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Are there tests for aphantasia? It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pr

Are there tests for aphantasia? It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pretty wildly. I myself don't have aphantasia I think but I feel like I really have to work on "drawing things up" when I try to picture something with my eyes closed. Or maybe that's just the normal amount of effort for the complexity and detail I'm trying to capture? Actually it's easier to "imagine" things with my eyes open which I always thought was weird before I read this comment about daydreaming blocking out vision. Which still sounds extreme to me, but maybe not more extreme than all those other reports that claim they can procure fully detailed houses / places / system architectures / electrical diagrams / etc on a whim.

to1y 3y ago
When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them. This makes me wonder two things: 1. Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation? 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?
- Sharlin 3y ago
  1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things. As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.
- in3d 3y ago
  > 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images? Yes, many reports suggest that most do. But I haven’t seen any rate comparisons with people who don’t have it.
- quantum_magpie 3y ago
  >2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images? Yes, I do. As it goes, I think it is some neurological thing, a receptor that is misfiring, or something. I've been testing it for the past decade and I only found three conditions where I can see images: 1. Dreams 2. Transition between awake and asleep during classical music concerts (This one is very interesting, cause one of my most vivid experiences was actually seeing different seasons during a Four Seasons (by Mozart I think?) piano concert, based purely on the music, without knowing which one was actually playing). 3. Psychedelics. Or, at least, mushrooms. Haven't tried others. It seems when some neurological inhibitor is turned off, the images come back, but I don't know if there was any research on that, or whether it is even true.
Forricide 3y ago
Conversations around this kind of thing are so fascinating to me, because they seem to present this fundamental breakdown in human communication - how impossible it is to convey what 'really is going on' inside your mind. The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'. But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not. Picture a dog in your head. It’s such an fuzzy, imprecise action that you can skew the definition of “seeing it” from nothing (you are mostly reasoning about what this dog looks like) all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision. Depending on what they think "seeing it" means, 100 different people can have 100 different explanations for the same phenomenon.
  - Forricide 3y ago
    > I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not. Yeah, this is exactly the issue, and it's really just impossible to know. There's this popular 'apple test' image that gets posted a lot, where you're supposed to self-diagnose your level of aphantasia/visual imagery prowess based on which 'tier' of apple you can visualize, and people will always say: yeah, I can see [extremely vivid, realistic image of an apple] in my mind perfectly well. And that seems impossible to me, but then, how are we supposed to know what other people can actually see in their mind? It's in their mind, after all. The one thing for me that does make me believe there is some major difference is murder mysteries; I have friends who can visualize scenes and solve mysteries that would be impossible for me.
chrisdbanks 3y ago
Picture an apple in your mind. What colour is it? ... Most people say red or green. If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.
- feoren 3y ago
  Wait, but, I know apples are red. I mean, picture "2 + 2 = " in your head and fill out the scene. What comes after the equals sign? It's 4, obviously. Nobody needs to hold anything in their visual field to know that. Wouldn't a better test be one of "visual reasoning"? I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well.
  - Forricide 3y ago
    > I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well. Yeah. I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but the big thing that made me understand (some of) the gulf in terms of visual rendering abilities was murder mysteries. I read a lot of them with friends and oftentimes mysteries rely on an ability to construct an image of the scene in your head. Not being able to solve such a mystery doesn't mean you have aphantasia, of course, but there's this feeling for me in these that they're literally impossible, and yet other people can definitely solve them.
    - pxc 3y ago
      Without spoilers, could you just list one or two such murder mysteries for me to read both for enjoyment and as a bit of a self-test?
      - Forricide 3y ago
in3d 3y ago
> Are there tests for aphantasia? Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures. Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).
- Forricide 3y ago
  > Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory). Thanks for mentioning this... did an extremely quick Google and I suddenly understand everything about my memory.
  - mdswanson 3y ago
    Also useful: https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/
mdswanson 3y ago
You can learn a lot more about aphantasia here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/
bongodongobob 3y ago
Yes there are tests, an MRI. Anyone claiming to have it is probably self-diagnosed and full of it. I'm tired of the self-diagnoses of everything trend over the last 5 or so years, sorry if my tone isn't the best.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  I'm tired of all the gatekeeping by the health industry telling us that we need to use their absurd rube goldberg processes, which often tell us "no", to know anything about ourselves.
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    Gatekeeping != Rigor. Set the bar higher.
- in3d 3y ago
  Doesn’t apply. Aphantasia is not recognized as a medical issue and there are no official diagnoses being conducted.
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    This is my conclusion as well although I did find a paper that said you could use an MRI of the vision region to tell.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Yes. My partner was tested for it once by a psychiatrist. From what I remember it's a lot of visual pattern and recall questions.
progmetaldev 3y ago
For myself, I don't think I have aphantasia, unless it is something that can come and go. There are times where I daydream and experience vivid visions akin to psychedelic closed eye visuals (except actual visions, and not geometric patterns). Most of the time when I daydream, I can picture something in my head, but it doesn't have the depth and detail of what I experience when deep in thought. I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new. This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).
detourdog 3y ago
I think it might be a literacy that can be honed. A 100 years ago a curriculum was devised to develop commercial art skills. Part of the curriculum I went through required 6 hours of life drawing a week for 2 semesters. The likely result is a strong visualization skill that can be expressed on paper The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.

to1y 3y ago

When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them. This makes me wonder two things: 1. Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation? 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

Sharlin 3y ago
1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things. As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.
in3d 3y ago
> 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images? Yes, many reports suggest that most do. But I haven’t seen any rate comparisons with people who don’t have it.
quantum_magpie 3y ago
>2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images? Yes, I do. As it goes, I think it is some neurological thing, a receptor that is misfiring, or something. I've been testing it for the past decade and I only found three conditions where I can see images: 1. Dreams 2. Transition between awake and asleep during classical music concerts (This one is very interesting, cause one of my most vivid experiences was actually seeing different seasons during a Four Seasons (by Mozart I think?) piano concert, based purely on the music, without knowing which one was actually playing). 3. Psychedelics. Or, at least, mushrooms. Haven't tried others. It seems when some neurological inhibitor is turned off, the images come back, but I don't know if there was any research on that, or whether it is even true.

Forricide 3y ago

Conversations around this kind of thing are so fascinating to me, because they seem to present this fundamental breakdown in human communication - how impossible it is to convey what 'really is going on' inside your mind. The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'. But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not. Picture a dog in your head. It’s such an fuzzy, imprecise action that you can skew the definition of “seeing it” from nothing (you are mostly reasoning about what this dog looks like) all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision. Depending on what they think "seeing it" means, 100 different people can have 100 different explanations for the same phenomenon.
- Forricide 3y ago
  > I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not. Yeah, this is exactly the issue, and it's really just impossible to know. There's this popular 'apple test' image that gets posted a lot, where you're supposed to self-diagnose your level of aphantasia/visual imagery prowess based on which 'tier' of apple you can visualize, and people will always say: yeah, I can see [extremely vivid, realistic image of an apple] in my mind perfectly well. And that seems impossible to me, but then, how are we supposed to know what other people can actually see in their mind? It's in their mind, after all. The one thing for me that does make me believe there is some major difference is murder mysteries; I have friends who can visualize scenes and solve mysteries that would be impossible for me.

chrisdbanks 3y ago

Picture an apple in your mind. What colour is it? ... Most people say red or green. If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.

feoren 3y ago
Wait, but, I know apples are red. I mean, picture "2 + 2 = " in your head and fill out the scene. What comes after the equals sign? It's 4, obviously. Nobody needs to hold anything in their visual field to know that. Wouldn't a better test be one of "visual reasoning"? I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well.
- Forricide 3y ago
  > I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well. Yeah. I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but the big thing that made me understand (some of) the gulf in terms of visual rendering abilities was murder mysteries. I read a lot of them with friends and oftentimes mysteries rely on an ability to construct an image of the scene in your head. Not being able to solve such a mystery doesn't mean you have aphantasia, of course, but there's this feeling for me in these that they're literally impossible, and yet other people can definitely solve them.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Without spoilers, could you just list one or two such murder mysteries for me to read both for enjoyment and as a bit of a self-test?
    - Forricide 3y ago

in3d 3y ago

> Are there tests for aphantasia? Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures. Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).

Forricide 3y ago
> Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory). Thanks for mentioning this... did an extremely quick Google and I suddenly understand everything about my memory.
- mdswanson 3y ago
  Also useful: https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/

mdswanson 3y ago

You can learn a lot more about aphantasia here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/

bongodongobob 3y ago

Yes there are tests, an MRI. Anyone claiming to have it is probably self-diagnosed and full of it. I'm tired of the self-diagnoses of everything trend over the last 5 or so years, sorry if my tone isn't the best.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
I'm tired of all the gatekeeping by the health industry telling us that we need to use their absurd rube goldberg processes, which often tell us "no", to know anything about ourselves.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  Gatekeeping != Rigor. Set the bar higher.
in3d 3y ago
Doesn’t apply. Aphantasia is not recognized as a medical issue and there are no official diagnoses being conducted.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  This is my conclusion as well although I did find a paper that said you could use an MRI of the vision region to tell.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago

Yes. My partner was tested for it once by a psychiatrist. From what I remember it's a lot of visual pattern and recall questions.

progmetaldev 3y ago

For myself, I don't think I have aphantasia, unless it is something that can come and go. There are times where I daydream and experience vivid visions akin to psychedelic closed eye visuals (except actual visions, and not geometric patterns). Most of the time when I daydream, I can picture something in my head, but it doesn't have the depth and detail of what I experience when deep in thought. I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new. This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).

detourdog 3y ago

I think it might be a literacy that can be honed. A 100 years ago a curriculum was devised to develop commercial art skills. Part of the curriculum I went through required 6 hours of life drawing a week for 2 semesters. The likely result is a strong visualization skill that can be expressed on paper The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.