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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 i

• 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
    • drdeca 5y ago
      Yeah, that’s definitely more vivid than what I see, and I’m fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have trouble “seeing the entire thing at once”. That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.
    • cercatrova 5y ago
      Usually, I can see everything all at once, fully detailed. Think of a screenshot, that's basically how it is like for me. I've even visualized entire websites in perfect clarity and reproduced them from that screenshot-like memory.
  • burke 5y ago
    What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities. If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination: * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery. * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part. * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail. * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update. It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation. It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.
• jaggederest 5y ago
  I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract thoughts in visual form. My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.
  • whatshisface 5y ago
    Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that people ask you to explain how you know where things are.
    • caddemon 5y ago
      I mean that's one specific example, but I get what he's saying. I'm super verbal and I used to do problem sets in college with a friend that obviously had much better visuospatial abilities than me. >75% of the time he'd be the one that really figured out the question. But then we'd go home to write up our solutions and I'd get consistently full letter grade higher marks on what was essentially the same work. He was just doing a way worse job of putting his own work into words. Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.
    • joombaga 5y ago
      You don't know how you know where you left your own things, but if I do know where a friend left e.g. their wallet or keys, I often do remember why. As if the novelty of the circumstance that allowed me to store the information also caused my brain to store metadata about that memory, e.g. the novelty itself.
  • mhandley 5y ago
    I think of myself as a very visual thinker, but I actually cannot form conscious images in my head. This seems like a contradiction, but it's true anyway. I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape. It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself. The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.
• watwut 5y ago
  It is not either or. I went from not never imagining things in visual way to having images popping up in my head by themselves. The brain started to visualize things, after I started to learn to draw. I knew absolutely nothing about drawing and used draw-a-box and youtube tutorials to learn. I never felt like missing something and those images dont add much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of things and much better at noticing properties of objects around me.
  • burnished 5y ago
    >> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.
    • watwut 5y ago
      It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only this one specific difference in how people think. I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.
      • pseudalopex 5y ago
        Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots of psychology topics. Try autism.
      • burnished 5y ago
• boole1854 5y ago
  For me, and I think for most people, "picturing an elephant" is very literal. For example, you could ask me to "picture an elephant" then follow up by asking "what is the elephant which you pictured doing with its trunk?" To answer the question, I focus my attention on trunk in the picture in my head in order to "take in" what it is doing (e.g., perhaps "it is curled upward but otherwise not doing anything" or it might turn out that "it is grasping a branch"). > Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms. Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or focusing attention on an image in your head in order to describe it, the way I explained above?
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I'm honestly not even sure if someone could describe their own experience of thinking about visual things with enough detail that I could tell whether my own experience of thinking about visual things is significantly different. When you started talking about having no concept of seeing something in your head I thought "whoa, that's very different from my experience." But then what you went on to describe sounds precisely like my experience. I can make poor but recognizable drawings of commonly-known objects like animals. I can also imagine large human spaces I've spent a lot of time in, like my apartment building or old Counter-Strike levels, with a fair amount of detail (certainly enough to describe how to navigate). But now I'm wondering what distinction you're making between being able to use your imagination to accomplish these tasks and "seeing" or "picturing" these objects in your mind. Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects? Surely that ability is extremely rare, and isn't what people mean when they say they're picturing something in their head, right?
  • caymanjim 5y ago
    > Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects? It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's why I think it may have more to do with the language people are using to describe the experience than the experience itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.
    • cj 5y ago
      If it helps, when I close my eyes I see black/darkness. If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks like, I still only see black/darkness… but I can still describe the features of the room in very much detail. I definitely can’t conjure up a vivid image in my head, I would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly visual experience. Same with recalling what someone’s voice sounds like… I can imagine what someone’s voice sounds like, but definitely can’t hear their voice in any meaningful level of detail, yet I’m still able to describe the voice - it’s more of a feeling than a literal audio/visual experience. I definitely wouldn’t describe my own experience as anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see black/darkness… (I think) it’s uncommon to literally see things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is abnormal?
• Accacin 5y ago
  Yeah it's confusing me too. When I asked a friend if he could picture a red apple he said he could 'see' it visually. If I do the same thing, I can't see an apple, but I do think about an apple, and I know what it looks like. I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way :)
• ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.
  • pxc 5y ago
    > When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes. Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I ‘visualize’ a tiger, it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read your comment I said ‘oh, wtf!’ out loud
    • Jtsummers 5y ago
      Consider sitting outside and looking at a flowering bush or tree. At first it's just a tree. Then you realize that there are flowers on it (they were always there, but you weren't attending to them before). After a little while you'll again suddenly realize that there are bees buzzing around the flowers, and a nest halfway up and a few feet from the center on the right. You, most likely, did not have all that in your head on your first glance at the tree. It was just a tree. This is how many mental images are formed. If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, or am asked a question about it, more details will come to mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a scene, like from a commercial.
      • saberdancer 5y ago
        The way it works for me (I can't visualize like that), it's like I am writing a story. I can say I see a tiger, then think about it and write down more details but I am always consciously adding stuff to the tiger. If I want details about number of stripes, I need to think about it and then "write" it. Never do I see something I am not consciously forming. Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.
• nicoburns 5y ago
  Do you have visual experiences while dreaming? For me "seeing in my head" is most similar to those: certainly a visual experience but with less detail than when I'm actually looking at something. I believe some people's are much more detailed than mine, as some people can reproduce scenes in exquisite detail from memory. Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite like reading from paper, but very similar.
• ksec 5y ago
  Same here. I could "think" about it, but I couldn't see it. I just tested this out in a completely dark room. Both with or without my eyes open. I just cant see it. I cant visualise an Elephant in my head. Not even the slightest. I never thought when someone visualise it they really meant "visualise" it. This is shocking! I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend. When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ? And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either. For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.
  • philsnow 5y ago
    > And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either. > For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing. FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a mental narrative voice.
    • ksec 5y ago
      I have "thoughts" or argument flows through my mind. But they are definitely silent and messy. So instead of arguing about it inside my head, I talked to myself, this makes things much clearer. Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.
  • nsxwolf 5y ago
    Do you just not hear your voice when you think? Are there words? How do you formulate ideas without words? What happens when you speak - do ideas just cross some event horizon and come out as vocalizations? Do you know what the words are going to be before you say them?
• tetraca 5y ago
  I would describe it this way: my mind kind of has a scratchpad of sorts that's separate from what I see or hear. It's a dream-like space that you can conjure a vague image onto that's visual in nature but distinctly different from literally seeing out of your eye and not in real space. If you are able to recall and play a song you heard in your head - it's reminiscent of that, but visual. I often do both. When I was younger I often visualized words in my head as I said or thought them.
• anyfoo 5y ago
  I can't imagine doing math or electronics in my head without some concept of internal visualization. Assuming you do those things (if not there is likely something else that applies): When you rearrange equations in your head, are you not having some visual representation of them (actual equations in an otherwise empty space for me) that you manipulate? When you think about a circuit, don't you mentally think about where the current goes in an actual visual representation of the circuit? What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or whatever was? I think the answers to these questions might help me at least to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a different description.
  • JshWright 5y ago
    For me it feels a lot more like proprioception. I understand the relationship of those things in the same way I understand where my arm is if I raise it over my head with my eyes closed. I have a very good directional sense, and I feel the same way about maps, etc. I can't visualize them at all, but I understand where things are in relation to each other. I am 100% sure I cannot visualize things. I have been able, with _lot_ of concentration, "visualize" a blob of color. I was unable to control the shape or size, but could (kind of) control the color (between the choices of red, green, and purple). It was incredibly vivid, and I'm convinced that's what "visualizing means, and that people can do it with actual objects and scenes.
• danShumway 5y ago
  Not sure if this is helpful, but that doesn't sound to me like just different words. I use the word "see" because it's the best word to describe what is happening in my head. It's not literally seeing, but... it's very close, it's not just me remembering details about what something looks like, it's "visualizing". I'm sorry, I don't know how to put into words the difference between the vision happening in my eyeball and the vision happening inside my head. There are differences, but they are very hard to articulate and there are fewer differences than there are similarities. The mental and eyeball "vision" are definitely at least running many of the same subroutines. My feeling is that when someone says that they think words like "picture" or "see" are just social conventions, I suspect they're having a different experience than me. I would probably have settled on a phrase like "picture something in my head" even if no one else used that phrase, I can literally mentally trace out the outlines of the thing I'm imagining in the head. It's not just a list of attributes or descriptions, it's a thing that I am... again, for lack of a better word, "seeing", even though I'm not literally seeing it via my eyes in front of me. What sticks out to me is that I literally can't think of any word that could be closer to what's happening then the words "vision", "seeing", "picture". Calling it a description is less accurate, it captures less of the experience than the word "seeing" does. Phrases like "replaying a scene in my mind", "remembering a sound", "an image popping into your head", etc... those are not rough poetic analogies, those are descriptions that are extremely close to what is literally going on inside my head. > I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me I am not going to try and diagnose anyone over the Internet, I'm not an expert on anything, but yeah, if you're curious about it that sounds to me a lot like aphantasia, at least as far as I understand aphantasia. You say the concept of comparing what's going on in your head to a picture doesn't make any sense at all to you? At that point I suspect it's not a difference in language; I'm not talking about being able to draw something or describe attributes about what it looks like, I'm talking about being able to... see it. I don't know for certain, but I feel like picturing something in your head is (again, while not literally exactly the same as seeing something in real life) still not an analogy I would need to explain to someone who didn't have aphantasia. ---- Articles like this are so fascinating to me, there are a couple of different parts of my experiences (ADHD, asexuality) that I always assumed were completely universal and then later in my life found out weren't. Whenever stuff like that happens to me it's always a surprising experience, and for some weird reason I'm always excited when I see it. Once you realize that certain things that you think are unique about you aren't, and that certain things that you think are universal aren't, and more than that you realize how easy it is to be in a situation where you'd never discover that -- for me it makes me feel like the world and the people around me are more interesting, and it makes me want to learn more about them. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if someone has aphantasia, it doesn't mean their life is going to get turned upside down. But I think sometimes it's just fun to learn about things and to think about how experiences shape people.
• mhandley 5y ago
  If I close my eyes and try to consciously see something, I see only black or maybe shifting colours. With my eyes open, and not consciously trying to form an image, I think I can see things I'm thinking about, though not in colour, but as soon I try to form an image, it slips away. It's odd - I'm not even certain I can see things unconsciously this way - I think I can, but I'm not really quite sure - the images are just on the very edge of conscious reach. This doesn't stop me being able to draw or paint reasonably well, and I'm really good at thinking about how three dimensional mechanisms work - I don't so much as form an image as just understand complex shapes without seeing them - but I still cannot just form an image consciously. To the extent I can, I'm more figuring out how I'd draw it than recalling the image itself. The test from the linked article seems to assume people can visualize an actual image more than fleetingly, but that's not me. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is very good at visualization (I certainly can when I'm dreaming), but it's not a conscious thing for me, and the very act that the test asks for - think of a scene - is what causes any half-images to disappear.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I do not as a general rule see anything but rather just have an understanding of the concept elephant - I think of the word, also if someone tells me don't think about X I can, so the whole now you can't stop thinking about X joke falls flat. But I can make myself visualize it at different levels, I can do a quick command visualize in which I have sort of a flash of what is meant but it isn't a continuing image in my mind. Right now when I did the visualize Elephant thing I got a bit of an image that looked like the center elephant off the cover to Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr If I do a much longer close my eyes and visualize I can make that image I flashed on more concrete in my head. As a general rule I do not consider myself a visual thinking but a language oriented thinker. I understand things better by reading than I do by looking at images.
• blindmute 5y ago
  You are definitely experiencing things differently from me. There is no question or ambiguity for me that I am 'seeing' something in my mind. It is nearly as close to seeing as I do with my eyes; there is no way that if you had this sense you would be unaware of it. I am not seeing the blackness of my eyelids at all. I'm completely unaware of the blackness. I'm seeing something as though it were in my vision. I can rotate it around and view it from any angle. It's as though the vision processor gets unplugged from the eyes and gets plugged into some part of the brain; different input source, but the output, that of experiencing sight, is nearly the same. I expect that the clarity of this sense varies on a spectrum, with some people low enough that they don't have it at all, and others kind of having it but not very clear. I expect that the latter group are the ones commenting things like "I'm not sure if I count or not." But from what I can tell, I'm toward the higher end of clarity, and the sense is by no means uncertain.
• mirkules 5y ago
  For me, it’s very specific. I can visualize a generic elephant, a generic apple or other generic or static object. However, I could never visualize a person’s face for more than a split second. I can describe the person’s features, but never maintain an image of a person’s face for any length of time. If I think of their picture, I can imagine that picture. I’m not sure how else to describe it. It’s kind of weird, but I never really think about it.
• batch12 5y ago
  I think of it like an offscreen rendering. I can see it in my mind and if I space out I begin focusing on the second screen instead of the first. In those fleeting moment I can only describe it as not seeing anything with my eyes, only my mind. When I realize it is happening, it is gone.
  • pineconewarrior 5y ago
    This is close to my experience, as well. Particularly if I'm also reading text or otherwise using my vision in an involved way.
• servytor 5y ago
  I think aphantasia is a sign of a weak skillset - I think you can practice it. I try to create wireframe versions of the rooms I am in sometimes, but I suck at it. Ask me to visualize something and I almost cannot - but for some reason I can do wireframes. It's my lame version of trying I guess.
• brigandish 5y ago
  That is called aphantasia, which I learned about through previous HN threads - there are many but here's a comment with a link to the VVIQ test https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20268557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20268557 I found the test difficult.