[HN Gopher] Some people can't see mental images
___________________________________________________________________
Some people can't see mental images
https://archive.ph/iMdvd
Author : petalmind
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-10-30 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| ourguile wrote:
| https://archive.ph/iMdvd
|
| I have aphantasia and it always astounds me when I see an article
| like this, or hear a friend talking about it (about not having
| it) and realize that their experience of the world is so
| fundamentally different than my own.
| tekacs wrote:
| Have you seen the Aphantasia Apples?
|
| https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...
|
| As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a
| scale of 1 - 5 of with what kind of fidelity you can picture an
| apple if you try to imagine it?
|
| I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question
| I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally
| in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several
| different numbers.
| ourguile wrote:
| I have seen it and unfortunately, I'm a 5. I quite literally
| cannot picture an apple in any form. I understand what I'm
| supposed to be picturing but when I try there's nothing that
| appears. It's fascinating to me too, since I typically have
| quite vivid dreams and I've been able to lucid dream on a
| number of occasions.
|
| Now, I've chatted with friends, and my one friend is close to
| a 2, or maybe a 1 from how he described it (being able to
| visualize the apple and rotate it 3-dimensionally).
| seneca wrote:
| I fully believe this to be real, but I struggle to
| internalize that there are people who genuinely can't picture
| an apple. That is a very useful simple tool. Thank you for
| sharing it.
|
| Even this feels like only a partial scale. I can picture what
| an apple looks like, rotate it in my, and see how light would
| reflect off of it as it moves.
|
| How about smell? Can you call you mind what it would smell
| like to slice open an apple and experience that in some
| sense? Or what it would sound or feel like? I'm curious if
| it's literally "seeing" or if it's the entire experience of
| imagining an event.
| Xiol wrote:
| I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'm also a 5.
|
| I can do none of the things you describe. I _know_ how an
| apple looks, smells, tastes and sounds when you cut into
| it, but I can 't visualise or hear those sounds at will. I
| cannot call to mind any visual image of an apple.
|
| I also can't visualise my wife or children's faces,
| although again, I know what they look like (so it's not
| face blindness).
|
| I do think I also have SDAM as well, which I think quite
| often goes hand in hand with total aphantasia.
|
| Hasn't really affected how I go about in the world. I don't
| feel deficient in any way. It was only a few years ago I
| found out my experience isn't what the majority
| experiences.
| seneca wrote:
| This is incredible to me. I wonder if you have some other
| mechanism of "knowing" or recalling that I don't that
| substitutes in. It's entirely possible, given that so
| many people report not being aware their experience is
| atypical.
|
| I find this absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you
| sharing.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| I'm 4 at a push. When I read, I see _very_ vague images in
| my head, but that's about it.
|
| I'm very adept at conjuring up sound, though. Maybe it
| doesn't apply in the same way, but I can hear full
| symphonies and pick out individual instruments and
| harmonies and the like.
| nogha wrote:
| I also have it I'm in my late forties and only found out last
| year. It blew my mind people saw, heard and smelled things in
| there mind.
|
| I barely ever dream.
|
| Guided meditation has never worked for me.
|
| I have a crazy good sense of direction. My girlfriend doesn't
| understand how that works if I can't see it in my mind.
|
| I do have vivid recall of what things look like but I don't see
| them at all.
|
| It all made so much more sense when I figured this out.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Is this related to internal monologue? I don't see mentioned in
| my view.
| ourguile wrote:
| I've seen some sections discussing memory, but not necessarily
| internal monologue.
| drdec wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| Anecdotally I know someone with aphantasia and they report
| having an internal monologue.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'm aphantasic and can hear internal monologue just fine.
| racingmars wrote:
| From everything I've read about aphantasia, I'm certain it
| described me -- I have absolutely no ability to consciously
| "visualize" things in my head (I was also surprised to learn
| that some/most people sometimes experience a smell sensation
| if they recall smells, or "hear" music when they think about
| music or have a song stuck in their head, etc.)
|
| Really the _only_ thing in my head is my internal monologue.
| If I 'm thinking about something I've seen, it's my internal
| monologue "saying," with words, physical attributes I
| remember about it. If a song is stuck in my head, it's my
| internal monologue (in my own voice) signing the lyrics or my
| own voice humming the tune in my head. No sensation of it
| being the original artist or the actual instruments, it's
| 100% my own voice in my own head.
|
| I have a friend who says she does not have any inner
| monologue at all, and thinks entirely visually. I can't
| imagine! We're on the pretty extreme opposite ends of the
| spectrum of how we think, apparently.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| Yes, that. Same here.
|
| I still remember (semantically) that my parents laughed at
| me, when they told me to count sheep to fall asleep and I
| told them all I can see is darkness and white dots when I
| close my eyes. They probably thought I was joking.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, aphantasia is talked about a lot but similarly whether
| people have an internal monologue, and to what degree, varies a
| lot. But they're not necessarily highly correlated, if at all.
| YcYc10 wrote:
| I think it might be. I'm pretty sure I don't have an internal
| monologue the way people describe it, and I definitely can't
| conjure up actual images in my mind. I can however imagine
| sounds or music.
| aurumque wrote:
| There is a related set of experiences that articles like this
| tend to conflate.
|
| * presence of internal monologue
|
| * ability for visualization
|
| * ability for audiation
|
| * affective memory (remembering feelings)
|
| * SDAM (weak autobiographical memory)
|
| It speaks to the larger questions around the human experience,
| and that we are only now discovering the many ways it differs
| for each individual.
| zeryx wrote:
| That's me! I can visualize processes really well, and complex
| systems. But ask me to picture or hear something in my head and
| I'll just stare at you.
| YcYc10 wrote:
| I was about to write something almost exactly this. However I
| can "hear something" if I try but definitely not picture
| something in the literal sense.
|
| Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've
| only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are
| related. Do you have the same?
| zeryx wrote:
| Yes same even multiple times, but if I met them online
| (slack, teams) I'll always remember them.
|
| When I was younger I was much worse at recognizing people and
| names, as an adult it's gotten much better
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia
| but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex
| systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until
| aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really
| visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial
| elements.
| pitdicker wrote:
| To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a
| few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but
| otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams. But it does
| not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any
| way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from
| multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with
| the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling
| stuff.
| andy99 wrote:
| I've read tons of these and still have no idea if I have
| aphantasia or not. I can't understand whether people just have
| different ways of describing what's in their minds eye or if
| there's really a fundamental difference.
| thecaio wrote:
| I was thinking the same! At first, I thought I was firmly in
| the "can clearly visualize" camp, but the more I read and hear
| people describe how they form (or don't) mental images, the
| less sure I am.
| bigyikes wrote:
| I've interrogated people about this but can never get a
| straight answer.
|
| ----
|
| "So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are
| closed?"
|
| Yeah!
|
| "And it's as though you're seeing the object in front of you?"
|
| Yeah, you don't have that?
|
| "So it's like you're _really_ seeing it? It's the sensation of
| sight?"
|
| Well... it's kind of different. I'm not _really_ seeing it.
|
| ----
|
| ...and around we go.
|
| Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don't see
| anything at all if I'm conscious and closing my eyes. I can
| recite the qualities of an object, and this generates
| impressions of the object in my head, but it's not really
| seeing. It's vibe seeing.
| mnmalst wrote:
| I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see
| - things. Like, when I close my eyes, I see the inside of my
| eye lids, the blackness. When I then try to imagine a candle
| for example there is no candle appearing in the darkness, I
| just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar
| characteristics. I see nothing.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and
| similar characteristics_
|
| If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do
| you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a
| list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular
| cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?
|
| I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I
| cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and
| most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame
| flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can
| see the yellow light it casts.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Not the parent, but I relate to their experience.
|
| It depends on what you mean by "see".
|
| It's nothing like seeing with my eyes, and it's nothing
| like dreaming.
|
| When I "see" it is abstract. There are impressions and
| sensations. I can recall the qualities of something -
| even the visual qualities - but it doesn't feel like
| sight.
|
| Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall
| a foul smell, but I don't recoil because it doesn't
| actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression
| of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
| mnmalst wrote:
| yes I think you come close to describing how I imagine
| things. Seeing is just fundamentally the wrong word, at
| least in my case. When I for example imagine a road I
| rode on with my bike the other day and do this with my
| eyes open, there is nothing popping up in front of my
| eyes, mixed with what i actually see atm, it's more like
| abstractions popping up in the back of my head. Very
| simple drawings maybe, just the contours of how it really
| looks.
| altruios wrote:
| Perhaps it is a mental process you can train and get
| better at. I understand the 'back of the head', location
| for imagination. And now - for me - it's at the front
| with some specific training. Drawing (and specific
| techniques within) have been the cause of the biggest
| shifts to 'where/how' my imagination is.
| Narushia wrote:
| > it's nothing like dreaming.
|
| That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine
| "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty
| much _exactly_ like the sensation I have when I "see"
| stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially
| clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close
| my eyes while awake -- I can continue where I left off,
| and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.
|
| But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the
| physical act of seeing with your eyes.
| cma wrote:
| > Can you remember what something smells like? I can
| recall a foul smell, but I don't recoil because it
| doesn't actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an
| impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
|
| Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I
| visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and
| recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not
| with most other foods so I think it's more mouth
| preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov
| saliva before feeding reaction.
| goatlover wrote:
| What about memory? Do you occasionally have vivid
| memories of sight, sound or smell?
| tavavex wrote:
| Can you describe what you mean by "seeing"? To me,
| imagination isn't like actual sight. The best way I can
| describe it is that it's a kind of meta-perception, I'm
| envisioning the thought, the impression of something. I
| can visualize the exact details and properties of the
| candle, but it's not like I'm actually seeing it, I'm
| just thinking of seeing it. The way you describe your
| imagination is that it's as if the candle is superimposed
| on your actual vision, like putting on a mixed-reality
| headset that's drawing in stuff in your real field of
| view, representing the same kind of sight as "real
| sight". Is that what that's like for you?
| the_af wrote:
| It's like a photograph is an indirection of the thing
| that was photographed: not the real thing, but a good
| visual approximation.
|
| It's like watching a movie; the people are not there, but
| you still see them.
|
| The cinema is in my mind. People here describe it as
| "thinking of seeing", but to me that's nonsense. It's
| definitely a visual thing, I bet it's activating some of
| the same regions in the brain. Seeing _is thinking_
| anyway, in the sense the brain is interpreting signals
| from the optic nerve.
|
| It's never an hallucination in the sense of being
| confused about what's real and what's not.
|
| I can also anticipate the taste of something I like, feel
| it in my mouth, and start salivating. Is it tasting or
| "thinking of tasting"?
| kraftman wrote:
| It's more like it's in a different plane, you can see it
| but it's from another source, like how I can hear things
| but it doesn't effect my site. If I imagine a candle I
| "see" a candle in front of a black background, with a
| flickering flame and a bit of wax dripping down the side.
| Like how you can have a song in your head but still
| listen to people
| antonvs wrote:
| I remember the shape of a candle perfectly well, I just
| can't "see" anything.
|
| It's not a list of abstract properties, it's an
| understanding of the shape of a candle. Why would you
| need to be able to see it to remember its shape?
| the_af wrote:
| Because the shape is a physical thing, it's perceived by
| your senses.
|
| I meant remember, not understand. You can understand
| something, but I specifically mean remember.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I'm also the same, but I do believe others can vividly see
| creations in their mind's eye. Nikola Tesla was one who
| could tinker in his imagination.
|
| Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand,
| like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have
| strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely
| may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like
| following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual
| information, it's far more topologically structural than
| bound to 3D physicality.
| drooby wrote:
| I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even
| quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2
| vividness.
|
| But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with
| my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so
| fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my
| daily life.
|
| What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and
| correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up
| to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual
| visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering
| in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the
| curtain.
|
| So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this
| feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to
| transfer information in this way.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Exactly same here. Can operation on the data, without the
| visuals.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Back when I was on some medication to help me sleep, it
| came with the side effect of having vivid dreams... and if
| I didn't fall asleep fast enough after taking it, I'd get
| hallucinations while my eyes were closed. I knew I wasn't
| seeing what I thought I was seeing, but I wasn't really in
| control of the imagery. In one case, I thought there was a
| suit of armor standing over me and mumbling. In another, I
| was laying in bed, but I was seeing the living room from a
| few feet outside of my bedroom.
|
| My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't
| any different than those hallucinations, with the exception
| of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what
| I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting,
| shading, and so on are all like what you would see with
| your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Pretend you're talking about photos and cameras. You mean you
| can see the image? even though the camera isn't pointed at it
| now? Like it's really seeing it?
|
| Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory
| of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg
| instead of a live feed.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Let's suppose you have perfect recall.
|
| Pull up the image on your phone and look at it. Now close
| your eyes and imagine the image as accurately as you can.
|
| Is it as though you didn't close your eyes at all? Do you
| see it the same way as when your eyes are open?
| k__ wrote:
| No.
|
| When I'm fully awake, the mental images are more like
| someone attached a new camera with a field of view that
| ends at the edges of the object/scene I try to generate.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Okay, forget everything outside that field of view in
| your real vision.
|
| If you could crop your real field of view somehow to just
| the photo in question, then would it be as though nothing
| changed?
|
| (Like, I get that things outside the phone image would
| change, but does the image your imagining change? Does
| the sensation change?)
| more_corn wrote:
| I've got a hollow log from an apple tree in front of my
| parked car. I know the contractor put a bucket upside down
| on it, I could walk out my front door with my eyes closed
| and kick it (I know exactly where it is) But is the bucket
| at an angle to the left or right? I don't have a picture I
| can reference. I know that I don't know because I'd have to
| have noticed and remembered.
|
| Does your photograph allow you to faithfully recall details
| you didn't notice at the time or is it a simulation of an
| image?
| kraftman wrote:
| It's like hearing a song in your head, you can listen to it
| and maybe keep time roughly but if someone asks you what
| instruments there are you might not be able to get all of
| them, or might not remember the drums or the baseline. It's
| all much more vague. If you asked me to remember my childhood
| home I can visualise 'all of it' in my head, but maybe not
| what the type of bricks are like, or where all of the windows
| were.
| tarentel wrote:
| Not quite. I have had a lot of musical training and have a
| very good musical memory. I can write down songs from my
| head or hear a song and write it down later, depending on
| how complicated it is, usually with only 1-2 listens, or
| play it back, etc. I can visualize things in my head but it
| is a lot more abstract, or rather, harder to explain.
| tavavex wrote:
| I think the person you're replying to didn't describe it
| exactly. It's not really about how good your memory is, I
| think. It's that no matter what, "replaying" the song in
| your head isn't going to bring about the same reaction as
| actually physically hearing music. It's like a
| simulation, a higher-order perception, thinking of
| yourself hearing it rather than willing yourself to
| really hear it in the same way as usual.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| This actually highlights to me what may be different about
| mental images for other people. Because I can much more
| clearly hear music in my head than I can see images in my
| head. So if it's much more vague for others, that must be
| kind of what images are like for me.
| nosianu wrote:
| For me it is like a different "space" for mental vs real
| images. It is not the same neurons, I would guess.
|
| The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously,
| you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of
| "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how
| I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more
| conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels"
| _(not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much
| more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right
| in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very
| early embryonic development)_. The better I know the object
| the better this internal concept-image, but far from what
| looking at the real thing is like.
|
| I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I
| think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague
| without details unless I concentrate on them specifically,
| and it is very dark in there.
|
| On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between
| apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop
| barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones.
| Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube
| videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to
| "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for
| fantastical landscapes and architecture.
|
| The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely
| replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even
| though I read the books long before those movies were made.
| People like me need graphically talented people around, or my
| mental images will be very much limited to drastically
| reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to
| all graphical artists).
| conradev wrote:
| It's the same for me, in terms of it being dark and fuzzy
| unless concentrated on.
|
| but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes
| to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often
| visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not
| always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can
| be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials
| I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc).
|
| I'm fairly good at remembering faces, and if they're next
| to a name when I see them, I can even associate the name!
| The flip side, of course, is that if I don't see the name,
| I won't remember it.
| markhahn wrote:
| I find it implausible that people really have extreme,
| detailed imagery. Not that they can't do it on demand, if
| desired. But if every time they imagined something, it
| instantly appeared with all possible detail - that's just
| tremendously inefficient.
|
| I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d
| visualization. So when you ask people how much detail
| they imagine, their response strategy might determine
| most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the
| ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean
| "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response
| viz".
| fsniper wrote:
| Very very well put. I couldn't describe my same state as
| you have. Makes perfect sense for me. Thank you.
| darkmighty wrote:
| I'd describe it as like having a second monitor in your
| desktop. It's not inherently "over" what I already see or
| anywhere physical, it's like in a different space. Sometimes
| it can feel like it's "behind" what I am seeing indeed (i.e.
| kind of over), but it can vary and I suspect that's just a
| learned position (I just tried and I can shift the position
| images 'feel where they are').
|
| I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save
| power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can
| definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not _exactly_
| like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can
| sense there 's trickery involved (particularly with motion
| being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still
| definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image
| exactly, more that it only generates some details I am
| particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of
| details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it
| generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear
| at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine
| this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes
| closed.
|
| It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used
| for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to
| simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased
| somewhat.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I have three different ways that vision seems to work with
| me.
|
| 1. Actually seeing something like in a dream.
|
| 2. A mental scratch pad I can draw on and use spatial
| awareness to navigate. (I see the code of applications as
| flying over a landscape or walking through a forest.)
|
| 3. Imagination, which uses whatever data vision gets turned
| into.
|
| I'm not sure how common 2 is. A lot of my brain has broken
| parts and this scratchpad is used in place of logic. This
| works fine until I need to work on linear list of similar
| tokens and keep them in order, like math and some
| functional programming languages.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > Personally, I can see images when I dream.
|
| If I dream I don't ever remember them - I assume I must, I
| think everyone (barring medical issues) has REM sleep.
|
| I envy people that, dreams sound amazing.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| In my experience remembering dreams is a matter of practice
| and stress levels. When life is calmer I remember alot
| more.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Not for me, never remembered them at any point, I asked
| my mum once if she remembered me dreaming when I was a
| kid and she couldn't remember it either, no dreams/no
| nightmares.
|
| I have an active imagination and I read a lot of fiction
| and I don't think I have aphantasia, I just go to sleep,
| wake up and never remember a thing in between.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I went from frequent lucid dreams as a child and teen, to
| no (remembered) dreams, back to vivid (but very rarely
| lucid) dreams. Ask while having aphantasia, I wish I could
| get even approximately close to dream images while awake.
| kulahan wrote:
| Have you tried a dream journal? We forget most of our
| dreams because we might have them at 2 am and wake up at 7
| am. If you wake yourself up in the middle of the night one
| or two times, you're more likely to have been in the middle
| of a dream, and it's still up there in your brain enough to
| write down. The more you do this, the easier it becomes.
| pm215 wrote:
| Personally I strongly do not want to get better at
| remembering dreams. At the moment I very rarely remember
| anything about dreaming, and on the very rare occasion
| that some fragment of memory from a dream pops into my
| head it is super confusing until I identify "oh, that
| must have been from a dream". I prefer to keep my memory
| uncontaminated with random garbage :)
| chao- wrote:
| I remember my dreams quite well. Years ago, I did a dream
| journal to up that even further. At the time, I discussed
| doing so with a friend, and she expressed a similar
| sentiment to yours. In our discussion, she explained not
| wanting to "carry emotional baggage" from a dream into
| her day, being distracted by it, and so forth.
|
| That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with
| me, because together we realized that people can relate
| to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a
| dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over
| again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine
| "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments
| after I wake.
| kaashif wrote:
| As someone with very poor natural dream recall, I think
| you're right. One time I kept a dream journal and got
| really good at dream recall.
|
| It was just hours and hours of random junk every night.
|
| I threw away the journal and realized forgetting dreams
| is good.
| kulahan wrote:
| It might be easier to describe as an eye that is only opened
| manually, and can only focus on highly specific things. This
| is my superpower - I can see things vividly in my mind, spin
| them around, zoom in/out, and more.
|
| When I'm looking at it, the only thing I can see is whatever
| object is being imagined. However, yes - it's similar to the
| sensation of seeing with your own actual eyes. The reason it
| seems so foreign is because our real eyes can see more than
| one thing at a time. Our mind's eye can only see exactly one
| subject at a time (though I should mention that when I
| navigate cities, I do so by imagining a birds-eye view, so
| there are many objects IN the map, but I cannot see anything
| other than the map, and it becomes extremely blurry outside
| of the section I'm focusing on).
| tbabb wrote:
| Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse,
| someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise:
| Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What
| variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a
| background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it.
| And so on.
|
| For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and
| texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally
| "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the
| broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife
| into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened
| "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was
| at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see
| with the naked eye without holding it very close.
|
| That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact
| level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it
| hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based
| on what other people describe of their experience, it seems
| pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental
| imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing
| differently".
| comprev wrote:
| I can _remember_ the properties of an apple - approximate
| size, weight (my hand does not instantly drop to the floor
| due to its weight), etc.
|
| I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the
| colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter
| and 100Kg).
|
| In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in
| my hand - not imagining the one according to your
| specifications.
|
| One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging
| desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_
| what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving
| them into place.
|
| I can make an educated guess based on their length/width
| but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged
| without physically moving them.
|
| It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!
|
| The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of
| someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of
| me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench
| but certainly not the one in front of me.
| illwrks wrote:
| I'm a designer by trade but do some coding for fun. I'm
| on the opposite side of it to you. I can visualise
| anything in great detail. Although if it was a machine I
| can only visualise sections of it at any one time.
|
| When I am coding for fun, or I'm trying to think through
| a problem I visualise the thing I my mind as a kind of
| interactive physical thing I can manipulate. It's useful
| as I have another dimension I can problem solve in. As an
| adult it also Helped me understand why I wasn't so
| academic as a child and had to work a bit harder than
| some of my peers.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine
| sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about
| themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn
| movie that you make in your own mind.
|
| I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think
| about it the way you are talking about it, like it would
| just be a sort of description of what the other person
| looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch,
| smell, visuals.
|
| And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever
| doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you
| want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it.
| Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a
| simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that
| you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and
| going to chat with women.
| markhahn wrote:
| but are those details fabricated on demand?
|
| I don't have any trouble following your path of increased
| detail, but if someone says "imagine an apple", I get a
| vaguely apple-shaped, generally redish object (I like
| cosmic crisp), which only becomes detailed if I "navigate
| my mental eye" closer.
| itsamario wrote:
| Can you remember seeing? I use my imagination to get a very
| grainy image but it's usually my interpretation of it and
| what I'm using it for.
|
| Like when in school I'd imagine graphs lines before drawn or
| best example is a cad test and from reading the directions I
| could get an idea of what I was about to draw in cad
|
| Man made computers in our image, it use to be a job title.
| RajT88 wrote:
| For me, it's a little more like you describe these days. It
| _is_ images, but fuzzier and more impressionistic than it
| used to be. I have to concentrate harder to have a full-on
| image of a scene, and can 't so much when multitasking.
|
| In college, especially when I was studying Japanese and had
| to memorize a lot of shapes, I could look at a poster filled
| with characters and recall it hours later to translate those
| characters. Your mind is a muscle and it gets better with
| exercise, and grows weaker when lazy.
| goatlover wrote:
| Some people can see images while they are conscious just like
| you see them in your dreams. Perhaps even better, depending
| on their ability to visualize. Maybe you just never developed
| the conscious ability to visualize.
| lm28469 wrote:
| When people tell me they can see things in their mind I
| usually ask something like:
|
| "imagine a ball, can you see it?"
|
| "yes"
|
| "ok what color is it? "
|
| I never heard anyone say anything other than a variation of
| "hm I don't know". It's just an anecdote but still
| antonvs wrote:
| What's funny is, I have complete aphantasia, but I can
| imagine a ball, I just can't see it. If you ask me what
| color it is, I would say white, because I imagined a
| baseball. But I can't see it, I'm just thinking about it.
| kraftman wrote:
| When you read this do you hear it in your head?
| antonvs wrote:
| > Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don't see
| anything at all if I'm conscious and closing my eyes.
|
| That's classic complete aphantasia. I have it too.
|
| The "kind of different. I'm not _really_ seeing it " would
| apply just as well to dream images. If you're interrogating
| people, you might try asking them whether it's similar to
| that.
| hvs wrote:
| If you have something to describe "in your mind's eye" then you
| don't have aphantasia. We can't "see" anything in our mind.
| brooke2k wrote:
| It might be easier to think in terms of what you can actually
| achieve with your visualization.
|
| I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what
| I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I
| have to write down in full every intermediate step because I
| can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two
| steps in the future.
|
| Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures
| of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing
| other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.
| rehevkor5 wrote:
| There's no diagnostic test for it. So is it real?
| abetusk wrote:
| "Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual
| imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory"
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
| rayiner wrote:
| I can basically do a Google Street View of places I've been
| before, seeing what I'd be seeing if I was there. It's not as
| clear as being there and having my eyes open, and th animation
| is jerky, but it's in color, and I have the same spatial sense
| of where things are relative to where I am mentally standing.
|
| For the most part, I can't "think" about things except maybe
| mental math. I see things, and I talk to myself in my head.
| redhed wrote:
| I have the same thing, I can "walk" through my childhood
| home. I see how the living room was set up, I can walk from
| there to my bedroom and "see" everything. Honestly if I had
| good art skills I feel like I could draw it out pretty well.
| However I would in no way describe it as looking like I'm
| there at the real thing or looking at photograph, not even
| close really. It's kinda just a hazy construct in my mind.
|
| I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes
| from, people who think others can close there eyes and be
| transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I
| actually just have aphantasia.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| YMMV, but for me, the image on en.Wikipedia
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia> made it easy for me
| to understand. That and having a frank conversation with
| someone close to me: "Wait, you just think of something and see
| it, like a picture or real life?" "Wait, you actually see
| anything?"
| abetusk wrote:
| The test is this:
|
| Close your eyes and try to visualize an apple. Do this for 30
| seconds or so. Try to visualize the skin, the reflection, the
| texture, the stem, the depth, etc. Try to hold a stable mental
| picture of that apple.
|
| After the 30 seconds, rate your ability to picture the apple
| from 1 to 5, where 1 is complete inability and 5 is as if you
| were looking at a picture of an apple for those 30 seconds. 1
| is aphantasia.
|
| Another idea is to recall a vivid dream you had. I think most
| people would describe it as being part of a movie or reality.
| While awake, are you able to recreate scenes in vivid detail as
| if you were dreaming? 5 for complete parity and 1 for not at
| all. 1 is aphantasia.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Are you really saying you can see an apple in the same way
| you see an apple with eyes opened? The exact same way? So if
| you close your eyes, imagine an apple and then look at an
| apple that someone holds in front of your eye, the apple
| looks exactly the same? As if you could look through your
| closed eye lids?
| altruios wrote:
| Some people can project the image of an apple into the real
| world. As in, they are able to imagine an apple on the
| table that they see with their eyes. They 'see' it, but see
| that it's a projection. It's a lot like when you have two
| very similar images (except one change), and you cross your
| eyes such that they overlap to highlight the change (it's
| ghostly, as it's only seen in one eye). Same Idea, only
| instead of the other eye, that projection is coming from
| your brain.
| mnmalst wrote:
| That's interesting, so how can people like that know
| which is real and which is not? I don't understand it.
| altruios wrote:
| Try the crossed eyes 'find the difference' technique.
| Which is crossing your eyes such that a third image (a
| blending of the two images: one from each eye) appears
| between those two images.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdVBzuGWr4
|
| You can easily understand where the difference is because
| the data is different between the eyes. The difference
| appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's
| eye is different from data from the physical eyes when
| those two 'streams of data' are blended.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Yes I can do this. I can see the image in the middle the
| same way as I see each individual image. (But not both at
| the same time, the outside images get blurry when I focus
| on the one in the middle).
|
| Anyways, this is nothing like what I experience when I
| imagine something.
| altruios wrote:
| That's what it's like to 'overlay' imagination onto your
| vision. But that requires - like the eyes focusing
| correctly - for the 'imagination vision' and the physical
| vision to 'line up'
|
| your imagination is more like it's in the the back of the
| head, yeah?
|
| What helped me 'move' where my imagination was (to the
| front and center), was to do the flame meditation. Which
| is to focus on a flame in a dark room for a few seconds,
| close your eyes, and try to retain the phosphene
| afterglow in the flame shape. and repeating that until
| you are able to retain image of the flame while your eyes
| are closed.
|
| Similarly: 'drawing from memory' - particularly from
| recent short term memory - was another method that had a
| profound impact on my ability to visualize.
|
| Both of these take time and commitment, but they have
| worked for me. They may work for you.
| swat535 wrote:
| I can do this, the best I can describe it is that your
| brain "knows" you're imagining it so it's different than
| for example hallucinations.
|
| It's similar to replaying music in your head (if you can
| do that), you can hear the tune but your ears "know" no
| music is actually playing.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| I suspect that much more people can do it than unable to
| do it (aphantasia)
| abetusk wrote:
| I'm not saying that at all. I think I have aphantasia. For
| me the score is 1 or 2 to picture that apple.
|
| I was shocked to realize that when people said "imagine in
| your minds eye", they meant it literally. This seems to be
| a common experience for people with aphantasia [0].
|
| Note that when I'm close to sleep or dreaming, then yes, my
| minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.
| While awake, its almost completely non-existent.
|
| [0] "I can't picture things in my mind. I didn't realize
| that was unusual"
| https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-
| aph...
| mnmalst wrote:
| I don't feel like I know better what other people
| experience talking about it here. :)
|
| Just now, what you wrote for example.
|
| > my minds eye visualization is close to photographic
| parity.
|
| What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the
| exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you
| are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you
| imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of
| your head?
|
| When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read
| but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely
| different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not
| "seeing".
| abetusk wrote:
| Yes, I often don't realize I'm asleep and dreaming while
| I dream. It's a common experience for me to dream and
| think I'm experiencing reality while I'm asleep. Are you
| saying you have never had a visual dream?
|
| Sometimes when I'm close to sleep or when I'm lucid
| dreaming, I can visualize things with good fidelity.
| While I'm awake, I'm almost completely unable to.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| I experience visual dreams the same way I described
| imagining the environment when I read. It's a completely
| different experience than seeing with my eyes open.
| abetusk wrote:
| Interesting. So it sounds like you don't even dream
| visually.
|
| I think for many people, even people with aphantasia,
| dreaming is akin to watching a movie or actually
| experiencing the event (myself included). I know the
| experience is immersive because it's the same feeling as
| watching a movie, but I can't recall it visually the same
| way after the fact, while I'm awake.
| joquarky wrote:
| I suspect the activated Default Mode Network interferes
| with the ability to perceive with detailed clarity.
| vorbits wrote:
| But what does it mean "visualize" ? I can "think" of an apple
| and all it's detail, but I wouldn't describe any visual
| sensation. If I had to draw the apple I could draw it detail,
| right down the the variation in colors on it's skin. But no
| sense of this experience feels like a visual sensation. It
| feels like "thinking". To me, the act of closing my eyes
| emphasizes that this isn't a visual sensation for me, because
| with my eyes closed, I see darkness.
| abetusk wrote:
| Bring a picture of an apple up on your computer screen and
| look at it for 30 seconds. There is a fidelity to that
| image that includes the color, texture, stem, shape,
| reflection, etc.
|
| Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30
| seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture
| in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye,
| an image of an apple _as if you were looking at on your
| computer screen_? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is
| complete parity as if you were looking at it from your
| computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what
| is your ability to do so?
|
| It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.
|
| I know it sounds crazy but I think there _really are people
| who can visualize that apple_.
|
| Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't
| recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It
| doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in
| perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or
| recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot
| literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.
|
| Here are some other articles of note:
|
| "Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without
| visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial
| memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
|
| "I can't picture things in my mind. I didn't realize that
| was unusual"
| https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-
| aph...
| cal85 wrote:
| > I think there really are people who can visualize that
| apple.
|
| Based on what evidence?
| abetusk wrote:
| The article goes into the history.
|
| Here's an article I found recently:
|
| "Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without
| visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial
| memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
| mnmalst wrote:
| I am exactly like this. Great description.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| I can visualize an apple, somewhat vaguely, but I've never
| been able to hold a stable mental picture of anything for
| longer that a split-second. It just blinks out of existence
| the moment I "see" it, which makes it rather dysfunctional...
|
| Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some
| of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but
| still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own
| at night, not letting me fall asleep.
|
| Imagination is weird.
| kevinh wrote:
| This is similar to how I'd describe it for me. I can mold
| the apple into what I want it to be, adding a sheen or
| showing the bottom or the top, but any "visualization" that
| I do disappears basically immediately.
| chao- wrote:
| I also am often kept awake by my brain playing songs,
| wishing my brain would stop.
|
| A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the
| aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little
| details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I
| never quite landed on an understanding of how much a
| person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is
| (assumed to be) innate or genetic.
|
| Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I
| could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to
| have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the
| friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music
| (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what
| degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling
| sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not
| been trained for years in music.
| joquarky wrote:
| What if you try it with the apple slowly rotating or moving
| in some way?
|
| I can keep a visualization as long as it keeps moving or
| rotating. As soon as I try to visualize it as still, it
| disappears.
| super_mario wrote:
| I prefer this test: "Imagine a ball resting on a table. A
| person walks up to the table and pushes the ball". Question
| for the test subject: "What will happen?"
|
| Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table
| and fall to the ground. But then ask them" "What was the
| color of the ball? What was the size of the ball? What was
| the gender of the person pushing the ball, what clothes were
| they wearing?"
|
| People with aphantasia are usually stunned by the follow up
| questions. People who don't have aphantasia really have seen
| the table, the material its made of, imagined a ball of
| certain size/type color (e.g. multicolor beach ball, or
| basketball or what ever), and they saw an actual person
| pushing the ball, they saw the ball rolling on the table an
| falling to the ground and can answer details about their
| vision.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yep. Problem is that there's actually a spectrum of vividity of
| mental imagery, but in popular discussion it's always seen as a
| binary on/off thing.
|
| An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown)
| discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a
| thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually
| means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely
| certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees"
| things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images
| are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The
| controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some
| rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot
| from person to person.
|
| [1]
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| In Russia, color-blindness is referred to as Daltonism, and I
| figured Francis must have been the one to be the source of
| that (given this topic), but apparently it was John Dalton:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalton
| jdadj wrote:
| I haven't heard of Galtonism. From my experience as the
| colorblind child of native Russian speakers, it's Daltonism
| (dal'tonizm).
|
| https://en.openrussian.org/en/colour-blind
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Good lord, I had both of their wiki pages open, and STILL
| somehow D and G were the same letter in my mind.
|
| I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a
| monument to my goof.
| at_last wrote:
| _shrugged_
| khazhoux wrote:
| We all doof from time to time
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Perhaps you suffer from D-G letterblindness.
| olalonde wrote:
| Quite a lot of languages use daltonism actually: French
| (daltonisme), Spanish (daltonismo), Italian (daltonismo),
| Portuguese (daltonismo), Catalan (daltonisme), Romanian
| (daltonism), Polish (daltonizm), Russian (dal'tonizm),
| Greek (daltonismos), and Turkish (daltonizm).
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Modern brain imaging techniques also weigh in on this issue.
| Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the
| visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery
| corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2]
| while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia
| have little to no visual cortex activity.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| "Others were vehement that mental images are just as real as
| those perceived with our eyes" - This sucks as a child, where
| you see a gymnasium floor open up beneath you. So you run to
| safety, just to be punished for what was an appropriate
| response.
|
| Some children don't see any differentiation between their
| imagination and reality, so it's a matter of paying attention
| to how others' behave to know what to do.
|
| Because you can't trust that the reality that you're in is
| shared by the people around you.
| agentcoops wrote:
| Comically, though, programming communities really seem to
| have a statistical over representation of both aphantasics
| and hyperphantasics. One of these articles comes out every
| few years and I've witnessed at numerous workplaces how
| quickly a large portion of the engineers realize they're
| aphantasic and everyone else is aghast that they can't rotate
| complete architectural diagrams etc.
|
| That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see
| images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very
| real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who
| realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty
| important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as
| early in your educational process as possible. For everyone
| else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid
| imagery than you and some people less, but probably that
| doesn't change very much about your life.
| kraftman wrote:
| I'm not sure its binary, I feel like ive gotten worse at it
| with age, and for some reason I find it harder with my head
| sideways.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| For me this is the other way round. When I was a student
| (physics) I had a very, for a lack of a better word,
| "practical" visualization in my head - what I needed to
| understand what I was studying. There was a lot of maths
| too, visualized.
|
| Today, 30 years later, I have vivid representations of
| calligraphy or art, especially when I fall asleep. I fall
| asleep within at worst minutes so I cannot really take
| full pleasure of watching these ilages and during the day
| I am too surrounded by sources of sound, images etc. to
| meaningfully repeat the exercise.
| conception wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
|
| Seems like a good test?
| gowld wrote:
| It's nothing like that at all. First, when you are awake you
| still see whatever is literally in front of you, even if it's
| your eyelids. Second, when you fail to recall something in
| detail, it isn't a sketch or child's drawing, it's just...
| incomplete sensation. We don't imagine things the way a
| painter paints a picture bit by bit (unless you are an
| experienced painter!)
| altruios wrote:
| "where" the mind's eye is also variable. And may be moveable.
|
| For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind
| "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of
| me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space
| between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of
| self to be.
|
| The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training,
| training to remain conscious through the process of falling
| asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image,
| quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye
| projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the
| blank page without access to the reference image}).
| parpfish wrote:
| it reminds me a bit of the debate in psychology back in the day
| of propositional vs. analogical representation.
|
| there was a long running debate in the literature about how
| mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of
| discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like
| format.
|
| two very different philosophies about how the information was
| stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were
| completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you
| observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be
| accommodated in the other.
|
| with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that
| everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp
| describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the
| other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based)
| framework
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Relatedly, I'm not sure I really believe people who say they
| think in code and can't be bothered to render their ideas in
| design or decision documents with actual reasoning. I can't
| even tell if something is a real thought I'm having /in my own
| head/ until I've written it down or otherwise recorded it
| somewhere in the consensus reality. Very often, I /think/ I've
| got some problem or idea all fleshed out in my mind, but the
| process of writing it down (in code or prose) reveals that this
| was all just a kind of illusion. Or maybe I really did have it
| all figured out but something got lost in the process of
| writing it down? Seems literally impossible to say.
|
| But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the
| same species had radically different methods of cognition,
| since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the
| broadest possible sense, is _not_ radically different, and
| neither is our thinking hardware.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I think its far more likely that they're just bad at writing
| or drawing. Tons of people can picture a scene in their head
| but are absolutely terrible at drawing it, and can only
| render much more boring imagery in text.
| gowld wrote:
| Code is "written it down or otherwise recorded it somewhere
| in the consensus reality"
|
| "thinking in code" means "render their ideas in code", like
| you render your ideas in English.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I agree, writing code is writing. I added a parenthetical
| above that hopefully clears that up. I guess my overall
| point is that I can't confidently say I've even _had_ an
| actual idea, until I prove it to myself by voicing it, or
| writing it in code or prose, or drawing a diagram, or
| whatever. Thinking is hard, but it feels good to have
| thunk, so the mind is incentivized to give itself the
| illusion of having done so, if it can.
| Lerc wrote:
| I have aphantasia in the sense that I have no sense of there
| being an image, but several years ago, I posted a comment
| hypothesising that the interpretation of the experience as an
| image might be the distinguishing factor.
|
| The response to that suggestion was unexpectedly strong, People
| really didn't like the notion of doubt of their experience.
| Some said I was accusing them of lying.
|
| It was quite odd, I thought it was an uncontroversial notion
| that what we feel we are experiencing can differ from reality.
|
| I think, perhaps, it was received as me saying "This is the
| truth, you're the one who is wrong."
| joquarky wrote:
| Many people believe everyone perceives reality the same way.
|
| They don't understand that each of us composes a novel
| reality from our senses.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| It's actually even worse than that. Not only am I unconvinced
| that aphantasia is real or merely a difference in the way
| people describe the same experience (either because of how they
| use language, or because of how their mental images are
| connected to their speech processing), but even if it were an
| experimentally verified phenomenon, people still talk about it
| like it's a /thing you have/ instead of a /skill you failed to
| develop/.
|
| I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of
| charcoal, but I don't consider this to be 'acarbographism' or
| something, I recognise that other people have put more effort
| into learning that skill than I have.
| Sephr wrote:
| Throwing in my anecdote: I acquired aphantasia after a viral
| infection as a child. This also slightly impacted my speech.
| There can definitely be a fundamental difference.
|
| In my case, I can distinctly remember my experiences from
| before the infection, and recall a clear difference in
| visualization capabilities before and after.
| normalaccess wrote:
| For me it's a gradient, depending on how tired I am. I can go
| from fairly vivid mental image to full on seeing things with my
| eyes closed. It's that window when falling asleep that is the
| most impactful visually and very close to lucid dreaming.
|
| So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in
| your "minds eye".
|
| If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song
| it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's
| imagery but from a different place.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I can _kind_ of do it, but it's not something that really comes
| naturally to me. And only fairly simple shapes, generally.
|
| Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.
|
| (I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is
| something that some/most people do.)
|
| Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just
| assuming is normal?!
| tines wrote:
| It's quite funny, for myself, if I concentrate I can so
| strongly visualize something that I stop seeing through my
| physical eyes and kind of go "blind," only perceiving with my
| eyes once I decide to again or once some large visual stimulus
| surprises me.
| buttercraft wrote:
| Same for me. It has led to some awkward moments in public
| where it looks like I'm staring at someone from across the
| room, but I'm just thinking/visualizing and am only vaguely
| aware of what my eyes are looking at.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Most people are extraordinarily dim to the point that they have
| zero introspective capacity. For instance, if they had more
| than a third grade vocabulary, would they be using the word
| "see" to describe this talent they think they have? I seriously
| suspect that if you could somehow educate everyone up to some
| minimal level, this disparity would disappear entirely.
|
| Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing
| around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point
| that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago
| was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still
| think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint
| Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.
|
| It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else
| imagines they have X-Men superpowers.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Describe how you see green and I'll tell you if it's the same
| as everyone else I know.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| I didn't know people see things in the real world, like an
| imaginary cat until I had a dream where I could imagine
| something purposefully. I woke up immediately, thrown out from
| the dream image.
|
| I told my wife proudly that I could see something in my dream I
| wanted to. She told me she can imagine ANYTHING ANYWHERE
| ANYTIME (painter)
|
| My question is: can you see the cat on the table? If not, sorry
| pal.
| skinkestek wrote:
| The way I understood it was the apple on a table test:
|
| I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.
|
| if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and
| think very hard about an apple on a table.
|
| spacer
|
| spacer
|
| spacer
|
| spacer
|
| then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the
| apple was.
|
| For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only
| thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no
| visual representation.
|
| For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course
| tell me the color and also the color of the table.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| A guy was talking to me about designing some robot legs. He was
| just getting started and was new to mechanical design. The more
| questions I asked him the more I realized he couldn't
| internally visualize what he was designing. When I'm putting
| something together in my head it's like a mental CAD where I
| can place objects down, constrain them to each other, and see
| how they move in relation to each other. For this guy I
| recommended simply diagramming on paper to work out how it
| should function.
|
| I have a fuzzy mental stage for these things. It's like my
| mind's second monitor. It mostly goes ignored but I can focus
| on it if I want to. Shapes and colors are weak but are
| definitely there. But still a useful tool.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Okay, so, if you think people are only metaphorically referring
| to their "minds eye", then you probably have aphantasia. If the
| idea of people "counting sheep" to go to sleep confuses you,
| thinking that perhaps you could not go to sleep if you just lay
| there counting to yourself (hint: that's not what they mean),
| welcome to club aphantasia.
|
| I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are
| people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of
| quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't
| understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities
| when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't
| have aphantasia.
|
| It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access
| data/information about things that the brain is presumably
| constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access
| to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not
| very strong": none.
|
| Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.
|
| No? Thanks for stopping by. :)
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| My understanding of it has been that aphantasiacs can only
| imagine in terms of verbal descriptions, not images. If that's
| the case, it seems like visual analogy would be a good
| differentiator.
|
| For example: without any internal monologue, think of the
| Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it
| resembles.
|
| Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off
| stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based
| purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be
| lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an
| answer from a mental list of attributes.
|
| (Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of
| visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name
| similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might
| be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)
| sean_pedersen wrote:
| By this reasoning aphantasiacs should be incapable of drawing
| anything from their mind.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| They can, but the representations are much simpler, often
| lacking visual detail and leaning on written labels:
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/12/05/86
| 5...
| bambax wrote:
| I'm in the exact same boat. I think I have aphantasia, because
| when I close my eyes all I see is black, and it is easier to
| conjure up images with eyes open, and I absolutely would never,
| ever, confuse what I "see" in my mind with reality.
|
| Yet I am very good at recognizing faces, have okay memory of
| past events (not outstanding, but acceptable) and can describe
| places and people with reasonable accuracy.
|
| So, I'm not sure.
| agentcoops wrote:
| There is really a fundamental difference as many studies now
| have shown---and I can attest from personal experience.
| Honestly, if you have to ask the question there's a pretty high
| chance you are: everyone at some level believes that their own
| inner experience generalizes to the rest of humanity, but it's
| those with aphantasia who thereby believe that everyone else's
| description is just a manner of speaking ("they, like me,
| surely don't really think in pictures").
|
| I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple"
| less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a
| co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me
| the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a
| "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an
| apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from
| that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on
| the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts
| ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?
|
| The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail
| of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns
| what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather
| singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past
| experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look
| up the references if you're interested.
|
| When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I
| found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be
| one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a
| catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a
| large study found. Probably there are critiques of his
| methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for
| trying to figure out how exactly you think.
| woopwoop wrote:
| Are you saying that a non-aphantasic person can recall the
| eye color of everyone in their office?
| teamonkey wrote:
| I have aphantasia. I know what something looks like, I just
| can't see it.
|
| It's not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no
| internal voice so that wouldn't make sense. It's just like the
| _concept_ of what I'm thinking of is right there in all its
| detail. Its extremely spatial - I'm thinking in 3D even if I'm
| not visualising it.
|
| On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an
| amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some
| abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is
| very hard, especially faces.
|
| Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually
| seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a
| second and can't be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams
| which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of
| thinking isn't visual.
| kraftman wrote:
| If you think about something famous, like the Eiffel tower,
| or big ben, you don't picture them?
| deadbabe wrote:
| I wouldn't doubt that maybe there's also some condition where
| people can't see physical images at all. Like they know where
| stuff is because signals go to their brain but if you ask them to
| describe what they are seeing they can't, they see nothing. It's
| really not much more bizarre than aphantasia.
| colechristensen wrote:
| There are several levels of this. There are people who can do
| things as though they see but have no conscious access to the
| interpreted visual information. Or they can do something that
| requires vision with one hand but not the other.
|
| You can think of it like a bunch of different subsystems
| responsible for different kinds of tasks and some of them can
| be broken so the connections between them don't work.
|
| Read _Hallucinations_ by Oliver Sacks for a lot of case
| studies.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > He knew, of course, that people talked about "picturing" or
| "visualizing," but he had always taken this to be just a
| metaphorical way of saying "thinking." Now it appeared that, in
| some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally.
|
| This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still
| struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their
| heads.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Do you see them in dreams? I normally struggle to visualize
| things but when I'm half asleep my imagination suddenly has
| color and detail that normally doesn't happen when I try to
| picture stuff
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I can't speak about my immediate experience of dreams because
| I'm not dreaming right now, but when I remember my dreams I
| remember them the same way I remember anything else, which is
| to say, without mentally reproducing any visual component of
| the memory.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| At first I had some suspicion that perhaps the findings
| were partly a result of interpretation of the question.
| After all, I don't generate a crystal clear image of what
| I'm thinking about - the image has some amorphous qualities
| and comes in and out of focus.
|
| But dreams are ultra-visual experiences for me, to the
| extent where I will occasionally have flashbacks or deja vu
| to dream images that were exceptionally strong.
|
| So that nullified my suspicion! That said, I do wonder if
| it's a spectrum, in that some people are more or less
| visual in their thinking, and on the extremes people may
| get the capability snipped, as the dim visual hum fades to
| black and background noise.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Not the OP - I think it's the same process. The difference is
| in what my inner narrator is doing. When I asleep it is
| almost always gone, and this is when I typically see things
| in full color. When awake, my attention is split between
| listening to its storytelling and the mental imagery, which I
| believe makes the latter more dull. I noticed that the
| narrator is more loud when I'm in a minor mental state, like
| tired or annoyed. When happy/refreshed - there is no voice in
| my head and I can "see" things very clearly, especially their
| colors. So, I started looking for ways to divert my attention
| from the narrator. The most effective seems to keep the
| narrator busy with commenting on my breath ("in" and "out"),
| got some boost of mental clarity from that.
| godshatter wrote:
| The hypnogogic state seems to work fine in at least some
| aphants, including myself. I see nothing at all when I try to
| visualize. I have also lucid dreamed in the past and have
| consciously seen things in a dream as well. I can remember
| the dream as having been visual in the same way I can
| remember seeing things with my eyes open yesterday.
| bena wrote:
| This is the fundamental question _about_ experience.
|
| You may be "right". What you consider to be "seeing" things in
| one's head may be not what's happening in that person's mind.
| What they call "seeing" may be something else.
|
| The best way I can describe it is essentially generating a
| memory. If I were instructed to picture an apple in my mind, I
| could imagine a hand holding up an bog standard Red Delicious.
| I can imagine it free-floating. And it would be much like when
| I remember what happened yesterday for instance. Of course, we
| get into whether or not we "see" the memory or not.
|
| So, if you are saying you do not consider yourself to have
| mental images, what, to your best ability to describe it, do
| you do when you remember an event?
| hvs wrote:
| Personally, I remember "facts" about the event. Like, who was
| there, when it was, what was said. I don't have mental images
| of an event.
| the_af wrote:
| So it's like an analytical description of the event?
|
| You don't remember sensations about an experience, like
| touch, smells, etc?
| hvs wrote:
| Basically? It's a "sense" or "vibe". "There was a guy
| begging on the street" is what I remember. Not the actual
| words or a picture, just the "vibe" of that sentence.
| Definitely no touches, sounds, smells, or pictures.
|
| My wife, who has a very visual and auditory memory, to
| the point that she can basically re-watch movies in her
| head, is still dumbfounded by this fact.
| ivape wrote:
| So, if you watch a poor person begging for food on the street,
| how do you process that in the future? Do you rely on the
| remembered feeling and literal observation in words? How do you
| not remember what you saw?
| hvs wrote:
| I "know" that I saw someone begging on the street. I might
| remember other "facts" as they seemed appropriate. But that's
| it. If you asked me what color their hair was or what they
| were wearing I would have no idea unless I had chosen to make
| a note of that fact.
| lakhim wrote:
| I rely on the feeling, the sounds, the words on the sign, or
| by analogy to another thing. I don't remember what it looked
| like in the way that in a dream I believe I physically see
| things
| kbrkbr wrote:
| I don't find it so surprising, because I can recollect sounds,
| voices, songs. The same thing, another sense.
|
| So it's probably like hearing "inner" sounds, just with motion
| pictures.
|
| I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly
| likely.
|
| Different to the case described at the beginning of the article
| I have lots of memories. But they are stories of what happened,
| not movies.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it 's
| highly likely._
|
| My friend is one such person. He is amazed I can "hear" the
| opening soundtrack of Star Wars. I'm amazed there are people
| who cannot.
|
| It's probably a related phenomenon to visual aphantasia. My
| friend, poor thing, has it all.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| would your friend be able to hum the star wars theme song
| from memory? it seems impossible for me to be able to
| recreate the star wars theme song without being able to
| hear it in my head.
| 1bpp wrote:
| I still struggle to believe that some _can 't_. There's just
| always been an abstract 'canvas' separate from the one signals
| from my eyes end up on and I can 'draw' on it by thinking about
| visual stimulus, and it's hazy but perceptibly there, the same
| way I 'hear' a song when I think about it. When this subject
| comes up I also always want to ask if people with aphantasia
| can hear sounds or music in their head. Or a taste or smell,
| etc..
| AstroBen wrote:
| I have no idea if I have aphantasia or not but the comparison
| between sound is interesting
|
| I can _very_ clearly imagine sound or music in my head. My
| visual imagination is at like 20% of that and it 's a
| struggle
| Sharlin wrote:
| My visual imagery is also "hazy" and somehow fleeting and
| unreal, but still very useful. I don't find it that hard to
| imagine (heh) that for some people it would be more vivid,
| and for others almost nonexistent - though a total lack of
| visualization ability is perhaps more difficult to picture
| (heh^2), similarly to how it's almost impossible to imagine
| what it is like to be born blind, for example.
|
| It would definitely be interesting if there were more
| discussion on other imagined sensory modalities, too. For
| example, as a choir singer I'd guess that, say, keeping a
| given starting pitch in your head is easier for people who
| can mentally "hear" it. Myself I can sort of imagine sounds,
| but keeping a pitch in my head is more about the physically
| preparing my larynx to produce that pitch.
| godshatter wrote:
| I have aphantasia and cannot hear sounds or music in my head.
| I can't taste or smell things either, but I've also been
| going through life assuming most people can't either. From
| reading about it, it seems that some people can do hear
| things but not see them and probably various other
| combinations.
|
| I have no abstract canvas to write anything on that I've ever
| seen.
| levocardia wrote:
| The most astounding thing to me (able to form mental images just
| fine thanks) is that aphantasia does not cause more problems.
| Naively I would have assumed such a condition would cause
| problems navigating abstract problems, nearly as badly as actual
| blindness impairs physical navigation.
| Sharlin wrote:
| One of the "big" things I've come to understand is that there
| really are very different ways to think, but yet it seems that
| they all have more or less the same "expressive power", up to
| some natural variance in how good people are at specific tasks
| like navigation.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| It's possible that in some configurations of aphantasia the
| brain is still doing some sort of processing that is made
| available via a subconscious process.
|
| So you can't visualize an occluded surface in an active way but
| your brain still prevents you from running your rear bumper
| into another car.
|
| Many people with aphantasia still dream at night.
|
| Congenital aphantasia and emergent aphantasia may effect brain
| structures differently, perhaps some forms just disconnect the
| pipeline that feeds the brains computed data back into our
| visual centers for further visual analysis.
|
| It's very interesting, in running down these differences we
| would probably learn a lot about the brain.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I developed aphantasia around 13 after a series of heart
| procedures where I had to be under.
|
| Evaluating qualia in others is extremely
| difficult/philosophically impossible, I have pre/post expierence
| with both states of being.
|
| I can still somewhat conjure up imagery from prior to the
| procedure series, it almost feels like I can see them, my
| mother's face, my father face, kinda of, it did not effect my
| dreams or ability to have imagery in my edge of dreaming state,
| not immediately at least.
|
| I went from being very imaginative to trying to surf that half
| awake state in the mornings because it was such a loss.
|
| At this point it's all mostly gone. My memory is entirely text
| strings now.
| bena wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience.
|
| So, for you at least, there is/was a significant difference
| between "seeing things in your mind" and not being able to.
| Have you ever gone under any studies or tests to compare your
| brain activity to others?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| No, if there was a study I would join it. I wish I had done
| an MRI in my "pre" state, the change was very rapid.
|
| You'll see a bunch of people always pile into these
| aphantasia threads and basically show a bias towards their
| own qualia being the only type of existing experience and the
| whole thing being mere semantic differences to describe the
| same mental function.
|
| It really boggles my mind, it's like in HS when I told people
| I was mildly color blind and they literally took it as being
| "like, blind?". I get that from a bunch of high schoolers,
| it's very odd to see in what are presumably adults on this
| site.
|
| Those people are simply incorrect, I and many like me didn't
| have congenital aphantasia, it's well established in the
| literature.
| bena wrote:
| I mean, the issue is that we cannot know what is actually
| going on in someone else's mind. All we can do is describe
| it to the best of our ability. So there is some likelihood
| that things like inner monologues and aphantasia are simply
| different ways of describing similar things.
|
| However, you present an interesting point of view. As
| someone who remembers being able to visualize but is no
| longer able to.
|
| And while I feel you on the MRI thing, I don't think you
| could have known you'd lose the ability to visualize. But I
| think there would be some value in comparing you against
| people who both claim to be able to visualize and those who
| claim to not be able to. You would serve as a sort of
| marker. Someone who we could be relatively comfortable
| categorizing as you have distinct memories of being able to
| visualize and now have a different experience.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| This may be a bit nitpicky of me but:
|
| I guess I just find qualia skeptism to be generally
| unhelpful and on a purely personal level I find it
| annoying and think of it as an almost brain dead take.
| Uncharitable though that may be, I guess I need an
| explanation for the behavior because I just don't get it.
|
| I distinguish this from being skeptical about specific
| qualia explanations (the voices in my head are demons
| talking to me) which I think is fair, you don't have to
| accept the attempt to explain.
|
| People who were skeptical of post covid health
| complications (also called long covid) who just straight
| up asserted it must be false and it's not worth looking
| into.
|
| I don't understand the knee jerk denialism of qualia, a
| thing widely understood to be essentially irreducible and
| "unsharable".
| bena wrote:
| It's completely ephemeral and ridiculously difficult to
| prove or demonstrate.
|
| We only really know what goes on inside our own heads.
| And unlike other things, like long covid, there's no
| outward expression of not being able to visualize.
|
| And even for those who claim to be able to visualize,
| they'll admit that they aren't "seeing" the object. But
| it's difficult to explain what I mean when I say "I can
| see it in my head". But it's not. So it's hard to say
| whether what we're doing is the same or not.
|
| Like the old bit about whether or not the blue you see is
| the blue I see. In the end, it kind of doesn't matter. If
| something is "blue", we both agree that the thing is
| blue, it occupies a certain wavelength, etc. So even
| though we agree that the thing is blue, we cannot know if
| we actually see it the same. But since the results are
| the same, the particular qualia doesn't matter.
|
| We can't make that comparison with inner monologue or
| visualization. Which is why I guess it fascinates people.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I wonder what happens when you e.g. flash a 5 digit number to a
| person with aphantasia for say 0.1 seconds. Can they read it from
| memory? Or are they worse at this task than people with mental
| imagery? How about mentally rotating 3D objects?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I can no longer rotate or even imagine 3d objects.
|
| My lexical memory is very high, and I have long running echoic
| memory so I can post process audio but a 0.1 second visual
| flash?
|
| Unless my brain picked it up and had time to parse out the
| numbers into lexical storage I would not be able to go back and
| recall it at all.
|
| I don't have congenital aphantasia and it's clear to me that
| there are certain kinds of background processing still
| occurring in my subconscious, it's like a unidirectional
| connection between parts of my brain that was once
| bidirectional.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| that was what i was wondering. if i showed someone a strange
| sort of asymmetrical 3d object and told them to tell me what it
| would look like if there were looking at it from the back, it
| seems like it would be almost impossible to do.
| tekacs wrote:
| For those who find themselves wondering whether they 'have'
| aphantasia or not, I would really recommend looking at the
| aphantasia apples:
|
| https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...
|
| As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a
| scale of 1 - 5 of as to the fidelity with which you can picture
| an apple if you try to imagine it?
|
| I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've
| gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a
| single group of a handful of people I'll get several different
| numbers.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I think this test is bad at accounting for subjectivity. A
| literal image you see with your eyes doesn't map exactly to an
| image you "see" with your mind.
| tekacs wrote:
| It... doesn't, but I've found that a large number of people
| (I've asked at least many dozens) find it relatively easy to
| rank themselves on it, and differentiate amongst one
| another's subjective perceptions.
|
| Also see my sibling comment about contrasting and tasks!
| AstroBen wrote:
| I have no frame of reference for what a 1 is even like so I
| don't know how to judge myself on it
|
| Do 1's see it as clearly as if it was through regular eyesight?
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| According to my wife (a 1), yes. Seems wild to me as a ~4. If
| I concentrate really, really hard on trying to imagine visual
| detail I can get something to a ~3 at low detail or hold
| individual small details at a 2 until I stop concentrating on
| them.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| I have sometimes wondered whether there is a personality or
| cognitive trait that makes one unable to respond to tests
| measuring personality or cognitive traits.
|
| Every personality test I have ever taken, on many of the
| questions I've felt that I could answer almost anything and
| still be truthful.
|
| When I see this apple scale, I simultaneously feel that both 1
| and 5 apply to how I visualize an apple. It's hard for me to
| describe what's going on in my brain, and I don't think
| language or images are very helpful at illuminating it.
|
| If such a meta-trait were to exist, which would have more to do
| with the narratives and metaphors we use to describe our mental
| processes than the processes themselves, it would be funny if
| that's actually a good deal of what was being measured all
| along.
|
| (Or maybe it just means I'm a 5)
| tekacs wrote:
| Something that might help - in this specific instance - is
| trying to contrast with others.
|
| That is: if you show this photo to people that you know and
| you compare and contrast _how detailedly_ you can imagine the
| apples, that can help.
|
| For example: are you imagining a _specific_ apple? What high-
| level color is it? How about more specifically? How does the
| color change across the surface? If so, does it have any
| distinguishing features? Leaves on the stem or no? What does
| the bottom look like? Can you turn it around and describe
| that?
|
| Folks who are high up on the spectrum (like 1) can often
| answer these questions specifically, whereas as you go down
| the spectrum these tasks seem progressively more impossible.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| That doesn't really help me, because I feel that I could
| answer those questions in detail but also truthfully say
| that there is no image at all of the apple in my head.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that image / not-image binary
| doesn't really map on to how I perceive the experience of
| my own imagination.
|
| But again, maybe that just means I'm a 5 and I'm coping.
| zaphoyd wrote:
| I've had mixed results with this method, especially for folks
| in category 5 because they grew up in a world where people
| casually talked about [actual] visualization and they've
| associated [not actually visualization] with the word (thinking
| it is a metaphor for something else). As someone who cannot
| visualize at all when faced with this question I feel like my
| answer wants to be.. "null" / "the premise of this question
| doesn't make sense" and not "5"
|
| A variant that I've found helpful for teasing out this case: 1.
| Ask the test subject to visualize an Apple 2. Ask them for a
| few very specific details about the apple they are currently
| visualizing (what color is it? does it have a leaf or a bite
| out of it?, etc)
|
| In many cases aphantastics will not object to the activity in
| step 1, but they won't be doing the same thing as the folks who
| are actually visualizing. They'll just do what they do when
| people talk about "visualizing".
|
| When you get to step 2 someone who is actually visualizing can
| immediately answer the questions and don't think they are
| strange, they are just reporting what they are visualizing in
| front of them.
|
| An aphantastic in step 2 is often confused. They aren't
| actually visualizing any specific apple so there isn't a
| reference to answer the questions. You'll get a response like..
| well what kind of Apple is it? How should I know if it has a
| bite out of it? You first have to either provide more context
| or reword the question to something like: What is a color an
| Apple could be? or What color is your favorite Apple?
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'm definitely in category 4 by default, though I can do
| category 2 with concentration. But I don't really feel like
| it's a problem? If things have colors and surfaces then your
| view of one object can block your view of another object which
| seems like it makes visualizing complex scenes or devices much
| less convenient.
| bambax wrote:
| I think I'm a 3? I don't see a real apple, more like the
| concept of an apple, but the harder I try, the more
| characteristics I can conjure -- although it would be a stretch
| to say I "see" them.
| poly2it wrote:
| From the comments here I'm almost getting the impression
| aphantasia is more common than not, which is wild to me. I'm
| quite sure I'd place myself on one. I can imagine an apple, and
| it will vividly appear. I can transform it, see reflections on
| it or imagine the feel and sound from slicing it. However, I do
| not experience the apple as part of an overlay, as some others
| have described it. Rather, it's as if I use a different set of
| eyes, ears or a another skin. The more vividly imagine the
| apple, the less aware I become of my actual senses. I can of
| course also imagine how the apple would interact with the
| environment around me, but the combined environment is still
| distinct from reality. I also have very precise memories of
| faces I've seen. I've always wondered if there's an inverted
| correlation with my number memory, which is much more diffuse.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I have no real basis for this, but I always suspected that the
| majority of differences in ability to picture things is actually
| just a difference in semantics about terms like "visualizing",
| "picturing", etc. I don't think anybody is "literally"
| envisioning things, as in hallucination. On the other end, I
| don't think anybody is actually unable to "think of" what a thing
| looks like. But it's really difficult to objectively describe
| what it's like to picture something in your head - so difficult,
| in fact, that I can see some people calling it "literally
| summoning an image" and others calling it "not seeing anything at
| all", while both talking about the _exact same thing_.
|
| Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might
| not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.
| podgietaru wrote:
| Yeah, when I first heard this I tried to picture an elephant.
| And I thought, huh. I can't. But I realised there's a vague,
| hazy representation of it in my mind. That idea of needing to
| see things with picture clarity really threw me at first.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yep. I can picture things all right, even details such as
| surface texture, and if I'm eg. planning a route I'm
| certainly doing it in a visual way (imagining a map), but the
| sensation is much more "ghostly" and transient than real
| imagery. The same goes for other modalities like sound or
| smell or touch.
| aosaigh wrote:
| I agree with this. I thought I had aphantasia the last time I
| read about it here.
|
| Then I started interrogating all of the people who claimed to
| "visualise" things and it turned out we were all doing the same
| thing - conceptualising in our "mind's eye".
|
| For example, anyone I've asked to visualise something with
| their eyes closed can also "visualise" the same thing with
| their eyes open. It's happening "somewhere else" and not in
| your vision.
|
| So I think the term "visualise" leads to a lot of the
| confusion.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'm friends with a Disney animator. I asked him, when you
| draw are you seeing the image in your mind? He was confused
| and said of course, he sees it very clearly, and his drawings
| are just laying down that image. He didn't understand what it
| would be like to _not_ visualize.
| godshatter wrote:
| As a person with aphantasia, I can see actual images when I'm
| on the edge of sleep, and I can see actual images when I'm
| dreaming, but I can't get anything like that to show up when I
| try to "picture" something. Just black with static.
|
| It is difficult to describe, but so many people talk about it
| as if they are seeing something and I never have - I've always
| assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind to visualize
| something.
| AaronAPU wrote:
| I can't generally "literally see" my mental images. But on a
| few rare occasions in my life, I did. I don't know why, and
| it was brief, but at least I can easily believe now that some
| people do it all the time.
|
| When it happened to me the few times it was an otherwise very
| mundane day and it felt very natural. It was overlayed onto
| whatever else I was looking at and could persist with eyes
| closed.
|
| Honestly the experience kind of cheapened art for me to an
| extent since you either have that cheat code or you don't.
| the_af wrote:
| No, I've talked about this with a friend with aphantasia, and
| that's not it.
|
| While I'm willing to concede there's probably different degrees
| of visualization (which in my mind also explains why some
| people are able to draw "from memory" and others are less apt),
| there's also people who absolutely cannot visualize at all.
|
| My friend:
|
| - Cannot visualize AT ALL. If you ask him to picture a red
| circle, he cannot do it. He cannot visualize the color red.
|
| - If you ask him to picture the face of his mother, he cannot
| do it. All he sees is darkness. (We've wondered about this, how
| can he tell it's his mother when he sees her? He has no
| difficulty identifying faces, he just cannot visualize them at
| all if they are not in front of him. Not "not close enough" --
| AT ALL).
|
| - He cannot mentally reproduce music, no matter how
| imperfectly. I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars
| (with reasonable fidelity), he cannot.
|
| - He cannot taste in anticipation something he enjoys, like
| flavorful coffee. I can anticipate drinking a good coffee, and
| get some sort of sensorial stimulation/anticipation even
| _before_ I get the coffee. He cannot, at all. And he does enjoy
| good coffee.
|
| It's not about a difference in terminology, he really cannot
| visualize/mentally experience anything if it's not actually
| happening.
|
| ----
|
| Finally:
|
| > _I don 't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as
| in hallucination_
|
| I am. It's not exactly a hallucination because there's no
| confusion about what's real and what's not, but "hallucination"
| is pretty close to what actually happens in my mind. I can
| visualize pretty much anything I've experienced, and some
| things I haven't too, like green elves dancing on my keyboard.
| I've always been a visual person.
|
| I can draw things "from memory" and it's pretty much putting
| into paper what I'm seeing in my mind.
| abetusk wrote:
| I think this is a typical response for someone with aphantasia.
|
| To see why your take might be false, many people dreams have a
| fidelity of images that is comparable to reality, even for
| people with aphantasia. Do you dream with this fidelity? Can
| you recreate that fidelity while awake?
|
| There are also testable differences that support the claim that
| people can _actually_ visualize, in photographic detail, images
| while awake [0].
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
| neilv wrote:
| I might not be the most representative example (I seem to use
| visual and spatial more than most people for abstract
| reasoning), but here goes an attempt to convey one data
| point...
|
| If I imagine a particular model of car, for example, I can
| instantly visualize much of what the entire car looks like. I
| can also move my attention around parts of the visualization,
| to see more detail. It's more than facts, and more than
| feelings.
|
| This visualization is different than seeing with eyes, and is
| not confused with that, but seems to be using some of the same
| machinery.
|
| I could sketch a detailed drawing from what I'm visualizing, a
| bit like the car was physically there, and I could keep looking
| back to it for references. But when it's in my head, I don't
| have to take my eyes off the drawing, and I can kinda merge my
| drawing and the reference in my head.
|
| In contrast, if I try to imagine the _scent_ of tire rubber, or
| of cooking, or any other scent, I cannot. Not even the tiniest
| bit. There 's just nothing there.
|
| As a point of reference for comparison, that's pretty dramatic
| and binary.
|
| Of course, when I smell a familiar scent, I often identify it
| instantly. And while I am physically perceiving it, I can
| experience it, and move my attention around it, and introspect
| on its character, and have other reactions to it (e.g., good,
| bad, etc.), etc. But immediately after I stop physically
| perceiving it, I again can't imagine it. I can only recall
| previously registered facts about it: that vanilla smells good,
| kinda sweet(?), and maybe creamy(?). I could know more facts if
| I was a baker or cook, and I guess reason about how to use
| vanilla, but I still doubt I could imagine perceiving the scent
| of vanilla in my head.
|
| And some scents will quickly surface related memories of
| previous times I perceived the scent, even decades ago. And
| those non-scent memories will remain activated and linger after
| the physical scent is removed. (Any rare accompanying wow deja
| vu sense is brief.)
|
| I can picture the visual appearance of various glass and
| plastic bottles of vanilla flavoring I've seen over the
| decades, and how some vanilla flavoring looks in a particular
| stainless steel teaspoon with ambient light reflecting through
| it, etc. I can also visualize in detail the visual appearance
| of things that come to mind when I try to think about things
| I've seen that have vanilla flavoring. I just can't imagine
| what they smell or taste like.
| loco5niner wrote:
| It's not a confusion of terms. I can easily conjure up picture-
| quality images in my head, whether my eyes are open or closed.
| Compare that to my wife who says she can't even see my face in
| her head, at all, and has a hard time recognizing faces to the
| point where she asked my not to do anything about the red dot
| on my face (broken capillaries) because that's one way she
| recognizes that it's me. She can't see images in her head. She
| can't recall visual memories in her head, she sometimes
| struggles to remember which shelf the cups go when emptying the
| dishwasher. Perfectly normal and smart and capable. Not arguing
| that it's binary, but there are distinct ends of the spectrum.
| It might also be stronger for me because I tend to 'think' in
| pictures when the problem calls for it and it's a 'style of
| thinking' I'm used to.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _I don 't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as
| in hallucination_
|
| I think it's basically exactly like a hallucination for some
| people, except it's mentally tagged as originating "internally"
| instead of "externally" (which is what freaks people out about
| having a hallucination). I think it's basically the same thing
| with internal monologue vs. auditory hallucinations.
|
| (for the record I have neither internal monologue nor
| visualization)
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| >Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books--since
| description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull
| --or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some
| aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling,
| since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to
| imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a
| book character in a movie was often unsettling--because they
| already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn't
| look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just
| particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their
| image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the
| actor conflicted with that amorphousness.
|
| I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't
| connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have
| the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read
| both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed
| at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague
| sense of knowing) the character looked like.
|
| However:
|
| >Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more
| compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were
| unable to imagine.
|
| I _do_ find that, once I 've seen a movie or show adaptation,
| that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the
| book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's
| glass in the first _Harry Potter_ book /movie.
| daemonologist wrote:
| These passages about reading were interesting to me as well,
| particularly the preceding one: > Naturally,
| aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading.
| Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped
| noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and,
| because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also
| stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the
| words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading
| bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly
| into their minds.
|
| I do _not_ have aphantasia, but I 'm not seeing mental images
| when I'm reading unless I'm not "in the zone" and consciously
| choose to do so. Good fiction especially is more direct-to-
| memory.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| For me I can "see" things in my minds eye and it almost doesn't
| matter if my eyes are closed or not. The detail isn't perfect and
| it's unlike anything else I would ever "see", such as a blurry
| image or simple drawing. I can manipulate the image in my mind,
| rotate it or fold it over, etc.
|
| The longer I think about a specific part the more detail I can
| see in that part. Unlike when I look around and see infinite
| detail all at once, my minds eye only sees the detail when I
| really focus on generating it.
| abetusk wrote:
| I've only skimmed the article but it seems to relate memory with
| aphantasia, which I haven't heard before. I'm a bit skeptical of
| this take.
|
| Note that people aphantasia tend to score _better_ at scene
| recall, at least in some metrics, than people without ( "Those
| without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial
| memory" [0]). I think the idea is that people with aphantasia
| tend to build language "scaffolding" to describe relations rather
| than relying on a visual representation.
|
| If true, this might be why people with aphantasia tend to
| gravitate towards some engineering and science disciplines.
|
| There's a lot of people lamenting the loss of minds eye visual
| imagery but a potential benefit is to have a lifetime's practice
| of using language to reason and quantify relationships between
| pieces of knowledge.
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
| zephyrthenoble wrote:
| I think an interesting different way to talk about aphantasia is
| not, "Can you see an apple when you close your eyes" but more
| along the linked of, "Can you mentally edit the visual reality
| you see?"
|
| A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I
| was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the
| power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.
|
| It's not literally overriding my vision, it's almost like a thin
| layer, less than transparent, over reality. But specifically,
| it's entirely in my mind. I would never confuse that imagery with
| reality...
|
| Having said that, I think that is related to the way our brains
| process visual information. I've had an experience when I'm
| driving that, when I recognize where I am, coming from a new
| location in not familiar with, I feel like suddenly my vision
| expands in my peripheral vision. I think this is because my brain
| offloads processing to a faster mental model of the road because
| I'm familiar with it. I wonder if that extra "vision" is actually
| as ephemeral as my imagined skateboarder.
| the_af wrote:
| > _A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car
| while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding
| along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace
| with our car._
|
| Oh, I've done this! I think many kids have. I remember a moment
| in my childhood when it was ninja turtles riding on those
| hoverboards, while I was bored watching outside the window of
| the back seat. Riding along the power lines, and occasionally
| katana-cutting something in the way.
| AaronAPU wrote:
| omg! That was every trip to my grandparents house my entire
| childhood. I couldn't "actually see" the skateboarder, but it
| was enough to serve as entertainment.
|
| Mine was usually some sort of superhero who did flips over
| things and picked them up and whatnot.
|
| I can't imagine if you could "actually see" the skateboarder
| how much less boring those rides would be.
| tayloramurphy wrote:
| Mine was a guy running next to us jumping over any shadows on
| the road. He'd stumble a bit and then be able to sprint to
| catch up.
| baby wrote:
| That's what i used to do too!!
| dominick-cc wrote:
| Same but with rollerblades
| jdshaffer wrote:
| Mine was a little 4-wheeled buggy riding along the guardrails
| as we drove. Really cool to see other people had similar
| imaginations!
| hondadriver wrote:
| Same here. I can't see, hear nor smell anything apart from what
| is really there.
|
| I can 'imagine' in great detail, have a good visual/ auditory
| memory, but there is no real picture or sound. It is black /
| silent. I never forget a face just can't picture them.
|
| I found out about this via an article posted here when I was 45
| years old, now 4 years ago.
|
| It never felt and does feel like a disability in any way.
|
| Dreams in contrast are a full sensory experience for me, so the
| route back from memory to senses is there, only it is blocked
| when I am awake.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I simply do not buy any aspect of this. It is absolutely
| untestable. It's not just that I don't think people who can't see
| mental images exist, I don't think that you can prove that anyone
| _does_ see mental images. It 's pure introspection and self-
| reporting, and half of the scientists named had very odd, old-
| timey standards of evidence that led them to many very wrong
| conclusions in their fields.
|
| I couldn't say whether I, myself, have any mental images. I
| wouldn't even know what it meant to see without eyes. Does that
| mean that I don't have mental images, or does that mean that I
| have them so easily that they pass without notice? Or does it
| mean that this is horseshit, and the consequences of it very much
| not profound or even detectable?
|
| People's self-reported subjective experiences, about any subject,
| are almost worthless. You are even an unreliable narrator _to
| yourself._ The burden of proof lies on the people who would claim
| these mind ghosts, not the people that deny them. These
| descriptions are all so much poetry, so literary.
|
| Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of work on introspection, and
| reminds us of things like how we thought we all dreamed in black
| and white before the invention of the color television, and we
| thought that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness; and
| how blind people who experienced "blindsight" had no idea that
| they were reflexively echolocating until you covered their ears
| and tested them again.
|
| People can have entire, sound chains of reasoning that they are
| only aware of the conclusions of (and unaware of the process even
| existing.) We are not aware of all of what we're thinking or how.
| Our self-perception relies as much or more on our self-images
| than actual recall of our experiences.
|
| Also, going through severe trauma and saying you see the world
| differently afterwards is not evidence of anything. If it was
| brain trauma, it'd be surprising if you _didn 't_ have a
| different understanding of the world during and after your
| recovery.
|
| I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their
| self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of
| untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as
| mysterious superpowers. I do think it helps to remind ourselves
| in these times how far just babbling the most likely thing can
| get us, now that we're in the age of LLMs. _There doesn 't have
| to be anything inside._
|
| edit: I've been paid as an artist at times in my life, and very
| much like to draw, and I _still_ have no idea if I have any
| mental imagery. It 's just not a concept I can attach any meaning
| to.
|
| -----
|
| edit2: I entirely forgot that there's a specific essay on this
| subject by Schwitzgebel.
|
| _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of
| Visual Imagery_
|
| > Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of
| our own current conscious experience or "phenomenology". I argue
| that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the
| experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent
| for this position is found among the introspective psychologists
| of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main
| arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge
| of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a
| visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about
| certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If
| so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken
| about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is
| observed that although people give widely variable reports about
| their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do
| not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills
| that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery,
| such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory.
|
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm
|
| other links:
|
| _Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?_
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm
|
| _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of
| Human Echolocation_
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
|
| _The Unreliability of Naive Introspection_
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm
| daemonologist wrote:
| Regardless of the actual internal experience, it would be
| interesting that most people are quite certain they can
| "visualize" things, and a significant number of people are
| quite certain they cannot. This, in my opinion, would be worth
| discussing even if it was entirely down to the unreliability of
| people's self-descriptions.
|
| However, the article mentions evidence that there is an actual
| physical difference here: fMRIs, and contraction of the pupil
| when imagining a bright light. Clearly _something_ is
| happening.
| swores wrote:
| > _I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their
| self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of
| untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as
| mysterious superpowers._
|
| FYI, I don't have any part of my self image related to any of
| this sort of thing (I never think about it except when it comes
| up in discussions like this, during which I briefly find it a
| bit interesting and then forget about it again), and I
| downvoted you because I think you're being confident to the
| point of cockiness yet talking absolute rubbish.
|
| So please don't assume there's some biased reason behind every
| downvote you get for that comment, at least some of us just
| think you're completely wrong.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > you're being confident to the point of cockiness yet
| talking absolute rubbish.
|
| Profound. I'm convinced. Ever consider speaking to the
| argument, or is this just easier?
|
| > So please don't assume there's some biased reason behind
| every downvote you get for that comment, at least some of us
| just think you're completely wrong.
|
| I'm guessing from the comment that you self-describe in this
| way? If so, why in the world would I change my assumption? I
| have to be honest: your taking my (confident) disbelief as an
| insult seems like a hit dog barking.
|
| edit: and no degree of upset is going to make me understand
| what a mental image is. So apparently, I don't have them
| either.
| swores wrote:
| I obviously wasn't trying to change your mind on the main
| subject, since I didn't make a single argument about it. I
| don't have an obligation to try to explain why I think
| you're wrong, and I don't understand the subject well
| enough to be the right person to do so.
|
| I was solely addressing your bullshit attempt to dismiss
| any downvotes as being people defending their own self
| images, by pointing out that I downvoted you without that
| being even slightly the reason. I used to think that what
| you believe was quite likely the case, and that people just
| have different ways of describing it, and if scientists
| were to prove that is indeed the case I'd be perfectly
| happy to change my mind again, I couldn't give a shit other
| than being curious to know the truth. Whether or not I can
| visualise things more or less than the next person is no
| more an important part of my self image than the exact
| number of hairs on my left leg is - it technically does
| make up a part of who I am, but not a part I'd ever bother
| thinking about if thinking about the subject of "me".
|
| > _" I'm guessing from the comment that you self-describe
| in this way?"_
|
| Your comment is confusingly worded such that I don't know
| what "this way" means, but no, unless someone specifically
| asked me how my mind works with regards to this specific
| subject, I wouldn't self-describe anything to do with this
| at all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I have no idea why you're concerned about my feeling
| about downvotes, but you're free to have it. I assumed it
| was a different reason, but it seems you're just
| concerned about me. I assure you that I'm fine.
| swores wrote:
| I've no idea what part of my comment gave you the
| impression I was concerned about you in any way or had
| any reason to think you might not be fine, but good for
| you that you are! :)
| godshatter wrote:
| There was a study published by the University of Exeter in 2021
| that showed the following:
|
| rsfMRI revealed stronger connectivity between the visual-
| occipital network and several prefrontal regions (BAs 9, 10,
| 11) in the hyperphantasic group when compared with the
| aphantasic group
|
| Here is a link to the paper:
| https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab035/626...
|
| So there does appear to be a way to potentially test for
| aphantasia that requires no self-reporting, just an attempt to
| visualize.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
| svachalek wrote:
| The last point is very interesting. I would say I have minimal,
| nearly nonexistent ability to visualize mentally, unless I am
| in a lucid dreaming state in which case it does feel like a
| magic power.
|
| I never thought about it until you brought it up, but my
| ability to manipulate images in my head is nonetheless top
| notch, I can solve visual puzzles that seem difficult for most
| people with hardly any effort at all. And my ability to
| draw/paint is not something people would pay me for but is
| still well above average, and that also requires "holding" an
| image in your mind. So either these skills are unrelated to
| being able to "see" your imagination or we are really failing
| to communicate about it.
| paulsutter wrote:
| What about visualizing physical systems. Billiards, air flowing
| over a wing, what's causing the flaws in an anodizing process.
| This is really more important because you can't invent machines
| (or even diagnose them) if you cant visualize how a physical
| system operates.
|
| This is an clear shortcoming of LLMs/RLHF. They can talk a good
| line about any subject, but become hopelessly confused when
| discussing a physical system. Because they just knows the words,
| they dont really have any idea about the physical world.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Given how diffently people describe various phenomena which are
| easier to actually compare, I have lost most hope of
| quantitatively understanding aphantasia. Of course people differ
| in ability to visualize thing and using "the minds eye", but
| exactly what they mean when describing their experience is only
| confusing.
|
| Many, many people are so very imprecise with words. And we humans
| are generally bad at analyzing ourselves vs others.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, here's the 'related' list that I could come up with. Anything
| I missed?
|
| (Note: lists of previous threads aren't meant as criticism for a
| topic being repetitive! On the contrary, the classic topics
| always reappear and that's fine when the new article is
| interesting. Lists like this are just for curious readers who
| might want more.)
|
| _Aphantasia and Psychedelics_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438296 - Oct 2025 (117
| comments)
|
| _I do not remember my life and it 's fine_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196576 - June 2025 (223
| comments)
|
| _Most self-reported aphantasics also reported weak or absent
| auditory imagery_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42534859
| - Dec 2024 (6 comments)
|
| _What do you visualize while programming?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237 - Oct 2024 (167
| comments)
|
| _What happens in a mind that can 't 'see' mental images_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138338 - Aug 2024 (432
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia Is No Creativity-Killer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40810777 - June 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40757775 - June 2024 (401
| comments)
|
| _Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from
| priors?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951990 - April
| 2024 (114 comments)
|
| _Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness
| extremes_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887661 - March
| 2024 (89 comments)
|
| _Aphantasics less likely to be engaged with a short story, but
| still enjoy it_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113343 -
| Jan 2024 (2 comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: The inability to create mental imagery_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877146 - Jan 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Poll: Can you visualize details with your eyes closed?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660632 - Dec 2023 (60
| comments)
|
| _What happens in the brain while daydreaming?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38654388 - Dec 2023 (146
| comments)
|
| _My Brain Doesn't Picture Things_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37789989 - Oct 2023 (50
| comments)
|
| _My Brain Doesn't Picture Things_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784984 - Oct 2023 (60
| comments)
|
| _How to see bright, vivid images in your mind's eye (2016)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37718999 - Sept 2023 (232
| comments)
|
| _Images in the mind's eye are quick sketches that lack simple,
| real-world details_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807533 - July 2023 (88
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: Picture This? Some Just Can't (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36723060 - July 2023 (2
| comments)
|
| _How blind photographers visualize the world_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719490 - July 2023 (48
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: It seems I lost imagination, what to do?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34862427 - Feb 2023 (41
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is
| blind' (2019)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862468 -
| June 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _Ask HN: Do you think in words or pictures?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684070 - June 2022 (29
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: Not Everyone Can Picture Things_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377295 - May 2022 (5
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) [pdf]_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153061 - April 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Pupils Reveal 'Aphantasia' - The Absence of Visual Imagination_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121556 - April 2022 (111
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia, or how not to do math in your head (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _How do you visualize code?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29979958 - Jan 2022 (86
| comments)
|
| _I Can't See You but I'm Not Blind_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551579 - Dec 2021 (306
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 -
| Nov 2021 (276 comments)
|
| _Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have
| aphantasia_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct
| 2021 (10 comments)
|
| _Picture This? Some Just Can't (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than
| other people 's_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27669211
| - June 2021 (146 comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Many People Have a Vivid 'Mind's Eye,' While Others Have None
| at All_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27437001 - June
| 2021 (31 comments)
|
| _Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _People who can 't see things in their mind could have memory
| trouble too: study_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23689667 - June 2020 (147
| comments)
|
| _Picture This? Some Just Can't (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 -
| June 2019 (72 comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (424
| comments)
|
| _The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100
| comments)
|
| _What it's like to be unable to visualize anything_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: A life without mental images_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73
| comments)
|
| _Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2
| comments)
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Looking at it from another direction, sometimes daydreaming can
| get so intense that what is in front of your eyes disappear.
| Internal imagery completely takes over. Does this happen to
| people who identify as aphantasiacs? Is everyone able to
| daydream?
| pfgallagher wrote:
| I have aphantasia. Like many others, I am able to see images when
| I dream and very rarely in a hypnagogic state.
|
| My partner is on the opposite side of the spectrum; she can
| conjure mental images with ease. Our differences in that respect
| have led to a lot of interesting conversations.
|
| I think aphantasia is quite misunderstood by people able to
| visualize. I can remember how things look, have no issues
| identifying faces, have a strong spatial understanding of places
| I've been, etc. It's hard to describe precisely; we just remember
| things differently.
| anthk wrote:
| Instead of the whole image, you just visualize the main aspects
| as vectors?
| pfgallagher wrote:
| Your metaphor isn't bad, actually. I just don't visualize
| anything. It's more like a feeling of abstract relationships.
| It often feels like most of my brain is in RAM; I can usually
| recall things almost instantly. And if I can't, I can do the
| trick where you think of something else and let your mind
| crunch in the background until it pops up.
|
| I should clarify that I can still imagine what a room looks
| like and what's in it. I just don't see it. It's more like I
| feel the layout or know where things are, almost like
| navigating a mental map without any visuals. Specific details
| like colors, patterns, etc. are much harder to recall unless
| I am intimately familiar with the object or whatever.
| cperciva wrote:
| _a feeling of abstract relationships_
|
| This. If you ask me to imagine a triangle I'll start
| thinking about having three sides and three angles and the
| area is half of the base times the height and it's a rigid
| body and the angles add up to 180 degrees... but there's no
| _visual_ aspect to it.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if aphantasia gave me an advantage in
| mathematics, because I had no trouble whatsoever with the
| concept of "abstract symbols".
| FjordWarden wrote:
| After coming down from the shock of learning there are people
| like you I was even more amazed that one of the founding
| engineers of Pixar, and a giant in computer graphics, also has
| this condition. He even did a survey that found his artists
| where more likely to be on the aphantasia spectrum than
| managers. Dunno, maybe some people are so driven to create what
| they cannot think or see.
| pfgallagher wrote:
| I've heard about that! My partner and I have both been
| learning to draw this year. I'm pretty decent at drawing
| observationally / from reference, but I haven't tried much
| from memory. I imagine she'd be much better at that side of
| things. I've also noticed I'm not great at coming up with
| initial ideas or visual concepts, but once I have a topic or
| direction, I can absolutely run with it.
|
| I also think it makes sense why a lot of software engineers
| (myself included) have aphantasia. Being "rational" is
| arguably easier when you're not influenced by the emotional
| weight of images. Maybe we're even less predisposed to PTSD,
| since we can't visually relive things in the same way. My
| mind still races at night like anyone else's, but it's all
| non-visual. Just endless inner monologue instead of a reel of
| images. Couldn't count sheep if I tried!
| dvsgaevsvsgavsv wrote:
| Mental images are a distraction from what is here right now. Be
| here now. Not be here yesterday or be here tomorrow..
| jedberg wrote:
| I have no mind's eye, and neither does my wife. Neither of us
| even realized people can actually see images in their head until
| recently.
|
| Our children appear to have a mind's eye though.
| adt2bt wrote:
| This has always been interesting for me, as I think I have
| aphantasia but also can vividly experience _taste_ in the same
| manner as if I 'm eating foods.
|
| In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I
| can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti &
| meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much
| effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is
| more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking,
| as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish
| will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or
| different techniques to follow.
|
| I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people
| can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely
| visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes.
| Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I
| did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I
| slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of
| eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.
|
| I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me
| and develop image visualization abilities over time.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| I am fascinated by the extent to which people can mentalize
| their different senses. I can visualize most of my primary
| senses. Sight would probably be my weakest one. I am definitely
| not aphantasic, but the images seem much more ephemeral than
| what other people experience. I can conjure up an image at will
| but if I focus too much it will become fuzzier.
|
| Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy
| but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't
| comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my
| brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once
| with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the
| other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect
| placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of
| what is missing, but which it is not.
|
| None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin
| pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my
| head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the
| feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and
| meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those
| cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth
| cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are
| somehow so bland yet over spiced.
|
| I also wonder how much of our differences are often our
| inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient
| manner.
| mannanj wrote:
| Flouride calcifying the pineal gland, the center of visualization
| internally, doesn't help.
| runekaagaard wrote:
| Thats me to a tee. I also don't have a inner dialogue when
| thinking through a problem:)
| kgwxd wrote:
| > I also don't have a inner dialogue...
|
| I wonder if some people grow to develop an inner monologue, but
| also immediately start developing an ability to silence it, to
| the point they don't have to try.
|
| Mine is basically always on, and it can be problematic.
| neRok wrote:
| Regarding "a propensity to hold grudges" and "easily move on,
| forget, not hold grudges": I find this to be the case. I can
| easily hold a grudge, because it's like the grudge is a post-it-
| note stuck to the front of my book-of-knowledge. This means I can
| readily recall the grudge, and that I can also easily
| forget/move-on from the grudge (just remove the note).
|
| Continuing with the post-it-note analogy, the note can only hold
| a small amount of information, and so the grudge will be recorded
| as something simple like "fuck ___, they're an arrogant twat". So
| then the situation arises where you're talking to someone else
| and they ask "what do you think about ___?"; and so you answer "I
| can't stand them, they're so arrogant"; to which they respond "oh
| really, how so?"; and you can't give an answer, because it wasn't
| written on the note.
|
| I think this ties in with memories not making you feel the
| relevant emotions, because the emotion you felt was also just
| saved as a "fact". I have found though that if I step through all
| the facts of an "event" and consider each "moment" along the way,
| that I can often generate the relevant emotion. So say I was
| remembering an argument, I can remember various facts about the
| argument and that I was angry about it, but I can't feel that
| anger. But if I walk through the moments, like `they said this,
| which made me think that, to which I rightly responded with...`,
| then eventually I'll start to feel angry just like I would have.
|
| For an analogy on how I think memories are stored differently:
| then for non-aphantasiacs, I reckon their brain must save
| `memory.zip`, which contains `video, audio, smells, emotions,
| etc`. For a person like myself with aphantasia however, it's like
| I asked ChatGPT for a summary of `memory.zip`, and then I only
| saved the summary.
|
| Saying that though, I do wonder about the connection between
| "fact based memories" and aphantasia's lack of mental imagery.
| Because if >50% of the usefulness of `memory.zip` is from the
| video, but you can't "see" the video because you aphantasia --
| then has your brain decided/learned to not bother saving
| `memory.zip` and instead just save the summary, or are all
| components of `memory.zip` also corrupt/unplayable?
| neRok wrote:
| Just to elaborate on the "fast-facts"/post-it-note point I
| made: it seems there's actually a lot of "facts"
| ("conclusions") stored in a readily available manor in my
| brain. All the references/data that lead to these conclusions
| are stored in some deeper "archive" section though, and aren't
| readily available.
|
| I guess you could compare them as if they are API's to
| different LLM's, and my "consciousness" is the web-browser. So
| it's like; - `fast_facts.llm` is a micro model
| with good breadth and fast response times, but it has little
| depth. So it's API can be fetch'd without worrying about it
| blocking the main-thread/browser. - `all_data.llm` is a
| full size model, but it's slow to respond, and "costs" more to
| run. So in the browser, it is only lazily-loaded (ie, not
| always used), and it has to be called async style because you
| have to wait for the results to slowly "stream in".
|
| And stream they do, because back to my example conversation
| where someone asks "how are they arrogant?" -- whilst I likely
| wouldn't immediately remember any examples (unless they
| happened very recently), at that point the request to
| `all_data.llm` would have been sent, and so after some umm's
| and ahh's, I might have an answer. Or I might just say "I can't
| remember off the top of my head, but also ..." start talking
| about something else, and then after 30 seconds I will drop the
| classic "but actually, i just remembered, ...".
| yeellow wrote:
| From my recent experience I believe you can train your mental
| vision, at least to some extent. I play chess and the ability to
| imagine a position and moves in your head is quite common among
| chess players, but I was always struggling with it. I could not
| see the board clearly in my mind and when I was doing exercises
| on telling the color of a given square I was checking coordinates
| parity, as I could not see it in my mind. Only recently I tried
| to train chess vision starting with 3x3 board, than extending to
| 4x4 and finally glueing 8x8 with 4 4x4 boards. To my surprise
| after a while I started seeing the board more clearly and I could
| memorize some simple positions. I've noticed that my general
| mental vision improved significantly at the same time. If you
| don't play chess you can start with playing tic tac toe in your
| head, focusing on seeing the board and marks. I think such
| exercise is better than imaging an apple, because you can
| objectively check if what you see is correct. Any board game
| would do, but start with a small board, and extend only when you
| feel comfortable. Imagining horse moves on a 4x4 board, focusing
| on seeing square colors helped me a lot.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Something not usually discussed is the different kinds of
| internal sensing:
|
| - Seeing images (what we usually talk about). Can you see your
| loved ones' faces in your mind's eye? Can you picture an
| elephant? Can you hold an image still or is it an ever-shifting
| scramble?
|
| - Seeing _color_. In your mind's eye, can you conjure up just the
| colors green, red, yellow...? No shape or imagery needed, but
| only the plain color. To my surprise and delight I discovered I
| can visualize colors without being able to see any actual image.
|
| - Seeing _movement_. Independent of actual imagery, can you
| visualize _pure motion_. Again to my surprise, I can visualize
| movement without any associated imagery. Like, I can imagine a
| runner on a treadmill and clearly see the _motion_ of the arms
| and legs going back and forth -- but I don't actually see the
| arms and legs at all. I'm seeing only the first derivative of an
| image, like a Schlieren image.
|
| - Hearing music in your head. Can you pick out the different
| instruments? Can you anticipate the guitar stab in the 2nd verse.
| Can you hear the harmonica in Karma Chameleon even though you've
| only ever listened to that song a couple of times, and probably
| not in over 20 years?
|
| - (might be same as above) Can you hear people's voices? Can you
| randomly conjure up your parents or Obama or Tina Fey counting to
| ten?
|
| Any others I've missed?
| tolerance wrote:
| Some people have more vivid imaginations than others and a vivid
| imagination entails more than just noodling and doodling well.
| Evidently.
|
| People vary in their capacity to reason with things. People who
| "see" things with their eyes closed probably don't believe that
| they are physically seeing them (i.e., with their actual
| eyeballs). People who can't...probably can; they just expect to
| actually see what it is that they're thinking about.
|
| This is a sensitive subject. At its core it beckons forth for
| questions of spiritual import.
|
| Is society fit to address something as abstract as this problem
| in an age where "Chatbot psychosis" is becoming a thing?
| skinkestek wrote:
| I'm a bit tired of people trying to explain it away.
|
| I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe
| because I have experienced and sometimes still experience
| seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time
| it is absolutely impossible.
|
| There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started
| researching this topic was because a person who had very clear
| visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his
| description got this thing started.
| mackeye wrote:
| i can visualize only faint wireframes and blobs, if that makes
| sense. the closest analog is, my internal monologue can speak, as
| if i were to physically speak, but i cannot "hear" it with my
| ears. i can visualize "where" each part of a composite scene
| should go (e.g., my laptop on a table, with a whiteboard in front
| of me, and a window to my left), and rotate a representation of
| the scene, but there is no visual component aside from a very
| plain outline, if i concentrate.
|
| speaking to people who claim to be able to visualize colorful
| scenes in 3d, with sound, etc., and truly see the scene before
| them --- there is probably _some_ variance. i wouldn't say it
| affects my cognition, but how could i really know? i've never
| asked my friends, but i imagine the percentage of people who use
| 3d visualization to reason, e.g., complex math, is small, given
| the number of people i've seen use the right-hand rule on exams
| :) (especially given aphantasia is supposedly quite rare).
|
| i attended a talk recently on experience with organic chemistry
| pedagogy at a university for deaf students. few requisite terms
| are defined in american sign language, so the professor formed a
| committee to create 400 or so signs. "tetrahedral" uses four
| fingers in a tetrahedral formation, "chiral" moves one hand about
| the other to simulate a mirror, etc. education of stereochemistry
| wasn't necessarily heavy on visualization, as you can draw the
| molecule and reason about it without conceptualization in 3d, but
| i caught that i'd often look at clocks for R/S rotation problems
| (where clockwise-counterclockwise in 3d was relevant).
| pitdicker wrote:
| There is an interesting reddit community 'CureAphantasia' with
| resources to develop your ability to visualize mental images.
| Together there are ca. 25 posts that offer a complete guide that
| might as well have been a book.
|
| This seems like a good start:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/xgtyd3/trad...
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Based on comments here I guess in addition to having no internal
| monolog, I also have no "mental images."
|
| I can _imagine_ how a specific voice sounds, or singing, etc.;
| and I can summon a vague visual impression of something,
|
| But ITT people are describing a level of detail I can't
| comprehend. I have no images I can "study" and I can't solve
| visual puzzles in my head. I can't rotate arbitrary objects and
| tell you the shape of their outline.
|
| I guess some of you can do this? Jealous AF.
| Matterless wrote:
| I don't know why I'm surprised every time to see so many people
| astounded in the comments every time another of these articles
| come out. I guess I thought by now this phenomenon would be more
| common knowledge... I'm a non-seer and a non-self speaker. That
| is, I do not have any clear monologue whatsoever, nor can I
| visualize anything at all. However, I have a pretty great memory,
| just not for the experience of things, but instead only the
| circumstances, the trivia, the conclusions, and all of those can
| be very granular.
|
| Words exist for me in the space beyond my lips, or my fingertips;
| what that feels like, in the moment, is that it is the act of
| externalization of words which makes them come into being, but
| not for a moment are they ever out of my control.
|
| I can't remember the sound of my mother's voice. Not really. Of
| course if I heard it in a recording it would be as recognizable
| as any voice, and in fact when I watch animated shows, like
| classic King of the Hill for example, I'm extremely good at
| picking out all the celebrity voices and I'm often surprised that
| I can identify a voice I didn't know that I knew.
|
| I used to have an internal monologue. I used to be able to
| picture things. That all went away in my teens. Not only can I
| somewhat remember what that was like, I'm able to experience
| vivid internal pictures and internal sounds sometimes in the
| moments just before I'm fully asleep. It doesn't happen very
| frequently, but it's enjoyable when it does.
|
| And that's it. If you have any questions for thisaphantasic non-
| self-speaker, have at it.
| vanadium1st wrote:
| When you're standing in front of a mirror, can you ask yourself
| a question and then answer it without saying anything out loud?
| saltcured wrote:
| I am also aphantasic and have no internal monologue. I never
| had them as far as I know. When I heard that kids could have
| "imaginary friends" I thought it sounded totally absurd. I
| equated it with my schizophrenic relative who hallucinates and
| suffers delusions.
|
| Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It
| is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly
| as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except
| for some spatial or topological feeling.
|
| I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and
| such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't
| this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel
| a subset of recognition features are present or there is
| something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition
| entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct
| triggering on the recognizable features.
|
| I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I
| mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking
| at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective.
| I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The
| feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being
| replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger
| was a very disturbing perspective shift.
| jibbit wrote:
| If you could see a photographic-quality image in your mind, you
| could answer questions about it the way you'd answer questions
| about a photograph in front of you. 'what's written on the sign?'
| 'how many windows?' That's photographic memory. Since that's not
| real, the 'normal visualization' everyone's comparing themselves
| to doesn't exist either. Yet we keep treating as credible people
| who assert what others experience based on not experiencing it
| themselves. This is epistemically bankrupt.
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