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Have you ever noticed a similar effect with sounds? Or does it feel like a purely visual/spatial thing? For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just

• ux-app 8y ago
  > For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head sigh you've got to be kidding me. You can actually replay a sound in your head?? well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :( I've also never been able to sing along with songs. It always blows me away when my wife can just start singing along with a song she's heard a few times. I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged.
  • l_t 8y ago
    Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button. :) It's super interesting how memory works. Like, I can remember the content of songs because they have rhyme and rhythm and pleasantness, but I can't remember anything else word-for-word. I'm the king of paraphrasing jokes and quotes, because I can never remember how they originally went. edit to add: I'm just kidding about the brain damage thing, but seriously, I very much don't like the idea of presenting this as "aphantasia" as though it is a lack of something. I think it's (probably) just a different system that's optimized for different kinds of behaviors. I do also suspect that the mental visualization could be learned. I feel like when I played Legos as a kid I was incidentally practicing my visualization, perhaps the only reason I'm good at it now is an aggregate of those kind of coincidences.
    • ux-app 8y ago
      >Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button hehe sure sounds like it :)
  • johnsimer 8y ago
    You've never had an earworm?? E.g. where a song is stuck in your head and you can't get it out?
    • chr1 8y ago
      I can hear/imagine a human voice singing, (similar to the way my internal voice 'talks' when thinking) but i usually can't imagine instruments, because they always end up sounding as if they are performed by a human voice. Several times i did listen the sound of instruments as if real, but it happened only before falling into sleep, and just thinking about that would wake me up enough to bring the human voice back.
      • hallihax 8y ago
        Do you / have you ever played any instruments before? Maybe it's just case of associating something else with the sound the instrument makes - for example perhaps you need direct experience of producing say, a guitar sound, in order to associate the 'performance' of the act, with the actual sound it produces.
        • chr1 8y ago
          Interesting suggestion, I have tried to learn piano as a child, but only for a few months so didn't learn anything beyond several simple melodies.
    • ux-app 8y ago
      > a song is stuck in your head and you can't get it out? never. although that sounds like a blessing :)
      • Baeocystin 8y ago
        As someone who is prone to earworms... I would be genuinely happy if I never had to experience them again. Not joking at all.
      • coldtea 8y ago
  • p1esk 8y ago
    Some people are able to do a lot more than that, once I was sitting on a plane next to a guy who turned out to be an orchestra conductor - he was silently reading an orchestra score like a book. I mean that was a dense score, some modern symphony for dozens of instruments, and the way he described it to me was he simply hears it in his mind just like if he listened to an orchestra recording. Most incredibly, he said he has never heard this particular music performed before!
    • root_axis 8y ago
      that anecdote fills me with an insatiable sense of envy.
      • klipt 8y ago
        I think these skills are to some degree learnable. That orchestra conductor probably spent a large part of their life studying music. Part of learning music is ear training: the ability to name/write chords by hearing them, and conversely to "hear" them in one's imagination given the name (or from written music). No different than the way many people "hear" words in their head when reading.
        • Tor3 8y ago
          They are, indeed, learnable. Even a mediocre amateur musician like myself learned to 'hear' the music when reading simple scores. Took a while though. But it's useful. I can look through score music and pick the ones I like, without having to actually play from the score first. Pros and orchestra conductors are on an entirely different level of course.
      • aristophenes 8y ago
        Ha, don't feel bad. That skill is important for maybe less than a thousand people in the whole world to have. And it can be done with computer programs anyway.
        • coldtea 8y ago
  • chillwaves 8y ago
    I can't stop music from running in my head, as a background to the constant noise of my thoughts. They coexist. It's interesting how different our experiences are. I do not think you are brain damaged, just specialized in a different way.
    • de_watcher 8y ago
      I try to avoid listening to the music. Because then it plays all the time in my head afterwards, especially when I'm a bit tired.
    • saberience 8y ago
      It's just as likely that you are the "brain damaged" one and he is the normal one. ;)
      • animal531 8y ago
        I like to imagine it as if we're all CPU's that has come out of a lab that organically grows them. But as a result of that they're all a little different. Unfortunately sometimes they're heavily different with extra or missing depth in certain areas, which makes the generic software that we're trying to install on them struggle to adapt (in various different ways).
  • astee 8y ago
    In my case, songs or melodies are nearly always playing. If I'm awake, chances are that something is on in my mind's radio. Conversation and writing seem to be the only activities that consistently quiet the music, though there are other times during the day when it's less noticeable. This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.
    • stephen_g 8y ago
      I’m much the same. I think that’s part of the reason I’m quite a good musician and can play by ear really well. I can visualise auditory/musical things far more vividly than I can images, and correspondingly I find visual art quite difficult. I can still imagine images to a reasonable extent but I suspect that people who can draw and paint well probably can do it more to the extent I can hear music!
      • astee 8y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if the musical practice led to the mental music. I am also a musician, but I'm not certain whether the mental music began before or after I started playing (I started playing more than ten years ago as a teen).
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Wow. I don't have this, and I don't think I can. I have an almost pathological hatred of silence on the outside - because when there is, there's also silence on the inside. Unless I actively think about a tune, or decide to hum or whistle a song, there's no radio. So I'll only hum/whistle or sing a few bars or a chorus and distract to thinking about something else. So sitting in silence quickly becomes wearing. I have to keep thinking of stuff, and music, to fill it. Now if I go fell walking or find myself in a forest or on a deserted beach, there's always enough sounds of nature that it doesn't feel silent. Not like a house, class or exam room or office can. It's only that which quickly gets oppressive.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • wongarsu 8y ago
    > well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :( I see it more as tradeoffs that make us different. For example you may have noticed that you are better than average at folding paper in your head and other spatial tasks. You have your aphantasia to thank for that.
  • aristophenes 8y ago
    Yes, I think that is common to be able to replay music you've heard in your head. I feel confident this is another thing that is a spectrum, not binary. So some people just need to hear something once and have it perfectly, others need to hear it a lot and still don't remember it well. My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time. I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory
    • saghm 8y ago
      > My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time. Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.
    • fjfaase 8y ago
      I sometimes have the experience that there is one word in a sentence that I did not get (often prompting me to say 'huh'), and that after some pondering, I suddenly get it and 'hear' the word being replayed in my head, and it suddenly becomes perfectly clear what word the person said (often prompting me to say 'okay').
    • FreeFull 8y ago
      Echoic memory is also very useful when someone says something, but you haven't understood them right away. There is also iconic memory, which stores the things you see and lasts less than a second.
  • nabla9 8y ago
    Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head? Do you have verbal thoughts? > I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged. You are probably just neuroatypical. You should try to discover if your neuroatypicality gives you an edge over neurotypicals in some areas and exploit it. You might enjoy reading experiences of someone who is neuroatypical in opposite way. "Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding". By Temple Grandin, Ph.D. https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html alternate link: http://web.archive.org/web/20170219035332/https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170219035332/https://www.grandi...
    • godshatter 8y ago
      >Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head? >Do you have verbal thoughts? Not the OP, but my mind's ear is deaf just as my mind's eye is blind. I can plan a discussion in my head. I don't really hear it, I just think of what word I'm going to use, in a similar fashion to how I can think of a sphere but not actually see it. I think more about the points I'm going to make sure to make, though, than the actual phrasing. When I'm practicing a speech or something, I can feel my jaw and mouth muscles trying to move, so I think I'm sub-vocalizing it or something. That realization makes me very careful around others when I'm having private thoughts. When I'm thinking about a solution to a programming problem, or any problem really, I sometimes "disappear" for a while and when I come back I have an idea about how to best proceed. People have commented in the past about my becoming completely still and zoning out for a period of time. The inside of my head is a pretty quiet place usually. I just noticed that my jaw was making the movements I would use were I to speak the end of that last sentence. Weird.
      • darkmighty 8y ago
        Interesting. In your daily activities, you cite your mind as 'clear' -- is it just of visual imagery/sounds, or in general? Do you 'feel' thoughts some other way? What is going on when you 'zone out' in your mind? Say for a programming problem, If you don't see code in your mind, do you still 'feel' it some other way? Can you describe what you experience when recalling something? For me, (it of course varies by the object of recall) it is most times imagery, although sometimes it can be emotions, sounds, etc. (I use the imagery as an 'address' after which other related memories are linked to and emerge).
• vidarh 8y ago
  I would separate visual and spatial. They are not the same thing. Part of the reason why I didn't realise that others are literal about being able to 'see' with their eyes closed is that I can tell you spatial relationships more precisely than most people I know. I know and can recall where things are in relation to each other with ease. E.g if you asked me to sketch rooms in my house, I would be able to reproduce it in a huge amount of detail even though I can't 'see' them,by walking through what is where in relation to what and plot it out. If I draw from memory rather than from sight or imagination, however, - something I learned as a child without connecting the dots - was that I do tend to draw in a much more 'sanitized' style. Clean lines etc. As if I'm drawing a diagram.
  • stephen_g 8y ago
    Interesting - I think that matches up with my experience. As I said in a response to another comment in this thread, I don’t have anywhere near as strong visual visualisation as I do auditory, but thinking about this third axis I think I do have quite good spatial visualisation. I’ve always been way better at diagramming, planning layout of things (part of my job is designing circuit boards and I used to do web design back in the day), etc. than artistic drawing.
    • vidarh 8y ago
      For some reason I can do more artistic drawings if drawing from fantasy (I still don't "see it") or sight than from memory. I think that is largely because when drawing from fantasy I don't need to painstakingly recall the spatial relationships as much, even if there's an extent of recalling an archetype of what I'm drawing... And the closest I get to auditory recall is internally humming the music - I can recall e.g. operatic arias that I have no hope in hell of reproducing with any accuracy out loud, but I can hum them out internally with a lot greater precision, but I can't hear them in any other voice than my own (and I can sense muscles around my mouth twitching as if I'm vocalizing while doing so)
  • Henk0 8y ago
    Second this. I'm aphantasic, but when I think about 3d space, it's like there's an invisible grid in my mind that helps me keep track of relative positions, and my sense of direction is possibly even a bit above average. Conversely, I'm often surprised by common it seems to be for strongly visually minded people to have a terrible sense of direction. I have enjoyed exploring and comparing my inner experience with other people since I discovered I was aphantasic (my ex was an artist and very visual, and first I thought she was the odd one). Now I usually do a little informal psychometric test session with people when the subject comes up. Asking them to imagine standing outside the house where they grew up, then walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of milk. I have them rate their inner experience on a hand-to-hand scale for: color, sharpness, detail, focus area size, opacity/transparency. It's interesting how much people vary My inner experience as aphantasic is: Visuals: - Closing my eyes I generally see black. Sometimes I can see vague, morphing images, blurry and colorless, if I'm falling asleep into a dream. On high doses of marijuana or normal-to-high doses of LSD I get some stronger visuals, but it still seems a far cry from many others sober-state visual imagination Sound: - This was my next surprise after discovering I had visual aphantasia. That other people apparently hear themselves talking in their head. I have an inner monologue (and dialogues), but there is no real sound quality to it. Same thing if I imagine a song or a melody. I know how it goes, I can sing along in my head. I'm a songwriter, so I also make up melodies all the time, but I don't 'hear' anything in my head. This is a more confusing concept to convey than the abstract spatial awareness. Taste / Smell: - Again, apparently it's common to be able to imagine eating this or that food, and actually smelling and tasting it. I lack this ability too. I can get an idea of whether something will taste good with something else, but there's no sensation of taste Dreams: - My dreams are actually very vivid, and after experimenting with lucid dreaming before, my dream recall is generally good too (though dream recall works like other memories, so it's all abstracted into spatial positions, dialogues and knowledge about location and details) Also agree with some other things that some people have written here: - I've always found it hard to pursuse long-term goals or imagined futures. I tend to gravitate to what I find most interesting at the moment and follow that impulse - I find it fairly easy to get over bad experiences - I don't 'miss' people much, even if I really like it when I spend time with someone close. I imagine getting over a breakup would be a lot harder if you kept having vivid memories of times you spent with them. My memories are a lot more abstract and vague. - Photos are a memory aid. Should take more of them - I'm bad at recognizing faces, especially if it's someone I don't know well and they've changed their hairstyle, or they look similar to someone else. I easily mix up characters in films/series, or fail to notice that some character is played by [famous actor I know] until the credits roll - I generally enjoy reading non-fiction much more than fiction. Though I have read a lot of fiction books in my life. Knowing what my experience of reading fiction is, and comparing that with what it can be for people who are not aphantasic, I do feel a bit envious Since I discovered aphantasia, I've at times felt like I'm lacking something, and missing out on part of the human experience. However, after talking to people at the other end of the scale, I actually appreciate that I can close my eyes and all I see is black, and that silence is actually silence. If you have no control over the images and sounds that appear in your mind, I feel that it could be both exhausting and anxiety-inducing depending on the content and intensity
• arien 8y ago
  Sounds are the easiest to reproduce for me, perhaps even more so than images. But I have experienced other things as well. Since I was a kid I play this game when I'm bored... let's call it "visualising". But not for images, for other sensory input. For example, I try to imagine really hard the taste and texture of a cake, the smell of coffee or a perfume, touching something fluffy with my hand, feeling hot or cold... It works, although I don't feel it physically in my body per se, it's just like... a very vivid memory of it. As if an invisible limb was experiencing this feeling again.
• Tor3 8y ago
  > For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it. It's terribly easy for me to acquire earworms (aka "stuck song syndrome"), and I have to avoid listening to certain kinds of music too late in the afternoon/evening - otherwise I can't sleep for music turning in my mind. I actually ripped out the stereo from my car years ago. I don't need it. If I want to listen to some music I just let the head play it. Same thing. Which leads me to the surprise my wife gave me one day - she told me that the daughter said a strange thing to her, she (my wife) had asked what she was doing - she was just sitting there - and the reply was "I'm listening to music in my mind". That was astonishing for my wife because she didn't know it was possible to replay music in the mind. She had never heard about such a thing. Which sounds awfully like aphantasia for audio - although I think it would be limited to just music. It's hard to imagine not being able to 'hear' a sentence in your mind. The funny thing is that my wife is an amateur musician, and her ear is very good. Better than mine, I think.