22 ms·

Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind'

• shaneos 8y ago
  Interesting that some great animators also have aphantasia. I always assumed that my aphantasia and complete inability to draw anything at better than a 5 year old level were related, but it seems some have developed an iterative process that works around it. That's pretty encouraging.
  • bitexploder 8y ago
    I can visualize well and can’t draw either.
    • OneWordSoln 8y ago
      There are methods that claim to guarantee the student will learn to draw. I believe they start with simple objects (boxes, spheres, cones, etc.) and then begin drawing them shaded with different light sources and then progress from there. Beyond the people with extraordinary natural ability, perhaps the rest of us just need to be taught what others can easily intuit?
      • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        You're probably right. I work with adults doing art work quite a lot. They are often upset that they can't just do it, they've not tried before, or last tried decades ago, but some how expect to just rock up and be great at creating something "artistic" without doing any practice or learning towards it. I'm one of the "omg I might be aphantasic" set here today, but I've never really tried picturing things in that way I don't think, so perhaps I can but just haven't learnt to.
  • theoh 8y ago
    I'd say it's a feedback process, not an iterative one. "Psychologists now recognize three basic types of visual thinkers. To determine what kind of visual thinker you are try imagining a triangle. Do whatever it takes to image that shape in your mind, How did you do it? Some people cannot "see" a triangle in their minds until they draw it on a piece of paper or trace its outline on a table with the and of their finger. Some people need to close their eyes, apparently because seeing interferes with their visual imagination. When their eyes are closed, however, they can "project" the triangle on the inside of their eyelids. Did your eyeballs move as you drew the triangle? Some rare individuals can bring up the image of the triangle with their eyes open, superimposing the triangle on whatever they are looking at. A subset of this latter group can make the triangle change size, color, and perspective; they can make it twirl, jump, and pass through other figures. Steinmetz and Tesla clearly fell into this last category." Elmer Sperry was notoriously good at mental visualization, to the point that he could supposedly just draw the projected outline of his mental images onto paper. A lot of figurative art in previous centuries was also based on drawing bodies from memory. I think you can infer that some painters could really conjure an image (the configuration of a body) in their mind before drawing it, just like Sperry. But the feedback loop approach is equally valid!
    • friday99 8y ago
      Wait, I can't believe that I am a "rare individual" who can visually imagine things. Is visual imagination really not a wide spread ability among the population at large? I would think that it is the opposite. That aphantasia would be rare.
      • danaliv 8y ago
        I found that surprising too. I picture things in a space that's not even here. Where does that fit in? Here's the book that the quote is apparently from: https://books.google.com/books?id=dZyPAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA52&ots=xXVel8t7kg&dq=%22Psychologists%20now%20recognize%20three%20basic%20types%20of%20visual%20thinkers%22&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q=%22Psychologists%20now%20recognize%20three%20basic%20types%20of%20visual%20thinkers%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=dZyPAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA52&ots=...
        • scott_s 8y ago
          I'm like you, which I had assumed is the norm: I can visualize things, but that "visualization space" is completely separate from my normal vision. When I'm imaging an image (or, more often, a short "clip" of something) I can't also focus my attention on what's in front of me at the same time.
          • bigtex88 8y ago
            You put it into words better than I could. That's the exact same for me.
        • theoh 8y ago
          Yes, that's the source, sorry. Math, CS, physics and engineering tend to attract people with visual/spatial aptitude. This may be because sighted people first encounter the subject matter of those disciplines through their visual perception. Whatever the explanation is, HN readers are likely to be an atypical population. My interpretation of the "superimposed" comment is that we are not talking about images appearing as if literally overlaid on what we are seeing. What people experience is that an object that they are visualizing seems to be spatially located in the same place as their visual field—hence Elmer Sperry's comment that he could just "draw around it". Would you agree that your visual imagination and your visual field occupy the same space "in front of" your head? If it's any help, what I'm trying to say about the relationship between real and imaginary is close to the mathematical idea of a covering space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covering_space
  • jnbiche 8y ago
    I have aphantasia but can draw fairly well, as long as I'm looking at what I'm trying to draw. But I can't draw anything from memory (because I have virtually no visual memory, it's very, very, very vague and fuzzy).
• aston 8y ago
  Blake Ross (co-founder of Mozilla) has a great post about his journey with Aphantasia here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
  • ignoramous 8y ago
    Outline: https://outline.com/VU4Mcg https://outline.com/VU4Mcg
  • Eric_WVGG 8y ago
    ^^^ This is an excellent and very funny read. I used to know a girl who I suspect might have some kind of "hyper-phantasia." She said that when she thought back on memories it was literally like hitting the rewind button on a VCR.
• john-radio 8y ago
  I'm having trouble operationalizing the "blind mind's eye" concept. Catmull's brain knows what a sphere is, and my brain knows what a sphere is, and we can both describe the experience of seeing a sphere, so we both know what one "looks like." Compare this to the phenomenon of "face blindness." My friends who suffer from this genuinely cannot describe what makes Angela Merkel's face (for instance) different from others because they lack the facility to remember it. But I can, because I don't have face blindness: Merkel's face is wrinkled, craggy even, with crows feet that resemble smile lines. What can I do that an aphantasia sufferer cannot?
  • ownagefool 8y ago
    My minds eye is mostly blind. I can dream a sphere. (Once had a semi lucid dream, but not really in control of that) In an extremely relaxed state maybe I can visualise a sphere, like once a year, by accident, for a few seconds. I feel like after a long time of practice I can sorta flicker a sphere, in order to describe it, but not really. I cannot recall, visualise and describe a sphere, that's just not possible not a real thing to me. But I can logically tell you what a sphere is, without recalling it visually. My wife can. She also has an idetic memory. She can picture anything she wants according to her. Pretty sure I have this, but I've never really considered a struggle. Once read something about it being a potential outcome from a stressful childhood, which I had. Similarly I have a shocking memory. Literally need to focus to remember more than one item from a store. Can't remember more than one name at a time, also requiring effort to remember just one. Oh well. As an aside, I'm fairly successful considering background etc. :)
  • shaneos 8y ago
    I suppose that you can actually picture things in your head. I (being a software engineer) think of my aphantasia as being like having the hash of an image plus some metadata in my head. I can recognize that I've seen something before once I see it again, I can tell you that I've deliberately memorized some facts about it, but I cannot recall the image itself - there are no pixels. So I can say that my two daughters have hair the same colour as mine (hopefully never to go bald like me!), and the colour of their eyes, but I simply cannot close my eyes and picture their faces no matter what I do. If you can picture people's faces, picture places you've been or even stare at some object in front of you right now then close your eyes and "see" a picture of it, you probably don't have aphantasia
• deleted 8y ago
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• type-2 8y ago
  My imagination is not the best, but when I am really high on marijuana and I close my eyes, I can imagine alls sorts of absolutely gorgeously bright and photorealistic visuals. I can imagine anything with remarkable photorealism during that state of mind. It's semi autopilot and spontaneous, though. My imagination also becomes very strong right before I'm about to fall asleep. When I'm sober, my imagination takes effort and is hazier, and not creative. I also want to ask people with Aphantasia, what do their dreams look like?
  • SargeZT 8y ago
    Our dreams are the same. Dreaming actually activates the visual cortex, so it doesn't depend on imagination. We also get hypnagogia.
    • type-2 8y ago
      >Dreaming actually activates the visual cortex, so it doesn't depend on imagination. I thought imagination also depended on the visual cortex. Dreaming and imagining is not too different to me. One is a bit more conscious, that's it.
      • SargeZT 8y ago
        As I understand it, aphantasia relates to a lack of coordination between different parts of the brain that allows that activation to happen while awake. There hasn't been a ton of research into aphantasia yet, so take that with a grain of salt, but during discussions with other people with aphantasia I have never heard of one of us not being able to dream. Psychedelics work too.
• unquietcode 8y ago
  This has been nagging me for weeks since I 'discovered' that almost everyone around me can visualize things in their mind. Frankly, it helps explain a lot about my life. The inability to picture the face of friends, family, places I've visited, all contribute to a sense of isolation and distance that I feel daily. My strong preference for non-fiction, too, is likely an artifact of reading fiction word by word but 'seeing' nothing interesting. My failed attempts at all sort sorts of meditation and mindfulness exercises are also now suspect. The anecdotes about being unable to understand the concept of 'counting sheep' also resonate strongly with me. That face-blindness is also commonly co-morbid also helps me understand that aspect of myself better. All in all, while I don't feel 'robbed' of this ability to visualize things, it does seem to lob off a chunk of things which are particularly joyful to the human experience. I can't really visualize a future life for myself, let alone my current life. To discover all of this after decades of being alive is quite mind-blowing, and I'm glad it's getting the wave of media attention that it is now (or else I would not have known). But then, perhaps, in this case, ignorance would be a bit more blissful.
  • meesles 8y ago
    I cannot fathom not being able to picture my loved ones at any time. I know it gives many people the little motivation they need to push through hard times. Do you happen to use photos and written word more than others to try and make up for it? Is that even a remedy?
    • garmaine 8y ago
      Not The grandparent, but I’m also aphantasic. I think the question doesn’t make sense. Why would I seek to remedy the lack of something I never experienced having in the first place? Aprantly the rest of the world goes around hallucinating 24/7. I find that frightening.
      • calibas 8y ago
        It's nothing like hallucinating, it's more like a blank canvas that you can paint whatever you want upon instantly.
• dekhn 8y ago
  I noticed this when I was a kid- I was playing with lego space ships one day and suddenly realized I could no longer visualize an actual space ship- it just looked a lego thing. I thought it was odd and sort of forgot about it until recently when somebody else said they were troubled by it. Discovering 3D rendering was a huge thing for me- suddenly, rather than having to work incredibly hard to visualize things in my head (or do mental rotations on them), I could build a model world and move things around until I saw what I needed (this was super helpful for molecular structures, but also for neural network architectures and complex workflows).
• ranie93 8y ago
  >He asked 540 members of staff to take a test of the vividness of their visual imagery. I wonder what this test encompassed, and if its available online-- anyone know?
  • oliveshell 8y ago
    It may have been this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
  • elliekelly 8y ago
    It's linked in the article but the link kind of looks like an ad so it's easy to miss: https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153 https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153
  • glitchy 8y ago
    I'm not certain which test Catmull used, but the article links to this one: https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153 https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153
  • russelldc 8y ago
    This past weekend, I attended the conference he was interviewed at for this article. During his talk, he mentioned he had them complete the VVIQ from University of Exeter (which the other replies linked to), the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/psychology/imagery https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/psychology/imagery), plus several more questions, maybe a dozen or so.
• topmonk 8y ago
  I can visualize things, but only for a brief moment. Then, it takes intentional effort to bring up the image again. I can also visualize something rotating or in motion (or my minds eye in motion) for a few seconds. I often feel a little dizzy when I do this. Can most people create a mental image and hold it for a long time?
  • mathieuh 8y ago
    I can superimpose my mind’s eye’s image over the images coming into my eyes, I can interact with these imagined things and make them do whatever I want. Requires a conscious effort for complicated things, but generally holding something in my head doesn’t require any more effort than conjuring it up initially
  • cartoonfoxes 8y ago
    I would describe it as an inherently animated medium. I find it difficult to keep an unchanging image in mind, though it does make an excellent meditation exercise. My mind's eye isn't like a framebuffer that I render to. Trying to visualize a direct analog of a still image is difficult, feels unnatural, and requires concentration. Moving scenes are easier, even if the objects are unchanged. It's easier still when the nature of the objects change too. I think it must exercise the brain's simulation and prediction hardware - it's easier to render and it has a smaller memory footprint. I can "look" at a sphere, but after only a short while it starts to change, move, or rotate as though my camera is changing position. It might spontaneously change color from "red" to "blue", or start to squish into a spheroid. Or change into a scoop of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. Or other elements might come into view. The changes aren't random - it feels like the scene takes input from a stream of thought just on the edge of consciousness. Maintaining the integrity of the scenegraph - the state and location of the objects requires constant corrective input to return it to its desired configuration. This is a separate and distinct act from the concentration required to "view" the scene in greater detail. The bigger the scenegraph, the harder it is to stop the motion. I can visualize what starts to feel dreamlike in its detail and complexity, but it becomes impossible to freeze the scene.
  • jxelam 8y ago
    Visualising does appear to be a skill you can actively get better at, for example there's some evidence to suggest describing what you're seeing out loud as you're doing it can increase your ability with time and practice. There's some work being done in this area under the name Image-Streaming: http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm
• colordrops 8y ago
  I'm really curious about what someone with aphantasia experiences while tripping on LSD. Visuals are a large part of the experience.
  • russelldc 8y ago
    I have aphantasia, an absolute 0 on the visualization scale. Not sure about LSD, but I've had vivid open and closed-eye visuals on quite large doses of psilocybin. Even though those visuals tend to lean more to the involuntary side, it feels like there's at least some level of control, so it's pretty exciting to experience that for the first time in my life. I very rarely had lucid dreams as a child, but I couldn't control the narrative, I just knew I was dreaming.
    • jxelam 8y ago
      Do you get any closed-eye visuals while falling asleep? Obviously psilocybin massively increases ability at this, but I've found practising daily at night can increase control and level of detail dramatically over the course of a few months. And from there it's possible, with effort, to do it while awake and with eyes open. If you've ever read Roald Dahl's "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar", I've found the experience remarkably reminiscent. I'm not sure if it's the same mechanism as aphants have, as it still feels far more laboured than what they describe and very much still in the realm of closed-eye visuals, but I've found it's better than nothing.
      • russelldc 8y ago
        Yes, I rarely experience hypnagogia just before I fall asleep, and it seems like I can force it to happen if I focus on my eyelids. Though, paradoxically, as soon as I realize it's happening, it's gone.
  • scruple 8y ago
    I'm very certain that I have aphantasia. I definitely recall that I experienced some visual hallucinations on psychedelics, but I do not have good recall over what those visualizations were. What I do recall from that life were the auditory hallucinations. Hearing music where there was none. Having conversations with people who were not physically present, or with historical figures who were long since dead.
• crooked-v 8y ago
  I think I'm partially aphantasic. I say 'partially' because I can picture the broad strokes about things in about the same detail as a watercolor painting run through a blur filter a few times. This hasn't been any hindrance to my career in software, as once I grok something sufficiently it turns into an abstract knowledge tree that I work through on a subconscious more than conscious level. I do lose track of things around the house constantly, but I'm not sure if this is a side effect of poor "where'd you leave it last" visualization or just everyday absent-mindedness.
  • cybersol 8y ago
    My strongest past memories of landscapes are this way, which I have also described as something like an expressionist painting. My conjured mental images (picture a red star) are just black though.
• dyukqu 8y ago
  I don't have any problems visualising objects, faces, rain, snow, wind,...etc. But when it comes to drawing, I get stuck, especially if I try to draw a face that I remember/visualise almost perfectly. Why is that? What it takes to be good at drawing (not that "painter-level" drawing)? It's (relatively) easy for me to draw objects which have sharp edges and straight lines (like a table, door, sofa), but I have hard times with drawing more detailed things like human faces, animals and cars even though I can visualise them as if they are present right before my eyes. I imagine that if I were to describe someone to obtain, say, a police sketch, I'd not be able to do it because I don't know how to describe a face, even though I have a clear image of it in my mind. Obviously, I'd not be able to draw it myself either. And some tangential thing, when I visualise things, I visualise them through my left eye (faces, especially. since you almost always see them, well, face-to-face), as if a projector projects them through it and I remember left parts of things better as if they're recorded using my left eye. I occasionally think about it, but haven't come up with an answer for myself yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • beering 8y ago
    > I have hard times with drawing more detailed things like human faces, animals and cars even though I can visualise them as if they are present right before my eyes. That's pretty normal in my experience as someone who went to art school. My best guess is that your "visualization" is a high-level representation that actually isn't detailed enough for the purposes of putting down on paper. Most artists rely on rules of thumb (head proportions, etc.), practice, and looking at references to be able to draw people, animals, and other "difficult" things.
    • dyukqu 8y ago
      >Most artists rely on rules of thumb (head proportions, etc.), practice, and looking at references to be able to draw people, animals, and other "difficult" things. Thank you for letting know. It explains a lot. But what is the distinction between "visualisation" and "high-level representation"? It's still a relative thing, I presume, since there is no standards for it and it's certainly not in the same "level" across all artists.
• kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
  Next up: people discovering that not everyone hears an internal voice either. And probably many other variations of the same kind. The funny thing is that nobody really talks about their internal experience in such detail, so there's little opportunity for observations like this to surface. A rigorous multidimensional classification of "thinking styles" would definitely be interesting.
  • barrucadu 8y ago
    Not hearing an internal voice is, if anything, harder for me to imagine than not being able to conjure mental images. While images are a significant part of how I think, it's nothing compared to the constant internal voice narrating my thoughts every moment I'm awake. If I'm not "seeing" something, I'm "hearing" it.
    • k__ 8y ago
      Sounds strange to me. If I want to think about sound, I hear it. If I want to think about an image, I see it. But if I "just" think a thought, it doesn't have a form like a video, audio or text; it's just ... I don't know ... an amorphous idea?
  • k__ 8y ago
    Wasn't there some misanthropical meme about some people being "real" because they have an inner monologue and some being NPCs, because they don't? Like, if you don't have one you're just "reacting" to the world and not really deciding anything etc.
  • drcode 8y ago
    I'm a zombie without any consciousness but never realized it until last week. I just go about my day like an automaton without any internal subjective experience and am perfectly happy doing so. I was talking to my friends and they were saying "it feels like there's somebody actually inside of me, experiencing things" and I was like "Oh that's funny, I don't have that sort of feeling at all." (kidding)
    • 8y ago
• hanoz 8y ago
  Can anyone here give a good description of what it's like not to have Aphantasia? I'm having a very hard time believing this condition isn't the norm. Edit. For a condition which supposedly affects only a few percent, the reaction to this article here and on Twitter contains a suspiciously high rate of people being surprised to find out they've got this and shocked that everyone else hasn't. The more I read about this the more I feel that the variety in reported inner experience is more to do with the variety in reporting than of the experience itself. I find myself able to relate to descriptions from both sufferers and non sufferers alike, but then again could often take extracts from each and be hard pressed to say who was claiming to be which.
  • barrucadu 8y ago
    I think crimsonalucard's description of what it's like to picture things with the mind's eye is spot on.
  • acjohnson55 8y ago
    I don't have aphantasia. With concentration, I can essentially override what I'm actually seeing with other imagery. For the most part, it's dimmer, duller, and less "present" than actual sensory input. It's much easier to do if there isn't a lot of actual visual input, because it's dark or my eyes are closed. I think many people can do this with great ease. For me, it depends on how hard I try, my mood, and maybe other factors I can't identify. I can recall memories or visualize things that have never happened. I'm not sure if my recall is reproducing what I actual saw, or reimagining it from something more schematic. I suppose mostly the latter, maybe with a little of the former. I can do the same thing with imaginary sound, far more easily. I'm not sure if people with aphantasia have difficulty here, too. And with great difficulty the other senses. Fairly often, these sensory reconstructions happen involuntarily. Which is basically what "daydreaming" is to me.
    • phito 8y ago
      Does it really come into your eyesight? For me, I can imagine things and "see" them, but they don't mix with the signal from my eyes. It's like a separate sense
• egypturnash 8y ago
  I almost wonder if artistic training tends to make you not get better at visualizing stuff. Why should you? It's right there in front of you and you're turning it into what you want it to be with your pencils/pens/brushes/stylus. I am a pro artist and my visualization is mediocre at best most of the time. I'm not aphantasiastic but I am sure not one of those artists who can imagine an entire drawing perfectly and "trace" it onto the page. Every now and then the right neurons connect and I can visualize stuff, sometimes sober, sometimes not. Smoking a sativa-dominant strain of marijuana sometimes gives me a huge boost to my internal visualization but I almost never do this because it also tends to make me super paranoid. There's a graph to be made similar to the XKCD Ballmer Peak one. [1] And then there is that one artist at Termite Terrace[2] who got in a car accident, hit his head, and suddenly had that imagine-and-trace skill. Brains are weird. 1: https://www.xkcd.com/323/ https://www.xkcd.com/323/ 2: the unofficial name of the 1940s Warner Brothers animated shorts studio
• deleted 8y ago
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• theonemind 8y ago
  I visualize things pretty weakly, pretty low on the ability-to-visualize scale. I don't really think it has caused me many problems, except that I tend to get lost very easily. Luckily, we have near ubiquitous GPS now and Google Maps. On the other hand, I have good mental auditory capabilities. I can, say, play "air on the g string" in my head right now with near perfect fidelity, or just imagine new music in real time as if I were simply hearing it. Some people apparently can't do that, but can do the visual equivalent. So, eh, you've got what you've got.
  • cr0sh 8y ago
    > I can, say, play "air on the g string" in my head right now with near perfect fidelity, or just imagine new music in real time as if I were simply hearing it. For me, I wish there were a way to easily get the music I imagine outside of my head. The best I've been able to do is whistle it, sing it, perhaps each "track" and record it; I've played around with 4-track recording too. Tried trackers, but always get lost in the nuances, or trying to create a particular sound or whatnot... But it's the same way with my visual side; I can think of things, but anything beyond technical drawing I am pretty weak at doing (and the only reason I have some success with technical drawing is that I took a few years in grade school doing it as an elective).
• caenn 8y ago
  I have aphantasia (hate the name, no phantasia my ass) and I wonder what kind of: 'color blind are people with better contrast' type of stuff there is. I remember reading that there is a significant amount of extra resilience for traumatic experiences due to not being able to get the memory visualized again, again and again which makes it easier to cope. If anyone has more info about other positive aspects I'd appreciate it.
  • russelldc 8y ago
    Memory tends to be poor among folks with aphantasia, but supposedly whatever details we do actually remember may have less of a chance to have been morphed over time through re-visualization. So we'd make for better eye witnesses.
  • NamTaf 8y ago
    I can vouch for this. I have it too, and a few years ago my partner died. I was the one who found her dead, but because I can't remember any visual aspect of it, I'm sheltered somewhat from flashbacks of the trauma. I also hypothesise that it's the reason why I very rarely ever remember dreaming, and this is probably also helpful as I suspect I'd otherwise have nightmares about the event. It has a double edged effect though: I also can't really visualise her face, and that really depresses me at times because it feels like I'm forgetting her memory (I have to remind myself that I'm not really).
  • JshWright 8y ago
    I am a paramedic with very limited visual imagery. I hadn't really put two and two together until you mentioned it, but I suspect this is a significant advantage. It would be interesting to study vividness of visual imagery and PTSD in first responders.
  • jxelam 8y ago
    Obviously there's a lot of variance as everyone's different, but here's a list of benefits at least some people with aphantasia report: * Being more in the moment. An example of this is being better at mindfulness, as well as simply not living in the past or worrying about the future as much. * Less prone to trauma. You've already mentioned this, but not remembering scenes with full sensory information appears to provide a level of protection in some people when it comes to traumatic memories that are otherwise relived and unable to be processed. * Being better at abstract thought. Lots of people's memory is largely a kind of first person chronological narrative, made up of scenes on a timeline. Some people with aphantasia report they remember in a far more abstract structural manner, not merely confined to the visual. This is obviously also somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to remembering say past events. * Thinking faster on your feet. Without the added visual element, it seems possible to be be more linguistically dexterous and witty because there's less delay between thought and words. I hasted to add this is all a generalisation, and more about a propensity to be better than you'd personally otherwise be at these things as opposed to a superpower. I don't think it's coincidental that in Francis Galton's original paper on this, he found people with aphantasia are disproportionately represented in what we'd now call STEM. I have an aphantasia and I'm a programmer, and I've personally found I'm much more able to reason about complex systems than average, and the way I think about them seems markedly different.
• the_solenoid 8y ago
  I discovered I had this a year ago. Honestly, I always thought I had some kind of learning disability. Some kinds of tests are very hard, I cannot picture anything while awake, I literally cannot remember anything about my life visually, learning faces takes a long time, I failed geometry, and struggled with any kind of visualization math past that (despite doing quite well in calculus)... Then there were the careers I was drawn to: creative things like graphic design, drafting, etc that I utterly failed at. I had ideas of what I wanted to do, but the step between transforming the thoughts onto paper was always a fight. I studied photography in school, and could never convert it into a profession because I found being creative enough to get clients wasn't coming to me - I would be burnt out on small projects for no reason I could fathom. I ALWAYS assumed people who visualize chakras or meditate with a object focus were just faking it. I remember reading about this a year or so ago, and telling some friends. One of them immediately recognized it as why I utterly failed at some MMO raid mechanics. So there is probably an unending list of ways this has impacted my choices, and I can only hope young kinds get a chance to learn they have this and get some guidance on what effects this will have on certain tasks based on the level of visualization they have.
• tempestn 8y ago
  Often when I hear people describing their experience with visualization, I wonder if I have a mild form of this. I am able to visualize things, think of visual scenes, manipulate objects in my mind, etc. But it's never at a level of fidelity I would consider 'looking at an image in my mind'. It's more of a nebulous, hazy thing, impermanent and lacking in detail. Faces in particular are very difficult to visualize; I don't have any real difficulty remembering what people look like or recognizing them, but summoning a complete mental picture of a particular face is usually elusive.
  • eduren 8y ago
    Yeah, threads like this make me wonder similar things. Lots of people here are using terms like overlay and superimpose that seem foreign to me. For those in the thread that can work on imagery in a visual manner, does it feel like the images are taking the same path as ones that actually hit the retina? To be more precise, could your visualizations be roughly matched by an idealized Augmented Reality headset? If that sounds close to most people's experiences thats weird to me because my vague visualizations seem to never interfere with my actual visual plane, but rather a more abstract in-brain space. Love discussions like these, subjective experience is crazy.
    • vcavallo 8y ago
      the way you describe your experience matches mine. i often suspect that people who seem to describe the “augmented reality” version are just using the wrong words to describe what you and i are experiencing... seems impossible to imagine visualizations actually overlaying my visual field like AR!! are they for real?
    • l_t 8y ago
      Chiming in as someone with fairly strong visual imagery (I think...) I think there are generally a variety of ways things can "appear". However it's never the same as true AR. For example, with true AR, you could be fooled into seeing something that's not there. But I can't fool myself (deliberately) with my own mental images. Having said that, it subjectively feels like the stimulus originates in a different part of the brain at a low level, but eventually both "mental visual" and "true visual" stimulus are unified to some degree. Like yes, I can visualize a ball in my hand, but it'll always be in a different layer from my actual visual input of my hand. Like two different layers in Photoshop. Also, beyond the AR concept, one of my favored types of visualizations is what I call "playing myself a movie". It's pretty much what you would imagine, basically watching a movie with my mind's eye. I can watch the movie and look at "real things" at the same time. Works great for falling asleep as well. I agree, it's a super fascinating discussion.
• madebysquares 8y ago
  I find this fascinating I wonder if I some altered form of this where I can visualize most things but they are never accurate depictions always deformed in some way.
• oluckyman 8y ago
  Most people could draw a bicycle well enough while looking at it. But most people are hopeless when asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. But most people don’t have aphantasia. I do, so am sceptical when people say they can picture a bicycle (say) in their “mind’s eye”.
  • NamTaf 8y ago
    I suspect this is more that when people look at a bike, they don't notice detail and just recall the concept of a bike having two wheels - one forward and one back, a seat, some handles, etc. Their failure to draw an accurate bike is in fact proof they don't have a photographic memory, rather than they can't visualise one. That is to say, they're entirely capable of visualising a bike that is incorrect from an engineering design perspective.
    • oluckyman 8y ago
      Then the “images” most people say they can imagine in their “mind’s eye” might be little different from what an aphantasiac like me would produce if asked to draw them. Perhaps I am not missing much at all.
  • Nition 8y ago
    This comment covers that scenario well, I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19619798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19619798
    • oluckyman 8y ago
      It’s helpful, but if the task is to draw the imagined bicycle, then you would presumably add details as far as possible. But for most people the result is very far from what they would draw if a bicycle was in front of them. So what they imagine is not a bicycle. So most people can’t imagine a bicycle.
      • Nition 8y ago
        I can only speak for myself but the more I gain knowledge/memory of an object, the more I can fill it in. If I know "bicycle" very well I can visualize all the details - maybe not in full detail all at once but at least by thinking about each part in turn. If my memory of one is not so good, the details will remain not filled in, like a blind spot where my mind fills in the gaps and I don't even notice the missing data until I try to "see" those areas specifically. The imagined bicycle may be a specific one I recall, or a mixture of various memories of bicycles I've seen.
• evanze 8y ago
  I find the terminology around this to be so vague as to be meaningless. Rather than using the words "image", "visualize", or "see" I'd rather use the more specific term "hallucinate", or to "see something that is not actually there". To those in this thread that do not consider themselves to be aphantasic I would propose this question: in your mind's eye, whatever that means to you, imagine a sphere or a barn or whatever physical object is easiest between you and your screen. What are its qualities? Is it opaque, translucent, transparent? Does it obscure the text on the screen? Or can you only hallucinate the object with your eyes closed? Or do you not hallucinate it at all? Personally, I can imagine my apartment in detail down to the relative placements of most objects, proportions, the colors, the way the wind enters if the window is opened. I can do similar for past apartments going back 8 years as well as my parent's home. Hell, I can imagine the Reno's steakhouse from my hometown that I haven't been to in over 13 years in much the same way. I do not consider myself to have aphantasia, however none of the "visualizations" I mentioned are hallucinations as some comments in this thread imply. I do not perceive them with any of my senses, including visual, as if I was there now. Rather it is more of a complex conceptualization in my mind.
  • russelldc 8y ago
    While I understand the desire to use less vague terminology, to hallucinate usually implies that it is done involuntarily. Based on your description of your abilities, have you considered that what you're describing is spatial thinking, rather than visual imagery? It is common for people with aphantasia to retain strong spatial cognition. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29175093 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29175093 https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6685&context=etd https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
    • evanze 8y ago
      Point taken. Merriam-Webster says "usually arising from disorder of the nervous system or in response to drugs (such as LSD)" so I take "usually" to mean not always. Regardless I hope the distinction I was drawing comes across clearly. Regarding spacial thinking, yes it seems fairly accurate however where I would expect it to break down would be recollection of colors, touch, sounds, tastes, or smells. But I don't feel I experience such a breakdown in ability to recall those either albeit in the same conceptualized not-connected-to-my-realtime-senses way. Out of the examples given in this thread I would say faces are the most challenging object to recall. Though, depending on the distinction of the features I can also do that without much difficulty.
• dinkleberg 8y ago
  This is incredibly interesting. About a year ago I began to acknowledge that I can't really force an image into my head, and if I try I can sort of get a vague impression of it, but it doesn't have color or anything. When I am free thinking I think my mind is able to conjure all sorts of images, but when I try to focus in on it, the image vanishes into that vague impression. And sometimes it is weird, I can think about all of the details and have sort of a distant detailed image of whatever I'm thinking about, but I can't bring it to focus. It feels like the uncertainty principle with my mind. But it was a strange topic, so I never really discussed this topic with anyone. Based on what I am reading, I don't think I have aphantasia, or maybe it is a spectrum and I have it to some degree. But it is refreshing and also kind of sad at the same time to hear that others experience visualization drastically differently. I'm still very much a dreamer and a thinker and haven't had any issues with my ability to visualize things. But hearing about how some of you are able to bring up vivid images sounds pretty magical. I do wonder if some of this is about how we as individuals explain things. Maybe what I am experiencing is actually normal but others describe it in a different frame of mind than my own. Regardless, it is an interesting subject.
  • graeme 8y ago
    It's a spectrum. Or at least vividness of visual imagery is. I'm extremely low on the vividness scale. Don't know if this makes me aphantasic, or something else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_...
• graeme 8y ago
  I have very weak visualization. One way of describing it would be that I can close my eyes and tell you where everything is in my house, or map my way downtown. But I don't see anything, I just know the spatial placement of everything and how to move through it. But if I try to see the stuff, it's as though there is a brief flash, and I see an outline for a second or so, and then it isn't there. But I know what's there. I don't think I was ever strong on this front, but I think my ability has been declining gradually. I'm 33 now. I remember arriving in a new country at age 23, and I could recall everything that happened when I arrived: my drive in, arrival at my new house, standing in the rain. I can still recall much of this, but I have a memory of seeing it and having great visual recall of this. But, how accurate is a memory of a memory? I didn't take any notes, so it's hard to say for sure what I could in fact recall. One odd point: I used to get the most vivid images while lying in bed with my eyes closed, falling off to sleep. The most fantastic scenes would flow from one image to the next. I think it actually helped me sleep. These were also notable in that I couldn't visualize that way during the day. One day I had to take antibiotics for an MRSA infection. I recall the images that night were dark and foreboding. I haven't had colourful images since then. Sometimes at night I get glimpses of them. It's as though the images are happening in the background, and I can catch them but without colour. And I can't always see them, so I can't follow, and the images stop. Haven't found anything in the literature about antibiotics causing this though, so I'm not too sure, it may have been coincidence and instead just gradual decline that crossed a threshold around then. Has anyone had gradual decline of mental images, loss of pre-sleep visions, or had either of these precipitated by antibiotics? I think these images were called Hypnagogia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
  • russelldc 8y ago
    Sorry I'm not sure of the relation to antibiotics, but Hypnagogia is something even aphantasics experience. It's typically more involuntary than not, so it's grouped with dreams rather than visual imagery/thinking.
    • graeme 8y ago
      Oh, that's interesting. Do you mean they experience visual hypnagogia? Because I'd say at the time I lost it, those visual experiences were the only ones I had, so it did seem distinct from any non-hypnagogic visualizations. Also, I remember as a kid if I played video games I would see images of them when I closed my eyes. I don't think that happens now. Maybe those brain pathways got pruned....
• pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Here's another potentially related issue: "memory palaces". I tried memory palaces, place this there, place that here - but really it just failed for me, I couldn't remember any details about the place. I've remembered a full pack of cards just by repetition before (a while back!) but memory palaces just didn't work for me at all. Maybe that's down to aphantasia??
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  It feels like 1/2 the commenters here have aphantasia. Just how common is this, anyway?
  • gwern 8y ago
    Selection bias. The 95% without aphantasia aren't going to chime in saying 'oh, I'm normal, just like everyone else', but people with aphantasia will be extremely excited about it, especially if they just found out.
• anitil 8y ago
  While we're all talking about internal imagery, does anyone have an equivalent 'deafness' in music? If I concentrate hard I can very clearly hear music as if I'm listening to it, though I often need to subvocalize to keep it on track
  • gwern 8y ago
    There's amusia, which is being tone-deaf; there's musical anhedonia (not enjoying or being emotionally moved by music); and anecdotally there are very large differences in ability to hear music - Beethoven, of course, but you can see a mention elsewhere in the comments of another composer, and here's one anecdote I was amazed by: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/agfbt1/am_i_weird_thread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/agfbt1/am_i... "This is why my favorite thing to do is drive and listen to music. I have thousands of songs I have coded to mental movies, all of which are (to me) incredibly exciting. It's legitimately more pleasurable than sex. I don't have much drive towards TV and books because I have this. I've never actually asked if other people can do this. AFAIK, it's just a me thing." (Although maybe he's just really bad at sex.)
• thatoneuser 8y ago
  My ex made me realize I had this a few years ago. It was like everyone here says, the literallity of seeing things in my mind escaped me. I'd always assumed sayings like counting sheep were just metaphorical. It kind of goes to show you how moritifyingly behind we are in understanding and articulating our cognition. Autism was right up there until a few years ago. I believe there's a lot we still have to open up to ourselves. I'm not religious, but maybe exploration of the self and mind is more warranted than our society currently expresses. Of course, it's easy to slip into quackery, but I almost wonder if it'd be worth a few more nut jobs if we collectively self analyzed more deeply. Maybe there's a lot out there to our happiness and evolution were missing out on if it's taken this long to realize there's a sizeable number of people who can't sense internally. Funny side note - despite having Aphantasia I have two degrees in physics. I could never follow in class (literally couldn't imagine what the prof was trying to hand model) and animated gifs made everything instantly understandable. The agony I felt in those programs seemed a little more justified after I was told about Aphantasia. A little.
  • 0xDEFC0DE 8y ago
    If you’re willing to share, what are your dreams like?
    • JshWright 8y ago
      Not the parent commenter, but I also have very limited visual imagery. It is extremely rare for me to be aware of having had a dream (maybe once a year or so). When I do though, I certainly remember 'seeing' things.
    • thatoneuser 8y ago
      For the most part I don't dream :/ Though I can sometimes experience a flash of a scene in my dreams. Or at least it feels that way - I think there's a distinction on that that this science is still missing.
    • ncallaway 8y ago
      That's a super interesting question to me. I would describe myself as having essentially no mind's eye. I don't "visualize" anything, ever. If I imagine a tree (or someone asks me to visualize one) I mostly have descriptive words, but no "images". But I can dream, and that definitely is a distinctively visual experience. Does that mean, when someone asks you to "visualize" something, you have an visual experience akin to dreaming?
• aristophenes 8y ago
  How many other things are like this? What abilities do I have that are rare, that I take for granted and think everyone else has them? What abilities am I completely ignorant of because I don't have them? I think this is a source of great misunderstandings because we think others think like we do. Something that is obvious to us is obvious to them. But that is not the case. I used to get a lot of push-back about ideas at work in ways that confused me. I have started to develop a habit of stating the obvious, what I think doesn't need to be said and I usually would leave unsaid. It has been surprising to me how often the things I was skipping over are viewed as novel ideas.
• bbayer 8y ago
  I am surprised that nobody mentioned pineal gland. As Descardes, it is where soul sits. Pineal gland also called "third eye". Pineal gland gets light information from skin and eyes and produces melatonin. Melatonin is a serotonin-derived hormone that modulates sleep patterns. People who has aphantasia also report that not having dreams. Calcification of pineal gland is proved scientifically and mostly caused by fluoride. Aphantasia might be related to this.
  • vidarh 8y ago
    > People who has aphantasia also report that not having dreams. I can't visualise while awake, but I have visual dreams.
  • jxelam 8y ago
    People with aphantasia may or may not dream visually. There's actually quite a range of experiences just within dreaming. For example, not everyone dreams in colour and not everyone dreams in first person.
• nautilus12 8y ago
  Ugh..this is like a high profile humble brag and it makes me sick. Look at me I can't visualize things in my head (something very difficult if not impossible to prove) and I'm the head of an animation studio that visualization is one of the key assets of someone that is good at this, and I'm still successful.
• dynamite-ready 8y ago
  Would anyone imagine (no pun) this condition has any bearing on the current theory of how empathy is formed in the human mind (mirror neurons and 'replay' neural networks)?
  • _Microft 8y ago
    If I recall correctly, aphantasia has no measurable effects on anything beside the ability to voluntarily visualize things (unvoluntary visualizations like under drugs or visual dreaming does/can even happen for people with aphantasia). I can't cite a source for that now (and frankly have no idea how I could find out).
• EvagohP5 8y ago
  I Can imagine something, but only for one second or so, it's like I can't hold it up. anyone relates?
• justwalt 8y ago
  Can people with this condition dream? And if yes, then what is that like in comparison?
  • chousuke 8y ago
    I suspect I have aphantasia or at least extremely limited voluntary visualization (I can with some effort make myself feel like I'm maybe experiencing something that could be related to a visual sensation, but I would hesitate to call it imagery). I do still see dreams, but extremely rarely. They're very different from any sort of pseudo-visualization I might be experiencing consciously, much closer to the actual visual sensation I get with eyes open. It's also much harder to remember anything about them. Just recently I had my first experience of a lucid dream, which was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, the only thing I remember about it is the realization of what it was and then flying around (somewhere, no idea where) for a while until I woke up. I also remember that it was a visual sensation, though I don't remember the visuals themselves.
• honzzz 8y ago
  I have to say that it is mind boggling to me that someone can be surprised to realize that visualizing things is normal for other people - it feels like someone surprisingly finding out in their thirties that the other people are not blind - that's how ever-present it feels for me. Living without it is as hard to imagine for me as hard it must be for people with aphantasia to imagine seeing things with the inner eye. If I can ask people with aphantasia... How do you remember things? When I remember the past I see the ephemeral image of what I was seeing then. And there is a thin line between memory and fantasy - I can play with my memories and let them play out some other way than they happened. How do you read the books without imagining what is happening? How else do you convert letters into meaning? What happens in your head when someone says "a car"? I see a vague image of a car - right now it's a red sports car but I have no idea why and I am not sure about the brand and it's kind of general car without specific features but if you ask me, I can immediately imagine the details of wheels or whatever - and some other day it might be a black BMW. How do you imagine your future? I can see myself sitting in a place (inspired by a photo I saw and liked) with big wooden bookcase in a bright room lit by setting sun - and that image makes me feel something and motivates me to work towards it. And fear is also visual - like when I see myself getting hit by a car when I am on a bike, with the blood and dirt in wounds... I could continue like this for long time - it feels like seeing things inside my head is so "normal" that I cannot imagine functioning without it. It is fascinating though.
  • ux-app 8y ago
    >How do you remember things? I don't. As I mentioned in a previous post, without photos to look at, my past is a complete, impenetrable, black hole. I've been aware of this for a very long time, but never thought it strange (I don't know any different). The tape in my head is non-visual and seems to only stretch a few weeks back. Photos are the only way for me to relive these moments. >How do you read the books without imagining what is happening? How else do you convert letters into meaning? I was a voracious reader as a child, reading dozens of novels per year. I can't see the story, but I still like hearing it. By the sounds of things I am missing a very large part of what makes reading enjoyable (this makes me sad). >What happens in your head when someone says "a car"? I unlock the "car" concept in my mind. This does not include an image. I guess it's the same for you if you think of something with no embodiment such as a taste. > How do you imagine your future? I consider things that I think will make me happy and work toward them. No images are part of this. >And fear is also visual For me it is visceral. I don't see anything, but am filled with an unpleasant sensation or dread if the fear is strong enough.
• moopling 8y ago
  So reading this has made me realise that my mental visualisation might not be normal. I definitely can't visualise images photo-realistically, there's maybe a similarity to synesthesia where I visualise some colours but I know it's my mother, a room, etc and it's sort of helpful for remembering other properties of that thing I'm visualising. Some things I can kind of visualise photo-realistically (in the sense it might be similar to a dark room where you only catch flashes of the thing): things I build from first principles (like say a mental model of a pulley system or an electronic circuit). I'd literally always assumed this was just how peoples brains worked, I'd be interested in hearing if this is or isn't similar to other people.
  • ndnxhs 8y ago
    I can mostly picture things but its not particularly vivid like a photo. If I think of a big area it kind of seems like there is a spotlight of detail where the focused area I am thinking of will be fairly detailed but the rest fades away.
• SUr3na 8y ago
  I don't quite get this idea. Is the ability to draw reflection of a sign (as if it was in mirror) or transposing a matrix or 'seeing' the graph of a function in my mind the same thing? I am terrible at remembering faces in details I can defiantly say if I saw a face before in my life or not but if you tell me to describe face of people who I lived with for many years I can't "see" them in my mind.
• dammitfoo 8y ago
  Has anybody with Aphantasia read 'Moonwalking with Einstein' by Joshua Foer or 'The Memory Book' by Harry Lorayne? I recently started working on improving my memory using mnemonic techniques described in these books. And, let me tell you, they ALL rely on visualization. It's just so shocking to me that some people just won't be able to do this! Has somebody with aphantasia tried any mnemonic techniques to remember things? Do you have problems recalling events long after they occur (like events from your childhood)? Do you ever daydream?
  • Henk0 8y ago
    I'm aphantasic, and I read that book during psychology studies. I actually used the method of loci for a social psychology exam where we got 320 total questions + answers and a random set of those questions would be on the exam. I used my parents farm as the location. It worked surprisingly well for me, considering I couldn't actually 'see' any of it, but rather used my inner spatial sense, combined with alliterations/rhymes for some connections, to form the memory. I have very vague memories from childhood (and in general). It's all quite abstract, with the spatial sense substituting for real imagery, and perceiving 'silent' voices when recalling conversations. There's no smell, taste or physical sensation. If I remember an embarrassing situation, there is the an emotional component (cringe), but even the emotional component is usually quite weak Daydreaming: Not in the way that I think people mean when they talk about daydreaming. I'll close my eyes and think sometimes. I usually get bored with that pretty quickly though, since it's just inner monologue/dialogue without any real sonic component
• francpaul 8y ago
  I have aphantasia. But I do have a good "visual" mind. I'm a super recognizer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_recogniser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_recogniser). I can see someone and KNOW that I've seen them before. I can recognize people I haven't seen in 25 years. Even if they've become adults in the interim. I immediately notice if someone changes their hair. But, I cannot visualize at all. Particularly not faces. I cannot see family members without looking at them. When I look at them I can notice deltas of things I haven't seen before. A change in hairstyle, new glasses etc. But I cannot 'see' what it was before, I cannot 'see' the old hairstyle or glasses. I can notice the anomalies. I can recognize faces really well. But only actually using my eyes. I think a lot in terms of how things relate to each other. My brain seems to work by attributes and relations, and then make analogies and predictions based on those. There's more an understanding of the relationships of the facial features to each other, and as a whole, than the exact qualia of the feature.
• Lapsa 8y ago
  I've got this. Keep telling this story often. Pictures in my mind are exceptionally rare. Even dreams are mostly just feelings and emotions or something. But I can "visualize" sound. On couple occasions have even managed to "replay" well known music in my mind near indistinguishable from the real thing (phantom of the opera in case you were wondering). And I got an ability to pinpoint loudest frequencies in a sound spectrum. Think a lot of it has to do with the way we individually interpret the world.
• jonplackett 8y ago
  Didn't know Catmull had this - really interesting that someone with no mind's eye became obsessed with visualising things externally by creating 3D worlds. I have aphantasia too and I really like Photoshop or other graphics software because it can be my temporary mind's eye Do any other people here with aphantasia do this too?
  • sergioj97 8y ago
    I can't fully understand the nature of this condition. Can you visualize faces? I assume you can't, but I guess you will be able to, say, describe someone's face without having him/her standing right in front of you, am I right?
• _Microft 8y ago
  I read somewhere that aphantasia can be changed if one practises visualizing things by sitting with closed eyes, describing aloud to either a partner or a recorder what you want to see in more and more detail until an image actually develops. It shouldn't take more than a month with a similar time investment like meditation (i.e. like 20 minutes a day). Speaking out loud what you want to see seemed to be important from what I remember.
• kszxgz 8y ago
  While I previously thought I might have aphantasia, I now tend to think that most people lack the ability to imagine face or other complex objects. HN threads tend to confirm this. In other words, while I can't imagine my family members' faces, I also don't think many people can. If not proven otherwise, I now assume that most people forget the visual memory of faces after a few seconds while preserving the ability to recognize people. Obviously this excludes people with photographic memory.
  • interfixus 8y ago
    Thanks. You wrote my comment :)
• karrotwaltz 8y ago
  A bit off topic, but I hope I'll find I'm not alone: my "mind" is color-blind to some degree. It's very hard for me to remember colors, if someone cut their hair I'll notice it easily, but if they change color (e.g blonde to brown), I'll have an unsettling feeling but it's very hard for me to pinpoint what has changed. When I'm asked to describe a person I'm extremely unlikely to give hair or skin color, and I can't even tell the color of the eyes of anyone of my family right now, I just don't know. When I remember colors it's more like I remember a textual description. My eyes are green, I know because I remember it being written on my ID, not because I've seen them in the mirror this morning.
  • kszxgz 8y ago
    So which characteristics do you describe when you're asked to describe a person? Which features do you imagine? The shape of their head? I would assume that most people have some form of non-visual, database-like memory for each person. (I sometimes lose the ability to recognize people when they change their haircut, when they wear a different type of clothes, or when they meet me in an unfamiliar setting.)
    • karrotwaltz 8y ago
      Tall, round face, short hair, wearing glasses, with mustache and beard, thick eyebrows. There are still plenty of ways to describe someone's face without using colors, but to be perfectly honest I'm terrible at describing people I can easily recognize.
• scandox 8y ago
  I think there has to be a spectrum for this? I can visualize but the impressions are I think weak and fleeting. It's more like a visual thought and I only do it when I concentrate. I'm not a visual thinker at all and I don't draw or paint well. I don't take much interest in photographs either and much prefer audio impressions. Also if I read a menu I am attracted more by the sensation of the words themselves than a visualization of the food they actually represent. Mushrooms in a white cream sauce simply sounds delicious (as verbiage), though I'm not terribly fond of them. Anyone similar?
• JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I am a bit confused here. If I am in a dark room and I close my eyes, all I see is black. I cannot, however hard I try, visualize the beach in my field of "vision" in front of me. However, if I relax I can picture the beach and the emerald water and white caps and the pier going out into it. But those images are ... further back in my head, not in front of my eyes.
• no_identd 8y ago
  In case any Aphantasia researchers read this (or someone with more time and energy to badger Aphantasia researchers about-this until they actually pay attention to this-than me): Can you please, for crying out loud, investigate this anecdotal report of Aphantasia attenuation following vision therapy for Amblyopia, Strabismus & Stereo-Blindness in a 70 year old: http://www.strabismusworld.com/practical/interview-how-bill-johnston-discovered-stereo-vision-at-the-age-of-70/ http://www.strabismusworld.com/practical/interview-how-bill-... To quote the relevant interview section: "MICHAEL: On April 9th, 2015, you reported another new and delightful phenomenon had occurred in your vision. This might give us a clue as to what happened in your brain. BILL: Because of the congenital amblyopia and suppression of the bad eye, my brain developed abnormally. I was never able to visualize arithmetic problems or to spell words in my head but if I wrote them down on paper, I was an ace at it. Fortunately, my school didn’t conduct spelling bees or I would have been awarded the dunce cap. Recently, the problems and words started appearing in my head just as though they are written on paper. I can spell a word simply by reading off the letters that I see in my mind’s eye. I think that when my lazy eye turned on fifteen months ago, the now unsuppressed new image in the visual cortex stimulated my brain’s neural plasticity to begin creating new neural passageways and my new ability to visualize is a product of this. Is this compatible with current theory?" Anecdotal, sure, but come the hell on, Science should investigate this, we don't have much other clues as to the causes & treatment.
• adverbly 8y ago
  Yup another person here who just discovered that they probably have this. My experience is that I only see black, but I can still think/reason about things. In the interest of cataloging other cognitive functions: 1) Sense of direction - Terrible. I get lost very easily - I do better if I am really focusing hard on the path I take, but that is never the case and I frequently find myself lost without a maps app, even after only a couple turns. 2) General Memory - Very poor. Was below average at spelling. Terrible at trivia. 3) Forward Digit span - Well above average. 9 digits. 4) Ability to rotate 3d objects - Above average. Took a spacial rotation test in university and scored in the top few percent out of several hundred participants. 5) Ability to slice 3d objects on a plane - Well above average. Aced a test in university(300 participants, only 1 other individual aced it).
• jlokier 8y ago
  There is also "mind's ear". Most people have it but some don't. Most people imagine voices in their head. When reading, writing, or imagining a conversation, especially an argument, or preparing for a meeting. When I'm reading, or writing, including coding, I hear the words in my head. The speech doesn't sound like real sound, just like visualising doesn't look like real images. (Dreams are different - they can sound real, and I've heard some amazing music in my dreams.) I have friend who doesn't hear anything in her "mind's ear", and had no idea until recently that other people do. After someone admitted to hearing imaginary voices (me), after asking other people she was astonished to find this is normal and she's unusual. Nearly everyone has an internal voice. This freaked her out as she wondered if other people experienced auditory "voices in your head telling you what to do" style hallucinations, and wondered if they sound like real voices (they don't, but there is some resemblance). She simply had no conscious experience of a mind's ear with speech. I can't imagine what it's like without one. Most of my thinking has imaginary speech going on, including when I'm coding or reading. I also have a friend who _stopped_ having the mind's ear speech after a stroke. She said she'd been trying for years to quieten the internal dialogue through meditation, and then after the stroke she finally experienced it.
  • Tor3 8y ago
    I read a lot, fiction mostly, but I don't hear an inner voice when reading speech (and I don't hear a voice from the narrator if the books is written like a narrative). I could do that, if I wished to apply a voice to it, e.g. imagine that some friend said those words. I wouldn't have it any other way. If I had to actually 'listen' to a voice when reading I imagine the reading would get terribly slow. Since I was a child I've always been able to read much much faster than any kind of speech or audio narrative. In elementary school I used to drop by the library every day, borrow up to four books, read them, get new books the next day. An inner voice would be like slow motion, it would take forever to read a book. (And I was surprised when book commentors complained about e.g. names in a story that are difficult to pronounce. Until I understood that their inner voice is actually trying to pronounce it - which breaks up their reading.)
    • jlokier 8y ago
• graeme 8y ago
  Did anyone ever have hypnagogia (visions before sleep) and then lose it or have it become much less vivid? That happened to me. I'm trying to figure out if I just lost it gradually, or if it happened due to antibiotics. It happened fairly rarely but consistently, but when I had antibiotics for MRSA, I remember the normally vivid colourful visions became dark. Since then if I do have them it's as though they're faded and behind a screen, I can only glimpse them and it's hard to keep them going as I can barely see them. In regular life I recall once having had more vivid visualizations when remembering, but it's hard to know. How reliable is a memory of a memory? If I had these, I had lost these long before hypnagogia went away. I have excellent spatial recall though, and can "visualize" a day in terms of the spatial placement of things and events. I just can't see it.
• taternuts 8y ago
  So I just realized I have this. I feel very weird right now knowing that people had this super-power that I don't. Kind of feels like the first time I found out my vision was god awful and that everyone else couldn't see detail past 5 feet.
• disillusion 8y ago
  Holy crap, this has blown my mind. I've always thought that "visualizing" something is a metaphor for "think about it" or "list the properties you know". This explains so much, at least for me. How I always skip the long visual descriptions in books since they add nothing to the story; there is no visual component to reading a book. Why meditation is nearly impossible unless I manage to think about nothing, which is extremely hard. How I can recognize faces but not describe them, even those close to me, other then a short list of features that stand out. Or how I can recognize a smell, but I can't tell you what the smell of a hamburger is unless I actually have one in front of me. Why people describe dreams or memories like watching a movie, while it's more a combination of emotions, situation descriptions and something that feels like the echolocation of a bat. What some people mean when they can hear a person speak or have a discussion in their head. It explains why it's so easy to recall emotions and factual information, but nearly impossible to recall anything else. Why my "now" is so strongly affected - emotions experienced in the current moment tend to influence the vague feelings of the past, as if it's always been that way. Why it's always been so difficult to work towards certain goals, unless they're divided up into sub goals that are so close as to be easily attainable. Anything further in the future is nearly incomprehensible. Why it's so easy for me to navigate through bad experiences, but not for others, because beyond needing to process the emotions, the rest will fade away like all other experiences. Some of those might be because of something unrelated. But somehow, reading this article, has answered a ton of questions I didn't even know I had. My mind is truly blown. Though one aspect I don't have: If I think about a song I know well, I can play it in my mind. The experience is almost, but not completely, like hearing the song in reality. So at least there's that. And that also explains why music is so much more "real" then anything else to me.