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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

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.

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.