16 ms·

Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

177 points by smusamashah 5y ago

Kaibeezy 5y ago
Not sure if science or joke I don’t get :(
- Akronymus 5y ago
  You may the following illuminating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI
  - pigbearpig 5y ago
    How is that illuminating? You're linking to Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube for a medical condition? Please.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Hmm, no wikipedia page for "ganzflicker", and 90% of the google hits are dubious websites. However, I will be trying this tonight because I loves me a good hallucination and if it can be done by sitting in a dark room staring at a flickering screen for 10 minutes, it sure beats acid.
  - nitemice 5y ago
    If you click through to the experiment, they say that it's actually called '"Ganzfeld imagery" (Allefeld et al., 2011; Sumich et al., 2018)'. Searching for that led me to this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Follow up: no hallucinations but I was nauseous for an hour afterwards.
- samkater 5y ago
  I don’t follow the research here but I was pretty sure it was a joke at first because after the initial quote (preceded by the statement “ Consider the statements below. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream?”): > I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place. Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen began to expand. I saw old stone buildings … like a castle … I was flying above it. I was presented with 3 options, a Dodge Ram, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and some other truck. I was trying really hard to figure out what the statement had to do with vehicles until I scrolled down (on mobile) more to realize it was a poorly placed advertisement. Not sure why the internet thinks I want to buy a truck, but I imagine there could have been even more hilarious things that could have fit the context better.
- pigbearpig 5y ago
  I'm with you, sorry, I don't believe you can see shit in a flashing screen. Aphantasia seems like a popular self-diagnosis.
- prower 5y ago
  It would be fun if this ends up being just a test of how suggestible or easily influenced people are.
neilv 5y ago
> In less than ten minutes, it creates altered states of consciousness, That's alarming. > with no lasting effects for the brain. How does the party asserting that, know that?
_virtu 5y ago
As someone who has thought that I've had aphantasia for the past six or seven years (thank you hn for teaching me about aphantasia), I'm going to give this a shot.
- neRok 5y ago
  Yer I think I have aphantasia too. I don't see images, but I feel like I can describe things which forms a picture that I can't see but I know. Anyway, at the very start of my 10min of ganzflicker I think I could see some very faint "wireframe" lines of no shapes in particular (just like * patterns), but these went away after a minute or so, and then it was just flashing colours, but the colours kept changing, and they were mostly reds, pinks, blues, yellows. Rarely green.
- pigbearpig 5y ago
  What did you call it seven years ago before the term aphantasia was coined?
  - bluehex 5y ago
    I'm in the same camp, thinking I probably have aphantasia. Before I read about it I didn't call it anything because I had no concept that there was anything lacking in my experience. I thought it was just how everyone's mind worked. I had no idea that people could actually see things that they visualized. I had always thought that the term "visualize" was just an exaggerated metaphor for imagining. For example I can imagine a little island in a field of blue ocean with a palm tree growing out of it just fine, I can conceptually place the objects around in this imaginary scene and have a sense for where the things are in relation to one another and what shapes and colors they are, but I can't for the life of me "see" a single thing no matter how much I focus on it. It might sound contradictory but I don't know how else to describe it. I have only experienced something that sounds like how normal folks see in their minds eye once, on the cusp of falling asleep, hypnagogic hallucinations began but I was somewhat in control of what I was seeing, I could change the image at will to whatever I imagined. It lasted but a couple of minutes before I fell asleep. Someone that has a normal mind's eye - and has also experienced the pre-sleep hallucinations - would have to tell me if my experience was similar to a normal imagination though. It could be that my hypnagogic episode was far more vivid than a typical person's visual imagination during normal waking hours though, too, who knows? I did feel very jealous though after that episode thinking that most people probably have such an ability to visualize like that while awake.
WillDaSilva 5y ago
This is extremely cool. Within about 10 seconds in a lit room without white noise playing I began getting fairly vivid visuals. I'll be sure to come back to this to get the full experience later, and complete the questionnaire. For reference I tend to get interesting/vivid visuals whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, often when I look at a finely patterned/textured surface, and sometimes when I look at basically anything when I've gone >36 hours without sleep. The visuals from this are more intense than those I get from simply closing my eyes though, and more interesting/changing than those from looking at tiled floors or popcorn ceiling.
- nivethan 5y ago
  Have you done lsd/shrooms before? This almost sounds like you can trigger the after effects yourself.
  - WillDaSilva 5y ago
    These visuals I regularly experience are similar to those experienced on shroom, but far less intense/intrusive/encompassing. They're fairly distinct in sensation from visuals experienced through imagining, which are fairly distinct from daydreaming, which are fairly distinct from dreaming. I wish we had a language expressive enough to share these qualitative experiences - my writing does little to express them.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  What sort of visuals did you see? I had some amazing visuals, but I'm not really sure what I'm to expect if I'm one of those people with vivid mental imagery. I didn't see anything particularly concrete, except what kind of looked like a spiral galaxy at one point. The rest was basically lots of cool fractals and textures. What was most strange was a few shooting stars I saw pass through my vision; they weren't those sorts of "shooting stars" you might get if you get up too fast or if you get all the wind knocked out of you. These were quite vivid shooting stars moving steadily for several seconds until each would vanish.
  - 5y ago
ravenstine 5y ago
Wow. I didn't see anything I would deem a full hallucination, but the visuals were pretty amazing. Lots of fractals, triangles, geometry, some shootings stars, what looked like a spiral galaxy for about 10 seconds, then a moment of staring into an abyss, X shapes in my peripheral vision, etc. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't see a tiger jump out from my screen or the Enterprise D passing by. My mental imagery is usually pretty vivid, but it's also impossible for me to really judge that. I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I'll try this periodically and see if I get anything different. EDIT: I am curious how this would be affected by music as opposed to white noise.
shannifin 5y ago
Interesting self-experiment, but results are self-reported (and failure of the experiment to elicit imagery does not necessarily imply anything about vividness). I'm not sure it really reveals any objective metric regarding vividness of mental imagery.
- juliangamble 5y ago
  Most psychology research is based on self reporting. It is the standard in that field.
  - shannifin 5y ago
    Not criticizing self-reporting in general, just that it can't by its nature do what the title claims.
Causality1 5y ago
determining whether a face is friendly or annoyed is a high-level cognitive process. I wouldn't be too sure about that. The human brain has an enormous amount of dedicated circuitry for recognizing and interpreting human faces. When something goes wrong in that circuitry we can't just "do it in software" and we call it face-blindness.
thom 5y ago
Nice try, basilisk-generating AGI, almost had me.
jonaustin 5y ago
There is an entire industry around this effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://mindplace.com/products/kasina-ganzframes https://mindplace.com/products/kasina-ganzframes Basically Sound and Light "Mind Machines" have been utilizing this effevt for decades.
axguscbklp 5y ago
Interesting. I do not have aphantasia. Actually it is easy for me to visually imagine. However, trying out this Ganzfield flicker for more than 5 minutes did nothing for me. Maybe I will try again later in a darker room and for a longer duration.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  You might want to try it late at night when you're particularly tired.
buss 5y ago
I am almost completely aphantasic and saw zero visuals
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dorkwood 5y ago
I watched this for ten minutes and didn't see anything (apart from a flashing red screen). I'm supposed to be the artistic one in the family, so I can't help but feel slightly disdapointed. I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying (the "images" in my mind's eye are very fleeting, lacking in detail, and can't be focused on -- like they're on the extremes of my periphery) but maybe I really was born with a disadvantage.
- noman-land 5y ago
  My mental images are usually very similar to how you described yours. I'm also "creative". I've casually self-diagnosed myself as "not being able to see images in my head". However there have been times where I've had picture perfect clarity of something in 3d, including color, but it only lasts for moments and I've never been able to conjure it on purpose.
  - possibleworlds 5y ago
    I was friends (more aquaintances now since I haven't seen him for quite a few years) with an incredibly talented artist / illustrator. I worked with him for a period and would place him more than anyone else I have ever met in the genius spectrum based on a number of factors. One of them is that I know that he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind. I have never been able to do anything close to this, and similarly have self-diagnosed as much weaker in this "power". I mean I can visualize things in my mind but it is fuzzy and fleeting, like focusing on any detail collapses the field of view. This episode of radiolab about a musician who can maintain a 3d mental image of four orchestras playing at once always stuck with me, and seems relevant to this topic: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/301427-head-full-symphonies https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/30142...
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind. FWIW this is sort of a thing that the process of becoming an artist trains you to do. I have been a professional artist for a couple decades and it is much easier for me to do this sort of thing than it was when I was a kid. There's a lot of steps involved in projecting a mental 3d model onto a 2d plane that I can just do in my head now because I've done them so damn many times. There's definitely an innate level of doing this as well, some people start with a big boost, various psychoactive chemicals can help (I have done so much work while slightly stoned for the performance boost it gives my visual cortex), and then there is that story about one 1940s animator at Warner Bros. who got in a car accident that involved a degree of head injury, and could suddenly just "trace" stuff directly off of his mental images onto paper once he recovered.
mcswell 5y ago
I watched it, twice, for about ten seconds. I found it quite uncomfortable to watch.
barrkel 5y ago
I saw a few repetitive patterns: something resembling the overlapping petals of a pine cone, and a bunch of cells vaguely similar to a Voronoi diagram. They didn't last long, were faint and transient. I get much more vivid visuals with my eyes closed.
postalrat 5y ago
Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it? It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep. I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a very good job.
- TheSpiciestDev 5y ago
  Over the more recent years, whenever I'd get sick and experience fever dreams, JavaScript paradigms would be what I'd get lost in i.e. asynchronous calls, callbacks, single-threaded nature, etc. This comes from someone who enjoys the language, too. Weird stuff...
- miloignis 5y ago
  I think I have experienced something similar, where I have to find the right configuration for some pattern, sometimes grounded in like how my sheets and blanket wrap around my body in order to create or fix some dream machine. It's not a fully formed concept, but I'm trying to fix it and arrange the pattern in my mostly-sleeping state - it's always impossible and I have to recognize what I'm doing, fully wake myself up, and then try to go back to sleep to get out of it.
  - recursive 5y ago
    Yes. I get this. It's kind of a problem some time. My brain gets trapped in a loop of trying to solve some puzzle or system of constraints, but none of it is based on anything. I couldn't even describe it. It's more like patterns of faux-logical systems. When I recognize it happening, I can usually snap out of it.
    - grogenaut 5y ago
      Agreed, doing matrix multiplication of Star and Pyramid makes no sense. Tho usually I do not wake up enough to stop.
merpnderp 5y ago
That was seriously uncool and no fun. I almost immediately saw crosshatching bars and shapes maybe like fractals, and then the center of the screen seemed to form a white sphere and a f'ing nightmare came crawling out of it filling me with dread, and then I closed the page. Took about a minute. Did it a second time maybe 30 minutes later and it quickly resolved into spinning wind turbines blades, dozens of them, circling the middle of the screen, in a random circle-ish flow that moved like waves. After a few minute of that, it seemed like I was falling through a warp tunnel with stars connected by glowing arms flashing by, then hands and arms started to reach up from the bottom of the screen and I turned it off. I just let my eyes relax and didn't really focus on the screen, but when I did focus, that's usually when the unpleasant images appeared.
- dbtc 5y ago
  I saw spinning shapes too: spirals, figure eights, spheres of rainbow pointillist light. Or just swirling patterns like schools of fish. They all moved slowly. When I tried to focus they just disappeared. For me it was relaxing. I watched for about 5 minutes.
  - Flenser 5y ago
    Sounds like what I see when I press my fingers (gently) onto my closed eyelids. I think it's the different layers of the visual cortex trying to find edges/patterns in something that doesn't have any.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I had bouts with nightmares and such and a technique I found is that when the horrors begin to appear, I consciously try to be unaffected by them. To try to at least delay what you just described, that feeling of dread taking over you. While you can't really have control over the outside world and the horrors within it, you can at least have control over your reactions to it. And reactions to stimuli like this red flashing thing, and many other situations, are really about just the reaction of the mind, filling in the blanks, trying to make sense. The more you can relax that effort, the less horrific it will become. Similar to relaxing a muscle cramp. I'm not saying that I'm very good at this all, but going this way has helped me a lot already.
booleandilemma 5y ago
Just don't stare into any bitmaps...
endisneigh 5y ago
Watching the flicker thing for a few moments made me think: is it possible that some sort of sensory stimuli could paralyze you? It would be fascinating if some crazy combination of stimuli could have sort of a “reset human” sort of effect. Given that we’re revolved organisms and not machines it’s hard to imagine any evolutionary purpose, but it’s fun to think about.
- no_protocol 5y ago
  Read Snow Crash
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Let me leave this here for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
nasalgoat 5y ago
Absolutely nothing for me, but after reading up on Aphantasia and the link it has to a lack of autobiographical memory, it makes sense. I have a condition called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html) which means I can barely remember anything from my life and what little I do remember is vague and fuzzy. Intereesting correlation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- buss 5y ago
  I know I'm aphantasic, but never heard of SDAM. Describes me so well! I remember nearly nothing of my life.
armchairhacker 5y ago
The Ganzflicker is very cool. I only did it for 2 minutes, and it wasn't strong or overpowering. But I saw a) a blurry checkerboard, and b) ripples coming out of the 4 corners of the screen. It turns out, 4 ripples coming out of the screen creates a blurry checkerboard! See https://www.falstad.com/ripple/ https://www.falstad.com/ripple/, set to "Example: Four Sources". That was exactly what I saw, but sped up, in red instead of green, and the ripples came out of the corners instead of east/north/west/south.
Animats 5y ago
Random flickering tiny green dots, a bit of fuzzy red rippling, and a desire to clean the screen, but nothing exciting.
holografix 5y ago
Honest questions: Do people with Aphantasia dream vivid dreams with images? How about masturbation without visual input? Are you not capable of visually imagining something arousing, like a person you find very attractive etc? I don’t _think_ I suffer from it but would call the images in my head very clear or detailed or very accurate.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  I think these things are a spectrum and I wouldn’t really say I experience it either, but my dreams have only rarely really felt visual, much more like a story or a narrative, which is also how my memories normally feel
- buss 5y ago
  I'm nearly completely aphantasic. I can get very brief flashes of images but can't make them happen nor hold them in my mind. I almost never dream. When I do dream it's fairly lifelike. I can't visualize anything arousing. When I first learned (at 26!) that my friends can visualize any fantasy at will I was floored. I have zero internal imagery for anything sexual. Have no fantasies. I can't picture anyone's face. Bodies are only experienced in person. If I can't see it with my eyes, it doesn't exist.
- Mehdi2277 5y ago
  I'm completely aphantasiac across all senses. I can't mentally visualize, mentally have song stuck in my head, imagine taste/touch/etc. I still dream frequently. Dreaming and lack of awake mental visualization are separate. There are people who lack both but you can dream visually frequently while being completely unable to have any visual imagination awake.
- NamTaf 5y ago
  I never remember my dreams, and I suspect I'm aphantasic. As far as I'm concerned, 99.something% of my sleep follows the pattern of fall asleep -> void outside of time -> wake up. There are extremely rare fleeting moments where I might wake up and remember some details about a dream for a few seconds, but then I lose it. Those would be counted on one hand per year, easily.
haxorito 5y ago
Saw or herd nothing. Haven’t lose presence. Only difference is now my eyes are tired, after looking at screen for 10 minutes without blinking.
pigbearpig 5y ago
Wow, so many people don't see anything, almost as if aphantasia isn't a real thing and it's just normal.
- sadness3 5y ago
  I see a tonne in this flashing thing, and the way I think is like a movie screen. I can't comprehend how thinking without vivid imagery is even possible. I really think there's variety in how brains are wired and very different experiences of thinking out there.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
I also cannot recollect visual things in mind eye. It is strange to explain but I am good with inventing things and imagining complex things but I cannot see anything in mind eye. It is not visual it is more as abstract "shape", shape is not good word as it is visual, in my case try to imagine shape more as intuition or feeling. I do not know how to explain. I was kind of annoyed by this finding that I started trying different ways to imagine objects. Few months ago interesting thing happen, I woke up really early and stayed up after 2am, when I got in bad, I was in state that I passed state of sleepy, so my mind was fully conscious, (state you can choose do you want to get up or not at any time), and then stream of images appeared from single point, that point grew and like accessing some optic cable hole, and it was vivid very vivid like reality. It lasted just a few 10 - 30 sec before I was knocked of and started sleeping. It look like my left side of brain (logic) was so tired that handed over everything to right side (pictures colors) additionally leaving spectator (chartering voice) awake for little while. I am no medical person just interpreting subjective experience so do not take any of this as fact. I just remember that at at that point that I had feeling that Logical side of brain imposed some kind of dictatorship on imaginative side of brain, because of job or past experiences. That time logical brain was too tired after more than 20hrs of coding and thinking so it seems went away for a sleep fraction of time earlier than the imaginative side. :)
- nefitty 5y ago
  I recently learned a trick to fall asleep faster. The theory is that sometimes we have trouble falling asleep because we’re stuck in that “logical mind” mode, ie verbalizing thoughts in our head, thinking about concepts, etc. The trick is to pick a word, something like “bed”, “sleepy”, etc. You then take each letter and try to think of as many things that start with that letter. The catch is that you should try visualizing the object as clearly as possible. You move on to the next letter once you run out of things for the current letter. This is supposed to move your mind from the verbal, anxiety-ridden, future-minded mode to the pre-verbal, visual mode. That then slowly fades into hypnagogic imagery, which then leads to sleep and dreams.
  - dorkwood 5y ago
d13 5y ago
I’ve never heard of Ganzflicker before, but it’s essentially a Dream Machine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine
Fwirt 5y ago
Does anybody else experience a similar phenomenon but with their auditory system? Whenever I'm falling asleep in a room with white noise (usually a fan) I swear I hear people talking, songs, animal noises... But it's just the fan.
- sgt 5y ago
  You can hear that? Guys, we better up his dose.
- andyjohnson0 5y ago
  This sometimes happens to me: voices and music.
- MaxDPS 5y ago
  I’ve experienced that. Sometimes I hear voices but I can’t make out the words. Sometimes it sounds more like birds chirping. I haven’t had that in a while though but when I do, it would happen just as I was dozing off to sleep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
- hexciple 5y ago
  Yes. Every time I run a vacuum, I can hear voices talking, shouting, screaming. It's very unpleasant. Fortunately it doesn't happen with lower-volume noises like fans.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Flowing water does that to me.
- vborovikov 5y ago
  Yep, when I'm really sleepy and is about to fall asleep I hear cacophony, familiar people's voices saying single words or short phrases. I even can hear my own voice saying something short. It's very consistent and I use it as a sign that it's time to sleep.
- sadness3 5y ago
  Check out Exploding Head Syndrome! I have it. I have only experienced it as a kind of electrical "boom", but the bursts of sound some of you describe sound related, especially since they happen while you are drifting off to sleep.
beardyw 5y ago
I am not sure about this. If you stare at anything for long enough you get peculiar effects in your vision (try it). That said, in the last year or so I have begun to enjoy music from the extractor fan in our kitchen. Each time it is on I hear a random genre of music - plain chant, brass band, jazz, etc. I don't experience it in any other context (or any other hallucinations before you ask). Anyone else get something like this?
- thom 5y ago
  I do get auditory hallucinations in other contexts (usually while sleepy) but yeah, anytime there’s some sort of drone like a microwave this happens to me. I have always felt terrible that I never really learned an instrument because it’s nice having a free source of compositions to draw upon!
- edem 5y ago
  I once had a friend who said that his brother could dance to any "music". This included the sound of oil being heated in a pan. I also have some flashbacks sometimes, when I hear familiar sounds and I sometimes see things in a fractal structure (this plant is especially trippy: https://naturgarden.hu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-tuja-gondoz%C3%A1sa-848x480.jpg https://naturgarden.hu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-tuja-gon... ). Now that I mentioned the extractor fan...have you listened to Sleep Research Facility's music? He made music out of the sound of broken fans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SleepResearch_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SleepResearch_Facility
  - beardyw 5y ago
    Thanks they are great, I will be ... I am using those at my desk. Reminds me that the 24 hour working factory behind our house when I was very small stopped their night shift. I am told I didn't sleep through the night for a fortnight. Maybe there is a connection.
  - AndrewDucker 5y ago
    This kind of thing was referenced, comedically in the UK TV series Spaced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSndZPynQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSndZPynQk
mikewarot 5y ago
I read Snow Crash, I see what you're trying to do. ;-)
kepair 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect The article starts with self-reported effects, already conditioning you to expect an almost psychedelic experience with this test. Didn't like that.
- torginus 5y ago
  This. I haven't read the guide carefully and I had no idea I was supposed to experience auditory hallucinations, and I didn't hear any. I wonder if the visual hallucinations (which I did see) were caused by my prior expectations.
throwawaynumber 5y ago
This seems like nonsense to me. I can visualise things with great detail in my minds eye, and yet I saw nothing but an annoying flashing screen with this.
SCLeo 5y ago
For some reason, staring at a blinking screen in a dark room really creeps me out. I got goose bumps all over my body. I had to give up after a minute or so.
Arcorann 5y ago
The article is reposted from https://theconversation.com/pseudo-hallucinations-why-some-people-see-more-vivid-mental-images-than-others-test-yourself-here-163025; https://theconversation.com/pseudo-hallucinations-why-some-p... requesting the link and title be adjusted. (I'm not sure if the link should be repointed to the original research study or not.) I'm not able to look at the Ganzflicker at the moment but I did skim the research study in question (given that the focus on the article is on the conjectured mechanisms and not the results themselves) and the results found there are somewhat intriguing.
no_time 5y ago
The imagery this produces is very similar to the one I see when I close my eyes and focus on the initially brown/red patterns that later become complex shapes and sometimes creatures. If you don't "see" anything with your eyes closed then this probably won't work for you. Also I should add that what I described above feels distinct from focusing on the inner eye.
kgwxd 5y ago
This reminded me of something I used to do when I was a kid, sit in the sun at the edge of a shadow moving in the wind, like a tree, with my eyes closed specifically to get this flashing red and black pattern and enjoy the random images. I can't believe I forgot about it.
sadness3 5y ago
The technical description of this phenomena is a bit conflicted. It seems to say the differing experiences are probably a result of different people having different visual refresh rates, and then somehow makes a logical jump to the test telling us about how visual spacial people are as thinkers. It seems to me that this would tell us a lot more about how our visual cortex interprets input. This is an experience of actual vision, not visualization.
xaedes 5y ago
To put things in perspective: The actual survey result says that most experience simple shapes (60%). 39% saw colors other than red and black. 24% report very vivid colorful and complex images. 25% didn't see anything (answer "No"). (doesn't add up to 100% because multiple options could be selected) A quick internet search reveals 1-3% of people have aphantasia. I wouldn't rely too much on the results of this test w.r.t. aphantasia.

177 points by smusamashah 5y ago

Kaibeezy 5y ago

Not sure if science or joke I don’t get :(

Akronymus 5y ago
You may the following illuminating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI
- pigbearpig 5y ago
  How is that illuminating? You're linking to Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube for a medical condition? Please.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Hmm, no wikipedia page for "ganzflicker", and 90% of the google hits are dubious websites. However, I will be trying this tonight because I loves me a good hallucination and if it can be done by sitting in a dark room staring at a flickering screen for 10 minutes, it sure beats acid.
- nitemice 5y ago
  If you click through to the experiment, they say that it's actually called '"Ganzfeld imagery" (Allefeld et al., 2011; Sumich et al., 2018)'. Searching for that led me to this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Follow up: no hallucinations but I was nauseous for an hour afterwards.
samkater 5y ago
I don’t follow the research here but I was pretty sure it was a joke at first because after the initial quote (preceded by the statement “ Consider the statements below. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream?”): > I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place. Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen began to expand. I saw old stone buildings … like a castle … I was flying above it. I was presented with 3 options, a Dodge Ram, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and some other truck. I was trying really hard to figure out what the statement had to do with vehicles until I scrolled down (on mobile) more to realize it was a poorly placed advertisement. Not sure why the internet thinks I want to buy a truck, but I imagine there could have been even more hilarious things that could have fit the context better.
pigbearpig 5y ago
I'm with you, sorry, I don't believe you can see shit in a flashing screen. Aphantasia seems like a popular self-diagnosis.
prower 5y ago
It would be fun if this ends up being just a test of how suggestible or easily influenced people are.

neilv 5y ago

> In less than ten minutes, it creates altered states of consciousness, That's alarming. > with no lasting effects for the brain. How does the party asserting that, know that?

_virtu 5y ago

As someone who has thought that I've had aphantasia for the past six or seven years (thank you hn for teaching me about aphantasia), I'm going to give this a shot.

neRok 5y ago
Yer I think I have aphantasia too. I don't see images, but I feel like I can describe things which forms a picture that I can't see but I know. Anyway, at the very start of my 10min of ganzflicker I think I could see some very faint "wireframe" lines of no shapes in particular (just like * patterns), but these went away after a minute or so, and then it was just flashing colours, but the colours kept changing, and they were mostly reds, pinks, blues, yellows. Rarely green.
pigbearpig 5y ago
What did you call it seven years ago before the term aphantasia was coined?
- bluehex 5y ago
  I'm in the same camp, thinking I probably have aphantasia. Before I read about it I didn't call it anything because I had no concept that there was anything lacking in my experience. I thought it was just how everyone's mind worked. I had no idea that people could actually see things that they visualized. I had always thought that the term "visualize" was just an exaggerated metaphor for imagining. For example I can imagine a little island in a field of blue ocean with a palm tree growing out of it just fine, I can conceptually place the objects around in this imaginary scene and have a sense for where the things are in relation to one another and what shapes and colors they are, but I can't for the life of me "see" a single thing no matter how much I focus on it. It might sound contradictory but I don't know how else to describe it. I have only experienced something that sounds like how normal folks see in their minds eye once, on the cusp of falling asleep, hypnagogic hallucinations began but I was somewhat in control of what I was seeing, I could change the image at will to whatever I imagined. It lasted but a couple of minutes before I fell asleep. Someone that has a normal mind's eye - and has also experienced the pre-sleep hallucinations - would have to tell me if my experience was similar to a normal imagination though. It could be that my hypnagogic episode was far more vivid than a typical person's visual imagination during normal waking hours though, too, who knows? I did feel very jealous though after that episode thinking that most people probably have such an ability to visualize like that while awake.

WillDaSilva 5y ago

This is extremely cool. Within about 10 seconds in a lit room without white noise playing I began getting fairly vivid visuals. I'll be sure to come back to this to get the full experience later, and complete the questionnaire. For reference I tend to get interesting/vivid visuals whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, often when I look at a finely patterned/textured surface, and sometimes when I look at basically anything when I've gone >36 hours without sleep. The visuals from this are more intense than those I get from simply closing my eyes though, and more interesting/changing than those from looking at tiled floors or popcorn ceiling.

nivethan 5y ago
Have you done lsd/shrooms before? This almost sounds like you can trigger the after effects yourself.
- WillDaSilva 5y ago
  These visuals I regularly experience are similar to those experienced on shroom, but far less intense/intrusive/encompassing. They're fairly distinct in sensation from visuals experienced through imagining, which are fairly distinct from daydreaming, which are fairly distinct from dreaming. I wish we had a language expressive enough to share these qualitative experiences - my writing does little to express them.
ravenstine 5y ago
What sort of visuals did you see? I had some amazing visuals, but I'm not really sure what I'm to expect if I'm one of those people with vivid mental imagery. I didn't see anything particularly concrete, except what kind of looked like a spiral galaxy at one point. The rest was basically lots of cool fractals and textures. What was most strange was a few shooting stars I saw pass through my vision; they weren't those sorts of "shooting stars" you might get if you get up too fast or if you get all the wind knocked out of you. These were quite vivid shooting stars moving steadily for several seconds until each would vanish.
- 5y ago

ravenstine 5y ago

Wow. I didn't see anything I would deem a full hallucination, but the visuals were pretty amazing. Lots of fractals, triangles, geometry, some shootings stars, what looked like a spiral galaxy for about 10 seconds, then a moment of staring into an abyss, X shapes in my peripheral vision, etc. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't see a tiger jump out from my screen or the Enterprise D passing by. My mental imagery is usually pretty vivid, but it's also impossible for me to really judge that. I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I'll try this periodically and see if I get anything different. EDIT: I am curious how this would be affected by music as opposed to white noise.

shannifin 5y ago

Interesting self-experiment, but results are self-reported (and failure of the experiment to elicit imagery does not necessarily imply anything about vividness). I'm not sure it really reveals any objective metric regarding vividness of mental imagery.

juliangamble 5y ago
Most psychology research is based on self reporting. It is the standard in that field.
- shannifin 5y ago
  Not criticizing self-reporting in general, just that it can't by its nature do what the title claims.

Causality1 5y ago

determining whether a face is friendly or annoyed is a high-level cognitive process. I wouldn't be too sure about that. The human brain has an enormous amount of dedicated circuitry for recognizing and interpreting human faces. When something goes wrong in that circuitry we can't just "do it in software" and we call it face-blindness.

thom 5y ago

Nice try, basilisk-generating AGI, almost had me.

jonaustin 5y ago

There is an entire industry around this effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://mindplace.com/products/kasina-ganzframes https://mindplace.com/products/kasina-ganzframes Basically Sound and Light "Mind Machines" have been utilizing this effevt for decades.

axguscbklp 5y ago

Interesting. I do not have aphantasia. Actually it is easy for me to visually imagine. However, trying out this Ganzfield flicker for more than 5 minutes did nothing for me. Maybe I will try again later in a darker room and for a longer duration.

VortexDream 5y ago
You might want to try it late at night when you're particularly tired.

buss 5y ago

I am almost completely aphantasic and saw zero visuals

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dorkwood 5y ago

I watched this for ten minutes and didn't see anything (apart from a flashing red screen). I'm supposed to be the artistic one in the family, so I can't help but feel slightly disdapointed. I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying (the "images" in my mind's eye are very fleeting, lacking in detail, and can't be focused on -- like they're on the extremes of my periphery) but maybe I really was born with a disadvantage.

noman-land 5y ago
My mental images are usually very similar to how you described yours. I'm also "creative". I've casually self-diagnosed myself as "not being able to see images in my head". However there have been times where I've had picture perfect clarity of something in 3d, including color, but it only lasts for moments and I've never been able to conjure it on purpose.
- possibleworlds 5y ago
  I was friends (more aquaintances now since I haven't seen him for quite a few years) with an incredibly talented artist / illustrator. I worked with him for a period and would place him more than anyone else I have ever met in the genius spectrum based on a number of factors. One of them is that I know that he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind. I have never been able to do anything close to this, and similarly have self-diagnosed as much weaker in this "power". I mean I can visualize things in my mind but it is fuzzy and fleeting, like focusing on any detail collapses the field of view. This episode of radiolab about a musician who can maintain a 3d mental image of four orchestras playing at once always stuck with me, and seems relevant to this topic: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/301427-head-full-symphonies https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/30142...
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind. FWIW this is sort of a thing that the process of becoming an artist trains you to do. I have been a professional artist for a couple decades and it is much easier for me to do this sort of thing than it was when I was a kid. There's a lot of steps involved in projecting a mental 3d model onto a 2d plane that I can just do in my head now because I've done them so damn many times. There's definitely an innate level of doing this as well, some people start with a big boost, various psychoactive chemicals can help (I have done so much work while slightly stoned for the performance boost it gives my visual cortex), and then there is that story about one 1940s animator at Warner Bros. who got in a car accident that involved a degree of head injury, and could suddenly just "trace" stuff directly off of his mental images onto paper once he recovered.

mcswell 5y ago

I watched it, twice, for about ten seconds. I found it quite uncomfortable to watch.

barrkel 5y ago

I saw a few repetitive patterns: something resembling the overlapping petals of a pine cone, and a bunch of cells vaguely similar to a Voronoi diagram. They didn't last long, were faint and transient. I get much more vivid visuals with my eyes closed.

postalrat 5y ago

Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it? It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep. I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a very good job.

TheSpiciestDev 5y ago
Over the more recent years, whenever I'd get sick and experience fever dreams, JavaScript paradigms would be what I'd get lost in i.e. asynchronous calls, callbacks, single-threaded nature, etc. This comes from someone who enjoys the language, too. Weird stuff...
miloignis 5y ago
I think I have experienced something similar, where I have to find the right configuration for some pattern, sometimes grounded in like how my sheets and blanket wrap around my body in order to create or fix some dream machine. It's not a fully formed concept, but I'm trying to fix it and arrange the pattern in my mostly-sleeping state - it's always impossible and I have to recognize what I'm doing, fully wake myself up, and then try to go back to sleep to get out of it.
- recursive 5y ago
  Yes. I get this. It's kind of a problem some time. My brain gets trapped in a loop of trying to solve some puzzle or system of constraints, but none of it is based on anything. I couldn't even describe it. It's more like patterns of faux-logical systems. When I recognize it happening, I can usually snap out of it.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    Agreed, doing matrix multiplication of Star and Pyramid makes no sense. Tho usually I do not wake up enough to stop.

merpnderp 5y ago

That was seriously uncool and no fun. I almost immediately saw crosshatching bars and shapes maybe like fractals, and then the center of the screen seemed to form a white sphere and a f'ing nightmare came crawling out of it filling me with dread, and then I closed the page. Took about a minute. Did it a second time maybe 30 minutes later and it quickly resolved into spinning wind turbines blades, dozens of them, circling the middle of the screen, in a random circle-ish flow that moved like waves. After a few minute of that, it seemed like I was falling through a warp tunnel with stars connected by glowing arms flashing by, then hands and arms started to reach up from the bottom of the screen and I turned it off. I just let my eyes relax and didn't really focus on the screen, but when I did focus, that's usually when the unpleasant images appeared.

dbtc 5y ago
I saw spinning shapes too: spirals, figure eights, spheres of rainbow pointillist light. Or just swirling patterns like schools of fish. They all moved slowly. When I tried to focus they just disappeared. For me it was relaxing. I watched for about 5 minutes.
- Flenser 5y ago
  Sounds like what I see when I press my fingers (gently) onto my closed eyelids. I think it's the different layers of the visual cortex trying to find edges/patterns in something that doesn't have any.
npteljes 5y ago
I had bouts with nightmares and such and a technique I found is that when the horrors begin to appear, I consciously try to be unaffected by them. To try to at least delay what you just described, that feeling of dread taking over you. While you can't really have control over the outside world and the horrors within it, you can at least have control over your reactions to it. And reactions to stimuli like this red flashing thing, and many other situations, are really about just the reaction of the mind, filling in the blanks, trying to make sense. The more you can relax that effort, the less horrific it will become. Similar to relaxing a muscle cramp. I'm not saying that I'm very good at this all, but going this way has helped me a lot already.

booleandilemma 5y ago

Just don't stare into any bitmaps...

endisneigh 5y ago

Watching the flicker thing for a few moments made me think: is it possible that some sort of sensory stimuli could paralyze you? It would be fascinating if some crazy combination of stimuli could have sort of a “reset human” sort of effect. Given that we’re revolved organisms and not machines it’s hard to imagine any evolutionary purpose, but it’s fun to think about.

no_protocol 5y ago
Read Snow Crash
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Let me leave this here for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

nasalgoat 5y ago

Absolutely nothing for me, but after reading up on Aphantasia and the link it has to a lack of autobiographical memory, it makes sense. I have a condition called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html) which means I can barely remember anything from my life and what little I do remember is vague and fuzzy. Intereesting correlation.

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buss 5y ago
I know I'm aphantasic, but never heard of SDAM. Describes me so well! I remember nearly nothing of my life.

armchairhacker 5y ago

The Ganzflicker is very cool. I only did it for 2 minutes, and it wasn't strong or overpowering. But I saw a) a blurry checkerboard, and b) ripples coming out of the 4 corners of the screen. It turns out, 4 ripples coming out of the screen creates a blurry checkerboard! See https://www.falstad.com/ripple/ https://www.falstad.com/ripple/, set to "Example: Four Sources". That was exactly what I saw, but sped up, in red instead of green, and the ripples came out of the corners instead of east/north/west/south.

Animats 5y ago

Random flickering tiny green dots, a bit of fuzzy red rippling, and a desire to clean the screen, but nothing exciting.

holografix 5y ago

Honest questions: Do people with Aphantasia dream vivid dreams with images? How about masturbation without visual input? Are you not capable of visually imagining something arousing, like a person you find very attractive etc? I don’t _think_ I suffer from it but would call the images in my head very clear or detailed or very accurate.

space_fountain 5y ago
I think these things are a spectrum and I wouldn’t really say I experience it either, but my dreams have only rarely really felt visual, much more like a story or a narrative, which is also how my memories normally feel
buss 5y ago
I'm nearly completely aphantasic. I can get very brief flashes of images but can't make them happen nor hold them in my mind. I almost never dream. When I do dream it's fairly lifelike. I can't visualize anything arousing. When I first learned (at 26!) that my friends can visualize any fantasy at will I was floored. I have zero internal imagery for anything sexual. Have no fantasies. I can't picture anyone's face. Bodies are only experienced in person. If I can't see it with my eyes, it doesn't exist.
Mehdi2277 5y ago
I'm completely aphantasiac across all senses. I can't mentally visualize, mentally have song stuck in my head, imagine taste/touch/etc. I still dream frequently. Dreaming and lack of awake mental visualization are separate. There are people who lack both but you can dream visually frequently while being completely unable to have any visual imagination awake.
NamTaf 5y ago
I never remember my dreams, and I suspect I'm aphantasic. As far as I'm concerned, 99.something% of my sleep follows the pattern of fall asleep -> void outside of time -> wake up. There are extremely rare fleeting moments where I might wake up and remember some details about a dream for a few seconds, but then I lose it. Those would be counted on one hand per year, easily.

haxorito 5y ago

Saw or herd nothing. Haven’t lose presence. Only difference is now my eyes are tired, after looking at screen for 10 minutes without blinking.

pigbearpig 5y ago

Wow, so many people don't see anything, almost as if aphantasia isn't a real thing and it's just normal.

sadness3 5y ago
I see a tonne in this flashing thing, and the way I think is like a movie screen. I can't comprehend how thinking without vivid imagery is even possible. I really think there's variety in how brains are wired and very different experiences of thinking out there.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

I also cannot recollect visual things in mind eye. It is strange to explain but I am good with inventing things and imagining complex things but I cannot see anything in mind eye. It is not visual it is more as abstract "shape", shape is not good word as it is visual, in my case try to imagine shape more as intuition or feeling. I do not know how to explain. I was kind of annoyed by this finding that I started trying different ways to imagine objects. Few months ago interesting thing happen, I woke up really early and stayed up after 2am, when I got in bad, I was in state that I passed state of sleepy, so my mind was fully conscious, (state you can choose do you want to get up or not at any time), and then stream of images appeared from single point, that point grew and like accessing some optic cable hole, and it was vivid very vivid like reality. It lasted just a few 10 - 30 sec before I was knocked of and started sleeping. It look like my left side of brain (logic) was so tired that handed over everything to right side (pictures colors) additionally leaving spectator (chartering voice) awake for little while. I am no medical person just interpreting subjective experience so do not take any of this as fact. I just remember that at at that point that I had feeling that Logical side of brain imposed some kind of dictatorship on imaginative side of brain, because of job or past experiences. That time logical brain was too tired after more than 20hrs of coding and thinking so it seems went away for a sleep fraction of time earlier than the imaginative side. :)

nefitty 5y ago
I recently learned a trick to fall asleep faster. The theory is that sometimes we have trouble falling asleep because we’re stuck in that “logical mind” mode, ie verbalizing thoughts in our head, thinking about concepts, etc. The trick is to pick a word, something like “bed”, “sleepy”, etc. You then take each letter and try to think of as many things that start with that letter. The catch is that you should try visualizing the object as clearly as possible. You move on to the next letter once you run out of things for the current letter. This is supposed to move your mind from the verbal, anxiety-ridden, future-minded mode to the pre-verbal, visual mode. That then slowly fades into hypnagogic imagery, which then leads to sleep and dreams.
- dorkwood 5y ago

d13 5y ago

I’ve never heard of Ganzflicker before, but it’s essentially a Dream Machine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Fwirt 5y ago

Does anybody else experience a similar phenomenon but with their auditory system? Whenever I'm falling asleep in a room with white noise (usually a fan) I swear I hear people talking, songs, animal noises... But it's just the fan.

sgt 5y ago
You can hear that? Guys, we better up his dose.
andyjohnson0 5y ago
This sometimes happens to me: voices and music.
MaxDPS 5y ago
I’ve experienced that. Sometimes I hear voices but I can’t make out the words. Sometimes it sounds more like birds chirping. I haven’t had that in a while though but when I do, it would happen just as I was dozing off to sleep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
hexciple 5y ago
Yes. Every time I run a vacuum, I can hear voices talking, shouting, screaming. It's very unpleasant. Fortunately it doesn't happen with lower-volume noises like fans.
npteljes 5y ago
Flowing water does that to me.
vborovikov 5y ago
Yep, when I'm really sleepy and is about to fall asleep I hear cacophony, familiar people's voices saying single words or short phrases. I even can hear my own voice saying something short. It's very consistent and I use it as a sign that it's time to sleep.
sadness3 5y ago
Check out Exploding Head Syndrome! I have it. I have only experienced it as a kind of electrical "boom", but the bursts of sound some of you describe sound related, especially since they happen while you are drifting off to sleep.

beardyw 5y ago

I am not sure about this. If you stare at anything for long enough you get peculiar effects in your vision (try it). That said, in the last year or so I have begun to enjoy music from the extractor fan in our kitchen. Each time it is on I hear a random genre of music - plain chant, brass band, jazz, etc. I don't experience it in any other context (or any other hallucinations before you ask). Anyone else get something like this?

thom 5y ago
I do get auditory hallucinations in other contexts (usually while sleepy) but yeah, anytime there’s some sort of drone like a microwave this happens to me. I have always felt terrible that I never really learned an instrument because it’s nice having a free source of compositions to draw upon!
edem 5y ago
I once had a friend who said that his brother could dance to any "music". This included the sound of oil being heated in a pan. I also have some flashbacks sometimes, when I hear familiar sounds and I sometimes see things in a fractal structure (this plant is especially trippy: https://naturgarden.hu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-tuja-gondoz%C3%A1sa-848x480.jpg https://naturgarden.hu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-tuja-gon... ). Now that I mentioned the extractor fan...have you listened to Sleep Research Facility's music? He made music out of the sound of broken fans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SleepResearch_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SleepResearch_Facility
- beardyw 5y ago
  Thanks they are great, I will be ... I am using those at my desk. Reminds me that the 24 hour working factory behind our house when I was very small stopped their night shift. I am told I didn't sleep through the night for a fortnight. Maybe there is a connection.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  This kind of thing was referenced, comedically in the UK TV series Spaced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSndZPynQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSndZPynQk

mikewarot 5y ago

I read Snow Crash, I see what you're trying to do. ;-)

kepair 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect The article starts with self-reported effects, already conditioning you to expect an almost psychedelic experience with this test. Didn't like that.

torginus 5y ago
This. I haven't read the guide carefully and I had no idea I was supposed to experience auditory hallucinations, and I didn't hear any. I wonder if the visual hallucinations (which I did see) were caused by my prior expectations.

throwawaynumber 5y ago

This seems like nonsense to me. I can visualise things with great detail in my minds eye, and yet I saw nothing but an annoying flashing screen with this.

SCLeo 5y ago

For some reason, staring at a blinking screen in a dark room really creeps me out. I got goose bumps all over my body. I had to give up after a minute or so.

Arcorann 5y ago

The article is reposted from https://theconversation.com/pseudo-hallucinations-why-some-people-see-more-vivid-mental-images-than-others-test-yourself-here-163025; https://theconversation.com/pseudo-hallucinations-why-some-p... requesting the link and title be adjusted. (I'm not sure if the link should be repointed to the original research study or not.) I'm not able to look at the Ganzflicker at the moment but I did skim the research study in question (given that the focus on the article is on the conjectured mechanisms and not the results themselves) and the results found there are somewhat intriguing.

no_time 5y ago

The imagery this produces is very similar to the one I see when I close my eyes and focus on the initially brown/red patterns that later become complex shapes and sometimes creatures. If you don't "see" anything with your eyes closed then this probably won't work for you. Also I should add that what I described above feels distinct from focusing on the inner eye.

kgwxd 5y ago

This reminded me of something I used to do when I was a kid, sit in the sun at the edge of a shadow moving in the wind, like a tree, with my eyes closed specifically to get this flashing red and black pattern and enjoy the random images. I can't believe I forgot about it.

sadness3 5y ago

The technical description of this phenomena is a bit conflicted. It seems to say the differing experiences are probably a result of different people having different visual refresh rates, and then somehow makes a logical jump to the test telling us about how visual spacial people are as thinkers. It seems to me that this would tell us a lot more about how our visual cortex interprets input. This is an experience of actual vision, not visualization.

xaedes 5y ago

To put things in perspective: The actual survey result says that most experience simple shapes (60%). 39% saw colors other than red and black. 24% report very vivid colorful and complex images. 25% didn't see anything (answer "No"). (doesn't add up to 100% because multiple options could be selected) A quick internet search reveals 1-3% of people have aphantasia. I wouldn't rely too much on the results of this test w.r.t. aphantasia.