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Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination

84 points by sethrin 4y ago

FPGAhacker 4y ago
Eh, I’m not so sure about what they believe the pupillary response was a proxy for. Your eyes dilate when you concentrate. Stare at your eyes in the mirror and start doing simple arithmetic in your head. Adding numbers, multiplication of multi digit numbers. Your eyes will dilate noticeably.
- lalopalota 4y ago
  Cool. Just like they mentioned in the article!
- Twisol 4y ago
  This is discussed in the article, where they used this fact to affirm that aphantastic individuals are indeed attempting to visualize (and failing), vs. simply not attempting. Moreover, they explain that in those who can visualize, pupils both dilated and contracted appropriate to the visualization.
  - FPGAhacker 4y ago
    Oh, thanks. I guess I judged too quickly.
- yes_man 4y ago
  Anecdotally I just tried recording a video of my eyes and started doing calculations in my head, but no dilation in my eyes when watching the recording. Could be my concentration just sucks.
  - FPGAhacker 4y ago
    Or it the calculations were easy for you.
colordrops 4y ago
As a regular meditator I'm curious if those with aphantasia are generally more present and in the current moment than those without it. A typical meditation practice involves working with mind wandering, and I'm guessing that visualization makes it easier to get lost in thought.
- srcreigh 4y ago
  Nope. I still have trains of thought. It's just auditory, conceptual, emotional etc not visual. I do get distracted with thoughts (even ignoring other people sometimes) most likely same as you or anyone.
- sethrin 4y ago
  I feel like that matches my experiences. I don't have commentary or mental projections, or stray thoughts: 'empty mind' is my default state. I'm not sure what tradeoffs this might entail.
CyborgCabbage 4y ago
Hoping they do a larger study. The methodology is a bit weird though; they change the colour of the screen right when they tell people to imagine stuff. Surely that would only make the effect of imagining harder to pick out? The aphantasia and control graphs also look very similar to my eye, and they didn't show them side by side or anything (though I might have missed it as I only skimmed).
gamerDude 4y ago
I have this for hearing. And after I realized it, I asked a lot of friends about their memories and experienced and found people who like me also have trouble imagining one of the senses. From remembering taste, they never had cravings and ate super healthy, lucky, to not be able to recreate visuals, touch and me missing auditory imagination.
- nimos 4y ago
  This is really interesting. I've had similar questions? For vision I'm an "aphant" but I think also for touch/smell/hearing? I could never replay a song in my head. At best I could repeat a few catchy lyrics. Certainty not a beat. For touch to me it seems impossible? Like I could never remember what touch feels like. I would be genuinely more baffled than visualization if someone could tell me they could remember what it felt like to be touched.
  - gamerDude 4y ago
    Yeah, similar experience. There is never a song stuck in my head. I can remember the lyrics and often sing along to modern pop songs because the chorus is the same or they use very predictable words. But I can remember what touch feels like. Like I can re-imagine it and re-feel it from memory. Its like other memories in that it isn't exact or anything, but I can definitely somewhat recreate the sensations.
npunt 4y ago
I wonder if study results would be different for aphantasics on psychedelics. I imagine aphantasia is like most other human differences and exists on a spectrum, so perhaps a mild psychedelic like THC may affect results.
- srcreigh 4y ago
  Aphantastic here. I get cool star patterns after drinking booze and laying down with my eyes closed. Like fast changing animation of different aspects of the shape changing-size, color, number of points, length of points, sometimes other types of shapes. Lasts only 20 seconds or so when I first lie down after 4+ drinks sometimes. Had some interesting visual imagination one time while meditating on LSD. Wasn't much in control of what I saw, but it was interesting to imagine colorful stuff for the first time ever. Normal LSD trip isn't very imaginative (I don't do psychedelics for years mind you.) mostly visual with my eyes. Same with shrooms. Marijuana for me never really created visual imagination (used to smoke a lot years ago).
- thucydides 4y ago
  I have aphantasia. In ordinary waking life, I can't voluntarily summon images to mind. It's darkness. But I have powerful visuals in dreams and on psychedelics. On LSD I once spent 15 minutes flying through a Henry Rousseau jungle on a toucan's back. I can sometimes voluntarily summon images immediately before falling asleep. Great question, by the way. I wonder if others have similar experiences.
  - npunt 4y ago
    Very interesting! Cool dream too :) That suggests to me it may not be some inherent lack of capacity but more so the path to accessing that capacity that is the issue. Makes me think that phantasia might be improved through frequent practice in something visual like arts or design. I wonder if any studies on aphantasics have been run that try to assess improvement. If pupillary contraction mentioned in this article is a good enough measure of aphantasia, that may serve as a way to measure improvements through practice. I'm somewhat on the other end of the phantasic spectrum, I close my eyes and can design things, though the images don't hold super long or can't get too complex. I'm better at it later in the evening and on edibles. I've also been practicing design for ~30 years, and I can say it's definitely gotten easier to visualize some things over time and I attribute it to practice. 'Practice' here perhaps could also be 'noticing'. I remember I used to be really into Magic:TG and spent a lot of time admiring the artwork and design of cards, like being really obsessed with all the details. After doing all this noticing for some time I realized I could sometimes visualize new cards, so I would close my eyes and thumb through a deck, trying to visualize cards as fast as possible as a kind of test. My sense is I wouldn't be able to do that without all the practice I had training my brain on the features of the cards.
swayvil 4y ago
My "visual imagination" becomes much more intense when I practice Vipassana meditation. Regularly so. That would suggest that it depends on your state of consciousness. And state of consciousness may be more or less constant for any given person. But it can be altered.
cartoonfoxes 4y ago
I suspect this has something to do with which parts of your brain are wired into your short-term memory, and the ratio of connections to each. My conscious visual imagination can produce hallucinatory "front-buffer" effects - like a heads-up display in my central field of vision. I also have a severe deficit when it comes to sensing my emotional state or stress levels. Short-term memory "size" seems fairly consistent between people. It wouldn't surprise me if those with aphantasia have a concomitant awareness of some other mental process that isn't normally consciously accessible. Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.
- kaashif 4y ago
  > Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance. Is that logical? I think the most logical thing would be to ask: does it impair the individual's ability to reproduce, or the health of their children? I don't think it does - people with aphantasia seem to function relatively normally in that respect. Thus I don't think it would be that heavily selected for or against. Sometimes things evolution produces are bad but not that bad, so they stick around because there's not enough pressure to make them go away.
  - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
    We're living in a novel environment. Being unable to imagine the juxtaposition of rocks which would shield your turned back from view of the sabertooth tiger, for example, could have very different outcomes depending on which side of the last ice age you were born into. edit: Also consider "impaired" vs "less fit". The absence of the trait might not be actively harmful to the individual, and yet enhance reproductive success of those who have it. Not having it among a population who do is a kind of cost.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
cercatrova 4y ago
To those asking whether people can normally "see" in their "mind's eye" as if one sees in reality, the answer is yes. We can see the world in our mind and conjure whatever we want, spatially manipulate objects (rotation, translation, scaling) and imagine their interactions with other objects (a ball hitting another in mid air and how it'd bounce off). It's like having a VR environment inside your own mind that you can use at any time and take wherever you want. I'm not sure about other people, but I can also conjure smells, sounds and tastes as clearly as if I'd experienced them in reality. This might however be more than what most people can do, I suspect I'm on the hyperphantasia part of the spectrum.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass those questions, but I can. It's almost an intuitive sense of which one is right.
  - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
    Elsewhere in this thread people were talking about imagined sounds or music, and a specific impairment in their ability to hear music in their heads. An anecdote: I'm in the middle of learning the bass part for a piece of music. Having listened to it enough I can imagine the sound enough to "hear" the notes, fret noises, pluck and slap sounds. Altogether it's a very high-fidelity simulation. I was practicing right up until, for apparently no reason at all, the song falls out of my short-term memory. Completely gone - can't even remember its name - but I could still work the fingerboard just fine. The muscle memory and intuition of how to play "that song" are still there, and my hands continue to play it almost as well as before. People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia. I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.
deleted 4y ago
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alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Who else here learned today from this link that they too have Aphantasia
JaimeThompson 4y ago
There are active discussions here [1] that contains a more representative sample of the population if anyone is interested. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
vba616 4y ago
There was an item on HN and elsewhere, probably reposted every so often, where a researcher asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and not one of them drew something physically reasonable. So that seems to suggest that about 0% of "normal people" have "visual imagination". What proportion of people can disassemble a mechanical device and remember how to reassemble it without taking photos? If it is substantial, why do most people who can afford it have professional mechanics do even simple things? What about people who have vivid visual dreams, but cannot retrieve details of things seen on awakening? Are they "aphantasic" or not? Surely the vast majority of people cannot draw or paint a familiar object in detail from memory, if put to the test. It's utterly useless to do "science" that starts with assuming everybody has a clear and consistent definition of a word denoting the subjective experience being investigated.
nimos 4y ago
I have aphantasia. Curious given the audience, how others feel about math? I've done well when I applied myself but definitely not any kind of genius (D- was my first calc 1 grade). One interesting thing I noticed is when I actually got into math at the university level and engaged with professors there were multiple times where I got the feedback along the lines of "Well yes that is right but kind of weird way to think about or answer the question." I think for higher dimensional problems it's actually an advantage? Like I have no idea how to visualize something in r^n. Not sure how much people "visualize" functions in r2/r3? To me the difference between r3->r4 is similar to the difference for r2->r3. It's more complex but the way I'd "visualize" something is largely the same.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  I think I have aphantasia, and I love math. I always did very well at it. I don't visualize it at all. It's simply facts that happen. When people told me they visualize code, I simply assumed they meant they organized it in their head somehow. I don't do any of that. My mental model of code happens automatically and it's just relations between things, no visual at all.
efferifick 4y ago
This reminds me a little of the Voight-Kampff test.
- tmitchel2 4y ago
  That was my first thought.
  - tmitchel2 4y ago
    My second thought is that this whole thing could be down to a two way road between the neo cortex and the visual cortex. Its all the rage in machine learning / neural net to paint images using just concepts / words so perhaps some of us can so the same thing. Personally I think mine is less a two way road and more a one way cul-de-sac.
mescaline 4y ago
One may wonder why Pearson remains hellbent on finding Aphants. Evolution is a bitch.
karmakaze 4y ago
I suspect that I would classify as one who has aphantasia, as I can't picture images at will. This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.
- davidhunter 4y ago
  I’m with you. Do you believe it gives you an edge on certain types of tasks?
  - aendruk 4y ago
    I feel like I’m better prepared for the tasks that are too complex to process all at once and must be decomposed and navigated systematically, because I’m well practiced at approaching everything that way, by necessity.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  I can't picture images at all, and don't really dream at all either. Wonder if there are any implications, I went through most of my life thinking this is normal.
  - emerged 4y ago
    I can’t picture images at all and thought it was normal. I mean it seems to be relatively common at least so we aren’t total aliens. It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts. That made art both more and less impressive to me lol
dang 4y ago
Related: Aphantasia (and how not to do math in your head) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments) Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment) Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments) Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments) Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments) The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments) What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments) Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments) Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
- cercatrova 4y ago
  I've read about and seen articles submitted on aphantasia more on HN than anywhere else on the internet. I wonder if it's just more prevalent among the HN population than others.
xvector 4y ago
Would aphants be better served with an academic pipeline that minimizes reliance on visualizing, especially when it comes to classes like geometry or trignometry? Perhaps a mechanism like this could identify aphantasia in early childhood and use this to provide a more optimized academic pipeline.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  Aphantasic here. Math concepts are not difficult to visualize, because they exist at the edge of abstraction.
- mkoubaa 4y ago
  It's not an issue at least for me, the only problem I've had as an aphant is descriptive writing of scenery.
- srcreigh 4y ago
  Triangles are super easy to draw (ie see) and the math is usually very simple. If there's an associated formula, working with formula is also very possible without visual skills. Trickier problems involving several shapes like a puzzle might be harder, though that's not usually curriculum.
- sethrin 4y ago
  I didn't have a problem with geometry or trig, but I was always angry at visualization exercises. "Imagine your pain as a ball of healing light..." But in general I think it would be like optimizing academic pipelines for being left-handed.
- doliveira 4y ago
  I don't think aphants have problems with these classes, at least not from what I read. I think I'd qualify as aphant, but I had no problems at all in Engineering or Physics (at least, not coming from aphantasia)
  - wallacoloo 4y ago
    yeah but classes like geometry? i remember our section on conical slices. like, cool, you can make an ellipse by intersecting a plane with a cone, but (for someone with limited mental imagery: ) isn't that just a really tortured way to go about the task?
codenesium 4y ago
The way I have described it is in the movie The Dark Knight they build the machine that uses phones to build something like sonar to see in environments. The way that is depicted in the movie is how I visualize things. I can navigate rooms or areas but I only see this vague representation of objects similar to how it's depicted in the movie. I have no problem with abstract concepts as a software engineer. But I can't visualize a face for example. It's a vague representation in my mind.
- doliveira 4y ago
  Yes! I described it once like the sense from Daredevil or Toph from Avatar. I can kind of feel shapes and directions in my mind. When it comes to colours, though, I have to "paint" "manually" over this mental sonar image.
- codenesium 4y ago
  Also, my memory is terrible. Poor recall from my childhood and even today. However, I'm good at improvising as an engineer and also as a musician.
  - grenoire 4y ago
    I think of two different types of minds in this case, 'functional' and 'stateful.' Functional (like functional programming) minds do not use recall much, but instead build tools to react to situations. Stateful (with reactions in storage already) minds are good at recall and can react to known scenarios with greater precision. I feel like you describe a functional one.
    - bsedlm 4y ago
      this is a really cool "dichotomy". I was just discussing this in terms of "sages" which know things, they recall and store "stateful data" and "seers" (like in the verb to see); them who don't know things but perceive them and observe them.
    - aendruk 4y ago
mjfl 4y ago
Aphants - I'm wondering how much you enjoy reading fiction? Seems like a visual imagination would help you enjoy it a bit more. I have seen a youtuber describe her aphantasia and how she doesn't enjoy reading, perhaps for this reason.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  I finally realized that I probably experience fiction at a much shittier quality than other people, and have basically given up on it. I mean, most fiction is lame IMHO anyway, but I get nothing out of visual descriptions. The characters play out their scenes basically in voids, or in the barest of sets (a room, a house, the bottom of a mountain).
  - kaashif 4y ago
    I always found the most engaging fiction to be the ones that explore really interesting concepts, rather than ones that try to describe rather mundane things happening. I told someone I absolutely loved Asimov's Foundation series and they had a really weird complaint - they said it was just people sitting in rooms talking. Maybe occasionally they'd smoke a cigar. I said yeah, but they're talking about something really cool! Would those books have really been improved if Asimov described the smoke or the room or whatever? Like who cares? I don't even have aphantasia, but man, sometimes there's a really long description of something in a book and I can barely get through it.
    - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
      I've read lots of sci-fi, but never Foundation. Knowing how well-regarded it is among fans of the genre, hearing it described as "people sitting in rooms talking" is the best hook I've heard in a while.
      - kaashif 4y ago
        Researching it now, I think Asimov actually had aphantasia, he talks about how he can't visualise at all: > IA: "I have no talent whatsoever for writing movie scripts." > Interviewer:"How can this be." > IA: "Easy. The requirements are different." > Interviewer: "Writing character or..." > IA: "Well you have to have a picture in your mind. You can't just tell a story. You have to at all times know what's on the screen." > Interviewer: "Visual medium." > IA: "And it's useless to ask me to do that. I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so "talky". One of the reviews of Nemesis says it's talky (oh what do they know) but it's true. It's great talk but he wouldn't know that." > Interviewer: "But what you talk about is visualizable." > IA: "I suppose, but that's purely accidental." From this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparently_andrej_sapkowski_author_of_the_witcher/ffu1t1p/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparent... although the video linked appears to be dead.

84 points by sethrin 4y ago

Eh, I’m not so sure about what they believe the pupillary response was a proxy for. Your eyes dilate when you concentrate. Stare at your eyes in the mirror and start doing simple arithmetic in your head. Adding numbers, multiplication of multi digit numbers. Your eyes will dilate noticeably.

lalopalota 4y ago
Cool. Just like they mentioned in the article!
Twisol 4y ago
This is discussed in the article, where they used this fact to affirm that aphantastic individuals are indeed attempting to visualize (and failing), vs. simply not attempting. Moreover, they explain that in those who can visualize, pupils both dilated and contracted appropriate to the visualization.
- FPGAhacker 4y ago
  Oh, thanks. I guess I judged too quickly.
yes_man 4y ago
Anecdotally I just tried recording a video of my eyes and started doing calculations in my head, but no dilation in my eyes when watching the recording. Could be my concentration just sucks.
- FPGAhacker 4y ago
  Or it the calculations were easy for you.

colordrops 4y ago

As a regular meditator I'm curious if those with aphantasia are generally more present and in the current moment than those without it. A typical meditation practice involves working with mind wandering, and I'm guessing that visualization makes it easier to get lost in thought.

srcreigh 4y ago
Nope. I still have trains of thought. It's just auditory, conceptual, emotional etc not visual. I do get distracted with thoughts (even ignoring other people sometimes) most likely same as you or anyone.
sethrin 4y ago
I feel like that matches my experiences. I don't have commentary or mental projections, or stray thoughts: 'empty mind' is my default state. I'm not sure what tradeoffs this might entail.

CyborgCabbage 4y ago

Hoping they do a larger study. The methodology is a bit weird though; they change the colour of the screen right when they tell people to imagine stuff. Surely that would only make the effect of imagining harder to pick out? The aphantasia and control graphs also look very similar to my eye, and they didn't show them side by side or anything (though I might have missed it as I only skimmed).

gamerDude 4y ago

I have this for hearing. And after I realized it, I asked a lot of friends about their memories and experienced and found people who like me also have trouble imagining one of the senses. From remembering taste, they never had cravings and ate super healthy, lucky, to not be able to recreate visuals, touch and me missing auditory imagination.

nimos 4y ago
This is really interesting. I've had similar questions? For vision I'm an "aphant" but I think also for touch/smell/hearing? I could never replay a song in my head. At best I could repeat a few catchy lyrics. Certainty not a beat. For touch to me it seems impossible? Like I could never remember what touch feels like. I would be genuinely more baffled than visualization if someone could tell me they could remember what it felt like to be touched.
- gamerDude 4y ago
  Yeah, similar experience. There is never a song stuck in my head. I can remember the lyrics and often sing along to modern pop songs because the chorus is the same or they use very predictable words. But I can remember what touch feels like. Like I can re-imagine it and re-feel it from memory. Its like other memories in that it isn't exact or anything, but I can definitely somewhat recreate the sensations.

npunt 4y ago

I wonder if study results would be different for aphantasics on psychedelics. I imagine aphantasia is like most other human differences and exists on a spectrum, so perhaps a mild psychedelic like THC may affect results.

srcreigh 4y ago
Aphantastic here. I get cool star patterns after drinking booze and laying down with my eyes closed. Like fast changing animation of different aspects of the shape changing-size, color, number of points, length of points, sometimes other types of shapes. Lasts only 20 seconds or so when I first lie down after 4+ drinks sometimes. Had some interesting visual imagination one time while meditating on LSD. Wasn't much in control of what I saw, but it was interesting to imagine colorful stuff for the first time ever. Normal LSD trip isn't very imaginative (I don't do psychedelics for years mind you.) mostly visual with my eyes. Same with shrooms. Marijuana for me never really created visual imagination (used to smoke a lot years ago).
thucydides 4y ago
I have aphantasia. In ordinary waking life, I can't voluntarily summon images to mind. It's darkness. But I have powerful visuals in dreams and on psychedelics. On LSD I once spent 15 minutes flying through a Henry Rousseau jungle on a toucan's back. I can sometimes voluntarily summon images immediately before falling asleep. Great question, by the way. I wonder if others have similar experiences.
- npunt 4y ago
  Very interesting! Cool dream too :) That suggests to me it may not be some inherent lack of capacity but more so the path to accessing that capacity that is the issue. Makes me think that phantasia might be improved through frequent practice in something visual like arts or design. I wonder if any studies on aphantasics have been run that try to assess improvement. If pupillary contraction mentioned in this article is a good enough measure of aphantasia, that may serve as a way to measure improvements through practice. I'm somewhat on the other end of the phantasic spectrum, I close my eyes and can design things, though the images don't hold super long or can't get too complex. I'm better at it later in the evening and on edibles. I've also been practicing design for ~30 years, and I can say it's definitely gotten easier to visualize some things over time and I attribute it to practice. 'Practice' here perhaps could also be 'noticing'. I remember I used to be really into Magic:TG and spent a lot of time admiring the artwork and design of cards, like being really obsessed with all the details. After doing all this noticing for some time I realized I could sometimes visualize new cards, so I would close my eyes and thumb through a deck, trying to visualize cards as fast as possible as a kind of test. My sense is I wouldn't be able to do that without all the practice I had training my brain on the features of the cards.

swayvil 4y ago

My "visual imagination" becomes much more intense when I practice Vipassana meditation. Regularly so. That would suggest that it depends on your state of consciousness. And state of consciousness may be more or less constant for any given person. But it can be altered.

cartoonfoxes 4y ago

I suspect this has something to do with which parts of your brain are wired into your short-term memory, and the ratio of connections to each. My conscious visual imagination can produce hallucinatory "front-buffer" effects - like a heads-up display in my central field of vision. I also have a severe deficit when it comes to sensing my emotional state or stress levels. Short-term memory "size" seems fairly consistent between people. It wouldn't surprise me if those with aphantasia have a concomitant awareness of some other mental process that isn't normally consciously accessible. Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance.

kaashif 4y ago
> Appealing to evolutionary biology - since aphantasia appears to be a persistent trait in humans which would seem to have obvious costs, it's logical to assume there are benefits somewhere to make up the balance. Is that logical? I think the most logical thing would be to ask: does it impair the individual's ability to reproduce, or the health of their children? I don't think it does - people with aphantasia seem to function relatively normally in that respect. Thus I don't think it would be that heavily selected for or against. Sometimes things evolution produces are bad but not that bad, so they stick around because there's not enough pressure to make them go away.
- cartoonfoxes 4y ago
  We're living in a novel environment. Being unable to imagine the juxtaposition of rocks which would shield your turned back from view of the sabertooth tiger, for example, could have very different outcomes depending on which side of the last ice age you were born into. edit: Also consider "impaired" vs "less fit". The absence of the trait might not be actively harmful to the individual, and yet enhance reproductive success of those who have it. Not having it among a population who do is a kind of cost.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago

cercatrova 4y ago

To those asking whether people can normally "see" in their "mind's eye" as if one sees in reality, the answer is yes. We can see the world in our mind and conjure whatever we want, spatially manipulate objects (rotation, translation, scaling) and imagine their interactions with other objects (a ball hitting another in mid air and how it'd bounce off). It's like having a VR environment inside your own mind that you can use at any time and take wherever you want. I'm not sure about other people, but I can also conjure smells, sounds and tastes as clearly as if I'd experienced them in reality. This might however be more than what most people can do, I suspect I'm on the hyperphantasia part of the spectrum.

prometheus76 4y ago
I have aphantasia, but I can flip objects around and pass those questions on tests where you have to flip an object "in your head". I don't know how I pass those questions, but I can. It's almost an intuitive sense of which one is right.
- cartoonfoxes 4y ago
  Elsewhere in this thread people were talking about imagined sounds or music, and a specific impairment in their ability to hear music in their heads. An anecdote: I'm in the middle of learning the bass part for a piece of music. Having listened to it enough I can imagine the sound enough to "hear" the notes, fret noises, pluck and slap sounds. Altogether it's a very high-fidelity simulation. I was practicing right up until, for apparently no reason at all, the song falls out of my short-term memory. Completely gone - can't even remember its name - but I could still work the fingerboard just fine. The muscle memory and intuition of how to play "that song" are still there, and my hands continue to play it almost as well as before. People use terms like "brain fart" to describe a sudden absence of something from conscious memory, especially when the expected information returns a short while later. In my music example there was nothing unusually wrong with my brain, since the memories returned a few tens of seconds later. In trying to relate the subjective experience of that gap, I would use exactly the same kind of language people do when describing aphantasia. I strongly suspect what's going on in these cases isn't that the simulation hardware isn't working - but that it's not wired up to a chunk of meat that does working memory. The existence of things like brain farts make me wonder if connections between key areas of the brain have a counter-intuitively high number of single-point failures.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Who else here learned today from this link that they too have Aphantasia

JaimeThompson 4y ago

There are active discussions here [1] that contains a more representative sample of the population if anyone is interested. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/

vba616 4y ago

There was an item on HN and elsewhere, probably reposted every so often, where a researcher asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and not one of them drew something physically reasonable. So that seems to suggest that about 0% of "normal people" have "visual imagination". What proportion of people can disassemble a mechanical device and remember how to reassemble it without taking photos? If it is substantial, why do most people who can afford it have professional mechanics do even simple things? What about people who have vivid visual dreams, but cannot retrieve details of things seen on awakening? Are they "aphantasic" or not? Surely the vast majority of people cannot draw or paint a familiar object in detail from memory, if put to the test. It's utterly useless to do "science" that starts with assuming everybody has a clear and consistent definition of a word denoting the subjective experience being investigated.

nimos 4y ago

I have aphantasia. Curious given the audience, how others feel about math? I've done well when I applied myself but definitely not any kind of genius (D- was my first calc 1 grade). One interesting thing I noticed is when I actually got into math at the university level and engaged with professors there were multiple times where I got the feedback along the lines of "Well yes that is right but kind of weird way to think about or answer the question." I think for higher dimensional problems it's actually an advantage? Like I have no idea how to visualize something in r^n. Not sure how much people "visualize" functions in r2/r3? To me the difference between r3->r4 is similar to the difference for r2->r3. It's more complex but the way I'd "visualize" something is largely the same.

wccrawford 4y ago
I think I have aphantasia, and I love math. I always did very well at it. I don't visualize it at all. It's simply facts that happen. When people told me they visualize code, I simply assumed they meant they organized it in their head somehow. I don't do any of that. My mental model of code happens automatically and it's just relations between things, no visual at all.

efferifick 4y ago

This reminds me a little of the Voight-Kampff test.

tmitchel2 4y ago
That was my first thought.
- tmitchel2 4y ago
  My second thought is that this whole thing could be down to a two way road between the neo cortex and the visual cortex. Its all the rage in machine learning / neural net to paint images using just concepts / words so perhaps some of us can so the same thing. Personally I think mine is less a two way road and more a one way cul-de-sac.

mescaline 4y ago

One may wonder why Pearson remains hellbent on finding Aphants. Evolution is a bitch.

karmakaze 4y ago

I suspect that I would classify as one who has aphantasia, as I can't picture images at will. This isn't to say I have no capability of generating images as in my dreams, or in rare moments lucid dreaming. I'm also very 'visual' in thinking processes, not exactly in images but in relationships between parts. After thinking about a particular problem for a while I sometimes have a flash insight of a structure/shape that can solve it. The clearest example was a puzzle of how to balance 20 framing nails on the head of one nailed upright. When I woke up the next morning I had imagined the solution though not necessary rendering an image of it. [Postpone cleartext spoiler replies so folks get a chance to sleep on it.] In ML terms it could be like working in feature-space rather than image-space.

davidhunter 4y ago
I’m with you. Do you believe it gives you an edge on certain types of tasks?
- aendruk 4y ago
  I feel like I’m better prepared for the tasks that are too complex to process all at once and must be decomposed and navigated systematically, because I’m well practiced at approaching everything that way, by necessity.
kmonsen 4y ago
I can't picture images at all, and don't really dream at all either. Wonder if there are any implications, I went through most of my life thinking this is normal.
- emerged 4y ago
  I can’t picture images at all and thought it was normal. I mean it seems to be relatively common at least so we aren’t total aliens. It always seemed really odd to me that people can sit down and draw whatever they want. The way my mind works it’s just absurd to imagine magically knowing what color to use and precise brush movements. But if you can visualize things you basically are copying from an image of sorts. That made art both more and less impressive to me lol

dang 4y ago

Related: Aphantasia (and how not to do math in your head) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments) Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment) Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment) Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments) Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments) Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments) Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments) The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments) What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments) Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments) Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments) Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)

cercatrova 4y ago
I've read about and seen articles submitted on aphantasia more on HN than anywhere else on the internet. I wonder if it's just more prevalent among the HN population than others.

xvector 4y ago

Would aphants be better served with an academic pipeline that minimizes reliance on visualizing, especially when it comes to classes like geometry or trignometry? Perhaps a mechanism like this could identify aphantasia in early childhood and use this to provide a more optimized academic pipeline.

khazhoux 4y ago
Aphantasic here. Math concepts are not difficult to visualize, because they exist at the edge of abstraction.
mkoubaa 4y ago
It's not an issue at least for me, the only problem I've had as an aphant is descriptive writing of scenery.
srcreigh 4y ago
Triangles are super easy to draw (ie see) and the math is usually very simple. If there's an associated formula, working with formula is also very possible without visual skills. Trickier problems involving several shapes like a puzzle might be harder, though that's not usually curriculum.
sethrin 4y ago
I didn't have a problem with geometry or trig, but I was always angry at visualization exercises. "Imagine your pain as a ball of healing light..." But in general I think it would be like optimizing academic pipelines for being left-handed.
doliveira 4y ago
I don't think aphants have problems with these classes, at least not from what I read. I think I'd qualify as aphant, but I had no problems at all in Engineering or Physics (at least, not coming from aphantasia)
- wallacoloo 4y ago
  yeah but classes like geometry? i remember our section on conical slices. like, cool, you can make an ellipse by intersecting a plane with a cone, but (for someone with limited mental imagery: ) isn't that just a really tortured way to go about the task?

codenesium 4y ago

The way I have described it is in the movie The Dark Knight they build the machine that uses phones to build something like sonar to see in environments. The way that is depicted in the movie is how I visualize things. I can navigate rooms or areas but I only see this vague representation of objects similar to how it's depicted in the movie. I have no problem with abstract concepts as a software engineer. But I can't visualize a face for example. It's a vague representation in my mind.

doliveira 4y ago
Yes! I described it once like the sense from Daredevil or Toph from Avatar. I can kind of feel shapes and directions in my mind. When it comes to colours, though, I have to "paint" "manually" over this mental sonar image.
codenesium 4y ago
Also, my memory is terrible. Poor recall from my childhood and even today. However, I'm good at improvising as an engineer and also as a musician.
- grenoire 4y ago
  I think of two different types of minds in this case, 'functional' and 'stateful.' Functional (like functional programming) minds do not use recall much, but instead build tools to react to situations. Stateful (with reactions in storage already) minds are good at recall and can react to known scenarios with greater precision. I feel like you describe a functional one.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    this is a really cool "dichotomy". I was just discussing this in terms of "sages" which know things, they recall and store "stateful data" and "seers" (like in the verb to see); them who don't know things but perceive them and observe them.
  - aendruk 4y ago

mjfl 4y ago

Aphants - I'm wondering how much you enjoy reading fiction? Seems like a visual imagination would help you enjoy it a bit more. I have seen a youtuber describe her aphantasia and how she doesn't enjoy reading, perhaps for this reason.

khazhoux 4y ago
I finally realized that I probably experience fiction at a much shittier quality than other people, and have basically given up on it. I mean, most fiction is lame IMHO anyway, but I get nothing out of visual descriptions. The characters play out their scenes basically in voids, or in the barest of sets (a room, a house, the bottom of a mountain).
- kaashif 4y ago
  I always found the most engaging fiction to be the ones that explore really interesting concepts, rather than ones that try to describe rather mundane things happening. I told someone I absolutely loved Asimov's Foundation series and they had a really weird complaint - they said it was just people sitting in rooms talking. Maybe occasionally they'd smoke a cigar. I said yeah, but they're talking about something really cool! Would those books have really been improved if Asimov described the smoke or the room or whatever? Like who cares? I don't even have aphantasia, but man, sometimes there's a really long description of something in a book and I can barely get through it.
  - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
    I've read lots of sci-fi, but never Foundation. Knowing how well-regarded it is among fans of the genre, hearing it described as "people sitting in rooms talking" is the best hook I've heard in a while.
    - kaashif 4y ago
      Researching it now, I think Asimov actually had aphantasia, he talks about how he can't visualise at all: > IA: "I have no talent whatsoever for writing movie scripts." > Interviewer:"How can this be." > IA: "Easy. The requirements are different." > Interviewer: "Writing character or..." > IA: "Well you have to have a picture in your mind. You can't just tell a story. You have to at all times know what's on the screen." > Interviewer: "Visual medium." > IA: "And it's useless to ask me to do that. I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so "talky". One of the reviews of Nemesis says it's talky (oh what do they know) but it's true. It's great talk but he wouldn't know that." > Interviewer: "But what you talk about is visualizable." > IA: "I suppose, but that's purely accidental." From this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparently_andrej_sapkowski_author_of_the_witcher/ffu1t1p/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/euvz05/apparent... although the video linked appears to be dead.