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I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind

• jstanley 5y ago
  > If you want to see what aphantasia is like look at the picture of the Apple. Now close your eyes and try to imagine the apple, seeing it mentally in your mind’s eye. If you don’t see anything, you might have aphantasia. I can imagine the apple, but I can't literally see it. Nothing I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia actually the inability to even imagine the apple?
  • DarylZero 5y ago
    Take this test: https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
    • necovek 5y ago
      Not the GP, but it was hard for me to take that test: I can describe features of a thing I am trying to imagine, but it does not show as a visual image at all. So it's all "nothing at all" all the way in the test. My first thought is "am I trying hard enough?" It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's really hard for someone with it to understand what's being asked of them. :) I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly not sure, just like the GP.
    • jstanley 5y ago
      Huh, maybe I have aphantasia too, thanks. The lowest level above "no image at all" is "Dim and vague; flat", which are not words that I would ever use to describe thoughts. But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else would use these words to describe thoughts.
      • timvdalen 5y ago
        That was my experience as well. The things in that test are not how I relate to thoughts.
    • ud_0 5y ago
      The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of mental images are. If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what? I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count? When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?
      • Jtsummers 5y ago
        > When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in front of them, that would be a hallucination.
        • ud_0 5y ago
          I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the way visualization is described. From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism. A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.
          • SamBam 5y ago
            I do think there's a difference between visualizing something clearly and not clearly, though, and this is what the test is asking. The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or different facial expressions she makes. If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up with something vague. I remember he was wearing large earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at his face, there are parts that simply won't come into focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way). So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction between visualizing things clearly and not.
    • fsflover 5y ago
      Or try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367989.
    • illwrks 5y ago
      "You have hyper-aphantasia". Makes sense as I'm a designer and can very easily visualise things, objects etc in my head.
  • fsflover 5y ago
    > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? No. See this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277.
    • jstanley 5y ago
      That thread seems to indeed suggest that people are confusing seeing something with imagining seeing something. The point about the common inability to draw an accurate bicycle seems to prove it.
      • Jtsummers 5y ago
        That point actually proved nothing. It demonstrated that there's a distinction between: 1. Ability to visualize 2. Accuracy of memory 3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings Those aren't one thing, it's a combination of things. The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save their lives. It says nothing about their ability to visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and ability to draw.
        • jstanley 5y ago
          The people who had trouble drawing a bicycle from memory would presumably have no problem connecting the right parts if they had a bicycle in front of them, which suggests they are not accurately visualising a bicycle.
          • Jtsummers 5y ago
            Right, but accuracy with respect to reality is not the distinction between aphantasia and non-aphantasia, that's more about memory or technical knowledge than about the ability to visualize itself. Someone without aphantasia can also visualize fantastical scenes with no connection to reality, either because it is fully fantastical (dragons and dwarves) or not a real memory (imagining meeting with someone, but it hasn't happened yet for you to be able to recall). They could visualize cartoonish scenes or cel shaded scenes or animated XKCD stick figures. None of those are realistic, but they could still be visualized in detail.
  • DoktorDelta 5y ago
    That sounds like antaphasia based on what I've read. You might be interested in the materials available at https://aphantasia.com/ https://aphantasia.com/ They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
  • jhedwards 5y ago
    > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the scene and draw up the details. I think it's interesting that the author of the article suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are definitely advantages for both types of thinking.
    • kayodelycaon 5y ago
      > I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without externalizing everything.
  • alecbz 5y ago
    > it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not. Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question. I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or weak. But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g. But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now remembering it.
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      > So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not. I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to remember images at all.
  • causality0 5y ago
    Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant turning and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case.
    • perennialmind 5y ago
      Oh that's fun. I imagined a distressed elephant walking through the office and pulling down ceiling tiles, the wood floor splintering under the weight. Didn't think about ears. Attitude, mass, height, and building materials: yes. Ears: no.
  • torstenvl 5y ago
    Most people can see things in their mind that they don't consciously remember as discrete facts. For example, many people have a visual and motor memory of things like passcodes, but do not consciously and discretely remember the digits. A fun example from my own life: when I was a child, during a spelling test, I couldn't remember where to put the "h" in "ghost" until I called to mind the cover of this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776
  • jcranmer 5y ago
    The way I would describe things (being a programmer) is that my actual eye and my "mind's eye" are using different display devices. The actual eye comes out as a PNG in its full vividness, but the "mind's eye" only "sees"... something like an SVG? It definitely comes across that the "mind's eye" is encoding visual information differently, and words like "wireframe" or "storyboard" (for entire scenes) seem to be a better way of describing it than anything else, although I wouldn't call them great descriptions [1]. The most notable difference is that there's no "visual" encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"--and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can tell you if that shade is "color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color. It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green square, but something like a color gradient just makes my "mind's eye" go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. [1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail. Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.
    • Twisol 5y ago
      Just to add my own anecdatum here -- my mind's eye definitely encodes color, and I can relatively easily match a color in the real world to one in my mind's eye. Color gradients are instant for me, although I summon the incorrect red-green gradient caused by incorrect gamma correction to mind by default rather than the more pleasing one with correct gamma correction. In the case of the red-green gradient, I'm not exactly computing the colors intentionally; I've just seen quads with interpolated coloring often enough that those memories feed my mind's eye. I can fairly easily visualize a blue-purple or orange-teal gradient, too, but I can't attest to their accuracy. > But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted. That's my experience, too. Reading your description of somebody driving away in their car, I was able to easily reconstruct an imagined scene in my mind's eye, but I naturally filled in the missing details with a kind of "default" -- camera position and angle, whether the parking is covered, the car is like the one Dexter's dad drives in Dexter's Laboratory (but not a cartoon), etc. The details are... there-ish, if I care to query them, but for a simple replay of the scene, my imagination doesn't bother rendering them to any significant fidelity unless I intend to.
  • housecarpenter 5y ago
    I'd slightly trollishly say nobody has aphantasia, it's just that some people make a false distinction between remembering what something looks like and seeing it. Same as what you're saying really, but makes people feel better about themselves, rather than worse. It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it is.
• necovek 5y ago
  Ok, I didn't need to learn that I might have aphantasia too :) Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and mathematics. But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write-only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well. Now, my dreams are usually pretty vivid, but I see that's "normal" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
• 0_____0 5y ago
  Aphantasia has non-visual forms as well. Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since. On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is missing for me.
  • gamerDude 5y ago
    And I have audio aphantasia. I can't remember the sound of anyone's voice and can't recall music. Never had a song stuck in my head. But I can remember the words and content just no tones/sounds/etc.
    • 0_____0 5y ago
      do you have high-fidelity recall of other senses? i've wondered since i have no olfactory, but high audio and spatial recall
      • gamerDude 5y ago
        I do seem to have a high quality memory in general for other things. So, maybe that counts? But I haven't really done a comparison with others for higher ability to recall different senses. I think its hard to judge due to language barriers in describing our own personal experiences compared to others.
    • Rastonbury 5y ago
      Do you like listening to music?
      • gamerDude 5y ago
        I listen to music, but only as background. It has caused some odd dating issues in the past because I don't care about concerts nor can I recall "our song". But I am also comfortable in silence and I generally won't notice if the background music stops.
• mhb 5y ago
  The Secret Sense - Asimov https://archive.org/details/TheSecretSense/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TheSecretSense/mode/2up
• vanderZwan 5y ago
  I remember reading about aphantasia while I was in art school. It made me wonder if the opposite also might exist: being really good at visualizing images in your head, and whether or not some of the people in my school might have it. The few classmates I asked thought I was being ridiculous, so I dropped the subject. I still wonder how one might test this though.
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    VVIQ covers low and high ability.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
  • egypturnash 5y ago
    There is a story that one of the animators in the 1940s Warners studio got into a car accident, and suffered a mild concussion. When he recovered, he found that his visualization was much improved - suddenly he could visualize the simple construction of the characters, and "trace" it directly onto the paper. This resulted in him being able to draw a lot faster, so that's a pretty obvious test. (IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you want citations.) My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a lot of steps that younger me couldn't. I generally like to describe the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer and a library of models on your brain".
• rietta 5y ago
  Wow, this is interesting. And I am now wondering if describes how I process visual information mentally. Outside of dreaming I do not specifically see anything visually if I close my eyes and think about something. I can describe. I can attempt to draw badly (more of a comment on my low artistic ability).
• Lealen 5y ago
  On the other hand it seems that I have hyperphantasia (I can visualize anything, animate it, rotate, check any of the details) and at the same time I work as an software engineer, but in contrary to what people might think it helps me a lot as I can visualize and remember all the parts of the code that I work on. I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding aspect.
  • riskable 5y ago
    Have you tried OpenSCAD (https://openscad.org/ https://openscad.org/) yet? If you have hyperphantasia and can code getting a 3D printer and fooling around in OpenSCAD could become your new favorite hobby/addiction! Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD: https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill (Low-poly Rose Twist Vase) https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise (just a neat keycap) https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium (an entire keyboard: Switches, stabs, case, keycaps, etc were all made with OpenSCAD) Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I hate the ternary operator! It's so obtuse.
    • Lealen 5y ago
      seems pretty fun, I'll definitely check it out
• ratmice 5y ago
  I always wondered to what extent aphantasia affects mundane tasks, like setting something down, turning out the lights and picking it back up in the dark. I always seem to use a mental image of the thing in the space where I left it.
  • necovek 5y ago
    That's more a spatial awareness and memory, I think. I think I might have "aphantasia" (or I am not trying hard enough :)), but I can perfectly well find things I left somewhere in the dark. I could also easily find that place I got to once through a maze of one-way streets following instructions by someone else weeks ago by kinda-recognizing buildings and houses where I need to make turns. I couldn't describe what those houses looked like for the life of me, but I could perfectly recognize them once I saw them. All of these are things I've noticed in the past, but never put a name to it (not that I looked).
• Spinnaker_ 5y ago
  I always thought "picture in your head" was a figure of speech. I was also really confused how police sketch artists worked. I have zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people could somehow describe features of strangers? A lot of things made more sense once I learned about aphantasia. I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind. I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element.
  • tartoran 5y ago
    You seem to have some degree of aphantasia. I do too and have similar experiences with audio and olfactory recall as you do. I had once been robbed and when police showed me a few mugshots I completely forgot what the mugger looked like and my theory is that since I could not entertain the image in my mind’s eye it was very weak and quickly got disturbed by seeing all the other faces in photos. Id be a terrible eye witness I think
  • riskable 5y ago
    Like many mental traits there's a spectrum: Some people (like me) have extreme levels of visualization in our heads. I can picture things I'm imagining in intimate detail which is (probably) why I'm pretty good at turning code into precisely what I'm imagining (e.g. https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise it's a keycap). However, I have such bad long-term memory that I qualified for special needs (mental impairment edition) education (which I did not get enrolled in, for reference). I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in true 3D. I thought it was because of this--and my long term memory issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces (or names). I am not the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind in one eye that are absolutely fantastic at remembering people's faces (and names, obviously). So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason haha). Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is a question like this? https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg
• eloeffler 5y ago
  A friend of mine spent much time on MUD[1] servers playing and interacting with strangers. The game theme was fantasy-ish. As he moved through the large world of the server he would repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some trait or role that you can have in the game. Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision played there, using screen readers. Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a wall of ASCII. Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD A MUD (/mʌd/; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
  • simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    What a great story to read. I would be really curious to know more about that particular MUD. I have normal vision, and have played on MUDs only for a few years, in my late teens / early twenties.
  • Taniwha 5y ago
    oh see-er
    • Talanes 5y ago
      Huh, I went to check if the pun still worked in German, and apparently that's just the actual etymology of both the English and German words.
• k__ 5y ago
  Interesting, I thought there were some discussions lately that this much more common than people think (i.e. >2%).
• Mezzie 5y ago
  Fun fact: I have no mind's eye UNTIL I take Tizanidine. That was a really weird discovery. I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug fixes that. It's VERY distracting.
  • alfonsodev 5y ago
    I was practically blind my first years of life too, and have aphantasia, how come did you started taking the drug, by chance unrelated ? Did it fix it for once or it reverts when not taking the drug? I’ve been only able to “see” in colors and details, in a state of half sleep half awake, never awake, and very low res when dreaming.
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      I got diagnosed with MS and I take it for my muscle spasticity at night to help me sleep, so it's completely unrelated. I have -20 vision with severe astigmatism and was completely uncorrected until I had eye surgery at 4 to fix some eye muscle issues. It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing' it. I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also experience.
  • exikyut 5y ago
    Oooh. Do you have any particular references you'd link to for more info about this? https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html says that > Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in which the nerves do not function properly and patients may experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax. > ... > This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask your doctor or pharmacist for more information. I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to follow/copy bits of it :) I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg recreational options) to shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost to helping me reset stuff.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  What is meant by "seeing in ones mind"? And how can he have that disability, but still see images in dreams? How do they test for this?
  • riskable 5y ago
    I believe they test this with the "paper folding test". Something like this: https://www.123test.com/spatial-reasoning-test/ https://www.123test.com/spatial-reasoning-test/ If you can answer at least one of those questions you probably don't have aphantasia.
    • caymanjim 5y ago
      Is this really testing aphantasia? I would think that to do that you'd have to show someone the first image, give them time to remember it or whatever, and then ask them which of the shapes are possible without reference to the original image. I think anyone can look back and forth between these things and reason about how they come together ("this is not adjacent to that so this folded version is not possible").
      • durovo 5y ago
        Yeah, I have the same concern as well. However, I felt that being able to visualize things in my head allowed me to solve some of these problems very quickly (in around 4-5 seconds). I can make the 2-d image collapse into the 3-d object in my head. I guess not having aphantasia would make you quicker on these tests? I must admit though, I had to look back and forth for some problems as well.
    • sethhovestol 5y ago
      I am mind-blind in every sense, yet I got a 9/10 on that. It's still only checked by qualitative things, how a person self reports about it. I know it's not just a language thing though. My go to example is that if you knew morgan freedman wrote this you could read it in his voice in your head. I can't, I'd recognize his voice, but I can't use it in my head.
• causality0 5y ago
  The way I’m wired has given me (and likely other founders and those in other fields) an edge. This seems like wild speculation. The single cited study is also riddled with problems, including comparing 2,000 people with self-reported aphantasia to a set of 200 control individuals from an entirely different study.
• erganemic 5y ago
  Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly-impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially through a text medium!). I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!". I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people - for starters, people vastly overestimate their ability to picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. Even if they didn't have the artistic skill to make a "good" drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has the handlebars in front of the front wheel). My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my brain is recalling apples it's seen before and telling itself to process that information as if it were coming from my eyes. Even though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I visualize it in my head, it feels like I'm seeing it. She chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same vividness anymore (she's since "recovered"). I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring each other that we weren't really mind-blind - but that would either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that make them more likely to be friends :)
• deleted 5y ago
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• jodrellblank 5y ago
  I can, and for context I've known about the distinction of people who can and cannot for years; even then I didn't notice until last year that I can't smell or taste in my imagination and other people can. "Lemon" to me is pictures of lemons, to my mum it's a lip-curlingly intense sour taste. You'd think it would be a simple hop years ago from sight to the other senses and which ones work in my head and which don't. But no, smell and taste are "out of sight, out of mind" for me in a way that sight isn't. When they aren't present I don't have a good way of thinking about them and don't really think about them much at all. What about the other senses, can people imagine kinaesthetic body positions of poses they aren't currently doing? Can people imagine balancing on a high-wire or being off-balance on a moving boat, while sitting on steady ground?
• torstenvl 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he didn't realize this was odd until adulthood. For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also have to be true: - He never heard anyone talk about dreams - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art - He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used and people describe what they see in their memory of an event - He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something was demonstrated visually - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory - Etc. It just strikes me as entirely implausible.
  • riskable 5y ago
    Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they literally just have a storage location for words/letters and that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they, "know them when they see (or write) them." You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath). Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?
  • GistNoesis 5y ago
    The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head. You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them. This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums. Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.
• sarasasa28 5y ago
  I can only imagine very vaguely and for just 1/2 seconds, is this it?
  • cescobedo 5y ago
    you have a mild aphantasia then
• lavasalesman 5y ago
  I don't have aphantasia but if I never learned about the mind's eye from other people I think I would have used it almost never, just sometimes as a memory aid. Everything I think about is done abstractly; ie words in books and conversations take on no image in my mind, only the ideas transfer. After learning about how imagery springs to other people's minds when they're reading, conversing, etc. I've tried to do it myself and it is possible but always a conscious effort and usually tiring. The benefit for me is that images are more memorable than ideas alone so my recall of the things I try to visualize improves if I do it well, and has led me to try things like diagramming the things people say, also improving recall and understanding.
• obventio56 5y ago
  I’m not sure why I’m the first to point this out on HN (which is usually a pretty skeptical group) but “aphantasia” is very poorly studied (1). I’ve met plenty of people who claim to have it but it seems more like a failure of language to compare experience. That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
  • zepto 5y ago
    Why? There are seemingly plenty of different ways that people are wired. Assuming everyone is wired the same seems like a preposterous null hypothesis given how varied we are in every observable way.
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    Some aphantasics weren't born with it. Many have vivid dreams. So they can compare their own experiences. How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in that article?
  • godshatter 5y ago
    I can understand the skepticism. I have aphantasia and am equally skeptical that most people can actually "see" anything. When I'm supposed to visualize a beach, for example, for me it's merely a list of things I would tell the setup crew to make if this were a movie. Chair, umbrella, lifeguard stand, ship on the horizon, trail of footsteps along the water's edge, film it at sunset. I have found differences between myself and others, though. When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note about it. It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly tell me they "see" something.
• caymanjim 5y ago
  I don't have any concept of seeing something in my head. I always assumed it was a way to say "think about this thing" and never thought people could "see" it in any meaningful way. If someone asks me to picture an elephant, I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me. I can describe what an elephant looks like. I can draw something--poorly--that other people would immediately identify as an elephant. I can talk about the shape of an elephant, the parts of an elephant, colors, textures, and other physical properties. But I can't "see" or "picture" an elephant. I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like that. Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.
  • aaronblohowiak 5y ago
    Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have memories of documentaries that “replay” in my head. When I am imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I can’t really see what is in front of me. In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.
    • codazoda 5y ago
      Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild.
    • pxc 5y ago
      > Fwiw I absolutely can “look” at an elephant in my imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind can be wild! ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow. How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that? These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme
• petercooper 5y ago
  Is there a more practical test for this than trusting what the person answering says? Like the aphantasia equivalent of one of those colorblind pictures where different people see different numbers. I struggle to determine if I can visualize imagery or not. I don't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route based on the shortest map distance? Because I can do that..
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research
    • petercooper 5y ago
      Thanks. A couple of ideas mentioned there for anyone else: "measuring cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex" and measuring skin perspiration/fear response in a situation where a story that triggers mental imagery is followed by imagery that might "amplify" the former. These both seem rather limited to measurements in study groups and both require equipment, but interesting nonetheless!
• olalonde 5y ago
  It's weird, I always considered myself as having a photographic memory and now I'm wondering if I have aphantasia. I believe I could draw a scene from memory with quite high resolution and accuracy. But it's not anything like the experience of seeing with my eyes. In fact, closing my eyes barely helps me visualise. I just assumed it was like that for everyone.
  • giarc 5y ago
    I tried the linked test mostly with my eyes closed. I don't 'see' anything, just black. It improved very slightly if I kept my eyes opened and stared at nothing (blank wall, desk surface etc). Not to the point where I could suddenly 'see' things, but I was able to come off the 1 scale of "knowing" I was thinking of an object.
  • kraemahz 5y ago
    Hypophantasia is what limited visualization is called. As with all things biological it is a spectrum of experiences.
• irrational 5y ago
  I have a sort of similar thing. I do not dream. That is, I am nearly 50 years old and I have never woken up having any recollection of anything happening from the time I fall asleep until I wake up. I understand that other people remember seeing or hearing things while they sleep (from what people describe, things like falling is a common dream theme). I've never experienced this. People say, "Oh, you do dream, you just don't remember it." After reading this article, would they also try to tell this person that he can see things in his mind's eye but can't remember them? I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my inability to derive pleasure from music. Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music. I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming.
• codazoda 5y ago
  My boss has this and I believe it's a real thing. That said, how do you know? If I "close my eyes an imagine the apple in the picture" I can both see "black" like the author mentioned and I can imagine what an apple looks like. I would describe what I see as a photo of that apple but I can't actually see the apple. But I don't see a list of facts about it either. So, is this a language barrier? Are there tests we can run to prove that I can see things in my minds eye that others cannot? Can I prove that I have the ability and that I don't fall into the 2%? Edit: Apparently, yes, if I would just follow the links. The test says I have visual hyperphantasia but I still wonder, is this just the way I think about the things I conjure up in my mind? :P
• jfhufl 5y ago
  Interesting - I may have hyperphantasia? Most of my thoughts are accompanied by images, and I can rotate and unfold things. It's so vivid I seem to have two types of synesthesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-rare-humans-who-see-time-and-have-amazing-memories
• marstall 5y ago
  I have vibrant dreams with very detailed renderings of landscapes, particularly non-existent cities that sprawl out block after block and mile after detailed mile as I move through them. In these places, I also experience intense interpersonal drama, highly detailed other characters, emotions, physical sensations, thoughts in my head about everything that's happening, empathy for others, anxieties, desires etc. And the rules of the reality change, inception-style, every few seconds, with themes and obsessions that recur. but this ability is completely lacking for me in reality. If I try to picture some of the obvious things mentioned in this thread - my wife's face, an apple, an elephant - I can, but it's a fairly muddy 2d image and I couldn't tell you what direction the elephant's trunk is pointing for example ...
• ghostly_s 5y ago
  I have aphantasia...but I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time this year, and since then have had a few moments—I believe they are hypnagogic states, where I have actually for the first time in my life been able to see in my imagination. Truly wild experience.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    This is fascinating because I posted earlier about how I think the hardware is there for us with Aphantasia, just that there is a software lock-out. I need to try LSD now. It's been on my to-do for a while. I managed to see images a handful of times through no obvious mechanism and it blew my mind, like it did yours.
• errcorrectcode 5y ago
  I had this ability vividly when I was <16. It diminished with age, physiological anxiety condition, sleep disturbances, and failing antidepressants. I basically lack it completely now.
• jp57 5y ago
  I used to wonder if this was just a difference in semantic understanding of the word "to see", just as two people might argue whether a color is blue or green or on what side of some arbitrary line some liminal experience falls. The thing that changed my mind was that the aphantasic people I've spoken with say their dreams have no visual component. They don't have a visual experience when they dream. My dreams are intensely visual; I am absolutely seeing things when I dream.
  • pxc 5y ago
    > the aphantasic people I've spoken with say their dreams have no visual component. They don't have a visual experience when they dream. My dreams are intensely visual; I am absolutely seeing things when I dream. I don't think my dreams have no visual component, but it's often the case that certain visual properties are just not filled in. Like someone's shirt might just not have a color in my dreams. Not grey, not transparent, and not like everything is black and white. Just that it didn't any color in particular, just didn't have that feature
• pjungwir 5y ago
  > This latest recognition of aphantasia as a neurological difference is only a decade or so old (although references in the literature go back to the 1890’s.) The first time I heard about aphantasia I recalled reading someone, one of the semioticians I think, perhaps Saussure, criticizing Locke for talking about ideas as visual images in your head. "Of course we don't actually see the images," he wrote. At the time I agreed with him, but maybe he and I both have this condition. :-)
• arkj 5y ago
  If the condition of Aphantasia intrigues you then you should check out Blidnsight[1] and Visual Agnosia[2]. Oliver Sacks book[3] had a humbling effect on the science-knows-it-all teenager in me. I really thing some of the next paradigms in computing will come from a deeper understanding of how human brain handles sensory information. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_agnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_agnosia [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
• yupper32 5y ago
  What's the opposite? I can vividly picture people. I can recognize and describe most people I've ever met in my adult life. I can remember and picture our conversation we had the one and only time we met at a bar 3 years ago. Where we were in the bar, the people around us, the drinks we had (at least the type of glass, I can't taste in my head). But your name? No where to be found. Disappears almost instantly. It's incredibly frustrating.
  • rexreed 5y ago
    A lot of us are better with faces than names, and can remember when and where and what we were doing with someone and forget their name at the same time.
  • cescobedo 5y ago
    hyperphantasia
• Borrible 5y ago
  Everything you 'see' is just in your mind. Aphantasia is, some people just can't make their optical qualia up willingly or their optical qualia lack the image quality of their visual capacity. A lot more people are convinced, what they 'see' through their eyes is outside their mind, because they can't make it up willingly. But, there is no color outside your mind.
  • vinceguidry 5y ago
    Not quite. Color is created in your eyes, by the rods and cones. What the mind sees comes from the eyes, and color blindness is usually caused by genetic defects causing the rods and cones to be differently sensitive than normal. Those with color blindness have had luck wearing special polarized shades turning some color frequencies into others that the rods and cones can better sense.
    • Borrible 5y ago
      So, tell me, what is 'red'? Not the wavelength thingie, I mean your subjective experience of this qualia.
      • vinceguidry 5y ago
        Are you asking me about 'a' qualia, or a 'type' of qualia?
        • Borrible 5y ago
          > your subjective experience Can't be more precise. That thing you experience when you think to see it in the wild when looking at a 'red' thing. Which is probably the same when you imagine that 'red' thing. A lot of people do also dream in exactly the same way about a 'red' thing. What is 'redness' in your consciousness? And what is it outside of it?
          • vinceguidry 5y ago
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  This seems to be a popular topic on HN but I wonder how much of this is due to semantics. Before I read a story about this I didn't stop to think that people couldn't picture things in their mind. But now that I've read a few and seen numerous comments on it, I've started to second guess myself. I can imagine a couple gears turning and I would normally have said, "yes I can see it in my mind" but it isn't really like seeing but it seems visual in some way. So maybe what I consider "seeing" in my mind doesn't really count as "seeing" for some because that isn't 100% what it is like? Maybe I'm just so locked into "seeing" things in my mind that I can't imagine how it would work if I didn't.
  • dougmwne 5y ago
    I am on the side that this isn’t semantics and is a real phenomenon. For me, I can hear in my mind very well. I can hear so well that I can occasionally confuse things I’ve hear in my mind’s ear for a real sound (did you just say something?). It very slightly crosses the line into an auditory hallucination. I can hear music so well that I don’t need a radio to listen, just think of the first few seconds of a song and off it goes on the jukebox. My mental images are nowhere near this clear, but they are a kind of “darksight” a seeing and a not seeing, ephemeral but also real and useful for visualization and problem solving.
    • basq 5y ago
      I can relate. I'll also get songs viscerally stuck in my head that will play nonstop for several days straight. And not only music, I'll occasionally get stuck images as well, pictures that will sit in my peripheral thoughts for days.
      • dougmwne 5y ago
        That's the first I've heard of eyeworms. Interesting!
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    I don't think semantics explains cortical excitability and skin conductance differences.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research
• woopwoop 5y ago
  I remain very confused about what aphantasia is. Let me give a concrete example. If you ask me to describe my mother's appearance to you, in as much detail as I can, the output is pretty meager. She's a woman in her early 70s. Tall, about 5'9". Slightly overweight. She has brown hair with streaks of grey. And that's it. I'm embarrassed to note that I cannot recall her eye color from memory. Does this mean I have aphantasia? From what I have read, I would say the opposite. Though their are many, many people fitting the above description, I'm confident I could pick her out in a lineup of hundreds of them. There is visual data in my head that I cannot articulate about, e.g., bone structure, skin texture, gait, etc. On the other hand, I cannot summon a picture of her in my head with high enough fidelity to be able to recall her eye color. If you are aphantasic, what is your experience recalling someone's face? Is it like this, or is everything you remember verbal, or verbalizable?
  • scotu 5y ago
    I would start with the fact that not much in the world is either one thing or another, so also with aphantasia I don't think you either "have it" or you don't. One might have varying degrees of it. I feel I can almost visualize a simple shape like a square, but a face is something I'm sure I cannot visualize. Then I'd say, in my self-diagnosed experience, I can describe things I remember, maybe not in painstaking detail but I can. I'm not able to see an image of the same thing if I close my eyes and try to imagine it. I feel like the difference is, I can recognize your face if I see it again, but if I need to recall what you look like I get a list of features written in words out of my brain, not an image.
    • woopwoop 5y ago
      Is your typical verbal description of a face you remember as sparse as the one I gave? Are their other things about the face you remember that you cannot put into words, or is everything you remember verbal?
      • scotu 5y ago
        yeah, I'd say my description could be pretty similar. But when it comes down to sparse descriptions, I think memory also has a role. My memory is not fantastic, so I might have just dropped the memory of eye colors, unless that came up a few times for some reason for me to fix that memory. But thinking about coming up with an unknown, generic face (GAN style, if you will): I cannot see it. Or something simpler, an apple: very foggy visual+takes a lot of effort to keep seeing the vague blurry image I might be able to come up with.
• lkbm 5y ago
  SSC has an interesting post about this and similar things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e... If you lacked some common internal mental experience, would you know? This guy didn't. In the SSC piece, there's someone who didn't realize he lacked a sense of smell until high school. I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre" and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of right and wrong. Make me wonder about how sometimes media will portray an angel and devil on your shoulders urging you to do right or wrong. (No one hallucinates those, do they? I've always just assumed it's a metaphor, but so did the "no sense of smell" guy!)
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    I didn't realize I was lactose intolerant until adulthood. I honestly never knew having to violently crap within minutes of eating most meals was abnormal since I'd been doing it my entire life and not really paying attention to whether anyone else was.
    • kingcharles 5y ago
      Me either! Took me until I was 30-something to suddenly figure it out. Bought lactose-free milk and .. poop good. WTF. ALL I ATE AS A CHILD WAS MILKSHAKES AND I HAD CONSTANT DIARRHEA. Also did not notice I had very serious ADHD until I was 35, reading an article in the New York Times.
  • pxc 5y ago
    > I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre" and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of right and wrong. Can you find that tweet?
• toss1 5y ago
  This is fascinating to me and it never occurred to me before reading about it a long time ago. My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing. In those sports it is critical to have a deep visualization of the course. For ski racing, you will see racers waiting around the starting gate for their start time with eyes closed lightly swaying their head and moving their hand in visualizing their ideal path down the course (we even sometimes crash in those simulation runs and shake our head and restart...) In sportscar racing, an important drill is to drive the course in your head, making every shift, turn-in point, apex, and track out point, visualizing and feeling your attitude, balance, the forces, at every point on the track —— and do it under a stopwatch so you know you have a realistic timing of the track with your car. I could typically come within a second of the real times, and it was quite vivid, and for 'fuzzy' sections, I could go back and sharpen the visualization. These seemed to me and my coaches as essential skills for the sport, and I never heard of anyone in either sport without that ability. I want to know if people without that innate capability just get filtered out early, or if it is trainable. Does anyone have any data on that?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thayne 5y ago
  I wonder if there is a continuum here. I think that I can visualize things in my head, but doing so is difficult for me, and definitely doesn't look exactly the same as if I saw it. And certainly if you tell me to think about an elephant my first instinct would be to think of words that describe an elephant, not summon up images of an elephant. But if pressed I could visualize a shadowy silhouette of an elephant. And I definitely think I can visualize movement and actions, although it is different than normal sight, and there generally isn't a lot of detail in what the things moving look like. I definitely relate to not being able to describe what people look like, because unless I specifically take note of details like what they are wearing, what color their hair is, whether they are wearing glasses etc. or I don't remember those details.
• heynow0 5y ago
  I attribute my inability to draw on this. If I try to imagine what a mouse looks like, I have no idea. And thus trying to draw it results in a disaster. My mom and brother can draw very well. I should ask them about aphantasia. But im pretty sure my aphantasia is cause of my inability to sketch anything even remotely well.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    I'm not sure, because I clearly have Aphantasia and my drawing was terrible, but the more I practiced at it the better I became. I think you just need more training.
• cryptica 5y ago
  I think maybe people with this condition over-idealize what it means to visualize something. I think I'm very good at visualization. I can visualize things and recall visual scenes from my past but it doesn't look anywhere near as vivid or detailed as the real experience... Except when it comes to emotions; my emotions are heightened when visualizing things (especially memories from my past) - I'm pretty sure that I didn't feel as strongly back then as I feel recalling the memory (I suspect so because I rarely feel very strongly about anything in the present). Emotions help make the visualizations seem real in spite of the lack of detail. For me, even the appearance of an inanimate object or a movement has a distinct feeling associated with it. My mind doesn't separate emotions and logic. When I react to things strongly (which is very rare), there is a logical reason behind it and I always know why I'm doing things and why I'm feeling a certain way. I'm immune to depression because I can always enumerate everything that makes me sad and when I resolve these issues, I always feel happy... Until new issues arise. I never got into situations whereby I thought something would make me happy but it didn't or I started to take it for granted. If I think something will make me happy, it will make me happy 100%. I usually run scenarios through in my head before I make any decision; I guess that's also a form of visualization. When I'm looking at the menu at a restaurant, I visualize myself eating each dish on the menu (and imagine the smell and flavor) in order to make a decision. Actually one of my siblings joked that they always try to choose the same dishes as me when we go to a restaurant together because it almost always turns out good.
• harel 5y ago
  I am exactly how he describes. I cannot visualise anything and I don't have an internal voiceover. I do however recall abstracts and concepts. So if I saw an elephant before I'd be able to bring up the concept of the elephant. Nothing visual, but conceptual. I've discovered this is a thing (that people actually visualise) past my 40s. For a while I thought I missed out on some special fx, but it had no detrimental effect on my life. Maybe even it does help me see complex software as abstracts easier. Who knows. It is what it is.
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I assume that when people close their eyes and see an apple, there’s an entire spectrum of how richly present that Apple is. Some, like me, vaguely see a colourless “idea” of an apple while others might even see colour and detail or more. If this is accurate, it makes me wonder two things: 1. Is there even a unique condition of not seeing the apple or are you just very far off to one end of the spectrum ? (Perhaps this isn’t an important distinction) 2. Are the people who can very richly see an apple more likely to be artistically inclined?
  • mod 5y ago
    While reading the article, I closed my eyes an imagined an apple in 3d, with accurate colors to that of the image in the post. Then I remembered the image was pretty flat and almost 2D, and so I corrected my visualization to try to match the apple. I also kept the surrounding space very limited, since the apple is framed so closely in the image. I double-checked my color accuracy after opening my eyes, and felt like I was pretty on-point. I'm not sure I ever realized that people couldn't imagine images before. I just assumed some people weren't very good at it, or weren't good at remembering details, or something along those lines. I want to ask someone with aphantasia what happens when they imagine the consequences of something? For me, I frequently imagine the consequences of a car crash--like if I narrowly avoid a crash, I might imagine slightly different circumstances. I can imagine the impact, what the cars look like after. I can imagine police cars showing up and where they would park, and what vehicle they'd arrive in. I think everyone can think through the consequences of their actions, but do you have no visual representation of them at all? The more I think about it, the more I realize that basically all of my thoughts have a visual representation while I think about them. Even while coding (ex web dev)--not a very visual task--I get fuzzy visual representations of code & maybe data flow and program structure and things like that.
    • Waterluvian 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing. That’s so fascinating. I just tried to imagine a car crash. I can see it. Rolling down a hill. But it’s a fuzzy outline, almost perpetually ephemeral. No colour or texture. Almost not there. But I do see it. When I do software dev I “feel” more than I see the abstract metaphors. I can look at code and find it to be as beautiful as a Bach cantata. Almost emotionally so sometimes. But I don’t “see” anything. This might be part of why I’m so horribly bad at UI design. I can’t see it. But when I take THC pills for sleep, my ability to see things becomes so enriched for the 20 mins or so where I’m “high” but not asleep that I actually enjoy just laying in bed daydreaming.
• sneak 5y ago
  I've read a lot of stuff about aphantasia but I don't know if I can see things in my minds eye or not. I'm not sure if the visualizations I can summon are what people are talking about when they use the term "mind's eye". I would not describe them as "seeing", more like "memory". This is operating with the assumption that people with aphantasia can still remember what things look like (something I can do). I guess I can't tell the difference between remembering what something looks like and what people mean when they say "seeing something in their head". I can remember what things look like that I haven't seen, such as "a life-size elephant made of gold" because I remember what gold looks like and what an elephant looks like. I can imagine this even with my eyes open and looking at other things, but it's nothing like "seeing" with a "mind's eye". Is this aphantasia?
• fieryskiff11 5y ago
  confirmed npc
• delecti 5y ago
  Aphantasia is so fascinating to me. Being able to mentally visualize things is so integral to how I experience consciousness that I find it hard to imagine existing without it. At the same time, the fact that a non-negligible percent of people (about as man people globally as redheads) are aphantasiac and society basically didn't realize makes me think that maybe it's easier to overcome fundamental differences in how we experience reality than we tend to assume.
• cromwellian 5y ago
  I have a form of this, but it is not 100%. I can kind of visualize stuff, but I can't "hold" onto the image for long, it fades after like 5-10 seconds. However, when I am very sleepy and laying in bed, or maybe relaxed from alcohol, I can sometimes have extremely detailed and vivid imagery that is persistent, almost to the point that I could sketch a picture from it. This leads me to think other things from brain are interfering with this visualization system and only when the other things are reduced by sleep or relaxation does visualization mechanism work for me.
  • mod 5y ago
    All of the things you said are true for me, as well--as if I wrote it myself--but I drew a different conclusion: I don't think I have any form of it. I think we are seeing things in our mind's eye, for sure. Is it totally in focus, detailed, etc? No. But it's there. It's an image. It has a color. I didn't memorize the color of sunsets, I can---see them? Imagine them? I never made a distinction between them before, before these discussions made me really think about it.
    • cromwellian 5y ago
      I can only see vague parts of a whole, like my object-detector neural net layers are working, and I can visualize lower layers of the network, but not the top layer. Like I can't remember my own children's whole face, but I'd instantly recognize it if I see it. It makes me wonder if people's 'visual memory' isn't some for of GAN, where people with good visual memory just have great generative networks with synthesize details which aren't there based on broad parameters. Because when I'm lucid dreaming, or partly asleep, I can have these vivid experiences where I can see imagined objects with perfect clarity, stable detail, even color, something I'm not able to do when normally conscious. Like if I think of red lips, or a red apple right now, I don't really perceive the 'red' -- its abstract. Perhaps the real issue is a 'visual cache' that expires too quickly. Like if your brain is using GAN-like techniques to synthesize imagery from learned network weights, maybe some people have a better working cache, and so it disappears less quickly -- is more persistent. I tend to think abstractly and my mind often gets filled with a bazillion ideas when I'm trying to imagine things, so perhaps I'm experiencing a kind of 'cache thrashing' that I don't get when sedated.
• MadcapJake 5y ago
  I too have some curiosity here as my mental image experience is not "vivid" per-se but rather is more like a cloudy feeling of visualness. I can reference parts of the image and sometimes remember specific minute detail but there is no ability to grasp new ideas from this image. It's also not in my eyes but feels "up" or floating somewhere. I would bet that this characteristic is not black-and-white but rather a spectrum from eidetic memory to no visual manifestations.
• mod 5y ago
  > I’m also realizing that that when people describe that they can hear the sound of their voice in their head (a train of thought), that it wasn’t just a metaphor. But my thoughts are silent. I call that "my brain," and I tell it to shutup a few times each day. It feels like thoughts I'm not in control of, I'm just listening to them. Usually, they're off-topic. Often, I don't even like them. Although I'm not sure I could swear they aren't silent. I relate to a "voice" in my head, but it's definitely not a third-party narrator, and it's certainly not auditory. It's more like I'm imagining a voice saying the words (generally at a pace that is much faster than I speak). So, as proposed in some other comments, I think I can see how either description would fit me, and how people might view their own inner thoughts as either voiced or silent, even if those inner thoughts were identical to mine.
• pineconewarrior 5y ago
  I'm surprised there are no comments about psychedelic substances and closed-eye visuals in here. One way to know if you have them normally is to -really- have them, almost intrusively, on drugs.
  • caddemon 5y ago
    The first time I smoked a lot of weed I felt like if I didn't focus really hard on the present I would go back in time. I was still functioning enough to know that could not be real, but it sure felt that way. I didn't realize until the next day that I was just having legit visual memories.
• redis_mlc 5y ago
  I highly recommend taking the short test link in the article. It reveals profound things about your mind in a couple of minutes.
• my50cents 5y ago
  I was not able to visualize images. When I first heard about aphantasia, I reasoned that since I could have vivid dreams, I must have the hardware to see. Then I started training myself, first by visualizing basic 2D shapes, then letters, then 3D letters ... eventually I was able to conjure up complex images at will, just like in a vivid dream. Some time later, it occurred to me that by doing this, I likely stored more data than necessary in my tiny little brain, so I spent more time to untrain myself, by deliberately ignoring images when they pop up. Now I can no longer conjure up images. My dreams have become more abstract. It has become harder for me to remember faces. On the other hand, I have generally found life easier to process and understand. I feel wiser than my younger self.
• sockfish 5y ago
  I wonder if you can play chess in your mind without being able to visualize the board.
  • my50cents 5y ago
    Yes. When I do that, I know where the pieces are on the board, but I don't have their visual properties such as shape or color in my mind.
• kingcharles 5y ago
  I have aphantasia, I've never been able to see anything in my head, but during the end of my eight years in jail I would sometimes sit on my bunk thinking, and four times I suddenly had images appear in my mind. Once was an apple, once a car, once a cat and once a beach scene with a boat. Each of these was so utterly mind-blowing to me. It was the equivalent of taking a caveman and sticking the latest Oculus headset on him. It was hard to even comprehend what was happening. The images only appeared for a few seconds, but each time I tried harder to hold the image and I managed to get each to last longer than the previous one. It's never happened again since and I don't know what triggered it. It made it clear to me that the condition isn't terminal. The hardware is obviously there, it's just the software that's the problem.
• gengear 5y ago
  My experience is like this. I can visualize things realistically or animated. When I took the test first sun rise that came to my mind was similar to sun set from lion king movie. I have to consciously make effort to switch for a realistic sun rise. When I was asked to visualize I see things I have already seen and convert it in to a live version to explore. For example when asked to visualize a elephant I have remembered an elephant from the memory. Isolated it from the old context and created a new visual space to explore the elephant in detail. Same with sun set. Its like my inner self was showing me rough things it had to build the visual space and I am consciously determining these properties. I do have a inner monologue. I used to have three voices in my head when I give presentations in college. One voice keep track of content I am reading. One voice that translates it into English (Even-though I am reading English text somehow it is represented in my head as native speech). Other delivers the presentation in English. I used have this processing for each sentence I utter. Even when I read a book I used to have context in native language and a English correlation. I was slow in processing information written in English even though I understand it because of this processing over head of translating from English to native context. I tried consciously to get rid of this language based contexts. Now a days I have something like a zone of thinking where I get in to a English processing context. It feels like my inner voice speaks in English when I am in this zone of thinking and switches to native tongue when I am out of this zone. I don't know if this is something everyone goes through when they acquire a new language.
• nhumrich 5y ago
  I have apahantasia and one thing I don't quite understand is how people without it visualize when their eyes are not closed. If you are thinking of something, maybe listening to an audiobook while driving, does the imagery in your head still show up? Or are their like two modes, eyes open and eyes closed? Because I don't see anything either way, there is no change. How does imagry and imagination work for you without apahantasia, when your eyes are open?