6 ms·

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

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.
- phaedrus 5y ago
  I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently, is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc. it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON" signal. So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason! The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT". When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in your head, you do not work with visual representations of your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is that impossible as well?
  - v64 5y ago
    Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while tuning out the rest. I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two." If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology. Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.
Accacin 5y ago
Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it makes us that little bit more unique. I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept. Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.
nicoburns 5y ago
> That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently. Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.
phaedrus 5y ago
I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I thought it would. I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain: I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought. So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.
stevebmark 5y ago
I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5 pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the visualization of seeing. I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable. When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training? I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.

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.

phaedrus 5y ago
I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently, is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc. it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON" signal. So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason! The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT". When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.
anyfoo 5y ago
Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in your head, you do not work with visual representations of your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is that impossible as well?
- v64 5y ago
  Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while tuning out the rest. I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two." If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology. Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.

Accacin 5y ago

Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it makes us that little bit more unique. I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept. Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.

nicoburns 5y ago

> That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently. Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.

phaedrus 5y ago

I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I thought it would. I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain: I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought. So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.

stevebmark 5y ago

I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5 pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the visualization of seeing. I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable. When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training? I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.