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People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

106 points by lnyan 6y ago

throw1234651234 6y ago
"Not everyone can see pictures in their minds when they close their eyes and summon thoughts - an ability many of us take for granted." I used to be into visualization as focus training. I can't "see" and change (move, change color) shapes in my mind at all. Artists I know claim to be able to do this. Obviously, Tesla (, Nikola) supposedly did this. For those who can do it - to what degree can you do it? Can you imagine a circle? A cube? A rubix cube with color? Edit: Since we are discussing this a lot - I am also a skilled lucid dreamer. In the sense that I trained myself for months to remember and control my dreams vividly. I realized my dreams have a "bandwidth limit" / "render limit". If I try to "look" at a detailed scene, it blurs and/or I wake up. Which, btw, is a huge argument against astral projection, not that anyone here likely ever even considered it to be real, but as a young child, I did.
- goatlover 6y ago
  Temple Grandin claimed her visualization worked like the Star Trek holodeck, which is amazing. But then many people can easily manipulate verbal language in their minds. Some can do that with music.
- falsaberN1 6y ago
  Characters, structures, vehicles, robots, pretty much anything I would like to draw or design. With color (or at least enough awareness to know a certain shape or area is in a specific color). I can also "listen" to music, unfortunately I'm really bad at creating new music so this skill is utterly useless for anything but remembering songs with just one listen or so. At night before falling asleep it's pretty much like visualizing a movie, including motion and sound, the effect is somewhat stronger when eyes closed and not moving, I assume because "input" is mostly clear and thus doesn't conflict with whatever image you are conjuring mentally. Seeing from other post, they say their dreams are pretty dull. My case is the opposite, my dreams are ridiculously vivid (including color, sound and touch) and there are very detailed environments and a lot of people moving around. I wonder if those things are related somehow? EDIT: I have narcolepsy, perhaps that's a factor.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - Tor3 6y ago
    In general my dreams have duller images than reality, but I had a dream many decades ago, after a half-dramatic winter day in the mountains - when sleeping in the tent that night I was dreaming about a summer day where I walked over the top of a hill, and in front of me was a valley with an old road, and fields of yellow flowers as far as I could see. What was special was that it was extremely sharp and vivid, much more so than reality. I could see every individual flower, from an apparent distance of a hundred meters or more. And at the same time I could see it all. I still remember that dream vividly. Which is also unusual for me.
    - falsaberN1 6y ago
      That's interesting. Dreams always were a very interesting topic to me, so I like to hear stuff like this. For me that's usually kinda how it goes. My dreams are usually rather mundane, borderline formulaic, although at times I can recognize places from my past that are altered (a little or a lot), or it's cleaner/with different materials or stuff like that. A thing that amuses me and seems to be uncommon, at least from what I hear from other people, is the amount of life. If I dream of a street, it's always going to have a lot of persons moving about. Entirely normal people, not people without faces or anything weird like that. They even remain consistent, like if I look somewhere in the dream, if I look back again, people retains their path and clothing. If I'm a bar or something there will be random patrons who I don't really interact with, but can be seen and heard like if it was a totally normal place. Another amusing thing is that people claims they cannot read in dreams, but while there are times I have difficulty reading a thing, stuff like billboards or random "decorative" text are clear to me. Exceptions happen, for example a few days ago I dreamed I was doing a school test online on a tiny old-school flipphone and I was struggling to read the questions (didn't help the text was in garish colors, probably remembering something a teacher used to do in real life). I can also get the feelings of taste, smell and touch, but for some reason the temperature is always "neutral". Like, if I'm dreaming in a hot or cold day, it'll be "neutral" in the dream, even if I later wake up because I'm too hot or cold. At times I dream I'm walking but my legs hurt (like when standing up for a long time) but then I wake up and my legs are in a totally neutral state, not in a bad position or anything. The biggest drawback is that at times I dream I'm just doing my job (maybe with some minor differences in the room or so) and it feels like doing 3-4 hours of just real life, absolutely realistic work stuff. That is terrible. Once in a while I get a cool nightmare monster or setting (which I parasitize for my creative endeavors. Is it plagiarism when your subconscious came up with it?), but overall it's really mundane stuff. Also, my dreams tend to be pleasant and chillaxing (like 99%), for some reason when sharing dreams people speaks of dreadful or depressing things or psychedelic nightmares and such. I'm glad it's not the case here. I have had weird psychedelic dreams during times of being extremely sick with fever but otherwise it's like some sort of virtual reality. Makes me wonder if people who claimed to do stuff like astral walking just had the same "ability" and just had really vivid and realistic dreams instead. I also wonder how much of this is related to narcolepsy (I might be dreaming in a higher state of awareness than most people, but I'm not very wise on these topics).
- greenonions 6y ago
  Yes, and there are no real limits to this. I can picture a Rubik's cube dominating the Manhattan skyline. I can also picture abstract images with no connection to the real world, that have emotions associated with them. I believe my wife cannot make images, and the differences between us that result are pretty wild. I'm dramatically better with directions and maps because she can't make a mental model of the map and how it relates to the real world. However she's very aware of her emotions in a given moment where it's very difficult for me to express how I'm feeling.
  - silveroriole 6y ago
    Oh, the map thing is interesting. I can visualise pretty well but I can’t move around smoothly in my visualisations. I can only warp around like in VR games. Most of what I visualise is more like a 2d film/photo than a full 3D scene. Like your wife, I can’t figure out maps or 3D spaces (I spend a lot of time in 3d games wandering around lost) - despite me being able to form images. Maybe some of us only have 1d/2d imaginary worlds in our heads!
    - gnramires 6y ago
      I also don't see smooth movement without extraordinary effort and simple objects, and it seems I'm just increasing the framerate. Although funnily I can imagine body and hand movements (which are smooth) in detail, and I don't feel the framerate limitation at all; I can get a 'intuitive feeling' for each kind of movement that way. So it seems like my kinetic-proprioception has a lot more temporal capability. In terms of 3D imagery, I can visualized complex 3D objects and rotate them around, or navigate 3D cave spaces. But it requires significant focus, and the "framerate" is very low, like warping you mentioned. And for years I've spent time before sleeping visualizing things (often in 3D), so I think it's something I developed too (it's fun and I knew it was going to be useful -- when solving problems I very often resort to visualizations).
  - JshWright 6y ago
    It's crazy how varied everyone's experiences are. I can't visualize anything at all, but have a very strong spatial sense, and navigate much better than my wife does (who can visualize things very vividly).
- sunsetSamurai 6y ago
  I can, but colours never seem as vivid in my mind as when I look at them directly, like I can imagine a red apple but it's like a faded red. I've always found this mildly frustrating.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  As complete as it needs to be. I can see and hear my imaginings quite clearly, and often use mechanical analogues to test non-directly visualisable abstract ideas and logical flows. In more general terms, I can see and explore real and imagined environments, and listen to music with perfect fidelity - although doing the hearing bit only works well with considerable focus, and peace and quiet - visual I find easy enough to just ignore what my eyes are seeing, leave walking or whatever on autopilot. To be clear, it’s not like just imagining a thing, it’s more like overriding a sense. When I visualise, I am literally looking at something that isn’t there, when I listen, I hear as though it’s real - although any real noise immediately breaks it.
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    I have a very hard time believing claims like this. Not to single you out, but you should be able to draw perfectly then and imagine whole systems in your mind. The latter is especially unlikely given that most people are limited to 5-7 "items" in their working memory. To design even a simple system, e.g. a brake caliper, that's way more than 7 items, and they aren't "atomic" items either. Again, this isn't a stab at you, this is a stab at the concept, because it's kind of like people saying they can put on 5lb of muscle a month without roiding. Sets false expectations.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      I can hold whole systems in my mind, but I can't draw, as I've never learned. That doesn't mean that what I see in my mind is not real or inaccurate.
    - madaxe_again 6y ago
      It’s about levels of scale and abstraction. When you’re designing a car you don’t care about the innards of the calliper. Reducible complexity, and modelled inputs and outputs. If something seems wonky it gets looked at more closely - either the model or the concept is wrong. I can’t draw for shit, but I can and do make complex devices and systems with no written plan, just a picture in my head. Oh, and I’ve put on well over 5lb of muscle this month, by doing brutal hours of manual labour and eating like a horse. Being out of shape but historically stacked makes it a world easier.
- ancient_art 6y ago
  I can only see a very limited amount of stuff in my head. My best visualizations are routes in 2D from above. Anything beyond that is really hard to do. Funny thing is, when I dream I can see anything.
- xthestreams 6y ago
  I can visualize to a limited extent, i.e. I can see anything I want but images are always very "unstable". I'm much better with music: I can listen to music in my head very clearly, even though there is a strong focus on the lead melody (e.g. voice, guitar). But I can also create music from scratch and let it unfold seamlessly, with any kind of instruments or vocals I want.
- auto 6y ago
  To expound a bit on what others are saying, I definitely have this visualization ability, and it isn't limited to sight, I have the same thing for all my senses. The way I've described it to other people is that I can emulate any sensation internally, it's just that it's a muted or foggy version of it. If it was 100% accurate, I think that would start to cause issues with your brain's ability to distinguish with what's real and what's "in your head". The example I always give people is that when deciding what to eat and looking at things in the cabinet, or the fridge, or deciding where to pickup food, I just mentally "taste" each thing, and it really does feel like I have the sensation of eating that thing, and I decide based on which one tastes the best in that moment.
- guicho271828 6y ago
  Like a 3D CAD or in Blender. Add or remove details. A circle could be a bouncy wire that has a shiny surface, or made of wood or plastic. They could rotate in the air, or running on a floor making a circle after being dropped. It could bend and get twisted it into a figure 8. I am writing this while imagining it, and I have no real ring-shaped object at hand.
- jecel 6y ago
  Nikola Tesla always thought that this was a side effect of a very serious disease he had as a child. That was probably due to him never meeting other people like him, though as some comments here show they certainly exist (I count myself among them). Some people with this ability can draw what they imagine very well, while others are not good at all. I don't see an issue - even if you project some image on a blank piece of paper so people just have to trace it everybody won't have the same results.
- starky 6y ago
  I can pretty much visualize things as if they were in a 3D modeling system (there may be a reason why I work in mechanical product design). I can take some object and imagine it flipped around to another orientation or imagine how a complex mechanism will operate. I'm so adept at doing this that I very rarely actually draw things out before I start doing CAD work. I would say my ideation process starts with a vague view of what I am trying to accomplish, and then gradually becomes clear. I'll have a general concept and can picture the end result, but without understanding how it is accomplished at first, which gradually becomes clearer as I think about it. I generally know I've got something when it "feels right". My main artistic hobby is photography. One of the things I most enjoy doing is going out without a specific shot in mind and trying to "find" a photo by deliberately experiencing my surroundings. It is almost have an aversion to have a shot in mind before I go out to take it because it invariably doesn't live up to the visual I have in my head.
missingrib 6y ago
I'm worried I have this but I'm not completely sure I do. My dreams are not very vivid at all and usually I just "know" that things are happening in them instead of vividly seeing what's going on. However I can hear music very clearly in my head. If asked to visualize, say, an apple in my head I really don't see it very vividly at all. It's depressing if I'm being honest.
- 3f34f34f 6y ago
  No one on earth can 'visualise' an image in their head as if they were seeing it in real life. This entire fiasco is just people on different spectrums of mental picturing that are freaking out because they are misinterpreting what aphantasia is. I assure you you are most likely normal, and it's common to not recite a sentence word for word or picture an object perfectly. Others can do it very well. Just like you can visualise music very well, whereas I cannot. It's a (tight) spectrum.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Plenty of people can visualize an image in their head as if they are seeing it in real life. As one of those people, trust me that if your brain is set up to work that way, it's pretty difficult to imagine any other way of picturing the world. Likewise there are plenty of people who honestly can't picture things in their mind at all. The fact that you are towards the middle of the spectrum does not mean the extremes don't exist.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - plutonorm 6y ago
      So you can draw photo realistic impressions of those memories? Come on now. I can visualise pretty vividly, but I know that my memory is conning me, the textures and details are the feelings of textures and details. If I actually interrogate the visualisation the detail is not there. It's like trying to read writing in a dream, you imagine that it's perfect because the feeling is the same, but try to actually read - the detail is not there.
raxxorrax 6y ago
How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc. What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?
- di4na 6y ago
  I can draw you a dog, but if you ask me to picture a ball on a table, i do not picture anything specific. It is just the abstract idea of a ball on the table. It does not have colour, substance, space, nothing.
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    For me - I can draw as much as I can visualize. That is, I know that a face is bisected sphere with some extra lines on the bottom for the chin. I can't hold this image clearly, but I can hold it for a fraction of a second - enough to know what to put on paper. I think drawing and visualization are pretty closely tied.
  - cj 6y ago
    Same, at first, but if I try I can conjure a vague / unspecific mental image (the harder I mentally try, the clearer the image gets, but it never gets anywhere near perfectly clear). For example: Are you able to take a table in your house and then imagine a soccer ball on it? Or do you still come up blank with just the concept and absolutely no mental imagery?
    - di4na 6y ago
      Still blank with the concept
  - smabie 6y ago
    What about dreams? Presumably you see images of stuff when dreaming?
silveroriole 6y ago
Makes sense. I’d like to see an experiment done with reading comprehension as well as real memories. When I read something, I hear and see it. I’m reading it out loud in my mind and I either have instant visual associations with certain words (e.g. when I read the word aphantasia I think of the hippo from Fantasia, when I see the word tea I instantly ‘see’ a teacup) or I visualise the scene (like where they have the quote from the man who can’t imagine music, I ‘see’ and ‘hear’ it like it’s a TV interview). So I suspect I’m going to remember it better than someone who purely reads the text - but maybe not! Maybe people who don’t do all the ‘translation’ work to turn text into audio/visuals will in fact turn out to be MORE efficient at remembering. I have no idea how reading would work without at least hearing it though. If you told me to read without doing this stuff it would be like telling me to think without having thoughts. Impossible.
- theelous3 6y ago
  Anecdotal, but a friend of mine has essentially no inner eye and has roughly one memorable dream per year, if even. He cannot picture anything internally bar the most basic geometry, and that requires active focus. I know him to have a strong memory across the board, and no particular issues with reading (dyslexia, however he is a very strong reader. Certainly a lot stronger than average). So I wouldn't say there's necessarily anything that prohibits a person with a weak minds eye from having good memory. Not arguing against the point he may be an outlier or that these two features don't often go hand in hand, just pointing out it's not so hard and fast.
- taeric 6y ago
  I neither hear nor see things I read. Such that I can remember things, but I couldn't tell you how I remember them. Is akin to knowing your way home. I don't see the turns ahead of time, but I recognize them when I do. And I can remember the decisions ahead of time. I think remembering decisions is ultimately my best way to describe it. Remembering making a choice. Something that is not sensory.
  - guicho271828 6y ago
    I am curious, what would you do when you lost your map in a forest/mountain while hiking, but assuming you "remember" the map that you checked the day before?
arkades 6y ago
Without even digging into the paper, let's be clear. They didn't find "they have memory trouble." They found, "they have trouble recalling sensations." > "Our data also showed that individuals with aphantasia not only report being unable to visualise, but also report comparatively reduced imagery, on average, in all other sensory modalities, including auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, taste, olfactory and emotion," the team wrote in their paper. I, for instance, am not aphantasic, but I fall quite close to that end of the spectrum. But I don't use mental imagery to store memory. When I am attempting to encode memories, I do so in the form of a narrative - narratives stick very effectively for me, and I have a pretty good memory (no one without a good memory survives medical school.) It's true, I can't just "remember" the image of relevant anatomy, but I'm fine with other mental models for encoding and retrieving information.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  > "they have trouble recalling sensations." On plus side, almost everytime I eat sushi it's the best sushi ever.
- abathur 6y ago
  I think there's some accidental synecdoche here. At least for those of us endowed with the gift/curse of forming memories as life rushes by, they can appear to be composed of details our senses perceived around us enmeshed with details about how our wetware experienced that moment. Sometimes, we even have false memories of things that didn't happen, or that happened differently than we remember. There's a separate world of practice where people develop mnemonic devices (spaced repetition, narratives, memorable nonsense phrases, memory palaces, songs/rhyme/prosody, hand gestures) to help memorize things better than we could do by accident, or just by thinking "remember X". I would guess most people who are able to form memories can find a mnemonic device that works for them when they need to remember things. The very idea of a "memory palace", however, is so absolutely foreign to my experience of the world that I don't think I could have invented it on my own. Once someone describes it, I have an abstract understanding that the ability to arrange things in visual space could be a powerful mnemonic. I can, after all, remember at least a few things about many thousands of physical places I've been at some point in my life, even though I can't really picture any of them vividly. But, as a mnemonic, it's useless to me--I can't conjure it. My partner can remember things like what shirt she was wearing when we went to a specific restaurant a decade ago. I have abstract knowledge that we have been to that place, but I couldn't tell you anything else about it. For her, memories like this are a springboard into conjuring many other details about the event. Sometimes her recall injects enough context to jog my own. Sometimes it's all lost in the fog. Whether you are "good" or "bad" at memorizing things in an intentional way, unless you have infinite time to creative narrative mnemonics as life rushes by, I suspect aphantasia impacts your ability to recall daily life.
pengaru 6y ago
Teaching people how to tie even simple knots is effective at distinguishing the visual from non-visual thinkers. It's one of the interesting aspects of going sailing.
- JshWright 6y ago
  I'm pretty convinced I experience aphantasia (never been clincially tested), I can't even fathom what it means to "visualize" something. I'm also very good at knot tying. It's a hobby I enjoy, and a practical skill in rope rescue activities I participate in. Knot typing seems much more "spatial" than "visual" to me. Interestingly, the article specifically mentions differences in spatial abilities as not being correlated to the ability to visualize. "But other aspects of the findings suggest self-reporting may not be biasing the results that significantly: there were variations in answers coupled with data suggesting that spatial abilities - an ability to map relationships and distances between objects - appear to be unaffected in the volunteers."
  - pengaru 6y ago
    I'm probably conflating visual and spatial into one group here.
  - Arelius 6y ago
    I resonate with this as well. Anything strongly spatial, such as tying knots, navigating really any sort of space, even after just a single visit, and things such as sports come very easy to me. But even visualizing an Apple in any capacity (as an arbitrary example) seems to escape me, And asking me to, for instance draw one, would rely on a list of facts that I know about apples: * Apples are red * Apples are generally spherical * Apples have a stem on one side, and a little flowery bit on the other. * There are indentations around those bits. * An Apple's shape is a bit heart-ish. * Bits of the apple are bumpy when as swept around it's primary axis (I.... think only on the bottom???) Maybe that gives you a sense of my ability to visualize. While in stark contrast, I can often take a few looks at an already tied knot, and reverse-engineer/decompose it's construction down to a series of steps that I can feel spatially I can then often, much later be able to reconstruct that knot based on the combination of the few bits I remember, and the general knowledge I have about space in general and knots in specific.
mac01021 6y ago
How can I tell if I have aphantasia?
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  Take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
ajkjk 6y ago
One question I like to ask in conversations about aphantasia: when you do relatively complex arithmetic in your head (for instance, compute 47 * 68 real quick), do you visually perform the gradeschool multiplication algorithm? Or something else? I've surveyed a lot of people on this - probably forty or so in person, plus another 100 or so in a poll on reddit once - and there's a pretty clear trend: people who perform the visual algorithm tend to be 'not math people', and are less accurate and less confident in their answer, or not even willing to try. I'm aphantasiac and I can do a calculation like that fairly quickly and accurately, without any special practice. I basically use my verbal memory to store and recall cached computations instead of any visualization. My theory is that the visual brain is not really designed for storing precise information so much as the gestalt of an image, so it does less well on precise numeric details.
- gretch 6y ago
  FOIL it :) 40 * 60 + 40 * 8 + 60 * 7 + 7 * 8 Basically a bunch of single digit multiplies followed by stacking zeroes
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Or 47x68= (50-3)x(70-2)=50x70 - 50x2 - 3x70 + 3x2
  - ajkjk 6y ago
    My mental method is not quite FOIL, for what it's worth. I distribute over one of the numbers -- so 47 * 68 = 47 * 60 + 47 * 8, and then compute the compute those (2400 + 420 = 2820). Then I grab additional terms: 2820 + 40 * 8 = 3140. 3140 + 7 * 8 = 3196 Among other things this scales better to larger numbers. I use it because it's more 'linear' -- I only need to remember one accumulated number at a time.
- akersten 6y ago
  That's an interesting question! I don't have aphantasia, and can visualize things pretty vividly - but I also resorted to "verbal memory" to do that calculation. I foiled it like the other comment says (maybe somewhat of a visualization, since I "visualized" it as 40x60 + 40x8 + ...), and I remember the running sum by "saying" it to myself inside my head. I performed each multiplication (grade-school multiplication memory lookup table, not actually doing the visual algorithm) and added the right number of 10's place zeros, then added it to the running sum. For this addition step actually, I do visualize as stacking the two numbers and carrying if needed. Then I "say" the result to myself and remember it for the next multiplication. I will say that my first reaction to seeing "calculate 47x68 real quick" was reluctance and it was not an easy task to do mentally, but it was mechanically straightforward.
m3kw9 6y ago
I’m not getting how someone can close their eyes and a high res picture shows up like the image on your desktop background? Is that even possible?
- achenatx 6y ago
  yes some people dont have to close their eyes.
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    You can somewhat train it as well through getting better at drawing.
  - Tor3 6y ago
    It makes no difference for me if I close my eyes or not. On the other hand the ball isn't as clear as a real image, most of the time, I see the black pentagons but if I try to count them I lose focus on the ones I'm not currently counting.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Yes, that is what the experience of most people is like without aphantasia. I can even, for like a second, see a fully formed picture in my mind, like a scene from a sci-fi movie, or anything else, really, although it can disappear if I don't focus on the exact details. I can see everything, the shapes, the layout, colors, all of it. It really is like playing a movie in your mind.
  - ip26 6y ago
    Picture a soccer ball in your mind. Can you now count the black hexagons in view, or do you have to decide how many there are first? (Ok, now did you notice that they aren't actually hexagons, they are pentagons?)
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Sure, I can count them. I can make them hexagons or pentagons at will when I think about them. It does take some time however to remember what a soccer ball actually looks like but after that I can see every details of it.
wnoise 6y ago
I think the takeaway here is that there are lots of people who are _partially_ p-zombies: missing important "inner experiences" that everyone else has, but otherwise appear normal.
georgewsinger 6y ago
Question: Beyond aphantasiacs, could there be living humans who lack qualia altogether? The Hard Problem of Consciousness™ is "how can a physical system generate qualia?", where "qualia" is something like "the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions", or "what it feels like to have experiences". I once ran into a very intelligent person (philosophically trained) who genuinely didn't understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness, or what was even meant by qualia. It occurred to me during this conversation that there might be genuine instances of humans out there who lack qualia. As opposed to p-zombies (hypothetical humans who lack qualia but claim they have qualia), real life qualia-less humans might just find the notion of qualia nonsensical. Perhaps there are even people out there who understand what qualia is, and outright deny that they have it?
- deleted 6y ago
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- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  There are those who lack an internal monologue. People with a lack of critical thinking skills may be overrepresented by this group without an equivalent tool to analyze abstract concepts.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  People who genuinely lack qualia would be completely immune to physical sensations, so this is unlikely. I can imagine a hypothetical brain in a glass jar might survive like this, but for most people the absence of physical sensations while living in a body would be evidence of a very serious medical condition. Of course being able to persuade yourself through sleight of philosophy that physical sensations are somehow illusory is a different class of problem.
_ink_ 6y ago
I only learnt about aphantasia very recently. I seem to be affected. It was very surprising to me, that people can "see" things only by thinking about them. It explains a lot. For example I never understood what's so great about reading books. But I can imaging that this is great if you actually see the things you read about. I can also confirm the findings of this study. I rarly dream. I cannot hear music in my head. I also learnt quite a while ago, that my peers can remember the past in way that is mind boggling for me. It's pretty depressing to be honest. Do we already know if this is something which is inherited?
- thedevelopnik 6y ago
  I believe I’m aphantasic and I still enjoy books. I think about the things described. To go the other way, I read recently that the author of the Witcher books doesn’t “see” the things he’s writing, it’s pure text description for him but his books are still great.
c3534l 6y ago
I came to the realization that not everyone feels emotions the same way. In therapy, I often had people ask me to try to describe my emotions in terms of bodily images and ask me to justify how I know I'm sad or angry or whatever. It always seemed like such an absurd waste of time, but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut. It makes me realize there's a lot of experiences we probably all take for granted and assume that everyone experiences the way we do, but we just kind of assume that when someone says they can see it in their head or they can feel it in their heart we just assume everyone means that metaphorically.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut. That's what that phrase refers to? I've never even heard of that before. "An abstract thing that you feel" has always been what emotions are to me.
khazhoux 6y ago
Glad to know there's a word for it. I'm aphantasic. I can't see things in my mind, and the vague imagery I do see literally cannot hold still for even a second -- any image I conjure up will twist and shift from one shape to another. Somehow, I can draw quite well though. But not from mental imagery. And, I can hear music clearly in my head, with a very long memory. I can easily play back a song as almost perfect audio, even if I haven't heard it in decades, with clear little details. But I mostly can't make out the words of any music I remember, and in fact I struggle to remember lyrics in general, even of songs I've listened dozens of times. And my sequence-memory is crap. Sigh... memory is fascinating.
unexaminedlife 6y ago
I'm pretty sure I have this condition. Never even knew the vast majority of people experienced the world differently than I do until recently. One of the perceived benefits IME has been that I seem to have a substantially higher capacity (on average) to understand things at a conceptual level than my co-workers. Not sure if that's just a testament to how I learned to learn early in life, or if it's somehow a way my mind has compensated for the lack of sensory info in my imagination.

106 points by lnyan 6y ago

"Not everyone can see pictures in their minds when they close their eyes and summon thoughts - an ability many of us take for granted." I used to be into visualization as focus training. I can't "see" and change (move, change color) shapes in my mind at all. Artists I know claim to be able to do this. Obviously, Tesla (, Nikola) supposedly did this. For those who can do it - to what degree can you do it? Can you imagine a circle? A cube? A rubix cube with color? Edit: Since we are discussing this a lot - I am also a skilled lucid dreamer. In the sense that I trained myself for months to remember and control my dreams vividly. I realized my dreams have a "bandwidth limit" / "render limit". If I try to "look" at a detailed scene, it blurs and/or I wake up. Which, btw, is a huge argument against astral projection, not that anyone here likely ever even considered it to be real, but as a young child, I did.

goatlover 6y ago
Temple Grandin claimed her visualization worked like the Star Trek holodeck, which is amazing. But then many people can easily manipulate verbal language in their minds. Some can do that with music.
falsaberN1 6y ago
Characters, structures, vehicles, robots, pretty much anything I would like to draw or design. With color (or at least enough awareness to know a certain shape or area is in a specific color). I can also "listen" to music, unfortunately I'm really bad at creating new music so this skill is utterly useless for anything but remembering songs with just one listen or so. At night before falling asleep it's pretty much like visualizing a movie, including motion and sound, the effect is somewhat stronger when eyes closed and not moving, I assume because "input" is mostly clear and thus doesn't conflict with whatever image you are conjuring mentally. Seeing from other post, they say their dreams are pretty dull. My case is the opposite, my dreams are ridiculously vivid (including color, sound and touch) and there are very detailed environments and a lot of people moving around. I wonder if those things are related somehow? EDIT: I have narcolepsy, perhaps that's a factor.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Tor3 6y ago
  In general my dreams have duller images than reality, but I had a dream many decades ago, after a half-dramatic winter day in the mountains - when sleeping in the tent that night I was dreaming about a summer day where I walked over the top of a hill, and in front of me was a valley with an old road, and fields of yellow flowers as far as I could see. What was special was that it was extremely sharp and vivid, much more so than reality. I could see every individual flower, from an apparent distance of a hundred meters or more. And at the same time I could see it all. I still remember that dream vividly. Which is also unusual for me.
  - falsaberN1 6y ago
    That's interesting. Dreams always were a very interesting topic to me, so I like to hear stuff like this. For me that's usually kinda how it goes. My dreams are usually rather mundane, borderline formulaic, although at times I can recognize places from my past that are altered (a little or a lot), or it's cleaner/with different materials or stuff like that. A thing that amuses me and seems to be uncommon, at least from what I hear from other people, is the amount of life. If I dream of a street, it's always going to have a lot of persons moving about. Entirely normal people, not people without faces or anything weird like that. They even remain consistent, like if I look somewhere in the dream, if I look back again, people retains their path and clothing. If I'm a bar or something there will be random patrons who I don't really interact with, but can be seen and heard like if it was a totally normal place. Another amusing thing is that people claims they cannot read in dreams, but while there are times I have difficulty reading a thing, stuff like billboards or random "decorative" text are clear to me. Exceptions happen, for example a few days ago I dreamed I was doing a school test online on a tiny old-school flipphone and I was struggling to read the questions (didn't help the text was in garish colors, probably remembering something a teacher used to do in real life). I can also get the feelings of taste, smell and touch, but for some reason the temperature is always "neutral". Like, if I'm dreaming in a hot or cold day, it'll be "neutral" in the dream, even if I later wake up because I'm too hot or cold. At times I dream I'm walking but my legs hurt (like when standing up for a long time) but then I wake up and my legs are in a totally neutral state, not in a bad position or anything. The biggest drawback is that at times I dream I'm just doing my job (maybe with some minor differences in the room or so) and it feels like doing 3-4 hours of just real life, absolutely realistic work stuff. That is terrible. Once in a while I get a cool nightmare monster or setting (which I parasitize for my creative endeavors. Is it plagiarism when your subconscious came up with it?), but overall it's really mundane stuff. Also, my dreams tend to be pleasant and chillaxing (like 99%), for some reason when sharing dreams people speaks of dreadful or depressing things or psychedelic nightmares and such. I'm glad it's not the case here. I have had weird psychedelic dreams during times of being extremely sick with fever but otherwise it's like some sort of virtual reality. Makes me wonder if people who claimed to do stuff like astral walking just had the same "ability" and just had really vivid and realistic dreams instead. I also wonder how much of this is related to narcolepsy (I might be dreaming in a higher state of awareness than most people, but I'm not very wise on these topics).
greenonions 6y ago
Yes, and there are no real limits to this. I can picture a Rubik's cube dominating the Manhattan skyline. I can also picture abstract images with no connection to the real world, that have emotions associated with them. I believe my wife cannot make images, and the differences between us that result are pretty wild. I'm dramatically better with directions and maps because she can't make a mental model of the map and how it relates to the real world. However she's very aware of her emotions in a given moment where it's very difficult for me to express how I'm feeling.
- silveroriole 6y ago
  Oh, the map thing is interesting. I can visualise pretty well but I can’t move around smoothly in my visualisations. I can only warp around like in VR games. Most of what I visualise is more like a 2d film/photo than a full 3D scene. Like your wife, I can’t figure out maps or 3D spaces (I spend a lot of time in 3d games wandering around lost) - despite me being able to form images. Maybe some of us only have 1d/2d imaginary worlds in our heads!
  - gnramires 6y ago
    I also don't see smooth movement without extraordinary effort and simple objects, and it seems I'm just increasing the framerate. Although funnily I can imagine body and hand movements (which are smooth) in detail, and I don't feel the framerate limitation at all; I can get a 'intuitive feeling' for each kind of movement that way. So it seems like my kinetic-proprioception has a lot more temporal capability. In terms of 3D imagery, I can visualized complex 3D objects and rotate them around, or navigate 3D cave spaces. But it requires significant focus, and the "framerate" is very low, like warping you mentioned. And for years I've spent time before sleeping visualizing things (often in 3D), so I think it's something I developed too (it's fun and I knew it was going to be useful -- when solving problems I very often resort to visualizations).
- JshWright 6y ago
  It's crazy how varied everyone's experiences are. I can't visualize anything at all, but have a very strong spatial sense, and navigate much better than my wife does (who can visualize things very vividly).
sunsetSamurai 6y ago
I can, but colours never seem as vivid in my mind as when I look at them directly, like I can imagine a red apple but it's like a faded red. I've always found this mildly frustrating.
madaxe_again 6y ago
As complete as it needs to be. I can see and hear my imaginings quite clearly, and often use mechanical analogues to test non-directly visualisable abstract ideas and logical flows. In more general terms, I can see and explore real and imagined environments, and listen to music with perfect fidelity - although doing the hearing bit only works well with considerable focus, and peace and quiet - visual I find easy enough to just ignore what my eyes are seeing, leave walking or whatever on autopilot. To be clear, it’s not like just imagining a thing, it’s more like overriding a sense. When I visualise, I am literally looking at something that isn’t there, when I listen, I hear as though it’s real - although any real noise immediately breaks it.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  I have a very hard time believing claims like this. Not to single you out, but you should be able to draw perfectly then and imagine whole systems in your mind. The latter is especially unlikely given that most people are limited to 5-7 "items" in their working memory. To design even a simple system, e.g. a brake caliper, that's way more than 7 items, and they aren't "atomic" items either. Again, this isn't a stab at you, this is a stab at the concept, because it's kind of like people saying they can put on 5lb of muscle a month without roiding. Sets false expectations.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    I can hold whole systems in my mind, but I can't draw, as I've never learned. That doesn't mean that what I see in my mind is not real or inaccurate.
  - madaxe_again 6y ago
    It’s about levels of scale and abstraction. When you’re designing a car you don’t care about the innards of the calliper. Reducible complexity, and modelled inputs and outputs. If something seems wonky it gets looked at more closely - either the model or the concept is wrong. I can’t draw for shit, but I can and do make complex devices and systems with no written plan, just a picture in my head. Oh, and I’ve put on well over 5lb of muscle this month, by doing brutal hours of manual labour and eating like a horse. Being out of shape but historically stacked makes it a world easier.
ancient_art 6y ago
I can only see a very limited amount of stuff in my head. My best visualizations are routes in 2D from above. Anything beyond that is really hard to do. Funny thing is, when I dream I can see anything.
xthestreams 6y ago
I can visualize to a limited extent, i.e. I can see anything I want but images are always very "unstable". I'm much better with music: I can listen to music in my head very clearly, even though there is a strong focus on the lead melody (e.g. voice, guitar). But I can also create music from scratch and let it unfold seamlessly, with any kind of instruments or vocals I want.
auto 6y ago
To expound a bit on what others are saying, I definitely have this visualization ability, and it isn't limited to sight, I have the same thing for all my senses. The way I've described it to other people is that I can emulate any sensation internally, it's just that it's a muted or foggy version of it. If it was 100% accurate, I think that would start to cause issues with your brain's ability to distinguish with what's real and what's "in your head". The example I always give people is that when deciding what to eat and looking at things in the cabinet, or the fridge, or deciding where to pickup food, I just mentally "taste" each thing, and it really does feel like I have the sensation of eating that thing, and I decide based on which one tastes the best in that moment.
guicho271828 6y ago
Like a 3D CAD or in Blender. Add or remove details. A circle could be a bouncy wire that has a shiny surface, or made of wood or plastic. They could rotate in the air, or running on a floor making a circle after being dropped. It could bend and get twisted it into a figure 8. I am writing this while imagining it, and I have no real ring-shaped object at hand.
jecel 6y ago
Nikola Tesla always thought that this was a side effect of a very serious disease he had as a child. That was probably due to him never meeting other people like him, though as some comments here show they certainly exist (I count myself among them). Some people with this ability can draw what they imagine very well, while others are not good at all. I don't see an issue - even if you project some image on a blank piece of paper so people just have to trace it everybody won't have the same results.
starky 6y ago
I can pretty much visualize things as if they were in a 3D modeling system (there may be a reason why I work in mechanical product design). I can take some object and imagine it flipped around to another orientation or imagine how a complex mechanism will operate. I'm so adept at doing this that I very rarely actually draw things out before I start doing CAD work. I would say my ideation process starts with a vague view of what I am trying to accomplish, and then gradually becomes clear. I'll have a general concept and can picture the end result, but without understanding how it is accomplished at first, which gradually becomes clearer as I think about it. I generally know I've got something when it "feels right". My main artistic hobby is photography. One of the things I most enjoy doing is going out without a specific shot in mind and trying to "find" a photo by deliberately experiencing my surroundings. It is almost have an aversion to have a shot in mind before I go out to take it because it invariably doesn't live up to the visual I have in my head.

missingrib 6y ago

I'm worried I have this but I'm not completely sure I do. My dreams are not very vivid at all and usually I just "know" that things are happening in them instead of vividly seeing what's going on. However I can hear music very clearly in my head. If asked to visualize, say, an apple in my head I really don't see it very vividly at all. It's depressing if I'm being honest.

3f34f34f 6y ago
No one on earth can 'visualise' an image in their head as if they were seeing it in real life. This entire fiasco is just people on different spectrums of mental picturing that are freaking out because they are misinterpreting what aphantasia is. I assure you you are most likely normal, and it's common to not recite a sentence word for word or picture an object perfectly. Others can do it very well. Just like you can visualise music very well, whereas I cannot. It's a (tight) spectrum.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Plenty of people can visualize an image in their head as if they are seeing it in real life. As one of those people, trust me that if your brain is set up to work that way, it's pretty difficult to imagine any other way of picturing the world. Likewise there are plenty of people who honestly can't picture things in their mind at all. The fact that you are towards the middle of the spectrum does not mean the extremes don't exist.
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  - plutonorm 6y ago
    So you can draw photo realistic impressions of those memories? Come on now. I can visualise pretty vividly, but I know that my memory is conning me, the textures and details are the feelings of textures and details. If I actually interrogate the visualisation the detail is not there. It's like trying to read writing in a dream, you imagine that it's perfect because the feeling is the same, but try to actually read - the detail is not there.

raxxorrax 6y ago

How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc. What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?

di4na 6y ago
I can draw you a dog, but if you ask me to picture a ball on a table, i do not picture anything specific. It is just the abstract idea of a ball on the table. It does not have colour, substance, space, nothing.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  For me - I can draw as much as I can visualize. That is, I know that a face is bisected sphere with some extra lines on the bottom for the chin. I can't hold this image clearly, but I can hold it for a fraction of a second - enough to know what to put on paper. I think drawing and visualization are pretty closely tied.
- cj 6y ago
  Same, at first, but if I try I can conjure a vague / unspecific mental image (the harder I mentally try, the clearer the image gets, but it never gets anywhere near perfectly clear). For example: Are you able to take a table in your house and then imagine a soccer ball on it? Or do you still come up blank with just the concept and absolutely no mental imagery?
  - di4na 6y ago
    Still blank with the concept
- smabie 6y ago
  What about dreams? Presumably you see images of stuff when dreaming?

silveroriole 6y ago

Makes sense. I’d like to see an experiment done with reading comprehension as well as real memories. When I read something, I hear and see it. I’m reading it out loud in my mind and I either have instant visual associations with certain words (e.g. when I read the word aphantasia I think of the hippo from Fantasia, when I see the word tea I instantly ‘see’ a teacup) or I visualise the scene (like where they have the quote from the man who can’t imagine music, I ‘see’ and ‘hear’ it like it’s a TV interview). So I suspect I’m going to remember it better than someone who purely reads the text - but maybe not! Maybe people who don’t do all the ‘translation’ work to turn text into audio/visuals will in fact turn out to be MORE efficient at remembering. I have no idea how reading would work without at least hearing it though. If you told me to read without doing this stuff it would be like telling me to think without having thoughts. Impossible.

theelous3 6y ago
Anecdotal, but a friend of mine has essentially no inner eye and has roughly one memorable dream per year, if even. He cannot picture anything internally bar the most basic geometry, and that requires active focus. I know him to have a strong memory across the board, and no particular issues with reading (dyslexia, however he is a very strong reader. Certainly a lot stronger than average). So I wouldn't say there's necessarily anything that prohibits a person with a weak minds eye from having good memory. Not arguing against the point he may be an outlier or that these two features don't often go hand in hand, just pointing out it's not so hard and fast.
taeric 6y ago
I neither hear nor see things I read. Such that I can remember things, but I couldn't tell you how I remember them. Is akin to knowing your way home. I don't see the turns ahead of time, but I recognize them when I do. And I can remember the decisions ahead of time. I think remembering decisions is ultimately my best way to describe it. Remembering making a choice. Something that is not sensory.
- guicho271828 6y ago
  I am curious, what would you do when you lost your map in a forest/mountain while hiking, but assuming you "remember" the map that you checked the day before?

arkades 6y ago

Without even digging into the paper, let's be clear. They didn't find "they have memory trouble." They found, "they have trouble recalling sensations." > "Our data also showed that individuals with aphantasia not only report being unable to visualise, but also report comparatively reduced imagery, on average, in all other sensory modalities, including auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, taste, olfactory and emotion," the team wrote in their paper. I, for instance, am not aphantasic, but I fall quite close to that end of the spectrum. But I don't use mental imagery to store memory. When I am attempting to encode memories, I do so in the form of a narrative - narratives stick very effectively for me, and I have a pretty good memory (no one without a good memory survives medical school.) It's true, I can't just "remember" the image of relevant anatomy, but I'm fine with other mental models for encoding and retrieving information.

Cactus2018 6y ago
> "they have trouble recalling sensations." On plus side, almost everytime I eat sushi it's the best sushi ever.
abathur 6y ago
I think there's some accidental synecdoche here. At least for those of us endowed with the gift/curse of forming memories as life rushes by, they can appear to be composed of details our senses perceived around us enmeshed with details about how our wetware experienced that moment. Sometimes, we even have false memories of things that didn't happen, or that happened differently than we remember. There's a separate world of practice where people develop mnemonic devices (spaced repetition, narratives, memorable nonsense phrases, memory palaces, songs/rhyme/prosody, hand gestures) to help memorize things better than we could do by accident, or just by thinking "remember X". I would guess most people who are able to form memories can find a mnemonic device that works for them when they need to remember things. The very idea of a "memory palace", however, is so absolutely foreign to my experience of the world that I don't think I could have invented it on my own. Once someone describes it, I have an abstract understanding that the ability to arrange things in visual space could be a powerful mnemonic. I can, after all, remember at least a few things about many thousands of physical places I've been at some point in my life, even though I can't really picture any of them vividly. But, as a mnemonic, it's useless to me--I can't conjure it. My partner can remember things like what shirt she was wearing when we went to a specific restaurant a decade ago. I have abstract knowledge that we have been to that place, but I couldn't tell you anything else about it. For her, memories like this are a springboard into conjuring many other details about the event. Sometimes her recall injects enough context to jog my own. Sometimes it's all lost in the fog. Whether you are "good" or "bad" at memorizing things in an intentional way, unless you have infinite time to creative narrative mnemonics as life rushes by, I suspect aphantasia impacts your ability to recall daily life.

pengaru 6y ago

Teaching people how to tie even simple knots is effective at distinguishing the visual from non-visual thinkers. It's one of the interesting aspects of going sailing.

JshWright 6y ago
I'm pretty convinced I experience aphantasia (never been clincially tested), I can't even fathom what it means to "visualize" something. I'm also very good at knot tying. It's a hobby I enjoy, and a practical skill in rope rescue activities I participate in. Knot typing seems much more "spatial" than "visual" to me. Interestingly, the article specifically mentions differences in spatial abilities as not being correlated to the ability to visualize. "But other aspects of the findings suggest self-reporting may not be biasing the results that significantly: there were variations in answers coupled with data suggesting that spatial abilities - an ability to map relationships and distances between objects - appear to be unaffected in the volunteers."
- pengaru 6y ago
  I'm probably conflating visual and spatial into one group here.
- Arelius 6y ago
  I resonate with this as well. Anything strongly spatial, such as tying knots, navigating really any sort of space, even after just a single visit, and things such as sports come very easy to me. But even visualizing an Apple in any capacity (as an arbitrary example) seems to escape me, And asking me to, for instance draw one, would rely on a list of facts that I know about apples: * Apples are red * Apples are generally spherical * Apples have a stem on one side, and a little flowery bit on the other. * There are indentations around those bits. * An Apple's shape is a bit heart-ish. * Bits of the apple are bumpy when as swept around it's primary axis (I.... think only on the bottom???) Maybe that gives you a sense of my ability to visualize. While in stark contrast, I can often take a few looks at an already tied knot, and reverse-engineer/decompose it's construction down to a series of steps that I can feel spatially I can then often, much later be able to reconstruct that knot based on the combination of the few bits I remember, and the general knowledge I have about space in general and knots in specific.

mac01021 6y ago

How can I tell if I have aphantasia?

Cactus2018 6y ago
Take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/vviq/

ajkjk 6y ago

One question I like to ask in conversations about aphantasia: when you do relatively complex arithmetic in your head (for instance, compute 47 * 68 real quick), do you visually perform the gradeschool multiplication algorithm? Or something else? I've surveyed a lot of people on this - probably forty or so in person, plus another 100 or so in a poll on reddit once - and there's a pretty clear trend: people who perform the visual algorithm tend to be 'not math people', and are less accurate and less confident in their answer, or not even willing to try. I'm aphantasiac and I can do a calculation like that fairly quickly and accurately, without any special practice. I basically use my verbal memory to store and recall cached computations instead of any visualization. My theory is that the visual brain is not really designed for storing precise information so much as the gestalt of an image, so it does less well on precise numeric details.

gretch 6y ago
FOIL it :) 40 * 60 + 40 * 8 + 60 * 7 + 7 * 8 Basically a bunch of single digit multiplies followed by stacking zeroes
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Or 47x68= (50-3)x(70-2)=50x70 - 50x2 - 3x70 + 3x2
- ajkjk 6y ago
  My mental method is not quite FOIL, for what it's worth. I distribute over one of the numbers -- so 47 * 68 = 47 * 60 + 47 * 8, and then compute the compute those (2400 + 420 = 2820). Then I grab additional terms: 2820 + 40 * 8 = 3140. 3140 + 7 * 8 = 3196 Among other things this scales better to larger numbers. I use it because it's more 'linear' -- I only need to remember one accumulated number at a time.
akersten 6y ago
That's an interesting question! I don't have aphantasia, and can visualize things pretty vividly - but I also resorted to "verbal memory" to do that calculation. I foiled it like the other comment says (maybe somewhat of a visualization, since I "visualized" it as 40x60 + 40x8 + ...), and I remember the running sum by "saying" it to myself inside my head. I performed each multiplication (grade-school multiplication memory lookup table, not actually doing the visual algorithm) and added the right number of 10's place zeros, then added it to the running sum. For this addition step actually, I do visualize as stacking the two numbers and carrying if needed. Then I "say" the result to myself and remember it for the next multiplication. I will say that my first reaction to seeing "calculate 47x68 real quick" was reluctance and it was not an easy task to do mentally, but it was mechanically straightforward.

m3kw9 6y ago

I’m not getting how someone can close their eyes and a high res picture shows up like the image on your desktop background? Is that even possible?

achenatx 6y ago
yes some people dont have to close their eyes.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  You can somewhat train it as well through getting better at drawing.
- Tor3 6y ago
  It makes no difference for me if I close my eyes or not. On the other hand the ball isn't as clear as a real image, most of the time, I see the black pentagons but if I try to count them I lose focus on the ones I'm not currently counting.
cercatrova 6y ago
Yes, that is what the experience of most people is like without aphantasia. I can even, for like a second, see a fully formed picture in my mind, like a scene from a sci-fi movie, or anything else, really, although it can disappear if I don't focus on the exact details. I can see everything, the shapes, the layout, colors, all of it. It really is like playing a movie in your mind.
- ip26 6y ago
  Picture a soccer ball in your mind. Can you now count the black hexagons in view, or do you have to decide how many there are first? (Ok, now did you notice that they aren't actually hexagons, they are pentagons?)
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Sure, I can count them. I can make them hexagons or pentagons at will when I think about them. It does take some time however to remember what a soccer ball actually looks like but after that I can see every details of it.

wnoise 6y ago

I think the takeaway here is that there are lots of people who are _partially_ p-zombies: missing important "inner experiences" that everyone else has, but otherwise appear normal.

georgewsinger 6y ago

Question: Beyond aphantasiacs, could there be living humans who lack qualia altogether? The Hard Problem of Consciousness™ is "how can a physical system generate qualia?", where "qualia" is something like "the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions", or "what it feels like to have experiences". I once ran into a very intelligent person (philosophically trained) who genuinely didn't understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness, or what was even meant by qualia. It occurred to me during this conversation that there might be genuine instances of humans out there who lack qualia. As opposed to p-zombies (hypothetical humans who lack qualia but claim they have qualia), real life qualia-less humans might just find the notion of qualia nonsensical. Perhaps there are even people out there who understand what qualia is, and outright deny that they have it?

deleted 6y ago
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kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
There are those who lack an internal monologue. People with a lack of critical thinking skills may be overrepresented by this group without an equivalent tool to analyze abstract concepts.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
People who genuinely lack qualia would be completely immune to physical sensations, so this is unlikely. I can imagine a hypothetical brain in a glass jar might survive like this, but for most people the absence of physical sensations while living in a body would be evidence of a very serious medical condition. Of course being able to persuade yourself through sleight of philosophy that physical sensations are somehow illusory is a different class of problem.

_ink_ 6y ago

I only learnt about aphantasia very recently. I seem to be affected. It was very surprising to me, that people can "see" things only by thinking about them. It explains a lot. For example I never understood what's so great about reading books. But I can imaging that this is great if you actually see the things you read about. I can also confirm the findings of this study. I rarly dream. I cannot hear music in my head. I also learnt quite a while ago, that my peers can remember the past in way that is mind boggling for me. It's pretty depressing to be honest. Do we already know if this is something which is inherited?

thedevelopnik 6y ago
I believe I’m aphantasic and I still enjoy books. I think about the things described. To go the other way, I read recently that the author of the Witcher books doesn’t “see” the things he’s writing, it’s pure text description for him but his books are still great.

c3534l 6y ago

I came to the realization that not everyone feels emotions the same way. In therapy, I often had people ask me to try to describe my emotions in terms of bodily images and ask me to justify how I know I'm sad or angry or whatever. It always seemed like such an absurd waste of time, but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut. It makes me realize there's a lot of experiences we probably all take for granted and assume that everyone experiences the way we do, but we just kind of assume that when someone says they can see it in their head or they can feel it in their heart we just assume everyone means that metaphorically.

Izkata 6y ago
> but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut. That's what that phrase refers to? I've never even heard of that before. "An abstract thing that you feel" has always been what emotions are to me.

khazhoux 6y ago

Glad to know there's a word for it. I'm aphantasic. I can't see things in my mind, and the vague imagery I do see literally cannot hold still for even a second -- any image I conjure up will twist and shift from one shape to another. Somehow, I can draw quite well though. But not from mental imagery. And, I can hear music clearly in my head, with a very long memory. I can easily play back a song as almost perfect audio, even if I haven't heard it in decades, with clear little details. But I mostly can't make out the words of any music I remember, and in fact I struggle to remember lyrics in general, even of songs I've listened dozens of times. And my sequence-memory is crap. Sigh... memory is fascinating.

unexaminedlife 6y ago

I'm pretty sure I have this condition. Never even knew the vast majority of people experienced the world differently than I do until recently. One of the perceived benefits IME has been that I seem to have a substantially higher capacity (on average) to understand things at a conceptual level than my co-workers. Not sure if that's just a testament to how I learned to learn early in life, or if it's somehow a way my mind has compensated for the lack of sensory info in my imagination.