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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 bea

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.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I don't think about the visual representation of equations. I think about the equations, not in any specific representation, but as what they are. I think my mental abilities are roughly average, including my ability to picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only for images of written expressions that represent equations. It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.
axby 5y ago
Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape. But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned. I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.
- axby 5y ago
  Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment: I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while. Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer. Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.

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.
whatshisface 5y ago
I don't think about the visual representation of equations. I think about the equations, not in any specific representation, but as what they are. I think my mental abilities are roughly average, including my ability to picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only for images of written expressions that represent equations. It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.

axby 5y ago

Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape. But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned. I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.

axby 5y ago
Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment: I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while. Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer. Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.