18 ms·

Aphantasia

105 points by misthop 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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misthop 5y ago
Read the article on Reality Shifting (daydreaming) and wanted to share that for some of us it is impossible
- carreau 5y ago
  Would suggest https://aphantasia.com/ https://aphantasia.com/ and their twitter as well. As Someone with aphantasia I was still amazed as how different the level of aphantasia can vary between people.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    I tried taking their little quiz and couldn't get past the first page. It asks me to imagine somebody I know, then asks which details I can observe. But those details are unobserved until the quiz asks me about them. The color of their clothing? I wasn't thinking about any specific clothing at all, but when prompted to I'm able to imagine that person in many different outfits. Vivid details of those clothes? Sure, I can imagine details, but the details aren't necessarily there in the "image" until I'm prompted to invent them. The possible answers to the question just seem... invalid. The details are neither dim nor vivid; the details are undetermined and flexible. Maybe the quiz should first ask me to imagine that person in a specific circumstance, where those details are predetermined by my memory of that circumstance? Even then I still don't understand what the quiz really means by half these answers. What does it mean for an image to be "lively"? That it's moving around? Am I meant to be imagining a still image or a moving image? Depending on how I interpret these questions and answers, I could get completely different outcomes from this quiz.
    - carreau 5y ago
      I think that part of what I discovered in the multiple degrees/kind of aphantasia. And like you most of those questions dot make sens. For many aphantasic people they do. And a lot of question I get is "how do you remember color if you don't see them in your head". One of the analogies I have is that my memory is a bit like a hash/bloom filter. I can't really get the original value, but I can tell you wether it's the same or not. I think the other part where aphantasic differ is WRT math. Others in this thread said that can't do math in their head as they can't see the number/equations. I have no issues with it but I don't rely at all on the number symbols in my head (or on paper) to do arithmetic. I wouldn't be surprised if aphantasia get more subcategories in the following decades.
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ALittleLight 5y ago
I was once watching an episode of House with my college roommate and the doctors had a machine that let them see a visual image of what the patient was seeing in their head. I laughed to roommate and observed that it was a stupid machine because, of course, people don't really "see" things in their head. In the ensuing discussion (and Google searches) I learned about the word aphantasia and about the phenomenon where people do actually (claim to) visualize things in their head. Until that moment I assumed that language was just figurative. I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things. One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I know my brain doesn't create visuals. When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
- godDLL 5y ago
  I was like you until the age of 34 or so. Now I can make full corporeal models that move in time and walk around them. Learn. And people don't visualize things the way I learned. They "see" the same spotty attention-point cloud they move around in in real life, one spot at a time. Plus many didn't learn to draw. Also learn.
  - Jap2-0 5y ago
    How?
    - godDLL 5y ago
      It's not an infectious disease, and in my case wasn't a disorder of some kind. I just never was told that it's a learnable skill. I just told you it is. You might have luck starting with a point, or maybe with a word – try tracing letters and read it backwards. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367198
  - 5y ago
jiggawatts 5y ago
It's almost impossible to compare the level of aphantasia people may or may not have, since all they can share is their opinions of their experiences. It's difficult to do an objective comparison. That aside, I do believe I have some form of aphantasia. I was talking to an artist colleague about his process, and he said that essentially he just visualises something on the paper and more or less just traces the outline of the mental image that he projects. At the time, I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like. Then one day while I was half asleep, I suddenly was able to picture simple geometric shapes and even human faces on the white wall next to my bed. Like black and white holograms, they were seemingly "right there", floating just above the surface of the wall. I reached out and I could trace the outlines with my finger. I haven't been able to reproduce that, and it only happened a few times during the period of a few weeks. Ah well, I guess I'll never be an artist...
- pram 5y ago
  Drawing is a technical skill you develop with directed practice like anything else. It has nothing to do with tracing magical images from your head.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I've heard this, and I did take a class in drawing once. I improved, and could see a path towards becoming good, but it was not "the same". The artist I was referring to didn't draw "iteratively", like most people. He didn't start with a pencil sketch outline that he refined progressively until it looked like the subject. Instead, he'd pick up a pen, put it on the paper, and then he just traced a single continuous outline, moving the pen inwards to fill in details. All in one movement, without picking up the pen. I saw him draw a "dwarf with a hammer" character like this, complete with clothes down to the buttons. A detailed beard and expressive face. Boots with the tops turned down. Wrinkles in the pants. A belt with a buckle. Detail upon detail. But he just... traced it. From the outside in. You couldn't even tell what he was going to draw until a couple of minutes. PS: I've also met a guy who could do the same kind of thing with programming. Most people build up code iteratively, "sketching" the structure using interfaces or function definitions, building them up and refining them one piece at a time. Not this guy. He'd just stare off into space, and then start typing. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, non-stop. I saw him open seven consecutive brackets and the close the last one a page and a half later. He did this for a couple of hours at a fast typing rate, then hit compile. There were 3 typos due to a sticky shift key. He fixed those, and then the code compiled, ran, and successfully completed the (very complex!) problem. These were some of the freakiest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Some people's brains just work differently to mine, and I won't ever be able to "think like them".
qrush 5y ago
My kids and I just listened to an entire podcast episode about Aphantasia from Wow in the World - they really do a great (and fun) job explaining science concepts and recently related papers! https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through-aphantasia-when-the-mind-is-blind https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through...
NateEag 5y ago
Aphantasiac here. Not quite pure aphantasiac, as I do on rare occasions experience momentary flashes of mental imagery, but it's so rare that it never occurred to me anyone could actually do anything useful with mental images. Once the penny finally dropped it was mind-melting. It's been three or four years now since I realized my experience is unusual, and I'm _still_ discovering ways it impacts how I experience life differently than most. A memorable moment was telling a friend who already knew I was aphantasiac that I struggle with mental arithmetic, and being completely lost when he replied, "oh, right, because you can't make the numbers dance in your head." I said, "what?" After a minute of confusion, he was finally able to get across that when he does mental math, he actually writes the problem in his mind's eye and does it on virtual paper. I think that was the day I first realized that it really is a handicap in many ways. OTOH, an upside is that I've never had to wish for "brain bleach". I didn't understand that phrase at all until the past year or three. I occasionally think that aphantasiacs should be preferentially chosen for high-trauma-exposure jobs, like EMT - we simply can't retain those horrible moments. I'm not on HN super-regularly, but I'd be happy to take a few minutes to answer questions the next time I check in.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  I’m not doubting your friend, but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability. I would say that ability depends much more on short term memory capacity than anything else. I think the visualization aspect is incidental.
  - godDLL 5y ago
    A few years back I couldn't visualize a point. Recently I learned to read words backwards in my mind. It's a skill.
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    I visualize mental math but anything more than 2 digits by 2 digits is hard to keep track of. Short term memory is very much the limiting factor.
  - 5y ago
jonplackett 5y ago
I have this! It made so much sense to me when I found out. An example: I was always amazed and somewhat confused how police photo-fit artists could create such a perfect likeness of someone. I thought they must have been endowed with magical drawing skills. What I couldn’t comprehend was that other people would be able to _describe_ someone they’d seen in that level of detail. Even if I think of my wife and kids I can only see the faintest fleeting flicker of their faces in my mind’s eye, and even that is in very murky black and white.
- NateEag 5y ago
  +100! I'm an aphant and police sketch artists seemed like sorcerors of the Dark Arts to me up until the day I realized most people can visualize.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    It’s funny I can see other comments where people still don’t really understand what it’s like. Nice to meet someone who gets it! Did you realise after finding out you had any coping strategies? I realised it’s why I loved using a computer - photoshop can be my mind’s eye. I even studied graphic design. I’m not a ‘natural’ designer that just instantly creates great designs, but I can put stuff in there and just move it around until I like it!
    - NateEag 5y ago
      I'm mostly just avisual. I did spend several years in high school working on traditional art skills because I thought it would be neat to be a 3D animator. I eventually concluded that while I was making progress, I clearly didn't have the natural abilities some of my friends did, and that it would be a constant struggle to have a career in the field. Obviously, I now understand better why my friends had better natural skills than I did. I used to use mindmapping software extensively to process and think through ideas and their connections (Tinderbox, specifically: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/). I now suspect that my other friends weren't as excited by it because they could do a lot of that stuff mentally. These days I mostly figure things out by writing plain text in Markdown files. My inner world is pretty much just words, and that's how I output things now.
anon2020dot00 5y ago
I think an interesting thing to discuss is how Aphantasia impacts people who have it, if at all? Are there any areas that are negatively or positively affected? Are there workarounds that these people do? I read someone with Aphantasia say that they do math differently in that they don't picture the computations in their head, like it would be done in paper, but that they just use their verbal memory to keep track of intermediate values.
- misthop 5y ago
  Someone who became aphantasic due to brain trauma would have to be asked. Until 3 years ago I truly believed that when people spoke about visualization or mind's eye it was meant figuratively. So it's not something that we work around or that knowingly impacts us. I assume there are some domains where I am more or less effective because of it, but that is true of everyone for all sorts of reasons.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  I once read that those with aphantasia have a hard time becoming architects since they can't visualize the building they're designing.
swayvil 5y ago
Speaking as a guy who meditates, where we study this kind of stuff, I would blame a shape of awareness. One part of your "reality" illuminated while another part, the part where mental images happen, resides in darkness (awarenessly speaking). A solution would be to practice the formless/objectless/mindfulnessy/vipassany type meditation.
- godDLL 5y ago
  It's not a solution, but it does help. When you learn to understand, feel what your mind is doing you can more easily adjust it. I would start with 3-4 minutes of boxed breathing back when I learned visualisation. Nothing would happen if my mind was doing the monkey thing, grasping at this, then at that, then at something else.
wpietri 5y ago
Ooh, let me ask a question of HNers who identify with this. What I get is occasional flashes of specific images. E.g., if you tell me to think of a beach what I'll get is a flashbulb photo of a specific beach I have been to. That image then quickly fades and I'm left with something more like a tactile representation, as if you 3D-modeled the beach and printed it in monochrome grey resin and I were running my hands over it to get the shape. Is it like that for anybody else?
- sambull 5y ago
  Very similar, a more green hue then grey but very much like that.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Thanks! Glad to know there's at least two of us!
- salamanderman 5y ago
  There's a thing called Flashbulb Memory, but I think you're talking about something else.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Oh, and I do get more visuals on the edge of sleep. Vivid hypnagogic imagery, I'm pretty sure. But whenever I become aware of it and get interested, it quickly recedes from me. So I suspect that I have some hardware ability to visualize, but that it's suppressed by other things when I'm alert.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Out of interest, how real are these "tactile representations"? I've had tactile hallucinations for many years now, sometimes when I'm in bed with my eyes closed (but nowhere near asleep) it feels like something is grabbing or poking at my face, or at times that sometimes is under the bed and breathing but at a different rate to my own breathing. Especially the tactile hallucinations on the face, these feel incredibly real, to the point that I usually open my eyes at least once just to confirm. However, thats clearly nothing I can control. The ability to be able to control that seems amazing to me
mrkstu 5y ago
Anyone like me who can ‘see’ images in dreams and in near sleep, but almost no voluntary ability to visually imagine when fully awake? Sometimes I sleep deprevate on purpose if I need an extra kick of creativity…
- misthop 5y ago
  I see dreams but have no visualization in any state of wakefulness
- grawp 5y ago
  Heh, I was contemplating this HN post and thinking how would I explain visual fantasy to an aphantasic person when a tought came to my mind: What about dreams?! I had to quickly open the post and search for a word 'dream' and found your comment. Btw. for me visual imagination during pre-sleep even when very sleep deprived is same as when being wide awake. Dreams themselfs are a little more vivid perhaps, I'm not completely sure. Which reminds me a phrase 'lucid dreaming'.. a supposed state where can you volountarily control your dream to utilize it as some kind of matrix/construct.
- michrassena 5y ago
  That's my experience. Dreams can be vivid, or close enough to real life including color. Occasionally I'll see hypnagogic imagery, but more likely I'll hear music when I'm really tired.
- scruple 5y ago
  I don't have any dream recall whatsoever. I'm not sure if I ever did. I do believe that I dream but that belief is based on anecdotes from friends and family who have observed me while I am sleeping.
khazhoux 5y ago
Aphantasic here. This is an odd subject for me because growing up I was always "the kid who could draw." I can paint surprisingly good portraits from life, and my sketchbooks and old canvases have lots of gems. And... a ton of crap, which now I realize was me struggling with my lack of mental imagery. If I try to conjure an image in my mind's eye, I get zilch. Just a scramble of shapes that won't hold still, not for one moment. So ask me to draw Obama, whose face I've seen a thousand times, and it'll be a miserable failure. Ask me to draw a hand, and (because I know how to "construct" it) and it will be expressive and fluid. But at the same time, I have excellent musical memory. I can recall music from 20 years ago, and pick out the exact synth line that comes in at the 2-minute mark. I can easily separate the winds and the strings and the brass in my head from whatever symphonies I'm familiar with. And I hear them back as near-perfect recordings. Only thing is: I can't play back the lyrics accurately. They'll be muddy usually and mostly indiscernible. The brain, huh?
- godDLL 5y ago
  Did you actually try and do a progression, with a journal? From point, to colored points, to simple shapes, to textured surfaces, to lit and moving mechanisms? I learned. You can too.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Years ago I spent time trying to improve my mental eye, similar to your suggestion. I would try to imagine and/or remember simple shapes. Didn't help much. Maybe if I had stuck with it (for a long long long time).
    - godDLL 5y ago
      It took 3 years of practice to develop an internal movie-CAD. But now I have it. It's worth it.
- scruple 5y ago
  I remember reading, when I first learned that I also had this weird thing people were calling "aphantasia," that Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar, had aphantasia [0]. I took inspiration from that fact and I've since learned how to draw. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment) Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments) Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments) Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments) The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments) What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments) Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments) Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
croddin 5y ago
Aphantasia is about the mind’s eye but I wonder about other senses as well such as “the mind’s ears” or “the mind’s nose” - being able to synthesize or realistically recall other senses. I can somewhat weakly visualize, but I can make music in my head, imagine what something would feel like to some extent, but I don’t think I can do that for smell or taste. What are other people’s experiences?
- godDLL 5y ago
  Well, there's the mind's fear. If you quiet it down and ask yourself "What am I afraid of happening?" you'll get an answer. It will usually be something you need to urgently attend to, or you'll regret it. It's like an inverse conscience.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  I can do that. I can create new music in my mind, and edit it at will, splicing it, mixing it with other instruments etc. In fact I use it to compose new music, then I just write it down as is on the page. I can also imagine smells and tastes, like if I ate popcorn I can vividly recall its sensory properties. I can also feel the tastes on my tongue and smells in my nose, it literally feels as if I experience them in real time.
- ben_w 5y ago
  I’ve been wondering the same since learning about aphantasia. I have once imagined music strongly enough it was the same subjective experience as if it was real (except for the conscious awareness it was internal, but that was literally the only difference). I can alter my sense of which way down is on a whim. I can’t imagine tastes or smells at all, merely recognise them when I experience them. I imagine thermoception more strongly than pain, but nowhere near as strongly as sound or gravity. I can imagine non-painful touch stimuli almost, but not quite, as strongly as gravity. I can imagine false proprioception with middling strength, including the perception of having a differently configured body.
zarzavat 5y ago
Since I started learning chess my visualisation has improved immeasurably. And not just for chess. I have much more control and can hold an image in my head longer without fatigue, although the vividness of my mental images has not improved. I lost the ability to make vivid mental images around adolescence. I'd be curious what happens when a person with aphantasia tries to learn chess. Would they simply not progress, or would they develop the ability to visualise?
- JshWright 5y ago
  I have (as best I can tell...) total aphantasia. I'm also ok-ish at chess. For me it feels a lot like imaging a map. There's no visual component to it at all, but a strong sense of where everything is in relation to everything else. It feels a lot more like proprioception than visualization.
bodge5000 5y ago
For myself, I find I can create incredibly vivid images and scenes in my head up until the point where I consciously think about them being in my head, at which point they start to degrade and I can't really build them up again until I immerse myself in it again. This makes it really hard to perform the test of how vividly can you imagine something in your head (an apple is the usual one), because if I try to imagine it, at best it comes off as very poorly formed and hard to get a good focus on. But I know and remember much more clear scenes from times where I've been focussing more so on the scene than trying to imagine the scene, if that makes any sense.
xwdv 5y ago
When I close my eyes and visualize I see two things simultaneously, first is the blackness of having the eyes closed, but then I also can see vivid imagery being animated, only it seems like it’s running elsewhere, like in another session, or another channel, it’s not being rendered out to my primary visual buffer, but it is rendering somewhere. Is anyone able to make the imaginary imagery appear in the primary context, right before their very eyes, replacing whatever the current input may be?
- JshWright 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I can't do what you're describing as your experience (let alone replacing other imagery).
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Are you aphantasic?
    - JshWright 5y ago
      Yep
  - godDLL 5y ago
    Start with motion. Focus on a point. Move that focus around. Get to two points. Spread them apart, move them closer together. Advance to tracing letters. One after the other, into a word. Movement is key. Try reading that backwards. And so on. Myself, it took about six months from nothing to colored triangle.
- godDLL 5y ago
  Yes. This is "your mind's eye". This is how I went from not being aware "picture yourself on a beach" was more than a figure of speech to being able to decompose mechanisms and take measurements all in my mind. This is exactly how you do it. Your eyes have nothing to do with it. Your brain fakes your eyes seeing stuff for you, and it can fake other things for you if you ask it.
atdt 5y ago
You can take an online test for aphantasia (the VVIQ, or Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) here: https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  That seems silly to me. Talk about random thing, ask "No image at all/Dim and vague; flat/Moderately clear and lively/Clear and lively/Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing", average results. I mean... you could ask this once with prompt "How vivid is your visual imagery" and you will probably get the same result.
- godDLL 5y ago
  Those are made up categories for a made up disorder. That's like "depression". There is no one kind. How depressed are you? Very? Not so much? How would you even know?
emmanueloga_ 5y ago
Reminds me (pun not intended) of Funes, the Memorious (Borges short story): A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge-all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. [...] With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.
- exikyut 5y ago
  I'd never thought about idiot savant behavior quite like that before, but it gels really well.
lawguy 5y ago
One aspect of aphantasia that I haven't seen mentioned yet is memory of Chinese characters / kanji. I absolutely cannot for the life of me visualize any* of the characters I can easily read and write. However, there is a trick I can do for the ones I can write: I can trace the strokes in my head in the correct direction, order, and proportion. And I have to do it by imagining the muscle movements I would use. Although I can't visualize the result, it's the closest thing I can get to seeing anything in my mind's eye. *Almost true; exceptions exist like 十，人，个，大. But something as easy as 车 is too complicated for me to visualize, but very easy to mentally trace.
- godDLL 5y ago
  That's similar to how I started learning. Did you try advancing past that though? Trace a word letter by letter, read it backwards? Take two points, move them apart? Make one green, one blue? It took me months to get from points to a spinning pyramid with colored sides.
Ccecil 5y ago
I was reading a biography of Nikola Tesla and they mentioned he could visualize entire machines in his head, rotate, tear them down, revise and redesign. My first thought was "wait...not everyone does that?" When I am describing a mechanical device the description builds in my vision...to the point where if I focus on it I can nearly block what I am actually seeing with what I am visualizing. My hand gestures are actually me mentally manipulating the device as I describe it. And immediately when I stop...my vision restores and the "real world" is back. When I was a child I was a "daydreamer"...constantly looking out the window. Now that I am older I realize this is why. Not everyone is like this...that was something I had no concept of...I have always been this way. I am not an exceptional artist...but I have a near photographic memory for things I read and conversations I have had. On the flip side though...I am for the most part totally face blind. I have trouble finding people in a crowd...especially if they change clothes, difficulty placing where I know someone from (but once they say "you know...at that one party"...I can remember the entire conversation we had). My suspicion is the mind typically balances these things and somehow I am "off balance". It is very much a gift and a curse.
- sph 5y ago
  FWIW I have aphantasia, but my abstract visualisation skills such as imagining and tearing down machines in my head, or even daydreaming, is on point. Which is why software engineering is my career path, as most of it is keeping a complex abstract idea in your mind to flesh it out and think most of the corner cases before sitting down to write code. I just do all this visualisation without seeing anything, but I describe myself as a visual thinker. I describe aphantasia as not being able to literally see things with my mind's eye, but still having the feeling of seeing them. Like running a headless browser.
  - godDLL 5y ago
    From the sheer amount of different descriptions of this Aphantasia it should be obvious that most of it will cluster not in "disorder of the brain" or some such, but in "different levels of ability, due to skill". I was blanker than you describe it. Nothing moving, nothing seen, nothing. Now I can light subjects, take measurements, walk around things with moving parts, roll them forward and backward through time. I went on a hunch that it just doesn't fit. Has to be learnable. And it was.
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
I wonder if this has to do with circumcision. It’s predominantly male, and I’ve read some current literature says that it stems from early childhood trauma
- ravar 5y ago
  I kinda doubt that, given that I and my father have it. And to my knowledge neither of us are circumcised or had any appreciable childhood trauma.
nbardy 5y ago
I work in Computer Vision with a passion for image synthesis. I recently discoverer I have aphantasia when I heard someone else in the synthesis community talking about it. I never realized I was “missing” something because I have a very strong sense of internal spatial mathematics and can keep track of geometric folds, twists, transforms, etc in my head very well. But once I read this I realized most people have color. My internal world is all black. I can feel colors and shapes. But I can’t see them.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
I have aphantasia but somehow I am having a feeling it is self induced. Let me explain. You know how in movies sometimes people who have hallucinations (basically uncontrolled prophantasia) start screening in terror because of the horror images they see. So, good portion of my life my dreams were black and white and they look like room with under the strobe light. Only rarely I could see horizon in "outdoor dreams" or colors in my dreams. But, from time to time I have vivid color dreams, and even fewer of those, look like a reality. So, when I started practicing meditation coupled with imagination and visualization of objects phantasia improved a bit, but dreams improved ten fold. But, soon as it improved a bit I stop practicing, I did not know why. So, few weeks ago I started again, and few days I had a extremely sharp dream in which I saw viper snake attacking me, it was so vivid that I jumped out of bad. And while opening eyes, that image was still there, "snake" in the dark, on my bed. So, my question is what if subconscious mind is doing it in order to protect us? Basically shutting down parts that feel unbearable for emotions to handle. Has anyone else had similar experience? Additionally, when I have gimps during visual streaming (practice designed to improve visual imagination) objects are too complex and moving to fast, it is like video is streamed into my mind and I cannot control it. Last thing I remember is seeing some kind of very complex puzzle, element that was reshaping in breathing very rapid motion. Also those streams look more like AI generated visuals, they kind of looks as something but you cannot recognize anything. Something like: https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585 https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585 and "Name one thing on this image" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Screen_Shot_2019-04-25_at_3.51.55_PM.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Scr... So, I guess if I would have those all the time, my sanity would be in question, so I suppose "slow conciseness" in order to sustain itself needs to "shut down" certain brain function, or optimize skills we used the most on expense of others, for instance I am good with imagining abstract things and logic. I would like to know how to invoke those visualisations on demand, but it seem they just happen. What I also find strange is that people who can vividly imagine, cannot recollect people faces. On the other hand, I cannot describe any face, not even my closest love ones, but I can recognize them. I could not describe anything to let say a police photo robot how crime suspect looks like, but I could pick it from the line among thousand of faces. I am finding that very strange, it is like having one directional mind, in the sense you can understand foreign language (read/listen) but you cannot create your own sentences, write or speak.
deadalus 5y ago
Related to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)
adjagu 5y ago
The first time I heard/read about this was back in 2016 or so when I stumbled across a post on Facebook from Blake Ross [0]. Since then I have read more about aphantasia and in the process I have learned more about myself and in turn others as well. It has been an enlightening and helpful experience so far. When it comes to visualization or a mind's eye I don't (and as far back as I can remember) have any form of that ability. When my eyes are open I see what is in my field of view, but I am unable to create new visual input, nor can I edit what I can see in any way. When my eyes are closed there isn't any colors, images, flashes of images, shapes, smoke, text, numbers or anything. It is just a darkened void. Unlike some I am not face-blind. I recognize people I know when I see them, either in person or in physical/digital pictures. If I had to describe someone I know well and see every day, but they are not in front of me at the time, I couldn't do it adequately. Estimated height, weight, and size compared to me, doable. Same for hair color and whether or not they wear glasses. Anything else I couldn't say. I simply do not possess that information. If tried to describe someone I know well that I haven't seen in six months the best I could do would be their height and size compared to me. At a certain point if I don't see them again it is like they just disappeared. The same applies to memorable conversations we had, places we went, and things we did. Over time it all just fades away. It really depends upon how strong of a connection there was. Even after 24 years I remember my high school sweetheart's name, how many years we were together, and where we went for both vacations we had. To this day I can recite her parent's telephone number and address from memory. I'm over 500 miles from there right now and I could hop in my vehicle and drive straight there without directions. I don't even need to remember their address to know how to get to their road and exact house from here and I haven't been there since 2003. Absolutely any other information about her and her family? That's all gone. Like my lack of a mind's eye I seem to also have a lack of a mind's ear. Unlike what some others have posted I am unable to imagine music nor can I compose it in my head (or in person) either. If I want to listen to music I have to queue up YouTube or my local music player. I do one or the other daily as the music provides some respite from tinnitus. As an aside: I played trumpet, trombone, and tuba throughout high school even though I can not read sheet music. I for some reason didn't or couldn't learn sheet music so my music teacher translated the notes into numbers for me. Those I understood. For the trumpet it would go something like: 13, 1, 12, 123, etc. Tuba was similar and trombone was based on distance the slider was from full back. As to whether or not I have an inner voice. That too is a negative ghost-rider. If I'm thinking or reading I do not hear any voice, mine or otherwise. If I am making a grocery list something does happen because I remember it, but when I am thinking it I don't hear the words I think nor do I visualize them in my mind's eye. They are stored as data to be retrieved when I next go to the grocer. Dreams are also absent from my life. When I wake up it is as if I had just laid down. I have no memory of anything happening between those two events. Since learning of aphantasia I have made some changes in my life. Now when I go places I want to be able to experience again after I've left I take lots of pictures and video. I try and do the same with my friends. Pictures, videos, and audio so that if they pass before me I'll still be able to see and/or hear them again. Hopefully from now on I'll be able to say more than "I spent a month in Key West, Florida in 1997" or "I went to Mountain View, Arkansas for two weeks in 2005". Overall I do not find aphantasia a negative. Up until I learned about it, it wasn't a thing so my experiences were just like everyone else. Now that I know about it and have learned more about myself I have made some small changes to my life to compensate. My current approach is to experience life as it happens and let the pictures, videos, and audio do the long-term backups. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
GistNoesis 5y ago
Let's try to visualize (A little mind-game for GPT-4): -Take a piece of A4 paper -A real one in the 3D world, with grain and texture. -The 1000 first digits of pi have been written on it in black Arial 12. (How many lines are there ?). (Read back the third line) (Read back the fourth line from right to left) -Wrap the paper page into a cylinder so that the first digit of the line of the over-wrap match with the first digit of Pi by transparency. -After the over-wrap, let the page go straight and not in a cylinder such that the wrapped paper look like a manuscript o. -Now take a red laser, and shine it through the the paper such that you highlight the same number through the 3 folds of paper. (What is the highlighted digit ?) -Color this digit green for all instances on the page. Unwrap the page, (on what line is there the most green numbers). -Change the font size to 20 and do the same exercise, but color the number blue while still keeping the previous colors. -Change the font size to 32 and do the same exercise, but color the number red while still keeping the previous colors. -The password is the first four consecutive red-green-blue-black, what is the password ?
CallingCalliope 5y ago
Global aphantasic, dyslexic, problems with recall at times, hard to traverse memory and also in process of being diagnosed with ADHD. When I’m deeply interested in something I don't read forums and join community's as it spoils the fun of working things out, and helps in leaving out mistakes of others. Once I've rinsed the topic, created my construct and can find no new worthy vein to mine, then I will compare with the consensus. So what I have to contribute is only from my own half finished ideas, there may be errors, in fact and terminology, I'm still playing with my toy. I'm annoyed I didn't work out I had aphantasia before reading about it, but I was close, from a young age. As many mention, counting sheep to sleep was a riddle, I discussed this with my sister about 8, I revisited that conversation after the revelation. She can not create visuals but can recall what she has seen. I can do neither. Many hints I was given, Henry Miller for one said I do not have much of a visual memory, Dracula and LOTR were too descriptive for me to appreciate fully. There's so many nuances with this topic, I have no sensory memory, touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing but I can remember feelings. No sense of taste is the most common in the people Ive talked to. To recall experience everyone has, to create new experiences everyone has. I dislike the name aphantastic, without imagination, as I have an uncontrollable imagination and is separate, it throws more confusion onto an already confusing subject. I have trouble recognising people, some aphants don't, I think this is due to my poor recall. I'm not sure if I believe in a subconscious as others do, that's another rabbit hole, but to be brief, my subconscious has access to that look up table that my consciousness dosnt. You can have hyper Aphantastics who have beyond 4k abilities. You program yourself with I (not AI), but the memory bus might be differently wired restricting read write permission’s, a hardware limitation because it is not something you can learn. A screen, a speaker are all only interfaces, we are all unique machines crafted by the universe, each one of a kind, and maybe, just maybe, for a specific purpose, that we have been blessed with I is astounding, I love playing with tech, my mate had a NES, I had a Master System, the enjoyable conversations we had describing our experiences would never have happened if we both had both. Its funny that I is the one thing we cannot fathom, in philosophy, maths, physics. What troubles me is why has it been such a secret, why have Ya all so quite about your visual imagination, sounds like your all watching stuff you don't want to to tell anyone about :-) and if it is a gift are they going to be happy with what your doing on their hardware. And finally, IMO, if you have a screen, you it you know, if your unsure you probably are.
83457 5y ago
This probably sounds dumb but after reading comments I've realized that I almost never visualize things onto the real world. If I'm imagining a machine I'm not imagining it in front of me, instead I'm holding it abstractley in my mind. The one exception is if I'm looking at something being tweaked I'll apply chances onto top of that thing. Someone mentioned their artist friend will imagine the drawing or subject they want is already on the paper then draw it. I've always tried to imagine the real thing in my mind and then translate it on the fly. A vr game I played recently has you move and manipulate a 3d puzzle hovering in space in front of you. I think approaching visualization as happening on top of the real world could be really helpful for me.
_ink_ 5y ago
I have this and it sucks.
rg111 5y ago
The opposite of Aphantasia is Hyperphantasia [0]. I believe myself to be hyperphantasic. I believe that reading books is much more enjoyable for me. I can quickly visualize stuff that others cannot. I actually see stuff in vivid details on my head. This has benifits in many areas. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia

Aphantasia

105 points by misthop 5y ago

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misthop 5y ago

Read the article on Reality Shifting (daydreaming) and wanted to share that for some of us it is impossible

carreau 5y ago
Would suggest https://aphantasia.com/ https://aphantasia.com/ and their twitter as well. As Someone with aphantasia I was still amazed as how different the level of aphantasia can vary between people.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  I tried taking their little quiz and couldn't get past the first page. It asks me to imagine somebody I know, then asks which details I can observe. But those details are unobserved until the quiz asks me about them. The color of their clothing? I wasn't thinking about any specific clothing at all, but when prompted to I'm able to imagine that person in many different outfits. Vivid details of those clothes? Sure, I can imagine details, but the details aren't necessarily there in the "image" until I'm prompted to invent them. The possible answers to the question just seem... invalid. The details are neither dim nor vivid; the details are undetermined and flexible. Maybe the quiz should first ask me to imagine that person in a specific circumstance, where those details are predetermined by my memory of that circumstance? Even then I still don't understand what the quiz really means by half these answers. What does it mean for an image to be "lively"? That it's moving around? Am I meant to be imagining a still image or a moving image? Depending on how I interpret these questions and answers, I could get completely different outcomes from this quiz.
  - carreau 5y ago
    I think that part of what I discovered in the multiple degrees/kind of aphantasia. And like you most of those questions dot make sens. For many aphantasic people they do. And a lot of question I get is "how do you remember color if you don't see them in your head". One of the analogies I have is that my memory is a bit like a hash/bloom filter. I can't really get the original value, but I can tell you wether it's the same or not. I think the other part where aphantasic differ is WRT math. Others in this thread said that can't do math in their head as they can't see the number/equations. I have no issues with it but I don't rely at all on the number symbols in my head (or on paper) to do arithmetic. I wouldn't be surprised if aphantasia get more subcategories in the following decades.
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ALittleLight 5y ago

I was once watching an episode of House with my college roommate and the doctors had a machine that let them see a visual image of what the patient was seeing in their head. I laughed to roommate and observed that it was a stupid machine because, of course, people don't really "see" things in their head. In the ensuing discussion (and Google searches) I learned about the word aphantasia and about the phenomenon where people do actually (claim to) visualize things in their head. Until that moment I assumed that language was just figurative. I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things. One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I know my brain doesn't create visuals. When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.

godDLL 5y ago
I was like you until the age of 34 or so. Now I can make full corporeal models that move in time and walk around them. Learn. And people don't visualize things the way I learned. They "see" the same spotty attention-point cloud they move around in in real life, one spot at a time. Plus many didn't learn to draw. Also learn.
- Jap2-0 5y ago
  How?
  - godDLL 5y ago
    It's not an infectious disease, and in my case wasn't a disorder of some kind. I just never was told that it's a learnable skill. I just told you it is. You might have luck starting with a point, or maybe with a word – try tracing letters and read it backwards. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367198
- 5y ago

jiggawatts 5y ago

It's almost impossible to compare the level of aphantasia people may or may not have, since all they can share is their opinions of their experiences. It's difficult to do an objective comparison. That aside, I do believe I have some form of aphantasia. I was talking to an artist colleague about his process, and he said that essentially he just visualises something on the paper and more or less just traces the outline of the mental image that he projects. At the time, I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like. Then one day while I was half asleep, I suddenly was able to picture simple geometric shapes and even human faces on the white wall next to my bed. Like black and white holograms, they were seemingly "right there", floating just above the surface of the wall. I reached out and I could trace the outlines with my finger. I haven't been able to reproduce that, and it only happened a few times during the period of a few weeks. Ah well, I guess I'll never be an artist...

pram 5y ago
Drawing is a technical skill you develop with directed practice like anything else. It has nothing to do with tracing magical images from your head.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I've heard this, and I did take a class in drawing once. I improved, and could see a path towards becoming good, but it was not "the same". The artist I was referring to didn't draw "iteratively", like most people. He didn't start with a pencil sketch outline that he refined progressively until it looked like the subject. Instead, he'd pick up a pen, put it on the paper, and then he just traced a single continuous outline, moving the pen inwards to fill in details. All in one movement, without picking up the pen. I saw him draw a "dwarf with a hammer" character like this, complete with clothes down to the buttons. A detailed beard and expressive face. Boots with the tops turned down. Wrinkles in the pants. A belt with a buckle. Detail upon detail. But he just... traced it. From the outside in. You couldn't even tell what he was going to draw until a couple of minutes. PS: I've also met a guy who could do the same kind of thing with programming. Most people build up code iteratively, "sketching" the structure using interfaces or function definitions, building them up and refining them one piece at a time. Not this guy. He'd just stare off into space, and then start typing. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, non-stop. I saw him open seven consecutive brackets and the close the last one a page and a half later. He did this for a couple of hours at a fast typing rate, then hit compile. There were 3 typos due to a sticky shift key. He fixed those, and then the code compiled, ran, and successfully completed the (very complex!) problem. These were some of the freakiest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Some people's brains just work differently to mine, and I won't ever be able to "think like them".

qrush 5y ago

My kids and I just listened to an entire podcast episode about Aphantasia from Wow in the World - they really do a great (and fun) job explaining science concepts and recently related papers! https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through-aphantasia-when-the-mind-is-blind https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through...

NateEag 5y ago

Aphantasiac here. Not quite pure aphantasiac, as I do on rare occasions experience momentary flashes of mental imagery, but it's so rare that it never occurred to me anyone could actually do anything useful with mental images. Once the penny finally dropped it was mind-melting. It's been three or four years now since I realized my experience is unusual, and I'm _still_ discovering ways it impacts how I experience life differently than most. A memorable moment was telling a friend who already knew I was aphantasiac that I struggle with mental arithmetic, and being completely lost when he replied, "oh, right, because you can't make the numbers dance in your head." I said, "what?" After a minute of confusion, he was finally able to get across that when he does mental math, he actually writes the problem in his mind's eye and does it on virtual paper. I think that was the day I first realized that it really is a handicap in many ways. OTOH, an upside is that I've never had to wish for "brain bleach". I didn't understand that phrase at all until the past year or three. I occasionally think that aphantasiacs should be preferentially chosen for high-trauma-exposure jobs, like EMT - we simply can't retain those horrible moments. I'm not on HN super-regularly, but I'd be happy to take a few minutes to answer questions the next time I check in.

FPGAhacker 5y ago
I’m not doubting your friend, but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability. I would say that ability depends much more on short term memory capacity than anything else. I think the visualization aspect is incidental.
- godDLL 5y ago
  A few years back I couldn't visualize a point. Recently I learned to read words backwards in my mind. It's a skill.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  I visualize mental math but anything more than 2 digits by 2 digits is hard to keep track of. Short term memory is very much the limiting factor.
- 5y ago

jonplackett 5y ago

I have this! It made so much sense to me when I found out. An example: I was always amazed and somewhat confused how police photo-fit artists could create such a perfect likeness of someone. I thought they must have been endowed with magical drawing skills. What I couldn’t comprehend was that other people would be able to _describe_ someone they’d seen in that level of detail. Even if I think of my wife and kids I can only see the faintest fleeting flicker of their faces in my mind’s eye, and even that is in very murky black and white.

NateEag 5y ago
+100! I'm an aphant and police sketch artists seemed like sorcerors of the Dark Arts to me up until the day I realized most people can visualize.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  It’s funny I can see other comments where people still don’t really understand what it’s like. Nice to meet someone who gets it! Did you realise after finding out you had any coping strategies? I realised it’s why I loved using a computer - photoshop can be my mind’s eye. I even studied graphic design. I’m not a ‘natural’ designer that just instantly creates great designs, but I can put stuff in there and just move it around until I like it!
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I'm mostly just avisual. I did spend several years in high school working on traditional art skills because I thought it would be neat to be a 3D animator. I eventually concluded that while I was making progress, I clearly didn't have the natural abilities some of my friends did, and that it would be a constant struggle to have a career in the field. Obviously, I now understand better why my friends had better natural skills than I did. I used to use mindmapping software extensively to process and think through ideas and their connections (Tinderbox, specifically: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/). I now suspect that my other friends weren't as excited by it because they could do a lot of that stuff mentally. These days I mostly figure things out by writing plain text in Markdown files. My inner world is pretty much just words, and that's how I output things now.

anon2020dot00 5y ago

I think an interesting thing to discuss is how Aphantasia impacts people who have it, if at all? Are there any areas that are negatively or positively affected? Are there workarounds that these people do? I read someone with Aphantasia say that they do math differently in that they don't picture the computations in their head, like it would be done in paper, but that they just use their verbal memory to keep track of intermediate values.

misthop 5y ago
Someone who became aphantasic due to brain trauma would have to be asked. Until 3 years ago I truly believed that when people spoke about visualization or mind's eye it was meant figuratively. So it's not something that we work around or that knowingly impacts us. I assume there are some domains where I am more or less effective because of it, but that is true of everyone for all sorts of reasons.
bobsmooth 5y ago
I once read that those with aphantasia have a hard time becoming architects since they can't visualize the building they're designing.

swayvil 5y ago

Speaking as a guy who meditates, where we study this kind of stuff, I would blame a shape of awareness. One part of your "reality" illuminated while another part, the part where mental images happen, resides in darkness (awarenessly speaking). A solution would be to practice the formless/objectless/mindfulnessy/vipassany type meditation.

godDLL 5y ago
It's not a solution, but it does help. When you learn to understand, feel what your mind is doing you can more easily adjust it. I would start with 3-4 minutes of boxed breathing back when I learned visualisation. Nothing would happen if my mind was doing the monkey thing, grasping at this, then at that, then at something else.

wpietri 5y ago

Ooh, let me ask a question of HNers who identify with this. What I get is occasional flashes of specific images. E.g., if you tell me to think of a beach what I'll get is a flashbulb photo of a specific beach I have been to. That image then quickly fades and I'm left with something more like a tactile representation, as if you 3D-modeled the beach and printed it in monochrome grey resin and I were running my hands over it to get the shape. Is it like that for anybody else?

sambull 5y ago
Very similar, a more green hue then grey but very much like that.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Thanks! Glad to know there's at least two of us!
salamanderman 5y ago
There's a thing called Flashbulb Memory, but I think you're talking about something else.
wpietri 5y ago
Oh, and I do get more visuals on the edge of sleep. Vivid hypnagogic imagery, I'm pretty sure. But whenever I become aware of it and get interested, it quickly recedes from me. So I suspect that I have some hardware ability to visualize, but that it's suppressed by other things when I'm alert.
bodge5000 5y ago
Out of interest, how real are these "tactile representations"? I've had tactile hallucinations for many years now, sometimes when I'm in bed with my eyes closed (but nowhere near asleep) it feels like something is grabbing or poking at my face, or at times that sometimes is under the bed and breathing but at a different rate to my own breathing. Especially the tactile hallucinations on the face, these feel incredibly real, to the point that I usually open my eyes at least once just to confirm. However, thats clearly nothing I can control. The ability to be able to control that seems amazing to me

mrkstu 5y ago

Anyone like me who can ‘see’ images in dreams and in near sleep, but almost no voluntary ability to visually imagine when fully awake? Sometimes I sleep deprevate on purpose if I need an extra kick of creativity…

misthop 5y ago
I see dreams but have no visualization in any state of wakefulness
grawp 5y ago
Heh, I was contemplating this HN post and thinking how would I explain visual fantasy to an aphantasic person when a tought came to my mind: What about dreams?! I had to quickly open the post and search for a word 'dream' and found your comment. Btw. for me visual imagination during pre-sleep even when very sleep deprived is same as when being wide awake. Dreams themselfs are a little more vivid perhaps, I'm not completely sure. Which reminds me a phrase 'lucid dreaming'.. a supposed state where can you volountarily control your dream to utilize it as some kind of matrix/construct.
michrassena 5y ago
That's my experience. Dreams can be vivid, or close enough to real life including color. Occasionally I'll see hypnagogic imagery, but more likely I'll hear music when I'm really tired.
scruple 5y ago
I don't have any dream recall whatsoever. I'm not sure if I ever did. I do believe that I dream but that belief is based on anecdotes from friends and family who have observed me while I am sleeping.

khazhoux 5y ago

Aphantasic here. This is an odd subject for me because growing up I was always "the kid who could draw." I can paint surprisingly good portraits from life, and my sketchbooks and old canvases have lots of gems. And... a ton of crap, which now I realize was me struggling with my lack of mental imagery. If I try to conjure an image in my mind's eye, I get zilch. Just a scramble of shapes that won't hold still, not for one moment. So ask me to draw Obama, whose face I've seen a thousand times, and it'll be a miserable failure. Ask me to draw a hand, and (because I know how to "construct" it) and it will be expressive and fluid. But at the same time, I have excellent musical memory. I can recall music from 20 years ago, and pick out the exact synth line that comes in at the 2-minute mark. I can easily separate the winds and the strings and the brass in my head from whatever symphonies I'm familiar with. And I hear them back as near-perfect recordings. Only thing is: I can't play back the lyrics accurately. They'll be muddy usually and mostly indiscernible. The brain, huh?

godDLL 5y ago
Did you actually try and do a progression, with a journal? From point, to colored points, to simple shapes, to textured surfaces, to lit and moving mechanisms? I learned. You can too.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  Years ago I spent time trying to improve my mental eye, similar to your suggestion. I would try to imagine and/or remember simple shapes. Didn't help much. Maybe if I had stuck with it (for a long long long time).
  - godDLL 5y ago
    It took 3 years of practice to develop an internal movie-CAD. But now I have it. It's worth it.
scruple 5y ago
I remember reading, when I first learned that I also had this weird thing people were calling "aphantasia," that Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar, had aphantasia [0]. I took inspiration from that fact and I've since learned how to draw. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment) Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments) Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments) Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments) The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments) What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments) Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments) Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)

croddin 5y ago

Aphantasia is about the mind’s eye but I wonder about other senses as well such as “the mind’s ears” or “the mind’s nose” - being able to synthesize or realistically recall other senses. I can somewhat weakly visualize, but I can make music in my head, imagine what something would feel like to some extent, but I don’t think I can do that for smell or taste. What are other people’s experiences?

godDLL 5y ago
Well, there's the mind's fear. If you quiet it down and ask yourself "What am I afraid of happening?" you'll get an answer. It will usually be something you need to urgently attend to, or you'll regret it. It's like an inverse conscience.
cercatrova 5y ago
I can do that. I can create new music in my mind, and edit it at will, splicing it, mixing it with other instruments etc. In fact I use it to compose new music, then I just write it down as is on the page. I can also imagine smells and tastes, like if I ate popcorn I can vividly recall its sensory properties. I can also feel the tastes on my tongue and smells in my nose, it literally feels as if I experience them in real time.
ben_w 5y ago
I’ve been wondering the same since learning about aphantasia. I have once imagined music strongly enough it was the same subjective experience as if it was real (except for the conscious awareness it was internal, but that was literally the only difference). I can alter my sense of which way down is on a whim. I can’t imagine tastes or smells at all, merely recognise them when I experience them. I imagine thermoception more strongly than pain, but nowhere near as strongly as sound or gravity. I can imagine non-painful touch stimuli almost, but not quite, as strongly as gravity. I can imagine false proprioception with middling strength, including the perception of having a differently configured body.

zarzavat 5y ago

Since I started learning chess my visualisation has improved immeasurably. And not just for chess. I have much more control and can hold an image in my head longer without fatigue, although the vividness of my mental images has not improved. I lost the ability to make vivid mental images around adolescence. I'd be curious what happens when a person with aphantasia tries to learn chess. Would they simply not progress, or would they develop the ability to visualise?

JshWright 5y ago
I have (as best I can tell...) total aphantasia. I'm also ok-ish at chess. For me it feels a lot like imaging a map. There's no visual component to it at all, but a strong sense of where everything is in relation to everything else. It feels a lot more like proprioception than visualization.

bodge5000 5y ago

For myself, I find I can create incredibly vivid images and scenes in my head up until the point where I consciously think about them being in my head, at which point they start to degrade and I can't really build them up again until I immerse myself in it again. This makes it really hard to perform the test of how vividly can you imagine something in your head (an apple is the usual one), because if I try to imagine it, at best it comes off as very poorly formed and hard to get a good focus on. But I know and remember much more clear scenes from times where I've been focussing more so on the scene than trying to imagine the scene, if that makes any sense.

xwdv 5y ago

When I close my eyes and visualize I see two things simultaneously, first is the blackness of having the eyes closed, but then I also can see vivid imagery being animated, only it seems like it’s running elsewhere, like in another session, or another channel, it’s not being rendered out to my primary visual buffer, but it is rendering somewhere. Is anyone able to make the imaginary imagery appear in the primary context, right before their very eyes, replacing whatever the current input may be?

JshWright 5y ago
For what it's worth, I can't do what you're describing as your experience (let alone replacing other imagery).
- xwdv 5y ago
  Are you aphantasic?
  - JshWright 5y ago
    Yep
- godDLL 5y ago
  Start with motion. Focus on a point. Move that focus around. Get to two points. Spread them apart, move them closer together. Advance to tracing letters. One after the other, into a word. Movement is key. Try reading that backwards. And so on. Myself, it took about six months from nothing to colored triangle.
godDLL 5y ago
Yes. This is "your mind's eye". This is how I went from not being aware "picture yourself on a beach" was more than a figure of speech to being able to decompose mechanisms and take measurements all in my mind. This is exactly how you do it. Your eyes have nothing to do with it. Your brain fakes your eyes seeing stuff for you, and it can fake other things for you if you ask it.

atdt 5y ago

You can take an online test for aphantasia (the VVIQ, or Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) here: https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/vviq/

garaetjjte 5y ago
That seems silly to me. Talk about random thing, ask "No image at all/Dim and vague; flat/Moderately clear and lively/Clear and lively/Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing", average results. I mean... you could ask this once with prompt "How vivid is your visual imagery" and you will probably get the same result.
godDLL 5y ago
Those are made up categories for a made up disorder. That's like "depression". There is no one kind. How depressed are you? Very? Not so much? How would you even know?

emmanueloga_ 5y ago

Reminds me (pun not intended) of Funes, the Memorious (Borges short story): A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge-all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. [...] With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

exikyut 5y ago
I'd never thought about idiot savant behavior quite like that before, but it gels really well.

lawguy 5y ago

One aspect of aphantasia that I haven't seen mentioned yet is memory of Chinese characters / kanji. I absolutely cannot for the life of me visualize any* of the characters I can easily read and write. However, there is a trick I can do for the ones I can write: I can trace the strokes in my head in the correct direction, order, and proportion. And I have to do it by imagining the muscle movements I would use. Although I can't visualize the result, it's the closest thing I can get to seeing anything in my mind's eye. *Almost true; exceptions exist like 十，人，个，大. But something as easy as 车 is too complicated for me to visualize, but very easy to mentally trace.

godDLL 5y ago
That's similar to how I started learning. Did you try advancing past that though? Trace a word letter by letter, read it backwards? Take two points, move them apart? Make one green, one blue? It took me months to get from points to a spinning pyramid with colored sides.

Ccecil 5y ago

I was reading a biography of Nikola Tesla and they mentioned he could visualize entire machines in his head, rotate, tear them down, revise and redesign. My first thought was "wait...not everyone does that?" When I am describing a mechanical device the description builds in my vision...to the point where if I focus on it I can nearly block what I am actually seeing with what I am visualizing. My hand gestures are actually me mentally manipulating the device as I describe it. And immediately when I stop...my vision restores and the "real world" is back. When I was a child I was a "daydreamer"...constantly looking out the window. Now that I am older I realize this is why. Not everyone is like this...that was something I had no concept of...I have always been this way. I am not an exceptional artist...but I have a near photographic memory for things I read and conversations I have had. On the flip side though...I am for the most part totally face blind. I have trouble finding people in a crowd...especially if they change clothes, difficulty placing where I know someone from (but once they say "you know...at that one party"...I can remember the entire conversation we had). My suspicion is the mind typically balances these things and somehow I am "off balance". It is very much a gift and a curse.

sph 5y ago
FWIW I have aphantasia, but my abstract visualisation skills such as imagining and tearing down machines in my head, or even daydreaming, is on point. Which is why software engineering is my career path, as most of it is keeping a complex abstract idea in your mind to flesh it out and think most of the corner cases before sitting down to write code. I just do all this visualisation without seeing anything, but I describe myself as a visual thinker. I describe aphantasia as not being able to literally see things with my mind's eye, but still having the feeling of seeing them. Like running a headless browser.
- godDLL 5y ago
  From the sheer amount of different descriptions of this Aphantasia it should be obvious that most of it will cluster not in "disorder of the brain" or some such, but in "different levels of ability, due to skill". I was blanker than you describe it. Nothing moving, nothing seen, nothing. Now I can light subjects, take measurements, walk around things with moving parts, roll them forward and backward through time. I went on a hunch that it just doesn't fit. Has to be learnable. And it was.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago

I wonder if this has to do with circumcision. It’s predominantly male, and I’ve read some current literature says that it stems from early childhood trauma

ravar 5y ago
I kinda doubt that, given that I and my father have it. And to my knowledge neither of us are circumcised or had any appreciable childhood trauma.

nbardy 5y ago

I work in Computer Vision with a passion for image synthesis. I recently discoverer I have aphantasia when I heard someone else in the synthesis community talking about it. I never realized I was “missing” something because I have a very strong sense of internal spatial mathematics and can keep track of geometric folds, twists, transforms, etc in my head very well. But once I read this I realized most people have color. My internal world is all black. I can feel colors and shapes. But I can’t see them.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

I have aphantasia but somehow I am having a feeling it is self induced. Let me explain. You know how in movies sometimes people who have hallucinations (basically uncontrolled prophantasia) start screening in terror because of the horror images they see. So, good portion of my life my dreams were black and white and they look like room with under the strobe light. Only rarely I could see horizon in "outdoor dreams" or colors in my dreams. But, from time to time I have vivid color dreams, and even fewer of those, look like a reality. So, when I started practicing meditation coupled with imagination and visualization of objects phantasia improved a bit, but dreams improved ten fold. But, soon as it improved a bit I stop practicing, I did not know why. So, few weeks ago I started again, and few days I had a extremely sharp dream in which I saw viper snake attacking me, it was so vivid that I jumped out of bad. And while opening eyes, that image was still there, "snake" in the dark, on my bed. So, my question is what if subconscious mind is doing it in order to protect us? Basically shutting down parts that feel unbearable for emotions to handle. Has anyone else had similar experience? Additionally, when I have gimps during visual streaming (practice designed to improve visual imagination) objects are too complex and moving to fast, it is like video is streamed into my mind and I cannot control it. Last thing I remember is seeing some kind of very complex puzzle, element that was reshaping in breathing very rapid motion. Also those streams look more like AI generated visuals, they kind of looks as something but you cannot recognize anything. Something like: https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585 https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585 and "Name one thing on this image" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Screen_Shot_2019-04-25_at_3.51.55_PM.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Scr... So, I guess if I would have those all the time, my sanity would be in question, so I suppose "slow conciseness" in order to sustain itself needs to "shut down" certain brain function, or optimize skills we used the most on expense of others, for instance I am good with imagining abstract things and logic. I would like to know how to invoke those visualisations on demand, but it seem they just happen. What I also find strange is that people who can vividly imagine, cannot recollect people faces. On the other hand, I cannot describe any face, not even my closest love ones, but I can recognize them. I could not describe anything to let say a police photo robot how crime suspect looks like, but I could pick it from the line among thousand of faces. I am finding that very strange, it is like having one directional mind, in the sense you can understand foreign language (read/listen) but you cannot create your own sentences, write or speak.

deadalus 5y ago

Related to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)

adjagu 5y ago

The first time I heard/read about this was back in 2016 or so when I stumbled across a post on Facebook from Blake Ross [0]. Since then I have read more about aphantasia and in the process I have learned more about myself and in turn others as well. It has been an enlightening and helpful experience so far. When it comes to visualization or a mind's eye I don't (and as far back as I can remember) have any form of that ability. When my eyes are open I see what is in my field of view, but I am unable to create new visual input, nor can I edit what I can see in any way. When my eyes are closed there isn't any colors, images, flashes of images, shapes, smoke, text, numbers or anything. It is just a darkened void. Unlike some I am not face-blind. I recognize people I know when I see them, either in person or in physical/digital pictures. If I had to describe someone I know well and see every day, but they are not in front of me at the time, I couldn't do it adequately. Estimated height, weight, and size compared to me, doable. Same for hair color and whether or not they wear glasses. Anything else I couldn't say. I simply do not possess that information. If tried to describe someone I know well that I haven't seen in six months the best I could do would be their height and size compared to me. At a certain point if I don't see them again it is like they just disappeared. The same applies to memorable conversations we had, places we went, and things we did. Over time it all just fades away. It really depends upon how strong of a connection there was. Even after 24 years I remember my high school sweetheart's name, how many years we were together, and where we went for both vacations we had. To this day I can recite her parent's telephone number and address from memory. I'm over 500 miles from there right now and I could hop in my vehicle and drive straight there without directions. I don't even need to remember their address to know how to get to their road and exact house from here and I haven't been there since 2003. Absolutely any other information about her and her family? That's all gone. Like my lack of a mind's eye I seem to also have a lack of a mind's ear. Unlike what some others have posted I am unable to imagine music nor can I compose it in my head (or in person) either. If I want to listen to music I have to queue up YouTube or my local music player. I do one or the other daily as the music provides some respite from tinnitus. As an aside: I played trumpet, trombone, and tuba throughout high school even though I can not read sheet music. I for some reason didn't or couldn't learn sheet music so my music teacher translated the notes into numbers for me. Those I understood. For the trumpet it would go something like: 13, 1, 12, 123, etc. Tuba was similar and trombone was based on distance the slider was from full back. As to whether or not I have an inner voice. That too is a negative ghost-rider. If I'm thinking or reading I do not hear any voice, mine or otherwise. If I am making a grocery list something does happen because I remember it, but when I am thinking it I don't hear the words I think nor do I visualize them in my mind's eye. They are stored as data to be retrieved when I next go to the grocer. Dreams are also absent from my life. When I wake up it is as if I had just laid down. I have no memory of anything happening between those two events. Since learning of aphantasia I have made some changes in my life. Now when I go places I want to be able to experience again after I've left I take lots of pictures and video. I try and do the same with my friends. Pictures, videos, and audio so that if they pass before me I'll still be able to see and/or hear them again. Hopefully from now on I'll be able to say more than "I spent a month in Key West, Florida in 1997" or "I went to Mountain View, Arkansas for two weeks in 2005". Overall I do not find aphantasia a negative. Up until I learned about it, it wasn't a thing so my experiences were just like everyone else. Now that I know about it and have learned more about myself I have made some small changes to my life to compensate. My current approach is to experience life as it happens and let the pictures, videos, and audio do the long-term backups. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

GistNoesis 5y ago

Let's try to visualize (A little mind-game for GPT-4): -Take a piece of A4 paper -A real one in the 3D world, with grain and texture. -The 1000 first digits of pi have been written on it in black Arial 12. (How many lines are there ?). (Read back the third line) (Read back the fourth line from right to left) -Wrap the paper page into a cylinder so that the first digit of the line of the over-wrap match with the first digit of Pi by transparency. -After the over-wrap, let the page go straight and not in a cylinder such that the wrapped paper look like a manuscript o. -Now take a red laser, and shine it through the the paper such that you highlight the same number through the 3 folds of paper. (What is the highlighted digit ?) -Color this digit green for all instances on the page. Unwrap the page, (on what line is there the most green numbers). -Change the font size to 20 and do the same exercise, but color the number blue while still keeping the previous colors. -Change the font size to 32 and do the same exercise, but color the number red while still keeping the previous colors. -The password is the first four consecutive red-green-blue-black, what is the password ?

CallingCalliope 5y ago

Global aphantasic, dyslexic, problems with recall at times, hard to traverse memory and also in process of being diagnosed with ADHD. When I’m deeply interested in something I don't read forums and join community's as it spoils the fun of working things out, and helps in leaving out mistakes of others. Once I've rinsed the topic, created my construct and can find no new worthy vein to mine, then I will compare with the consensus. So what I have to contribute is only from my own half finished ideas, there may be errors, in fact and terminology, I'm still playing with my toy. I'm annoyed I didn't work out I had aphantasia before reading about it, but I was close, from a young age. As many mention, counting sheep to sleep was a riddle, I discussed this with my sister about 8, I revisited that conversation after the revelation. She can not create visuals but can recall what she has seen. I can do neither. Many hints I was given, Henry Miller for one said I do not have much of a visual memory, Dracula and LOTR were too descriptive for me to appreciate fully. There's so many nuances with this topic, I have no sensory memory, touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing but I can remember feelings. No sense of taste is the most common in the people Ive talked to. To recall experience everyone has, to create new experiences everyone has. I dislike the name aphantastic, without imagination, as I have an uncontrollable imagination and is separate, it throws more confusion onto an already confusing subject. I have trouble recognising people, some aphants don't, I think this is due to my poor recall. I'm not sure if I believe in a subconscious as others do, that's another rabbit hole, but to be brief, my subconscious has access to that look up table that my consciousness dosnt. You can have hyper Aphantastics who have beyond 4k abilities. You program yourself with I (not AI), but the memory bus might be differently wired restricting read write permission’s, a hardware limitation because it is not something you can learn. A screen, a speaker are all only interfaces, we are all unique machines crafted by the universe, each one of a kind, and maybe, just maybe, for a specific purpose, that we have been blessed with I is astounding, I love playing with tech, my mate had a NES, I had a Master System, the enjoyable conversations we had describing our experiences would never have happened if we both had both. Its funny that I is the one thing we cannot fathom, in philosophy, maths, physics. What troubles me is why has it been such a secret, why have Ya all so quite about your visual imagination, sounds like your all watching stuff you don't want to to tell anyone about :-) and if it is a gift are they going to be happy with what your doing on their hardware. And finally, IMO, if you have a screen, you it you know, if your unsure you probably are.

83457 5y ago

This probably sounds dumb but after reading comments I've realized that I almost never visualize things onto the real world. If I'm imagining a machine I'm not imagining it in front of me, instead I'm holding it abstractley in my mind. The one exception is if I'm looking at something being tweaked I'll apply chances onto top of that thing. Someone mentioned their artist friend will imagine the drawing or subject they want is already on the paper then draw it. I've always tried to imagine the real thing in my mind and then translate it on the fly. A vr game I played recently has you move and manipulate a 3d puzzle hovering in space in front of you. I think approaching visualization as happening on top of the real world could be really helpful for me.

_ink_ 5y ago

I have this and it sucks.

rg111 5y ago

The opposite of Aphantasia is Hyperphantasia [0]. I believe myself to be hyperphantasic. I believe that reading books is much more enjoyable for me. I can quickly visualize stuff that others cannot. I actually see stuff in vivid details on my head. This has benifits in many areas. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia