gets hard, and I'm not sure if this is something solveable
| with practice or just a hard stop.
|
| Similarly, the top chess players can remember a lot of the
| matches they played, and others they studied. This is not
| something my brain is able to do, period. Similar to how I
| have less personal memories than a lot of other people.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| I'm about 1800-2000 on lichess and have almost complete
| aphantasia and I do feel like it really hurts me, especially
| in very sharp middlegame positions. When calculating I have
| to explicitly list out what squares are attacked by what
| pieces, which is inevitably very slow.
|
| Long term positional planning isn't a problem as I can feel
| my way around a position pretty well and can imagine
| positions I want to reach, but detail heavy calculation is
| much harder.
|
| Doing a lot of deep puzzles is the best antidote I've
| found.(And blind chess, but that's really hard)
| v64 wrote:
| Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual
| board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the
| board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall
| falls to average. It may be that they're not directly
| interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it
| combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct
| the details.
| dfan wrote:
| IM David Pruess has aphantasia and can play multiple
| simultaneous blindfold games.
|
| Pretty much everyone at my level (2000 USCF) can play
| blindfold. I always assumed that I was completely unable to
| because of my aphantasia, but when I heard about Pruess's
| story, I decided to work on it, and I now can, although with
| difficulty and very slowly.
|
| Basically I still keep around all the information about where
| all the pieces are; it's just not on a virtual board that I
| "look" at, it's stored more abstractly. I keep track of
| clusters of pieces and relations between them. The fact that I
| have an excellent sense of the board itself (I know how all the
| squares relate instinctively) helps. But I still have to stop
| all the time and confirm where all the pieces are (or,
| conversely, what's on every square).
| dfan wrote:
| As an addendum, when I calculate variations in chess or Go I
| sometimes close my eyes because my "board database access"
| can be easier to operate when everything is purely in my
| head, as opposed to performing mental diffs on the physical
| board in front of me, which requires me to keep track of both
| real and virtual pieces.
| bengale wrote:
| Yeah I have this. I also can't hear voices or sounds in my mind.
| Poor autobiographical memory tracks too, major things stick but a
| lot just fades pretty quickly.
| postalrat wrote:
| If you try to repeat a drum beat without making any noise can
| you image what it would sound like?
| bengale wrote:
| No, just silence.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I have aphantasia and similarly didn't realize it until a few
| years ago, at 22, when someone asked me that "Apple" test.
|
| Since then, I've noticed a few interesting things:
|
| 1) I remember things by association. I'm great with maps,
| physics, economics, and topics where things are inter-related,
| but terrible at memorization and obviously can't visualize
| anything.
|
| 2) I'm relatively unburdened by trauma. A lot of my friends will
| have a visual memory of things that have happened to them, but
| for me, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. It's sort of sad
| to not remember all the good times, though.
|
| 3) It's not really related to taste (I think my taste visually is
| better than most of my friends and they ask me for fashion
| advice), but I have to see something to know how it will look and
| make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or
| designer.
| brotchie wrote:
| 100% visual aphant here, but have a very strong musical "minds-
| ear". So not full-sense aphantasic.
|
| Best self-described mental model for how my brains feels
| internally is as objects (in the programming sense) with
| properties and relations. As I "imagine" something, I'm
| recalling the object "living room couch", and then enumerating
| properties of that object "leather, brown, L shape."
|
| If I think of something on the couch e.g. "cushion", then it
| starts off being just a relationship "cushion is on the couch"
| without any location component. If I then inspect the
| "location" property of the cushion, then I think "the cushion
| sitting upright in the L-shaped bend of the couch."
|
| I'm pretty damn good at spatial reasoning in my head, e.g. I
| can "design" a component in my head, and then sit with Fusion
| 360 and create it as a 3D CAD model... but I'm not actually
| seeing anything in my head at all. It still remains in that
| abstract object <> properties <> relations head-space.
|
| In some ways, when I'm imagining a 3D object in my head, I'm
| actually thinking "this sketch" with "this shape" extruded by
| 10mm. So the actual constructive process by which an object is
| realized in my mind IS the actual process by which I'd design
| it.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I'm like you. I have good spacial intelligence, but I never
| realized until reading this headline that some people
| actually see what they are imagining? That seems insane.
| matsemann wrote:
| I'm curious:
|
| 1) But how do you navigate when you're not looking at the map?
| I'm placing myself mentally "in it" as a dot and can then know
| that I need to go two streets more etc. Or any game I've ever
| played I can recount now in my head, for instance I could
| explain to you how to get to a star in Super Mario 64. Can you
| do that without "visualizing"? What if I ask what level is to
| the immediate right when entering the castle? I can see it, but
| I wouldn't have memorized it any other way I think?
|
| Also 1), when I do maths I also visualize it. Like I can
| mentally integrate a formula, and then I see it in my head as
| if it was on a piece of paper. How do you keep track if you
| can't see it? Or programming, it's like things that align in my
| vision when I design some piece of code, I can see the
| different parts and how they will fit together, how is that for
| you?
| OvbiousError wrote:
| Not OP but aphant: the information is there, we just can't
| "see" it. So we can know how to navigate because the map is
| stored, it's just that we can't access it in a visual way.
| Note that for me the access is less detailed and also fades
| quicker.
|
| As for maths: I actually have a physics PhD and am now a C++
| dev. I couldn't mentally integrate anything complex. Never
| needed to, someone invented paper at some point ;) I'm a
| decent programmer I'd say, it seems to be common among
| aphants to be good at abstract reasoning, which I think
| really helps with coming up with good programming solutions
| to concrete problems.
| jdbernard wrote:
| Not OP, but another visual aphant.
|
| Navigation - I'm doing the same thing, but without "seeing"
| it. I know Georgetown is N-NE of Austin, Liberty Hill is due
| W from Georgetown, IH-35 runs N-S but actually slightly NE-SW
| through Austin for example. I can draw pretty good maps on
| command (if not to scale), but I don't "see" that until I put
| it on paper. I think I actually have a much better recall of
| spatial relations than my wife, who has a vivid mind's eye.
|
| Regarding math: again a similar process, but I don't "see"the
| equations. Coding is interesting because when I'm really in
| the zone I feel like I can sit, think, and come up with a
| holistic design for some problem. Then as I start to write
| the code I can "feel" the congruence or discongruence between
| the code I've written and the design I conceptualized. But
| it's not, for example, a visualized graph in my head. It's
| more of a physical graph, like holding a carved statue and
| feeling the curves, edges, and features. Except it's not the
| same physical sensation as touch, but a mental analog.
|
| Edit: another commentator called it "imaginary
| proprioception" which I find very apt.
| sandspar wrote:
| If you listen carefully, you can hear the rumble of the hordes of
| people rushing to post "I have this".
| karmakaze wrote:
| I only recently realized that my mind's eye really isn't. Just
| now I made the connection maybe why I can't stand descriptive
| prose. I remember having to read the Scarlett Letter _(think that
| was the one)_ and there were pages and pages of words painting a
| picture that did nothing for me, and I was just waiting for it to
| get on with telling the story. _Out of context but "I'm drowning
| here and you're describing the water." sums it up for me._
|
| Another thing that makes sense now is how I could never learn
| facts and stories in school. I'm guessing that I just couldn't
| form a conceptual model for me to store it. If I studied a field
| deeply I could probably be able to connect all the dots and it
| would make sense. OTOH math and science was super easy as they
| were all formulas and relationships that touched on each other
| and naturally all fit into place relative to each other, once I
| could get a thing to _click_ I wouldn 't have to remember it
| because I'd just _know_.
| lilyball wrote:
| > _No matter how nascent the research is into these imaging
| extremes, the scientists all agree on one thing: Aphantasia and
| hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the
| spectrum don't have problems navigating the world._
|
| I don't know about hyperphantasia, but aphantasia absolutely is a
| disorder. I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office
| wall, and I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them
| out mentally. They've been sitting in a pile for years because I
| have nowhere to even begin. I can't just start hanging things
| because I'm going to end up unhappy about where everything is
| placed. Decorating things in general is very difficult. Or any
| sort of arranging or laying out where I don't have a
| representation I can physically (or digitally) manipulate to
| explore ideas.
|
| I also have really poor dreaming. For most of my life I'd say I
| didn't even have dreams. When I do have dreams, the visual
| quality is shockingly bad and largely abstract and indistinct.
|
| I also have very little autobiographical memory, which I
| previously didn't think was connected to aphantasia until reading
| this article. I do know that looking at photos of the past helps
| with recall, very frequently when my wife tries to describe
| something to me I'll have no memory of it until I can see a
| photo.
|
| The funny thing is I'm actually fairly visual-driven otherwise. I
| learn better when I can see things. Although maybe that's
| actually a consequence as well, maybe other people construct
| mental images when listening or reading?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| It's funny because I have no mind's eye, and I definitely
| consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a
| euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by
| friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the
| "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was
| serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at
| least.
|
| My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not
| think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately
| think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture -
| it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the
| walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on,
| can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the _concept_
| of an elephant in a room. There 's no visual.
|
| Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have
| a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously
| "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which
| is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second
| left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule
| for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-
| right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while,
| and then drops out.
|
| So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules
| up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect)
| structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like
| running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best
| analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults
| well before others do - and often several complex states away
| from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings
| just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down
| the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-
| out, but it's still something of a super-power.
|
| I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I
| blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will
| interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the
| womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning".
| Someone goes off and writes a test and _almost_ all the time
| (hey, I 'm human) I'm correct.
|
| Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I
| think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except
| the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
| lilyball wrote:
| Thinking of relationships is exactly how I conceptualize what
| I do too. I can manipulate geometric objects in my mind even
| though I'm not seeing them, because I'm manipulating the
| relationships between the objects (or between the
| vertices/edges within an object).
|
| The downside of this is all this modeling of relationships is
| a lot to keep in my brain at once, so there is a limit to how
| far I can push this.
|
| That said, I've yet to encounter a situation where this is
| actually any better than what my wife can do, who does have a
| mind's eye (and is frighteningly good at tetris / packing).
| The part you describe about seeing "boundary conditions"
| sounds to me like what I do with seeing edge cases and
| potential unwanted interactions in programming, which is
| completely non-visual.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of
| visualisation.
|
| _From_ is a strong word. It sounds more likely you gain that
| from having a very high IQ. But in a poetical sense yeah,
| necessity begets use which begets development, and it 's
| fascinating and inspiring that you were able to build your
| life around that.
| naasking wrote:
| > I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office wall, and
| I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them out
| mentally
|
| You don't have to lay them out mentally to organize them. Just
| lay them out on the ground and rearrange until it's
| satisfactory. If aphantasia is linked to other issues, they're
| minor enough to have straightforward workarounds like this, and
| no worse than being mildly forgetful or something. That's below
| "disorder" threshold I'd say, which is why aphantasia has
| basically gone undetected for so long.
| lilyball wrote:
| If I lay them out on the ground, I can't see how this
| interacts with the furniture that's by the wall.
| naasking wrote:
| So mark out the furniture outlines with masking tape on the
| floor.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| As an aphant. I kinda think it made me better at
| physics/mathematics. I also really like not having traumatizing
| images stick around.
|
| If I could choose I wouldn't get mental imagery, I'd rather
| like to be non-aphant for taste. I do have "sound imaging" btw.
| It's great to see more research into this, it can e.g. lead to
| teaching/learning techniques that are more tailored to how ones
| brain works.
| dfan wrote:
| Same here! I think whatever compensatory mechanisms I've come
| up with turn out to be real advantages in some ways.
|
| One interesting thing that I've found is that my approach to
| physics and math problems is often extremely geometric. Even
| if I don't visually look at things, I'm constantly
| constructing objects in my head (e.g., graphs of functions)
| and playing with them, although it's in more of a tactile
| way. I'll immediately start thinking "what does this function
| look like?" when my peers are more likely to start by pushing
| symbols around.
| galkk wrote:
| I cannot see mental images and it never occurred to me until my
| late 30s that things like "mental palace", "imagine yourself on a
| beach", even kind of Feynman ball mean literal picture that
| people kind of see in front of their eyes.
|
| I was trying really hard to do mental imaginary techniques to
| remember things in games (e.g. "imagine ikea shelf and put number
| when the next item respawns in corresponding box") until I
| realized that there is something wrong with me and the entire
| premise.
|
| For everyday life, I think that this is has some weight in the
| fact that the docs that I'm writing usually text heavy and don't
| have many illustrations/diagrams and I was/am solving spatial
| puzzles kind of "analytically" in my head.
| amelius wrote:
| This may not be for everyone, but I found it interesting:
|
| https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/sex-and-aphantasia/
|
| (mild nsfw warning)
| hintymad wrote:
| Just curious, doesn't it happen to everyone for certain
| abstractions? When we study maths, our teachers encourage us to
| "see" examples or geometric representations or simply some
| abstract representations in our mind. Some people couldn't do so
| at high-school level, some people couldn't do so at college
| level. Those who can no matter what have a high chance of
| becoming an accomplished mathematician or scientists, but even
| for them they can't "see" mental images for every concepts no
| matter how hard they try.
|
| Similarly, someone couldn't see mental images for the things they
| wanted to draw, and they were miserable in their arts class. I
| certainly felt so.
| corysama wrote:
| As a coder who was reasonably good at math, I've always done
| mental work by tracking the motion of objects in my head. Can't
| see them. But, I know where I put them and how I want to
| shuffle them around. Imaginary proprioception, I guess. Works
| better for data structures and algorithms than for math.
| boricj wrote:
| I don't have aphantasia, my mind's eye is composited onto my
| senses. Obviously I'm aware of what I'm consciously imagining,
| but I've recently realized that I can't actually tell the
| difference between imaginary and real sensory inputs. I'm
| experiencing them the same way.
|
| I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce
| sensory hallucinations at will.
| v64 wrote:
| > I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce
| sensory hallucinations at will.
|
| I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I
| have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain
| drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call
| these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets
| my experience apart from others.
|
| I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in
| my head quite well (with verification of this through being a
| musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is
| definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| Sounds like hyperphantasia, so also a bit rare and on the
| complete opposite side of the spectrum ;) Most people fall in
| between the two extremes.
| boricj wrote:
| I do have a vivid imagination, but I was specifically
| referring to the way it is subjectively experienced, not its
| objective quality.
|
| If I decide to play a song in my head, I know that it's not
| real, but I don't _hear_ that it 's not real. Not because of
| the quality of the rendition, but because it would be
| indistinguishable to me from hearing an identical live
| reproduction [1]. If I'm really tired and start having
| sensory hallucinations, I don't know that they're not real
| and I don't hear that they're not real.
|
| Personally, after experimenting with it, I believe that when
| I'm imagining sights or sounds, I'm actually self-inducing
| sensory hallucinations. I can do it with other senses too,
| but I have less practice with those. I don't _have to_
| visualize in order to think or conceptualize [2].
|
| All of that is what makes me think that aphantasia is the
| inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will. Depending
| on the person, it might be limited to one or more senses, the
| quality might be limited by available bandwidth, but if it's
| _visualized_ then it would not be distinguishable from an
| equivalent sensory input. If it 's _conceptualized_ , then by
| definition it's not a sensory input. Of course, I only have
| my own subjective experience as a data point, so I don't
| expect this to be an authoritative answer.
|
| [1] Excluding other correlated stimuli, like feeling my
| innards vibrating due to proximity to a speaker emitting a
| loud base.
|
| [2] I'll have to think and experiment on my own to quantify
| this part. That being said, I haven't managed to read a
| sentence without having a voice speaking out the words in my
| head.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Best I can tell is that I think I have this. Or at least some
| amount of it.
|
| But I find it really hard to understand what people exactly mean
| when they describe their visualization experience.
|
| Like I definitely don't feel like I see anything if I close my
| eyes and try to think of specific objects.
|
| If I close my eyes and rub them I can see sorts of blobs and
| sparkles that are usually white or a bit yellowish even though my
| eyes are closed.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| The sparkles are real, so they don't count. And yes, most
| people, when they count sheep, do this literally, i.e. imagine
| a bunch of sheep and count them. I also can't do that, never
| could. Realized my brain was different when I knew I couldn't
| do the memory palace thing, even though I'm among the smarter
| part of the population. /r/aphantasia has more info and other
| aphants ;)
| mk12 wrote:
| I've never understood how people talk so objectively and
| confidently about this. There are subjective things we'll never
| able to compare, like whether your experience of red and green is
| the same as mine or swapped. Then there are other things like
| face blindness that have testable effects in the real world. When
| one person says they see 80% clear mental pictures and another
| person says 10%, how can we be so sure they aren't just
| describing the same experience differently? I have no idea how I
| could accurately report my experience of the apple test. I could
| say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by
| seeing.
|
| EDIT: It also reminds me of the "inner monologue". I'm skeptical
| when people confidently claim they have no inner monologue, as if
| it's as easy to verify as being right-handed or left-handed. In
| the context of meditation, it's common for people to confuse
| "having no thoughts" with "thinking nonstop" -- it's not an easy
| thing to understand about yourself, let alone claim how it
| relates to other people's subjective experience.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I think that means that you have aphantasia? I just asked my
| wife if she can see the apple and she can, no doubts, she
| pointed to it and asked what I meant, of course she could see
| it, she was imagining it and that is what imagining means. I
| feel like I'm missing out now, I kind of wish I hadn't read the
| story now.
| mk12 wrote:
| If it means being able to hallucinate on command, i.e.
| superimpose the apple in your view as if you were wearing AR
| glasses, indistinguishable from a real apple apart from your
| knowledge that it's fake -- then that's a much sharper test
| and I can confidently say I can't do that. I'd be very
| surprised if anyone told me they could do that. If it's more
| of a separate mental plane rather than _really_ seeing it,
| that 's where I think it gets tricky to agree we're
| describing the same thing.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I have no idea how I could accurately report my experience of
| the apple test. I could say I see it clearly or not at all
| depending on what you mean by seeing.
|
| Same on my end. As far as I'm concerned, I don't see an apple,
| but basically just in the sense that I'm not hallucinating--
| with my eyes open, there is no apple before me, and with my
| eyes closed, there is no apple on the insides of my eyelids,
| and I don't think that there is. I feel like I could answer
| questions about the appearance of my imagined apple, but I
| don't literally see it. But does that mean that I have
| aphantasia? Since this seems to be the main diagnostic
| instrument for a casual Googler, and since, as you say, there's
| no way for me to understand whether or not other people
| "really" see an apple, I have no idea.
|
| (If people think that your point about never really knowing
| what other people are seeing is merely academic or
| philosophical, I'll mention that my mother went a long time
| before getting her amblyopia treated because she assumed that's
| what things looked like for everybody. Nothing in ordinary
| conversation told her, or anyone else, that her vision was
| different, and so no-one ever thought to test her for it.)
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right?
|
| I literally don't believe that aphantasia meaningfully "exists"
| given what we've learned about brains. I'm reminded of the
| great article I saw about how "Your mind is not a computer?" No
| one remembers "images" in the way a computer does, we
| (re)construct them via association.
|
| So I think our brains "remember" enough to do what it needs to
| do and no more, and so called aphantasia people are perhaps
| doing what subjectively feels like less reconstruction based on
| what they read.
| omgin wrote:
| > how people talk so objectively and confidently about this
|
| I can visualise things in my head exactly the same as someone
| with their eyeballs removed can see real things.
|
| I think that's relatively objective.
|
| And I say this with confidence.
| dfan wrote:
| The thing that finally made me very confident that I had
| aphantasia (back in 1998, before it was A Thing) is that I
| realized that my ability to "hallucinate" sounds is excellent.
| I can re-hear songs in my head, I can compose music and hear it
| as I think about it, I can hear my friends and family talking
| with their particular cadences and accents. I can't do anything
| remotely like that with visual images. Before I had that
| realization, I thought it was pretty possible that I was "just
| describing the same experience differently".
| gamerDude wrote:
| Conversely, I discovered I had anauralia (finally got a name
| for my inability to "hallucinate" sounds). I found it when I
| was hosting a weekly event and meeting lots of people. And we
| talked about senses and memory, etc. And one day I realized I
| have no sounds in my memory, nor do I get songs stuck in my
| head. I asked others and it was instantly clear they had a
| different experience than mine.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| We have algorithms that can hallucinate now.
|
| LLMs basically are examples of how humans visualize things.
| With a few differences. Humans have more fine grained
| control over the result and understanding of a query. LLMs
| have greater detail in the sense that the LLMs knows the
| location of every wrinkle on a face while our imagination
| delivers an approximation with detail only being rendered
| if we decide to focus on the details.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Memories are also highly fallible, there are many experiments
| that prove people will rewrite what they did and why they did
| it and believe the new version of reality fully.
|
| I remember reading somewhere that consciousness is like a
| public relations manager. It makes sense that highly social
| creatures that will die if shunned by their tribe would have a
| complex system for explaining their actions in the most
| positive light possible.
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