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Aphantasia: How it feels to be blind in your mind By Blake Ross https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A2862324277332876%7D&path=%2Fnotes%

Aphantasia: How it feels to be blind in your mind By Blake Ross https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A2862324277332876%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F&refsrc=deprecated&_rdr https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A... Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!

bemmu 5y ago
I still can’t quite believe there are people who can see clear images in their minds. Maybe it’s more a matter of how you report your experience? I’m very conscious of how poor my mental images are, but maybe with a little less introspection I would also say I have great mental imagery.
- kilbuz 5y ago
  Yes, this. I honestly don't know if I see things vividly or not well at all because there is no baseline for comparison, such as a traditional vision and color test.
- rolltopdesk 5y ago
  Yeah, I have asked people “ can you visualize Obama’s face on this piece of paper?” They say “oh, yes-perfectly! -it’s like I’m looking at a photograph” “Could you trace it and come away with a drawing that would compare well with a traced photo?” They can’t, and I think they are over-reporting the fidelity of their visualizations.
  - FinanceAnon 5y ago
    I agree that some people might under/over-estimate their abilities. However, I am not sure if drawing is the right way to test it. I can visualise a straight line or a perfect circle, but I wouldn't be able to draw them perfectly.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Well, the image moves when you try to trace it, because your eyes are jumping around. Then, when you've got a wrong line, your brain tries to fit the imagined image to the wrong line by skewing it, which it does in several different ways once you've got enough wrong lines, so the wrong lines multiply. A skilled artist can work around this, by drawing the right lines (and erasing / ignoring the wrong lines).
  - piyh 5y ago
    I can't play the piano, but I can mentally play back Flight of the Bumblebee in my head. The skill to produce and the skill to recall are different.
    - beeboop 5y ago
      You could (or at least I could with little musical training) fumble around finding the right notes, and with enough time, eventually transcribe the song to sheet music though. mostly accurately. just because you have no skill in shading and drawing lines doesnt mean that you shouldn't be able to replicate the correct proportions and details in the features of someones face.
  - Xplune13 5y ago
    Visualization is a bit confusing in the sense that I can perfectly "see" someone's image in my mind or on the piece of paper, but I cannot draw it that well. It is like a "floating image"? that gives me the person's face in my head, but I if I sit down and try to describe it with minor details or draw it, I cannot.
  - confidantlake 5y ago
    I couldn't do that if my eyes were open and Obama was in the room.
- jerf 5y ago
  I do think variances in reporting are some of it. I have some visualization skills and wouldn't claim to be "aphantasic", but on the flip side, there is an enormous dividing line between real-world images and these imagined images. While awake I would never confuse the two. I also suspect a lot of people are massively overreporting the quality of their images. It's very easy to imagine something and think you understand it, until asked to produce something based on it. This isn't just limited to mental images, it's the source of the "why don't you 'just'..." questions, and comes up all the time in building, engineering, artistic endeavors, etc. Your brain is easily convinced it has a thought with more detail than it actually has. I really only trust people who have taken a lot of time to train the relevant system if they claim they have these things. For instance, I really can design some somewhat non-trivial programs in my head... but I've been doing this for ~25 years, and only recently would I say I'm getting to the point where these designs are sometimes good enough that they're not taking serious body blows betwixt conceptualization and realization.
- caddemon 5y ago
  What's more convincing to me than self report of image quality is self report of imagery use. Whether it should be described as aphantasia I don't know, but I never think in a visuospatial way unless I consciously stop and try because the problem really requires it (and even then I feel I'm pretty bad). On the other hand I have friends that describe their ideas in such a visual way almost instantly, and report having imagery pop into their heads naturally. To me it seems really obvious that relative to my internal monologue, my imagery is much weaker and quantifiably less frequent. So I think at least people that report having imagery much stronger than internal monologue likely have something different going on for real, not just with reporting.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's just in how people report it. I was always quite good at geometry puzzles because I could picture the shapes moving in my head. Does that mean I can see images in my mind or not? It's nothing like seeing with my eyes, but I can definitely "see" it in my mind.
- confidantlake 5y ago
  I suspect that people that play chess without looking at a board must have a somewhat clear picture of the pieces in their mind.
FinanceAnon 5y ago
That's very interesting and the term "aphantasia" only got coined in 2015, so it looks like a fresh area of research. Do you think that there are some advantages to being this way? For example, being able to live more "in the moment"?
- Henk0 5y ago
  I'm aphantasic, and I'd say one advantage is that I'm not bothered by invasive vivid memories or anxiety inducing imagery. Just on a hunch, I think aphantasics are probably less likely to develop PTSD after trauma, as a big component of PTSD appears to be just this kind of pervasive, invasive and hyper-vivid memories. I sometimes feel that I'm missing out on something, but from experiences on psychedelics, which give me closed-eye visuals of geometric shapes and colors which don't go away until the effects pass, I think I prefer the still black void and relative mental silence (apart from the soundless inner monologue) of aphantasia to a 'richer' inner world that I'm not able to shut off. Would be happy to get other aphantasics' (as well as hyperphantasics at the other end of the spectrum) perspective on this
  - caddemon 5y ago
    I'm curious what you mean by "soundless inner monologue"? I don't really experience much imagery at all but my inner monologue feels very close to how talking to myself aloud feels, so I wouldn't describe it as soundless. The verbal vividness of my internal monologue is actually how I imagined people with good imagery skills "see". On the note of advantages, I know I have something weird going on with the back right of my brain specifically (focal slowing on EEG among other things), which I am pretty certain connects to my favoring of verbal over visual thinking. So I guess it depends on the cause of a case of aphantasia, but to me it feels a little like how blind people end up with heightened hearing. I think I've really developed strong verbal skills because of it, and there are definitely advantages to having strong verbal skills. I recall a professor showing us a study once where students performed better on an exam when they were allowed/encouraged to talk out loud to themselves while they were taking it. He was encouraging us to talk through stuff with ourselves, but at first I found the result weird because I assumed everybody was always talking to themselves in their head. That was the first time it really dawned on me there may be large individual differences in how we experience thoughts.
beltsazar 5y ago
What's even crazier is that not everyone has an internal monologue: https://www.insidemymind.me/blog/brain-stuff/today-i-learned-that-not-everyone-has-an-internal-monologue-and-it-has-ruined-my-day/ https://www.insidemymind.me/blog/brain-stuff/today-i-learned... If aphantasia is "internally blind", this one is "internally mute and deaf". I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.
- mgeduld 5y ago
  I have no internal monologue. No voice in my head and also no words. I can't even imagine what my voice sounds like (or my wife's voice) unless I hear it. And I also have aphantasia. It's totally silent and totally dark in my head. (And when I'm typing this, I know the ideas I want to communicate, but I have no idea what words I'll use until I see them on the screen.) As far as I can tell, I think in abstract ideas.
- zachruss92 5y ago
  This blew my mind when I first discovered this.
- geocar 5y ago
  I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading. I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way. I can also recognise some specific images I have seen previously, but I definitely do not see them and cannot conjure up any imagery of any kind. You might be amused to know that until I joined that study I had no idea that you were thinking any differently than I was, and since learning you-all are freaks, I have wondered if the reason you guys get distracted so easily is that you're watching a movie out of the corner of your eye, or maybe the reason you think code is unreadable is that you need to sound out your program in order to read it.
  - meowface 5y ago
mehphp 5y ago
I wonder if those with aphantasia tend to hate reading novels. For me, once I get into a book I basically "see" it playing out in my head and I won't even notice that I'm reading words. I could totally understand how it would be bland if you were just reading a description and nothing was coming to you.
- teknopaul 5y ago
  I guess I have this thing, I had never heard of it before but I have it based on Wikipedia's description, I also have very few memories of my life, which can be disturbing, maybe this is why. For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into. e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book) Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring. How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything? On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
  - mehphp 5y ago
    > On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex Wow, really? I'd love to hear more about how that works.
  - A_Venom_Roll 5y ago
    Let's say somebody shows you a picture of a house for a couple of minutes and then takes it away, is there no way for you to recollect and reproduce anything that was on that picture (visually)?
    - beeboop 5y ago
      not the OP but similar to him. I can fleetingly see details individually in my mind, i struggle to really see the whole house. i can see (fleetingly) in my mind how the shutters are built, their material, what color they are, how they fold over the window. and so on for each feature of the house. reading fiction and fantasy books are also sort of boring for me because i have no mental image of the characters or their settings or faces or anything like that. like if it's describing a blacksmith's forge, sure i know that has a forge and anvil and tools and quenching bucket. but there's not really a cohesive setting in my head of what it looks like for the story. i also cant really mentally image the faces of people i know. i can see their features but their face in my mind doesn't really look human. i can't imagine someone's whole body including their face. i have no issue recognizing faces and putting them to names in person though. i have a notoriously bad memory. i still made good grades in school and can study and retain knowledge and skills. but i forget the vast majority of conversations i've had with people after a couple weeks, and my fiance is constantly telling me things i said where i have no memory of saying it.

bemmu 5y ago

I still can’t quite believe there are people who can see clear images in their minds. Maybe it’s more a matter of how you report your experience? I’m very conscious of how poor my mental images are, but maybe with a little less introspection I would also say I have great mental imagery.

kilbuz 5y ago
Yes, this. I honestly don't know if I see things vividly or not well at all because there is no baseline for comparison, such as a traditional vision and color test.
rolltopdesk 5y ago
Yeah, I have asked people “ can you visualize Obama’s face on this piece of paper?” They say “oh, yes-perfectly! -it’s like I’m looking at a photograph” “Could you trace it and come away with a drawing that would compare well with a traced photo?” They can’t, and I think they are over-reporting the fidelity of their visualizations.
- FinanceAnon 5y ago
  I agree that some people might under/over-estimate their abilities. However, I am not sure if drawing is the right way to test it. I can visualise a straight line or a perfect circle, but I wouldn't be able to draw them perfectly.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Well, the image moves when you try to trace it, because your eyes are jumping around. Then, when you've got a wrong line, your brain tries to fit the imagined image to the wrong line by skewing it, which it does in several different ways once you've got enough wrong lines, so the wrong lines multiply. A skilled artist can work around this, by drawing the right lines (and erasing / ignoring the wrong lines).
- piyh 5y ago
  I can't play the piano, but I can mentally play back Flight of the Bumblebee in my head. The skill to produce and the skill to recall are different.
  - beeboop 5y ago
    You could (or at least I could with little musical training) fumble around finding the right notes, and with enough time, eventually transcribe the song to sheet music though. mostly accurately. just because you have no skill in shading and drawing lines doesnt mean that you shouldn't be able to replicate the correct proportions and details in the features of someones face.
- Xplune13 5y ago
  Visualization is a bit confusing in the sense that I can perfectly "see" someone's image in my mind or on the piece of paper, but I cannot draw it that well. It is like a "floating image"? that gives me the person's face in my head, but I if I sit down and try to describe it with minor details or draw it, I cannot.
- confidantlake 5y ago
  I couldn't do that if my eyes were open and Obama was in the room.
jerf 5y ago
I do think variances in reporting are some of it. I have some visualization skills and wouldn't claim to be "aphantasic", but on the flip side, there is an enormous dividing line between real-world images and these imagined images. While awake I would never confuse the two. I also suspect a lot of people are massively overreporting the quality of their images. It's very easy to imagine something and think you understand it, until asked to produce something based on it. This isn't just limited to mental images, it's the source of the "why don't you 'just'..." questions, and comes up all the time in building, engineering, artistic endeavors, etc. Your brain is easily convinced it has a thought with more detail than it actually has. I really only trust people who have taken a lot of time to train the relevant system if they claim they have these things. For instance, I really can design some somewhat non-trivial programs in my head... but I've been doing this for ~25 years, and only recently would I say I'm getting to the point where these designs are sometimes good enough that they're not taking serious body blows betwixt conceptualization and realization.
caddemon 5y ago
What's more convincing to me than self report of image quality is self report of imagery use. Whether it should be described as aphantasia I don't know, but I never think in a visuospatial way unless I consciously stop and try because the problem really requires it (and even then I feel I'm pretty bad). On the other hand I have friends that describe their ideas in such a visual way almost instantly, and report having imagery pop into their heads naturally. To me it seems really obvious that relative to my internal monologue, my imagery is much weaker and quantifiably less frequent. So I think at least people that report having imagery much stronger than internal monologue likely have something different going on for real, not just with reporting.
globular-toast 5y ago
I'm pretty sure it's just in how people report it. I was always quite good at geometry puzzles because I could picture the shapes moving in my head. Does that mean I can see images in my mind or not? It's nothing like seeing with my eyes, but I can definitely "see" it in my mind.
confidantlake 5y ago
I suspect that people that play chess without looking at a board must have a somewhat clear picture of the pieces in their mind.

FinanceAnon 5y ago

That's very interesting and the term "aphantasia" only got coined in 2015, so it looks like a fresh area of research. Do you think that there are some advantages to being this way? For example, being able to live more "in the moment"?

Henk0 5y ago
I'm aphantasic, and I'd say one advantage is that I'm not bothered by invasive vivid memories or anxiety inducing imagery. Just on a hunch, I think aphantasics are probably less likely to develop PTSD after trauma, as a big component of PTSD appears to be just this kind of pervasive, invasive and hyper-vivid memories. I sometimes feel that I'm missing out on something, but from experiences on psychedelics, which give me closed-eye visuals of geometric shapes and colors which don't go away until the effects pass, I think I prefer the still black void and relative mental silence (apart from the soundless inner monologue) of aphantasia to a 'richer' inner world that I'm not able to shut off. Would be happy to get other aphantasics' (as well as hyperphantasics at the other end of the spectrum) perspective on this
- caddemon 5y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by "soundless inner monologue"? I don't really experience much imagery at all but my inner monologue feels very close to how talking to myself aloud feels, so I wouldn't describe it as soundless. The verbal vividness of my internal monologue is actually how I imagined people with good imagery skills "see". On the note of advantages, I know I have something weird going on with the back right of my brain specifically (focal slowing on EEG among other things), which I am pretty certain connects to my favoring of verbal over visual thinking. So I guess it depends on the cause of a case of aphantasia, but to me it feels a little like how blind people end up with heightened hearing. I think I've really developed strong verbal skills because of it, and there are definitely advantages to having strong verbal skills. I recall a professor showing us a study once where students performed better on an exam when they were allowed/encouraged to talk out loud to themselves while they were taking it. He was encouraging us to talk through stuff with ourselves, but at first I found the result weird because I assumed everybody was always talking to themselves in their head. That was the first time it really dawned on me there may be large individual differences in how we experience thoughts.

beltsazar 5y ago

What's even crazier is that not everyone has an internal monologue: https://www.insidemymind.me/blog/brain-stuff/today-i-learned-that-not-everyone-has-an-internal-monologue-and-it-has-ruined-my-day/ https://www.insidemymind.me/blog/brain-stuff/today-i-learned... If aphantasia is "internally blind", this one is "internally mute and deaf". I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.

mgeduld 5y ago
I have no internal monologue. No voice in my head and also no words. I can't even imagine what my voice sounds like (or my wife's voice) unless I hear it. And I also have aphantasia. It's totally silent and totally dark in my head. (And when I'm typing this, I know the ideas I want to communicate, but I have no idea what words I'll use until I see them on the screen.) As far as I can tell, I think in abstract ideas.
zachruss92 5y ago
This blew my mind when I first discovered this.
geocar 5y ago
I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading. I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way. I can also recognise some specific images I have seen previously, but I definitely do not see them and cannot conjure up any imagery of any kind. You might be amused to know that until I joined that study I had no idea that you were thinking any differently than I was, and since learning you-all are freaks, I have wondered if the reason you guys get distracted so easily is that you're watching a movie out of the corner of your eye, or maybe the reason you think code is unreadable is that you need to sound out your program in order to read it.
- meowface 5y ago

mehphp 5y ago

I wonder if those with aphantasia tend to hate reading novels. For me, once I get into a book I basically "see" it playing out in my head and I won't even notice that I'm reading words. I could totally understand how it would be bland if you were just reading a description and nothing was coming to you.

teknopaul 5y ago
I guess I have this thing, I had never heard of it before but I have it based on Wikipedia's description, I also have very few memories of my life, which can be disturbing, maybe this is why. For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into. e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book) Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring. How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything? On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
- mehphp 5y ago
  > On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex Wow, really? I'd love to hear more about how that works.
- A_Venom_Roll 5y ago
  Let's say somebody shows you a picture of a house for a couple of minutes and then takes it away, is there no way for you to recollect and reproduce anything that was on that picture (visually)?
  - beeboop 5y ago
    not the OP but similar to him. I can fleetingly see details individually in my mind, i struggle to really see the whole house. i can see (fleetingly) in my mind how the shutters are built, their material, what color they are, how they fold over the window. and so on for each feature of the house. reading fiction and fantasy books are also sort of boring for me because i have no mental image of the characters or their settings or faces or anything like that. like if it's describing a blacksmith's forge, sure i know that has a forge and anvil and tools and quenching bucket. but there's not really a cohesive setting in my head of what it looks like for the story. i also cant really mentally image the faces of people i know. i can see their features but their face in my mind doesn't really look human. i can't imagine someone's whole body including their face. i have no issue recognizing faces and putting them to names in person though. i have a notoriously bad memory. i still made good grades in school and can study and retain knowledge and skills. but i forget the vast majority of conversations i've had with people after a couple weeks, and my fiance is constantly telling me things i said where i have no memory of saying it.