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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 i

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
- 1_player 5y ago
  You can't simply say to "learn" to cure yourself from aphantasia and leave it at that. Please elaborate.
  - godDLL 5y ago
    The way you learn anything. 0_o You need a journal. You need deliberate practice. You need progressive goals. I did about 5 minutes every 2 to 10 days. First, no other thoughts. I did mindful boxed breathing for about 3-4 minutes. Then, a point. Something that is in a spot. Then two points. Something like a distance. When you have that, advance to a triangle. Then colored triangle. Then a pyramid that you spin around, coloring different faces in different colors. That alone took about 6 months of practice. Then it gets easier.
    - yodon 5y ago
      I also did this process, but my experience was different. When I first realized that others could visualize things and I could not. I practiced trying to visualize a simple cube for months, relaxing and meditating as you did. Then one day I actually saw something. I was fully awake, and I saw a crystal clear image of a large granite slab, slowly rotating. I could see the texture of the surface, the physical detail of the shape. It was a truly amazing experience, the likes of which I had never experienced. And then I had what was the most frightening thought I've ever had: "I don't know how to make this thing go away - what if I can't make it go away? Have I just taught and meditated myself into psychosis? Oh shit!!!" I then pulled out of the visualization (no idea how that happened, it just ended with no fanfare, presumably as I started to think about other things) and have never seen another mental image like that, even though I've tried. This happened perhaps ten years ago. That experience was not entirely unlike my experience with lucid dreaming some years earlier. I essentially never dreamed (never recalled my dreams), but I read all about lucid dreaming, thought about it, and used Richard Feynman's dream study approach to try to focus on it. Then one night I had a lucid dream, and the next night, and the next. Each night for almost a week I had an incredibly vivid lucid dream, absolutely amazing experiences, waking up the next morning with full recall of it and feeling exhausted and entirely unrefreshed from my sleep. At the end of that week I had a final dream. In that final dream the subject of my dream was the realization that I couldn't lucid dream any more. I never had another lucid dream, and have almost never remembered any dreams since then. The hardware is clearly there for this stuff, at least in my case, but it seems the OS is also clearly working to "protect" me from some of those hardware features. Given that there absolutely are people who are subject to uncontrolled hallucinations and mental breakdowns between the real and the imaginary, I've concluded that at least for my mind these experiences are too close to the boundary for whatever circuitry protects me from that sort of breakdown. Others will have their own journeys, but for me based on my personal experiences I've concluded it's not a case of the mind "can't" it's a case of the mind "shouldn't" or "wont." As with any extreme training, be careful not to injure yourself. You might be fine, but not everyone who engages in extreme training does so without injury. I'm glad to have walked away from the process safely and can easily imagine not having done so.
- godDLL 5y ago
  You know what, I just might do a training app for you all. After all, I know a thing or two about that.
smt88 5y ago
> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. Can you accurately draw something while looking at a photo of it? Most people can't. Seeing something and drawing it are obviously different skills. What you may not understand about other people's mental visualizations is that they're somewhat fuzzy and unstable. It's very difficult to zoom in and out or to focus on the details. The better you know something, the better you can visualize it. There are also degrees of the ability -- some people are very good, and some aren't. > Other people think they have a visualization but do not. I know someone with aphantasia, and he was confused about whether or not he had it for a long time. I think this makes sense: you can't imagine being 100% certain you see something in your mind because it's a "sense" that you don't possess, so you assume other people aren't certain. I assure you that you're absolutely wrong. I am absolutely certain I see things in my mind and that it's common for people to be able to do so (with varying degrees of stability, accuracy, clarity, etc.). Especially faces, I can see them very clearly. It is somewhat a function of memory.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  I think you nailed the important distinction of instability of visualization. I think people that dont visualize much or at all get the wrong impression on the fidelity and stability of the ability to visualize.
  - haimez 5y ago
    I’m unconvinced, but maybe because I’m “one of those people who can’t” (no, seriously). How would you describe the limits of what you can visualize? Especially with memory, there’s a clear tendency for people to inject details upon recall and as part of the process of communication.
    - bobsmooth 5y ago
      What are the limits of what you can dream about?
      - 5y ago
kgwxd 5y ago
I can't visualize complex things very clearly, but I have no doubt that I can "see" something simple like a white square on a black background, and "manipulate" it voluntarily. I can do stuff more complex than that too but I image if aphantasia is a thing, those people couldn't even do something that simple.
- michrassena 5y ago
  I'm not sure myself. Growing up, I remember being frustrated anytime I was asked to imagine something. I imagined what other people's imaginations were capable of, which seemed like so much more. Where reading a book would lead to a movie playing in your mind's eye. But still, I can see a short column of numbers and add them, move the carry, etc. But it never seemed like the visualizers could.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    In my experience, "a movie playing" wouldn't be the right description. I never have a super clear image of characters in my head. More like a vague cartoony idea that can morph drastically through-out the book or even when re-reading. Once I see a movie though, I'd have to force the imaginary version back. Without effort, it's probably the actor in my head, but still not super clear. Environmental descriptions seem a littler clearer and consistent, both man-made stuff, like buildings and vehicles, and nature, but still nowhere near stable.
    - kgwxd 5y ago
      One thing I just realized is that, when it comes to audio, I can both imagine and recall far more clearly than anything visual. And, now that I think about it, it feels 100 times more clear. Can you "hear" in your head?
      - michrassena 5y ago
        I sometimes get portions of songs stuck in my head for a day or two, but otherwise no music unless I'm really tired. The depiction of hearing someone else's voice when reading a letter from them always fell flat with me.
abathur 5y ago
We all have this moment. I'm not sure asking someone to draw "a helicopter" or "a bicycle" (inherently an abstraction) is a good way to get non-nonsense simplifications. It's like asking for "a face" and expecting something that isn't cartoonish? Also, I doubt all non-aphantasiacs can draw tolerably. That said, I do sort of assume it's a spectrum, and that there's a similar-ish 1-10% of people on the far end who visualize very well. Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can?
- thfuran 5y ago
  >Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can? That is not a task that requires the ability to visualize.
  - WillDaSilva 5y ago
    Neither does drawing one, as shown by the numerous artists (painters, illustrators, etc.) with aphantasia.
warent 5y ago
My experience of visualization is like this: focus on your peripheral vision, and that's what my whole vision becomes like--peripheral. Then another layer of peripheral-like focused vision is on top of it featuring things that aren't really there. it's unclear and always morphing
actinium226 5y ago
Their visualizations are fine but most people haven't trained in the fine motor skills required to produce a compelling image. Visualization and ability to draw are separate. The latter can be trained, and I imagine that if I learned to draw better I would probably visualize more accurately, but I am convinced that the limiting factor in my ability to draw a bicycle is my lack of ability to draw and not my lack of visualization.
etrevino 5y ago
Art is a skill that has to be developed, though. People who are talented artists weren't born being able to draw or paint. So if someone is untrained them just drawing "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" may be because they're concerned to convey the idea of a bike. In any case, at least some people do have visualizations. There are artists that can look at something and then draw it from memory. For myself-- and I'm a fairly talented amateur-- I can see nothing in my head as I also have aphantasia. I can draw nothing from memory. When I draw something from scratch I'm having to build it on the paper and I can never repeat a drawing. Aside from my anecdata there's another key piece here that the article mentions: people with aphantasia lack voluntary visualizations: they can still have them involuntarily, such as when they dream. I know I get pictures in my head when I dream. It's an experience that's quite distinct from the normal day to day blackness in my mind's eye.
phonypc 5y ago
Where would one see things other than in their mind? The visual field isn't an accurate representation of reality. It's constructed by the brain. I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  But your drawing of a helicopter would be better if you were looking at one. That's what I'm trying to get at - you aren't looking at a helicopter if you don't have a picture in front of you, otherwise your drawing wouldn't get better. Are you visualizing a weird looking helicopter or do you think you're visualizing while actually not?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Being able to visualize doesn't mean being able to visualize everything you've ever seen perfectly. I have friends who work on helicopters (technical work behind the scenes, engineering stuffs), some who could draw a detailed helicopter (happen to be excellent at technical drawing) and some who couldn't (like me, lousy artists). And if you're not familiar with the object, it will be even harder to draw it accurately (even if you are a good artist).
  - phonypc 5y ago
    No, my drawing would be quite awful either way. With a picture for reference, it might be more "accurate" in the sense of discrete details, like say it has two blades while my imagined one had four, but I wouldn't be any better at drawing the relative dimensions or shape. In this scenario, I happened to visualize (rather accurately, after checking) an AH-64. Not some abstract helicopter concept.
  - cjameskeller 5y ago
    I'm someone who can copy a picture or scene in front of me to near photo-realism level of detail, but usually makes cartoon-like pictures without a reference. I can visualize 3-D Tetris blocks in my head and rotate them at will, and read off information (like, if letters were assigned to the faces of the blocks, I could spin the whole chunk around and read off according to instructions). I think the main difference here is due to two factors: 1. Time investment, and behind that, 2. Contextual demands. With a reference, one may feel more _expected_ to produce a high-fidelity drawing, and take the appropriate time. But if someone simply asks, "Draw a horse", I would usually try to make a basic outline, and not worry too much about the details. The difference between a photo-realistic drawing, and one that is like a child's, is tens of hours of focused work, because reality is very easy to picture for many people, but reproducing that level of detail requires a lot of pencil-strokes.
bobsmooth 5y ago
It's really like explaining vision to a blind person. It's kinda like dreaming if you could control the dream.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  Eh I wouldn't say it's necessarily like lucid dreaming. My lucid dreams were much more stable than visualizations, maybe because in a dream I'm not distracted by the outside world.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I live with someone who has Aphantasia, when they recall their dreams it's in the form of 'words', not images. They have no concept of 'visual dreams'.
michrassena 5y ago
I think you're on to something with how people describe their experience of visualizing. On the one hand, I don't doubt there are artists and architects who can visualization clearly, or musicians who hear music and can transcribe what they hear. But I can't help but think the description of these capabilities are exaggerated for the majority of the population. I've asked someone to visualize a house then asked them how many windows it has. They didn't have a answer. This isn't any different from what I'd say. I can try to imagine an apple. I know it's red. I know there's a stem and a green leaf on the stem. I know the shape of a Macintosh, with the wide top narrowing at the base. But the serrations and veins of the leaf, I'm not sure of. And I'm fairly confident that most people who claim to be able to visualize couldn't describe the leaf well enough to distinguish it as an apple leaf and not some idealized idea of a leaf. Could they describe it well enough that an artist could draw it?
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  For me the visualization loses precision in the periphery. And if I focus on one part of the house then switch to focus on another part and then return, things won’t be the same. It’s not stable. So answering the question “how many windows” changes from moment to moment. I’m not saying everyone is this way, but I am.
  - michrassena 5y ago
    That's interesting. To the degree I can visualize, it's the same for me.
- cjameskeller 5y ago
  I think some of this comes down to the way the question is asked. If you asked me to imagine "a house", I would have a somewhat abstract, child-like template in mind. Some of that would be due to expectation -- that you probably will have me do something with respect to the _concept_ of a house, rather than asking details of it. If you asked me to picture, instead "a specific house, perhaps one on your street", then it would be a detailed image, and I could easily count the windows, give the colors of roof, siding, and trim, etc. But I suppose thinking about it now, I couldn't even in that case provide you with the number of rows of siding on the house. It's something I would imagine one could do with practice, but the brain seems to naturally drop some level of detail when recalling or imagining an object.
light_hue_1 5y ago
> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. For two reasons. One. They actually have the wrong mental model of the machines and really imagine them incorrectly. Basically, they've never paid attention to the details, so they get them wrong mentally, but because they aren't sure anyway so they never notice a discrepancy. If they had to rebuild the machine, that's the mess they would probably build unless they stopped to really think about it. Two. They don't know how to draw. One aspect of learning to draw from memory is to learn how to focus on specific detailed areas and then build out. You need to train this skill before you can do it well. > 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. As you learn to draw, if you have a good imagination, you begin to learn how to interrogate your mental images systematically. To rotate the drawing, focus in on specific details, etc.
mikelevins 5y ago
"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." Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things. Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that. If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing. If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy. I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week. Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try. A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen. The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-figure-out-what-you-see-while-youre-dreaming-15553304/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig... Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is. For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.
salamanderman 5y ago
This reminds me of a friend I had who was born with one eye, and would swear up and down that binocular depth perception basically doesn't actually exist. You don't have to feel like you've missed out in life, but you also don't need to act smug about yourself either. Even if I'm looking directly at a thing, trying to do a still life, I can't draw for crap. Visualization and drawing ability are not the same thing.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Another commenter provided a link that I should have[1]. My point is not about drawing ability but that having access to pictures dramatically changes the kind of things people draw. Unless you're a bike mechanic, or unusually attentive, you probably don't really know what a bike looks like or how it works. You have some of the basic ideas but not enough to wire it together. So, when people draw a bicycle from memory what they draw doesn't really make sense from a mechanical perspective. The bikes they draw couldn't work. It's not about being good or bad at drawing, it's a question of "are you poorly drawing a workable bike, or are you poorly drawing a nonsense contraption?" If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct. As you cannot you just draw the same abstractions that I might. e.g. I know there are handlebars, pedals, wheels, connected together by metal poles. The fact that your drawing would be very different if you had a photo of the bike in front of you when you were drawing, no matter the objective quality, tells me that you probably don't have a picture of the bike available to you in your mind. Regarding your one eyed friend, the solution is pretty simple. Demonstrate what you can do with binocular vision that he cannot with ocular vision. I assume you could estimate distances better, throw more accurately, similarly describe three-d visuals as someone else, etc. If you couldn't actually do anything to differentiate your binocular vision from your friend's vision then I'd say he has a point. Same argument applies to aphantasia. If phantasia people really do have a mind's eye, I'd expect them to have some ability that aphantasia people lack. As is, I doubt that it's a real phenomenon. 1 - https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
  - 5y ago
hosh 5y ago
My wife has aphantasia. She knows she has aphantasia. It isn’t that she gets no visuals in her head at all. It sometimes happen on their own. But she does not know how to voluntarily do it. So she knows that other people are capable of visualizing even if she cannot. When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting. I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually “seeing” it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger. Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They can’t visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
- sneak 5y ago
  > It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. In the industrialized west we simply call that "doing drugs".
  - hosh 5y ago
    I live and work in the industrialized west, and that characterization misses a lot of things.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Ingesting DMT is doing drugs, no matter how much hippie shaman woo or "traditional herbal medicine" adjectival touch-ups one sprinkles on top. This isn't derogatory, but let's call a spade a spade. I would like there to be less stigma around doing drugs. The stigma around boring ones like THC is already starting to fade. There never seemed to be any around the most commonly used drugs (nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine) in the first place, despite all of their massive harm (alcohol and the inhaled combustion byproducts involved in smoking primarily). Pretending that hallucinogens are some special "medicine" in a different class than someone with an anxiety disorder slamming a double rye neat after work (or a double espresso beforehand, or a smoke on their lunch break) is doing neither drug user any favors. We are all drug users.
holoduke 5y ago
I am absolutely sure that I can visualize images. But I can also visualize sound. What do you visualize? Just words? Must be some kind of image, sound or something.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  My mental experience is something like a voice that rapidly narrates my every thought at all times (and is indeed reading along with me as or slightly before I type this). Saying "narrates my every thought" is kind of a weird construction because those essentially are my thoughts not just narration. I also have what I think of as a separate thread that is barely at the edge of awareness and has thoughts that aren't quite words but more like feelings. There are no images of any kind that accompany any of this nor a black void on which images might be rendered. In another comment I likened it to reading a book. When I read a book that voice is just enunciating the stream of text instead of my thoughts (except when I get distracted and the internal voice starts narrating my thoughts again).
  - mikelevins 5y ago
    So, for contrast, my mental experience is mainly visual with some other constructed senses, and intermittent verbalizations. Sometimes the verbalizations are sentences. Sometimes they're phrases, or single words. Sometimes they're entirely absent. Sometimes my mental experience is something I might call spatializations, rather than visualizations, especially when I'm solving problems with data structures. These will be 3-dimensional spatial arrangements of symbolic objects without any specific shapes, colors, or textures. I've been a programmer and a technical writer for a little over thirty years. I have a lot of practice converting my thoughts into words. It's pretty much always a distinct conversion process, though. I usually cannot speak my thoughts because they mostly aren't words. I have to go through a process of translation to represent them as words.
screye 5y ago
> I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things I can't imagine not visualizing things. My undergrad was in mechanical engg, so it was kinda central to our field. Imagining a 2d machine drawing as a 3d figure, imagining the interactions between various moving parts or system of joints and levers is expected of you. The way I think reflects the visualization itself. Usually, it takes quite long to 'load' a complex system in your head and visualize it. But after it is done, I can describe intricate details of it. I also get irrationally irritated when someone interrupts me in the 'loading' phase, cuz I have to start all over again. For a similar reason, I have a very natural affinity to graphs = undirected-trees and flow charts as they serve as a visual representation of what is a symbolic relationship. I am also completely unable to recall language or isolated-facts perfectly, but can do the same for visual systems. I am famously 'the whiteboard guy' at what is now an ML job, so I can believe that not everyone thinks of these systems visually. But, visual intuition in some form is and has always been core to how to how I understand stuff. > Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? In my case, the key points of interaction are visualized clearly. (eg: point of contact for gears, or a joint, or multi head attention on a single node). The rest is invisible in an out of focus sort of way, like things in our peripheral vision are out of focus and practically invisible, but you're still seeing them. > I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I maintain that vision is a crutch. It helps develop an easy to grok intuition, that works within the realm of visible way you'd think of interacting with the system. True intuition of things requires moving away from the visual intuition, and one that is grounded purely in the key axioms of that idea itself. An example would be us thinking of differentiation as slope of a curve. The visual grounding is helpful but a more axiomatic understanding would allow you to grok concepts like [1], where the slop method falls short. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM
- doliveira 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia, but I didn't struggle at all in my Engineering or Physics undergrads. I guess can visualize the abstract aspects of it, if it makes any sense? Kinda like I'd imagine having a Daredevil-like radar sense would feel, or Toph's sense in Avatar. I can kind of have a feeling for shapes, movement, position without the sight itself.
rags2riches 5y ago
People who can't draw typically don't draw what they see (or visualize). They draw symbols or icons. To draw a face, they draw a mouth, a nose and a couple of eyes. A house is a box with a door and some windows, etc. Pretty much everything they draw for the first time will be goofy, unless they can fall back on a standardized set of icons they have picked up from other drawings. They just don't have the skill to go from what they visualize to a drawing without the reduction to icons in between.
vidarh 5y ago
I have aphantasia, but I don't doubt that people actually do visualize things, for two reasons: 1. Dreams. I have "after-images" of dreams for brief moments after I wake up, but then rapidly fade, as do memories of what happened in the dreams unless I quickly make sure to fix memories of specific details in memory by thinking about them after I wake up. And so I have memories of having the dreams and seeing images in them, though I can't recall the dreams themselves. 2. I've meditated for years, and once I had an experience where I suddenly could see clearly, as if I was on a movie-set. Everything was clear. I could turn around and see what was around me. I was lucid - I could have fallen asleep for a moment, it's possible, but I was controlling the "camera", and I was fully aware it was not real, which sets it apart from most dreams for me. It was also a far clearer image than I recall from dreams. I call it a "movie set" because it was clear to me it was not real and it felt like a "replay" of events happening around me that I was not taking part in, which also does not match how dreams feel to me. 3. I occasionally see very brief, fuzzy flashes. E.g. in writing #1 above, I for a fraction of a second saw a flash of my grandparents cabin, which was the subject of a weird recurring nightmare I used to have where on one side of the cabin it was sunny, while on the other side there was a torrential downpour that eventually became a wall of green water. I can describe the cabin in great detail, but I can only see that very brief flash of an image, even that inconsistently. So, I know my brain can create visuals of different fidelity under different circumstances. At the same time, when I "visualise" things, the "visualisations" are entirely spatial, not visual, and I can reproduce abstract drawings with a level of precision that I can't copy if I sit down in front of something and try to draw it. I remember a particular time in school (as I type that, I can recall the layout of the class-room, down to where I sat, how we were seated in groups of four, what the desks and chairs looked like, but I can't see it) where we were given the task of doing two drawings of our shoes: For one we were to draw purely from memory. For the other we were to put a shoe in front of us and copy it. My drawing from memory was very precise. I remembered almost exactly what my shoe looked like, and drew a stylised and precise representation of the concept of that shoe that incorporated most details of it. My drawing from having it front of me was far more fuzzy and impressionist, with lots of imprecision and imperfections that were not there in the stylised drawing from memory. But it looked more like the real-life shoe. My point being that I see no reason for you to assume that how people draw things are linked to their ability to visualise the thing. I can draw things I can't visualise in ways that are many ways better than how I can draw things sitting on my desk in front of me, but in some ways worse. I think it is in part because the lack of visual recall forces me to compensate by learning the details of something. E.g. another comment asked about number of windows in their house. Well, I can't see my house, but I can "spatially walk around it" and count, but if I do I quickly realise that if I could visualise the house it'd likely be fuzzy in parts because I need to think about certain rooms because I mostly see the house from the inside and in some rooms the curtains towards the road are usually drawn shut. I see no reason why someone would accurately be able to recall or visualise most objects, because most of the time we don't really look at objects properly. People superficially pay attention to just some details and never bother to actually fully take in enough detail to ever remember an object the way it actually looks. So when you say other people think they have a visualisation but do not, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion: People don't have an accurate memory, as you point out. And whether or not it is limited that way for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that visualisation is limited by recall and imagination, and that you can't "test" whether or not people can produce visualisations by judging their ability to recall an object precisely.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Claim to? We just do. Why can‘t we draw perfect helicopters from mind? The same reason most can’t draw a perfect helicopter when having one in front of them.
Kiro 5y ago
This comment reads like a blind person arguing that everyone else is blind as well. For seeing people it's just nonsense. You're clearly in denial.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  "I have this magical ability. I can generate the feeling of warmth whenever I want." "Oh neat, you can mentally generate warmth and we can measure with a thermometer!" "No, no. It's mental warmth only." "Okay, so you never get cold?" "Well, no, true cold overwhelms my mental warmth, I get cold as easily as anyone else." "But, you could make yourself sweat on demand, right?" "No, sweating is a response to actual warmth..." That's what it's like in this thread. People claim to have an ability that produces no actual difference. Elsewhere in this thread we see that mental imagery folks aren't better at shape rotation (they're worse), they can't draw from their images the way the could from real images, their mental imagery is vague, low resolution, and imprecise. A blind person easily discovers the sighted can do things they cannot. Read text, spot distant objects, etc. A person with aphantasia discovers there is nothing the visualizer can do that they cannot. How could this be so? I think you're just confused about which of us the blind one is.
  - alpha_squared 5y ago
    You're looking for concrete proof of something that happens in people's minds, but you go about it by evidence of how well they transpose that into other things (like drawing). I think brain scans could be that proof, but I suspect your disbelief may not be satisfied.
  - Kiro 5y ago
    The point is not that it's superior to your experience. The point is that you saying "you can't do it either" is so obviously false. We know what we experience. Someone telling me I can't see images in my head is like someone telling me I'm blind. With that said, I actually can't phantom how I would function without mental imagery. How do you recognize things? How do memories play out in your head? How do you even know where to put "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" in your drawing if you can't visualize it? It feels like I would be completely handicapped and not far from being blind for real or having amnesia. However, I presume you're a functioning individual so I guess I'm equally surprised but from the other end.
aufhebung 5y ago
Can you hear in your head? If you can hear someone else's voice in your head can you reproduce it in your own vocal chords? If you can hear a song played on guitar can you fret the correct frets and pluck the correct strings? I will agree that there is probably some trickery going on in the minds eye; I can see parts of images created in great detail, but I doubt that detail existed before I looked for it.
lookACamel 5y ago
Does "mindbleach" make sense to you? I suppose you do not experience the phenomenon of having disturbing imagery "stuck in your head"?
ralfd 5y ago
How do you masturbate (without video stimulation)? Do you make up a story/setting? How do you visualize an attractive nude body without visualizing?
kymaz 5y ago
To do math, I may literally visualize the numbers in my head, like an extra piece of paper I can manipulate numbers on, but it's not literal paper so it doesn't have to conform to annoying IRL properties like fixed transparency and permanent ink that can't be slid around. It gets difficult to do more than simple calculus and algebra problems purely in my head, so I start offloading parts of my virtual workspace to a meatspace page.
HKH2 5y ago
How do police sketches work? If a person is describing who or what they saw, are they only recalling metadata or ascribed properties?

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
1_player 5y ago
You can't simply say to "learn" to cure yourself from aphantasia and leave it at that. Please elaborate.
- godDLL 5y ago
  The way you learn anything. 0_o You need a journal. You need deliberate practice. You need progressive goals. I did about 5 minutes every 2 to 10 days. First, no other thoughts. I did mindful boxed breathing for about 3-4 minutes. Then, a point. Something that is in a spot. Then two points. Something like a distance. When you have that, advance to a triangle. Then colored triangle. Then a pyramid that you spin around, coloring different faces in different colors. That alone took about 6 months of practice. Then it gets easier.
  - yodon 5y ago
    I also did this process, but my experience was different. When I first realized that others could visualize things and I could not. I practiced trying to visualize a simple cube for months, relaxing and meditating as you did. Then one day I actually saw something. I was fully awake, and I saw a crystal clear image of a large granite slab, slowly rotating. I could see the texture of the surface, the physical detail of the shape. It was a truly amazing experience, the likes of which I had never experienced. And then I had what was the most frightening thought I've ever had: "I don't know how to make this thing go away - what if I can't make it go away? Have I just taught and meditated myself into psychosis? Oh shit!!!" I then pulled out of the visualization (no idea how that happened, it just ended with no fanfare, presumably as I started to think about other things) and have never seen another mental image like that, even though I've tried. This happened perhaps ten years ago. That experience was not entirely unlike my experience with lucid dreaming some years earlier. I essentially never dreamed (never recalled my dreams), but I read all about lucid dreaming, thought about it, and used Richard Feynman's dream study approach to try to focus on it. Then one night I had a lucid dream, and the next night, and the next. Each night for almost a week I had an incredibly vivid lucid dream, absolutely amazing experiences, waking up the next morning with full recall of it and feeling exhausted and entirely unrefreshed from my sleep. At the end of that week I had a final dream. In that final dream the subject of my dream was the realization that I couldn't lucid dream any more. I never had another lucid dream, and have almost never remembered any dreams since then. The hardware is clearly there for this stuff, at least in my case, but it seems the OS is also clearly working to "protect" me from some of those hardware features. Given that there absolutely are people who are subject to uncontrolled hallucinations and mental breakdowns between the real and the imaginary, I've concluded that at least for my mind these experiences are too close to the boundary for whatever circuitry protects me from that sort of breakdown. Others will have their own journeys, but for me based on my personal experiences I've concluded it's not a case of the mind "can't" it's a case of the mind "shouldn't" or "wont." As with any extreme training, be careful not to injure yourself. You might be fine, but not everyone who engages in extreme training does so without injury. I'm glad to have walked away from the process safely and can easily imagine not having done so.
godDLL 5y ago
You know what, I just might do a training app for you all. After all, I know a thing or two about that.

smt88 5y ago

> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. Can you accurately draw something while looking at a photo of it? Most people can't. Seeing something and drawing it are obviously different skills. What you may not understand about other people's mental visualizations is that they're somewhat fuzzy and unstable. It's very difficult to zoom in and out or to focus on the details. The better you know something, the better you can visualize it. There are also degrees of the ability -- some people are very good, and some aren't. > Other people think they have a visualization but do not. I know someone with aphantasia, and he was confused about whether or not he had it for a long time. I think this makes sense: you can't imagine being 100% certain you see something in your mind because it's a "sense" that you don't possess, so you assume other people aren't certain. I assure you that you're absolutely wrong. I am absolutely certain I see things in my mind and that it's common for people to be able to do so (with varying degrees of stability, accuracy, clarity, etc.). Especially faces, I can see them very clearly. It is somewhat a function of memory.

FPGAhacker 5y ago
I think you nailed the important distinction of instability of visualization. I think people that dont visualize much or at all get the wrong impression on the fidelity and stability of the ability to visualize.
- haimez 5y ago
  I’m unconvinced, but maybe because I’m “one of those people who can’t” (no, seriously). How would you describe the limits of what you can visualize? Especially with memory, there’s a clear tendency for people to inject details upon recall and as part of the process of communication.
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    What are the limits of what you can dream about?
    - 5y ago

kgwxd 5y ago

I can't visualize complex things very clearly, but I have no doubt that I can "see" something simple like a white square on a black background, and "manipulate" it voluntarily. I can do stuff more complex than that too but I image if aphantasia is a thing, those people couldn't even do something that simple.

michrassena 5y ago
I'm not sure myself. Growing up, I remember being frustrated anytime I was asked to imagine something. I imagined what other people's imaginations were capable of, which seemed like so much more. Where reading a book would lead to a movie playing in your mind's eye. But still, I can see a short column of numbers and add them, move the carry, etc. But it never seemed like the visualizers could.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  In my experience, "a movie playing" wouldn't be the right description. I never have a super clear image of characters in my head. More like a vague cartoony idea that can morph drastically through-out the book or even when re-reading. Once I see a movie though, I'd have to force the imaginary version back. Without effort, it's probably the actor in my head, but still not super clear. Environmental descriptions seem a littler clearer and consistent, both man-made stuff, like buildings and vehicles, and nature, but still nowhere near stable.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    One thing I just realized is that, when it comes to audio, I can both imagine and recall far more clearly than anything visual. And, now that I think about it, it feels 100 times more clear. Can you "hear" in your head?
    - michrassena 5y ago
      I sometimes get portions of songs stuck in my head for a day or two, but otherwise no music unless I'm really tired. The depiction of hearing someone else's voice when reading a letter from them always fell flat with me.

abathur 5y ago

We all have this moment. I'm not sure asking someone to draw "a helicopter" or "a bicycle" (inherently an abstraction) is a good way to get non-nonsense simplifications. It's like asking for "a face" and expecting something that isn't cartoonish? Also, I doubt all non-aphantasiacs can draw tolerably. That said, I do sort of assume it's a spectrum, and that there's a similar-ish 1-10% of people on the far end who visualize very well. Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can?

thfuran 5y ago
>Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can? That is not a task that requires the ability to visualize.
- WillDaSilva 5y ago
  Neither does drawing one, as shown by the numerous artists (painters, illustrators, etc.) with aphantasia.

warent 5y ago

My experience of visualization is like this: focus on your peripheral vision, and that's what my whole vision becomes like--peripheral. Then another layer of peripheral-like focused vision is on top of it featuring things that aren't really there. it's unclear and always morphing

actinium226 5y ago

Their visualizations are fine but most people haven't trained in the fine motor skills required to produce a compelling image. Visualization and ability to draw are separate. The latter can be trained, and I imagine that if I learned to draw better I would probably visualize more accurately, but I am convinced that the limiting factor in my ability to draw a bicycle is my lack of ability to draw and not my lack of visualization.

etrevino 5y ago

Art is a skill that has to be developed, though. People who are talented artists weren't born being able to draw or paint. So if someone is untrained them just drawing "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" may be because they're concerned to convey the idea of a bike. In any case, at least some people do have visualizations. There are artists that can look at something and then draw it from memory. For myself-- and I'm a fairly talented amateur-- I can see nothing in my head as I also have aphantasia. I can draw nothing from memory. When I draw something from scratch I'm having to build it on the paper and I can never repeat a drawing. Aside from my anecdata there's another key piece here that the article mentions: people with aphantasia lack voluntary visualizations: they can still have them involuntarily, such as when they dream. I know I get pictures in my head when I dream. It's an experience that's quite distinct from the normal day to day blackness in my mind's eye.

phonypc 5y ago

Where would one see things other than in their mind? The visual field isn't an accurate representation of reality. It's constructed by the brain. I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.

ALittleLight 5y ago
But your drawing of a helicopter would be better if you were looking at one. That's what I'm trying to get at - you aren't looking at a helicopter if you don't have a picture in front of you, otherwise your drawing wouldn't get better. Are you visualizing a weird looking helicopter or do you think you're visualizing while actually not?
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Being able to visualize doesn't mean being able to visualize everything you've ever seen perfectly. I have friends who work on helicopters (technical work behind the scenes, engineering stuffs), some who could draw a detailed helicopter (happen to be excellent at technical drawing) and some who couldn't (like me, lousy artists). And if you're not familiar with the object, it will be even harder to draw it accurately (even if you are a good artist).
- phonypc 5y ago
  No, my drawing would be quite awful either way. With a picture for reference, it might be more "accurate" in the sense of discrete details, like say it has two blades while my imagined one had four, but I wouldn't be any better at drawing the relative dimensions or shape. In this scenario, I happened to visualize (rather accurately, after checking) an AH-64. Not some abstract helicopter concept.
- cjameskeller 5y ago
  I'm someone who can copy a picture or scene in front of me to near photo-realism level of detail, but usually makes cartoon-like pictures without a reference. I can visualize 3-D Tetris blocks in my head and rotate them at will, and read off information (like, if letters were assigned to the faces of the blocks, I could spin the whole chunk around and read off according to instructions). I think the main difference here is due to two factors: 1. Time investment, and behind that, 2. Contextual demands. With a reference, one may feel more _expected_ to produce a high-fidelity drawing, and take the appropriate time. But if someone simply asks, "Draw a horse", I would usually try to make a basic outline, and not worry too much about the details. The difference between a photo-realistic drawing, and one that is like a child's, is tens of hours of focused work, because reality is very easy to picture for many people, but reproducing that level of detail requires a lot of pencil-strokes.

bobsmooth 5y ago

It's really like explaining vision to a blind person. It's kinda like dreaming if you could control the dream.

cercatrova 5y ago
Eh I wouldn't say it's necessarily like lucid dreaming. My lucid dreams were much more stable than visualizations, maybe because in a dream I'm not distracted by the outside world.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
I live with someone who has Aphantasia, when they recall their dreams it's in the form of 'words', not images. They have no concept of 'visual dreams'.

michrassena 5y ago

I think you're on to something with how people describe their experience of visualizing. On the one hand, I don't doubt there are artists and architects who can visualization clearly, or musicians who hear music and can transcribe what they hear. But I can't help but think the description of these capabilities are exaggerated for the majority of the population. I've asked someone to visualize a house then asked them how many windows it has. They didn't have a answer. This isn't any different from what I'd say. I can try to imagine an apple. I know it's red. I know there's a stem and a green leaf on the stem. I know the shape of a Macintosh, with the wide top narrowing at the base. But the serrations and veins of the leaf, I'm not sure of. And I'm fairly confident that most people who claim to be able to visualize couldn't describe the leaf well enough to distinguish it as an apple leaf and not some idealized idea of a leaf. Could they describe it well enough that an artist could draw it?

FPGAhacker 5y ago
For me the visualization loses precision in the periphery. And if I focus on one part of the house then switch to focus on another part and then return, things won’t be the same. It’s not stable. So answering the question “how many windows” changes from moment to moment. I’m not saying everyone is this way, but I am.
- michrassena 5y ago
  That's interesting. To the degree I can visualize, it's the same for me.
cjameskeller 5y ago
I think some of this comes down to the way the question is asked. If you asked me to imagine "a house", I would have a somewhat abstract, child-like template in mind. Some of that would be due to expectation -- that you probably will have me do something with respect to the _concept_ of a house, rather than asking details of it. If you asked me to picture, instead "a specific house, perhaps one on your street", then it would be a detailed image, and I could easily count the windows, give the colors of roof, siding, and trim, etc. But I suppose thinking about it now, I couldn't even in that case provide you with the number of rows of siding on the house. It's something I would imagine one could do with practice, but the brain seems to naturally drop some level of detail when recalling or imagining an object.

light_hue_1 5y ago

> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. For two reasons. One. They actually have the wrong mental model of the machines and really imagine them incorrectly. Basically, they've never paid attention to the details, so they get them wrong mentally, but because they aren't sure anyway so they never notice a discrepancy. If they had to rebuild the machine, that's the mess they would probably build unless they stopped to really think about it. Two. They don't know how to draw. One aspect of learning to draw from memory is to learn how to focus on specific detailed areas and then build out. You need to train this skill before you can do it well. > 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. As you learn to draw, if you have a good imagination, you begin to learn how to interrogate your mental images systematically. To rotate the drawing, focus in on specific details, etc.

mikelevins 5y ago

"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." Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things. Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that. If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing. If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy. I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week. Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try. A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen. The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-figure-out-what-you-see-while-youre-dreaming-15553304/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig... Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is. For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.

salamanderman 5y ago

This reminds me of a friend I had who was born with one eye, and would swear up and down that binocular depth perception basically doesn't actually exist. You don't have to feel like you've missed out in life, but you also don't need to act smug about yourself either. Even if I'm looking directly at a thing, trying to do a still life, I can't draw for crap. Visualization and drawing ability are not the same thing.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Another commenter provided a link that I should have[1]. My point is not about drawing ability but that having access to pictures dramatically changes the kind of things people draw. Unless you're a bike mechanic, or unusually attentive, you probably don't really know what a bike looks like or how it works. You have some of the basic ideas but not enough to wire it together. So, when people draw a bicycle from memory what they draw doesn't really make sense from a mechanical perspective. The bikes they draw couldn't work. It's not about being good or bad at drawing, it's a question of "are you poorly drawing a workable bike, or are you poorly drawing a nonsense contraption?" If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct. As you cannot you just draw the same abstractions that I might. e.g. I know there are handlebars, pedals, wheels, connected together by metal poles. The fact that your drawing would be very different if you had a photo of the bike in front of you when you were drawing, no matter the objective quality, tells me that you probably don't have a picture of the bike available to you in your mind. Regarding your one eyed friend, the solution is pretty simple. Demonstrate what you can do with binocular vision that he cannot with ocular vision. I assume you could estimate distances better, throw more accurately, similarly describe three-d visuals as someone else, etc. If you couldn't actually do anything to differentiate your binocular vision from your friend's vision then I'd say he has a point. Same argument applies to aphantasia. If phantasia people really do have a mind's eye, I'd expect them to have some ability that aphantasia people lack. As is, I doubt that it's a real phenomenon. 1 - https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
- 5y ago

hosh 5y ago

My wife has aphantasia. She knows she has aphantasia. It isn’t that she gets no visuals in her head at all. It sometimes happen on their own. But she does not know how to voluntarily do it. So she knows that other people are capable of visualizing even if she cannot. When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting. I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually “seeing” it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger. Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They can’t visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

sneak 5y ago
> It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. In the industrialized west we simply call that "doing drugs".
- hosh 5y ago
  I live and work in the industrialized west, and that characterization misses a lot of things.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Ingesting DMT is doing drugs, no matter how much hippie shaman woo or "traditional herbal medicine" adjectival touch-ups one sprinkles on top. This isn't derogatory, but let's call a spade a spade. I would like there to be less stigma around doing drugs. The stigma around boring ones like THC is already starting to fade. There never seemed to be any around the most commonly used drugs (nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine) in the first place, despite all of their massive harm (alcohol and the inhaled combustion byproducts involved in smoking primarily). Pretending that hallucinogens are some special "medicine" in a different class than someone with an anxiety disorder slamming a double rye neat after work (or a double espresso beforehand, or a smoke on their lunch break) is doing neither drug user any favors. We are all drug users.

holoduke 5y ago

I am absolutely sure that I can visualize images. But I can also visualize sound. What do you visualize? Just words? Must be some kind of image, sound or something.

ALittleLight 5y ago
My mental experience is something like a voice that rapidly narrates my every thought at all times (and is indeed reading along with me as or slightly before I type this). Saying "narrates my every thought" is kind of a weird construction because those essentially are my thoughts not just narration. I also have what I think of as a separate thread that is barely at the edge of awareness and has thoughts that aren't quite words but more like feelings. There are no images of any kind that accompany any of this nor a black void on which images might be rendered. In another comment I likened it to reading a book. When I read a book that voice is just enunciating the stream of text instead of my thoughts (except when I get distracted and the internal voice starts narrating my thoughts again).
- mikelevins 5y ago
  So, for contrast, my mental experience is mainly visual with some other constructed senses, and intermittent verbalizations. Sometimes the verbalizations are sentences. Sometimes they're phrases, or single words. Sometimes they're entirely absent. Sometimes my mental experience is something I might call spatializations, rather than visualizations, especially when I'm solving problems with data structures. These will be 3-dimensional spatial arrangements of symbolic objects without any specific shapes, colors, or textures. I've been a programmer and a technical writer for a little over thirty years. I have a lot of practice converting my thoughts into words. It's pretty much always a distinct conversion process, though. I usually cannot speak my thoughts because they mostly aren't words. I have to go through a process of translation to represent them as words.

screye 5y ago

> I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things I can't imagine not visualizing things. My undergrad was in mechanical engg, so it was kinda central to our field. Imagining a 2d machine drawing as a 3d figure, imagining the interactions between various moving parts or system of joints and levers is expected of you. The way I think reflects the visualization itself. Usually, it takes quite long to 'load' a complex system in your head and visualize it. But after it is done, I can describe intricate details of it. I also get irrationally irritated when someone interrupts me in the 'loading' phase, cuz I have to start all over again. For a similar reason, I have a very natural affinity to graphs = undirected-trees and flow charts as they serve as a visual representation of what is a symbolic relationship. I am also completely unable to recall language or isolated-facts perfectly, but can do the same for visual systems. I am famously 'the whiteboard guy' at what is now an ML job, so I can believe that not everyone thinks of these systems visually. But, visual intuition in some form is and has always been core to how to how I understand stuff. > Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? In my case, the key points of interaction are visualized clearly. (eg: point of contact for gears, or a joint, or multi head attention on a single node). The rest is invisible in an out of focus sort of way, like things in our peripheral vision are out of focus and practically invisible, but you're still seeing them. > I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I maintain that vision is a crutch. It helps develop an easy to grok intuition, that works within the realm of visible way you'd think of interacting with the system. True intuition of things requires moving away from the visual intuition, and one that is grounded purely in the key axioms of that idea itself. An example would be us thinking of differentiation as slope of a curve. The visual grounding is helpful but a more axiomatic understanding would allow you to grok concepts like [1], where the slop method falls short. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM

doliveira 5y ago
I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia, but I didn't struggle at all in my Engineering or Physics undergrads. I guess can visualize the abstract aspects of it, if it makes any sense? Kinda like I'd imagine having a Daredevil-like radar sense would feel, or Toph's sense in Avatar. I can kind of have a feeling for shapes, movement, position without the sight itself.

rags2riches 5y ago

People who can't draw typically don't draw what they see (or visualize). They draw symbols or icons. To draw a face, they draw a mouth, a nose and a couple of eyes. A house is a box with a door and some windows, etc. Pretty much everything they draw for the first time will be goofy, unless they can fall back on a standardized set of icons they have picked up from other drawings. They just don't have the skill to go from what they visualize to a drawing without the reduction to icons in between.

vidarh 5y ago

I have aphantasia, but I don't doubt that people actually do visualize things, for two reasons: 1. Dreams. I have "after-images" of dreams for brief moments after I wake up, but then rapidly fade, as do memories of what happened in the dreams unless I quickly make sure to fix memories of specific details in memory by thinking about them after I wake up. And so I have memories of having the dreams and seeing images in them, though I can't recall the dreams themselves. 2. I've meditated for years, and once I had an experience where I suddenly could see clearly, as if I was on a movie-set. Everything was clear. I could turn around and see what was around me. I was lucid - I could have fallen asleep for a moment, it's possible, but I was controlling the "camera", and I was fully aware it was not real, which sets it apart from most dreams for me. It was also a far clearer image than I recall from dreams. I call it a "movie set" because it was clear to me it was not real and it felt like a "replay" of events happening around me that I was not taking part in, which also does not match how dreams feel to me. 3. I occasionally see very brief, fuzzy flashes. E.g. in writing #1 above, I for a fraction of a second saw a flash of my grandparents cabin, which was the subject of a weird recurring nightmare I used to have where on one side of the cabin it was sunny, while on the other side there was a torrential downpour that eventually became a wall of green water. I can describe the cabin in great detail, but I can only see that very brief flash of an image, even that inconsistently. So, I know my brain can create visuals of different fidelity under different circumstances. At the same time, when I "visualise" things, the "visualisations" are entirely spatial, not visual, and I can reproduce abstract drawings with a level of precision that I can't copy if I sit down in front of something and try to draw it. I remember a particular time in school (as I type that, I can recall the layout of the class-room, down to where I sat, how we were seated in groups of four, what the desks and chairs looked like, but I can't see it) where we were given the task of doing two drawings of our shoes: For one we were to draw purely from memory. For the other we were to put a shoe in front of us and copy it. My drawing from memory was very precise. I remembered almost exactly what my shoe looked like, and drew a stylised and precise representation of the concept of that shoe that incorporated most details of it. My drawing from having it front of me was far more fuzzy and impressionist, with lots of imprecision and imperfections that were not there in the stylised drawing from memory. But it looked more like the real-life shoe. My point being that I see no reason for you to assume that how people draw things are linked to their ability to visualise the thing. I can draw things I can't visualise in ways that are many ways better than how I can draw things sitting on my desk in front of me, but in some ways worse. I think it is in part because the lack of visual recall forces me to compensate by learning the details of something. E.g. another comment asked about number of windows in their house. Well, I can't see my house, but I can "spatially walk around it" and count, but if I do I quickly realise that if I could visualise the house it'd likely be fuzzy in parts because I need to think about certain rooms because I mostly see the house from the inside and in some rooms the curtains towards the road are usually drawn shut. I see no reason why someone would accurately be able to recall or visualise most objects, because most of the time we don't really look at objects properly. People superficially pay attention to just some details and never bother to actually fully take in enough detail to ever remember an object the way it actually looks. So when you say other people think they have a visualisation but do not, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion: People don't have an accurate memory, as you point out. And whether or not it is limited that way for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that visualisation is limited by recall and imagination, and that you can't "test" whether or not people can produce visualisations by judging their ability to recall an object precisely.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Claim to? We just do. Why can‘t we draw perfect helicopters from mind? The same reason most can’t draw a perfect helicopter when having one in front of them.

Kiro 5y ago

This comment reads like a blind person arguing that everyone else is blind as well. For seeing people it's just nonsense. You're clearly in denial.

ALittleLight 5y ago
"I have this magical ability. I can generate the feeling of warmth whenever I want." "Oh neat, you can mentally generate warmth and we can measure with a thermometer!" "No, no. It's mental warmth only." "Okay, so you never get cold?" "Well, no, true cold overwhelms my mental warmth, I get cold as easily as anyone else." "But, you could make yourself sweat on demand, right?" "No, sweating is a response to actual warmth..." That's what it's like in this thread. People claim to have an ability that produces no actual difference. Elsewhere in this thread we see that mental imagery folks aren't better at shape rotation (they're worse), they can't draw from their images the way the could from real images, their mental imagery is vague, low resolution, and imprecise. A blind person easily discovers the sighted can do things they cannot. Read text, spot distant objects, etc. A person with aphantasia discovers there is nothing the visualizer can do that they cannot. How could this be so? I think you're just confused about which of us the blind one is.
- alpha_squared 5y ago
  You're looking for concrete proof of something that happens in people's minds, but you go about it by evidence of how well they transpose that into other things (like drawing). I think brain scans could be that proof, but I suspect your disbelief may not be satisfied.
- Kiro 5y ago
  The point is not that it's superior to your experience. The point is that you saying "you can't do it either" is so obviously false. We know what we experience. Someone telling me I can't see images in my head is like someone telling me I'm blind. With that said, I actually can't phantom how I would function without mental imagery. How do you recognize things? How do memories play out in your head? How do you even know where to put "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" in your drawing if you can't visualize it? It feels like I would be completely handicapped and not far from being blind for real or having amnesia. However, I presume you're a functioning individual so I guess I'm equally surprised but from the other end.

aufhebung 5y ago

Can you hear in your head? If you can hear someone else's voice in your head can you reproduce it in your own vocal chords? If you can hear a song played on guitar can you fret the correct frets and pluck the correct strings? I will agree that there is probably some trickery going on in the minds eye; I can see parts of images created in great detail, but I doubt that detail existed before I looked for it.

lookACamel 5y ago

Does "mindbleach" make sense to you? I suppose you do not experience the phenomenon of having disturbing imagery "stuck in your head"?

ralfd 5y ago

How do you masturbate (without video stimulation)? Do you make up a story/setting? How do you visualize an attractive nude body without visualizing?

kymaz 5y ago

To do math, I may literally visualize the numbers in my head, like an extra piece of paper I can manipulate numbers on, but it's not literal paper so it doesn't have to conform to annoying IRL properties like fixed transparency and permanent ink that can't be slid around. It gets difficult to do more than simple calculus and algebra problems purely in my head, so I start offloading parts of my virtual workspace to a meatspace page.

HKH2 5y ago

How do police sketches work? If a person is describing who or what they saw, are they only recalling metadata or ascribed properties?