11 ms·

Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All

39 points by dduugg 5y ago

fishmaster 5y ago
If I try to imagine a room I have never been in or a landscape I have never seen before it comes out looking like in a fever dream. No proportions make sense, it's shifting around, etc. I don't know if that's worse than having none at all. :P > On the other hand, people with aphantasia don’t do as well as others at remembering details of their own lives. It’s possible that recalling our own experiences — known as episodic memory — depends more on the mind’s eye than does remembering facts about the world. This is true for me as well. I know that I've been to Italy several times from ages 10 to 15 with my family, but I couldn't tell you much more than fragments or how often that was, etc.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  What about when reading books? "It was an average sized room with orange carpet and white walls, entirely empty except for a small circular table with a telephone on top in the middle." When you read something like that do you not form a coherent mental image of this room?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spdionis 5y ago
    Somehow the room I imagine never seems to actually fit the description well. Especially if the text adds details later, I won't be able to add those in most of the time. For example, for the fragment you quoted, there is no carpet in my room no matter how hard I try to add it. And the walls are made of wood.
  - istorical 5y ago
    A lot of people who don't visualize when reading (who may or may not have some degree of mind's eye - it may just be a weaker muscle than those who are extremely visual people) just basically skip over visual description in writing. So when I am reading I would say at least half of the visual descriptions given to me are just filtered out by my brain as 'useless / ignore' and I just skip over / skim to the next part of the sentence / paragraph that returns to things I care about. It's more of a 'I don't care' about what a character's appearance is or what the setting is of a place in the story than a 'I'm taking in these visual descriptions and nothing is happening'. So like, hearing that the character got out of a car and is at the beach now is enough for me, reading about the white sands, wooden chairs, and crystal clear water is just stuff I ignore, my brain just says 'ok - store fact that character is now at beach. engage mental / factual associations about what beaches are like / what your emotions are around beaches'. But there's not a step where I think 'let's picture that beach'. I'd rather just think about it.
  - prometheus76 5y ago
    No. I get a "sense" of what the room looks like/feels like, and I can usually catch clues about the mood the author is intending to portray, but there's no room in my mind.
rogerclark 5y ago
People love to talk about this stuff because it's the same concept as "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" but dressed up in more complicated language and with frankly depressing overtones of fixed intrinsic capabilities or genetic luck of the draw. Everything I know tells me that most people, because they seem capable of doing the same things everyone else can do, all have extremely similar minds and don't differ in major ways like this, at least not in terms of potential. IMO, the only caveat here, and it may be a big one, is that of perception and imagination shaped by experience. I started learning music in my late 20s. Now, in my mid 30s, I can understand lyrics to songs when I couldn't before, identify chord progressions (a concept I had no knowledge of beforehand) and imagine entire arranged songs in my head. It's not that I didn't have a "mind's ear" before, it's just that I hadn't built a bunch of useful skills and conceptual frameworks to work with. Whether my music education developed new neural networks that might be detected or analyzed is another question. This has to be the same way it works for visual artists. Obviously a skilled illustrator, painter or sculptor is going to be better at visualizing imagery than someone who doesn't do those things. If that's the case, just thinking about images a lot makes you better at visualizing images. Ultimately, that's not much of a shocker and isn't very interesting.
- karpour 5y ago
  I could always perfectly imagine songs, make up music in my head, etc. I have no experience with music. On the other hand, I am almost completely unable to imagine anything with my minds eye willingly. I have been drawing for 15 years now, and i did not notice any improvement in being able to visualize things in my mind. So, at least from my standpoint, it does not seem like a skill that you can easily train.
  - rogerclark 5y ago
    This is why it's the same thing as "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" There's no way to prove what you're saying is true in any useful sense.
    - karpour 5y ago
bugs_bunny 5y ago
I wonder if this is a skill that must be learned before a certain age, something like what happens for learning a language [0] and possibly learning the natural numbers [1]. It is also interesting that they have learned to be able to solve problems that require mentally rotating shapes. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.2157&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...
rektide 5y ago
I played a little bit of Disco Elysium, which is a super interesting detective who-has-lost-their-memories, & wakes-up-in-a-run-down-city game, and one thing that just blew me away right away was picking skills as I was building my character. One of the example skills that blew me away, that put a pin on a set of ideas & thoughts that were floating about but un-named, was "Inland Empire". I struggle to describe it, but it's kind of the inner reserve of imagination, resounds very much with the hyperphantasia extreme described in this article. The game's full skill set is semi-viewable from here[1], & Inland Empire is a psyche skill on it. There's a lot of other fun amazing good skills, most a bit more classic in nature, but Inland Empire shored up & defined how I think of the Mind's Eye in a big way. [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-character-creation-intellect-psyche-physique-motorics-and-the-24-skills-explained https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-charac...
culopatin 5y ago
My girlfriend is one of those. And I’m one of the opposite. I can visualize building an engine in my head step by step. Even going to get the parts if I want to. My girlfriend can’t even visualize the car. Or the garage, or anything. She thinks in concepts, and understanding stuff like abstract things is much easier for her than for me. If I don’t see the process or make some visual analogy, it’s hard for me to get it.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Ditto. You older than 33 or younger? I ask because mine was more vivid in my early 20’s. Was the same way as you. One Twitter thread in particular messed with me: visualize a bright red star. Do you actually see the color? Are you sure? For me, it felt (and feels) like I can’t actually picture a red star. This is highly disconcerting because I used to be able to, I think. However, if I picture a red star next to a blue star, it’s clearly distinguishable in my mind. Maybe the mind’s eye operates in YCrCb, and the CrCb can get kinda crappy. :)
  - Terretta 5y ago
    “Visualize a red star, do you see the color?” feels a little waffly. I’d think you’re likely to get yes, as people imagine they “see” the way others “see” and respond similarly. By contrast, as seen in an article mentioned here on HN previously (5 years back?), and trialed any number of times since, you can ask them to “picture” or “visualize” something then surprise ask a different attribute that would have to exist if pictured literally. If someone isn’t expecting this, asking most people “picture a red triangle” … “ok?” … “which way is it pointing?” will elicit an immediate direction (up, down, left right). In a small subset of people, when not expecting it, the second question gets a long pause, a “What?”, or some other manifestation of not having a literal triangle envisioned with a preexisting direction. Those metaphorically “picturing” the concept of a red triangle seem to be taking time to decide and layer into their model what concept of direction it should have, while those with aphantasia seem to come back with “what, literally?” or similar indications that “picture” is a figure of speech. For myself, that HN discussion is the first time I gathered that for other folks “counting sheep” when they were kids wasn’t a metaphor.
haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.is/x06Th https://archive.is/x06Th

39 points by dduugg 5y ago

If I try to imagine a room I have never been in or a landscape I have never seen before it comes out looking like in a fever dream. No proportions make sense, it's shifting around, etc. I don't know if that's worse than having none at all. :P > On the other hand, people with aphantasia don’t do as well as others at remembering details of their own lives. It’s possible that recalling our own experiences — known as episodic memory — depends more on the mind’s eye than does remembering facts about the world. This is true for me as well. I know that I've been to Italy several times from ages 10 to 15 with my family, but I couldn't tell you much more than fragments or how often that was, etc.

Buttons840 5y ago
What about when reading books? "It was an average sized room with orange carpet and white walls, entirely empty except for a small circular table with a telephone on top in the middle." When you read something like that do you not form a coherent mental image of this room?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spdionis 5y ago
  Somehow the room I imagine never seems to actually fit the description well. Especially if the text adds details later, I won't be able to add those in most of the time. For example, for the fragment you quoted, there is no carpet in my room no matter how hard I try to add it. And the walls are made of wood.
- istorical 5y ago
  A lot of people who don't visualize when reading (who may or may not have some degree of mind's eye - it may just be a weaker muscle than those who are extremely visual people) just basically skip over visual description in writing. So when I am reading I would say at least half of the visual descriptions given to me are just filtered out by my brain as 'useless / ignore' and I just skip over / skim to the next part of the sentence / paragraph that returns to things I care about. It's more of a 'I don't care' about what a character's appearance is or what the setting is of a place in the story than a 'I'm taking in these visual descriptions and nothing is happening'. So like, hearing that the character got out of a car and is at the beach now is enough for me, reading about the white sands, wooden chairs, and crystal clear water is just stuff I ignore, my brain just says 'ok - store fact that character is now at beach. engage mental / factual associations about what beaches are like / what your emotions are around beaches'. But there's not a step where I think 'let's picture that beach'. I'd rather just think about it.
- prometheus76 5y ago
  No. I get a "sense" of what the room looks like/feels like, and I can usually catch clues about the mood the author is intending to portray, but there's no room in my mind.

rogerclark 5y ago

People love to talk about this stuff because it's the same concept as "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" but dressed up in more complicated language and with frankly depressing overtones of fixed intrinsic capabilities or genetic luck of the draw. Everything I know tells me that most people, because they seem capable of doing the same things everyone else can do, all have extremely similar minds and don't differ in major ways like this, at least not in terms of potential. IMO, the only caveat here, and it may be a big one, is that of perception and imagination shaped by experience. I started learning music in my late 20s. Now, in my mid 30s, I can understand lyrics to songs when I couldn't before, identify chord progressions (a concept I had no knowledge of beforehand) and imagine entire arranged songs in my head. It's not that I didn't have a "mind's ear" before, it's just that I hadn't built a bunch of useful skills and conceptual frameworks to work with. Whether my music education developed new neural networks that might be detected or analyzed is another question. This has to be the same way it works for visual artists. Obviously a skilled illustrator, painter or sculptor is going to be better at visualizing imagery than someone who doesn't do those things. If that's the case, just thinking about images a lot makes you better at visualizing images. Ultimately, that's not much of a shocker and isn't very interesting.

karpour 5y ago
I could always perfectly imagine songs, make up music in my head, etc. I have no experience with music. On the other hand, I am almost completely unable to imagine anything with my minds eye willingly. I have been drawing for 15 years now, and i did not notice any improvement in being able to visualize things in my mind. So, at least from my standpoint, it does not seem like a skill that you can easily train.
- rogerclark 5y ago
  This is why it's the same thing as "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" There's no way to prove what you're saying is true in any useful sense.
  - karpour 5y ago

bugs_bunny 5y ago

I wonder if this is a skill that must be learned before a certain age, something like what happens for learning a language [0] and possibly learning the natural numbers [1]. It is also interesting that they have learned to be able to solve problems that require mentally rotating shapes. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.2157&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...

rektide 5y ago

I played a little bit of Disco Elysium, which is a super interesting detective who-has-lost-their-memories, & wakes-up-in-a-run-down-city game, and one thing that just blew me away right away was picking skills as I was building my character. One of the example skills that blew me away, that put a pin on a set of ideas & thoughts that were floating about but un-named, was "Inland Empire". I struggle to describe it, but it's kind of the inner reserve of imagination, resounds very much with the hyperphantasia extreme described in this article. The game's full skill set is semi-viewable from here[1], & Inland Empire is a psyche skill on it. There's a lot of other fun amazing good skills, most a bit more classic in nature, but Inland Empire shored up & defined how I think of the Mind's Eye in a big way. [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-character-creation-intellect-psyche-physique-motorics-and-the-24-skills-explained https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-charac...

culopatin 5y ago

My girlfriend is one of those. And I’m one of the opposite. I can visualize building an engine in my head step by step. Even going to get the parts if I want to. My girlfriend can’t even visualize the car. Or the garage, or anything. She thinks in concepts, and understanding stuff like abstract things is much easier for her than for me. If I don’t see the process or make some visual analogy, it’s hard for me to get it.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Ditto. You older than 33 or younger? I ask because mine was more vivid in my early 20’s. Was the same way as you. One Twitter thread in particular messed with me: visualize a bright red star. Do you actually see the color? Are you sure? For me, it felt (and feels) like I can’t actually picture a red star. This is highly disconcerting because I used to be able to, I think. However, if I picture a red star next to a blue star, it’s clearly distinguishable in my mind. Maybe the mind’s eye operates in YCrCb, and the CrCb can get kinda crappy. :)
- Terretta 5y ago
  “Visualize a red star, do you see the color?” feels a little waffly. I’d think you’re likely to get yes, as people imagine they “see” the way others “see” and respond similarly. By contrast, as seen in an article mentioned here on HN previously (5 years back?), and trialed any number of times since, you can ask them to “picture” or “visualize” something then surprise ask a different attribute that would have to exist if pictured literally. If someone isn’t expecting this, asking most people “picture a red triangle” … “ok?” … “which way is it pointing?” will elicit an immediate direction (up, down, left right). In a small subset of people, when not expecting it, the second question gets a long pause, a “What?”, or some other manifestation of not having a literal triangle envisioned with a preexisting direction. Those metaphorically “picturing” the concept of a red triangle seem to be taking time to decide and layer into their model what concept of direction it should have, while those with aphantasia seem to come back with “what, literally?” or similar indications that “picture” is a figure of speech. For myself, that HN discussion is the first time I gathered that for other folks “counting sheep” when they were kids wasn’t a metaphor.

haspoken 5y ago

https://archive.is/x06Th https://archive.is/x06Th