7 ms·

In response to your statement that it's difficult to say definitively that you're experiencing those images in a fundamentally different way from someone with a

In response to your statement that it's difficult to say definitively that you're experiencing those images in a fundamentally different way from someone with aphantasia, I can share my experience as someone on the complete opposite of the spectrum. I do have imagery when I dream, but in my waking hours, I __cannot__ picture things in my head. I can reason about objects based on experiences I have with them (i.e. describe them), but there is no "illusory" reference image. There's just nothing. It's difficult to articulate my method of internal processing, other than saying I have a constant internal monologue that is used to bring to mind whatever it is I'm trying to imagine, but imagery is completely non-existent. Additionally, I've never heard these described as possible symptoms of aphantasia until this article, but "Aphantasia is associated variably with a reduction in both autobiographical memory and face recognition" really resonates with my experience. I don't have many memories from childhood, my adult memories are often vague and more based on feelings that I have of a period in my life rather than concrete details, and I have a difficult time with recognizing actors even if I've seen them in a lot of films. I also have an exceptionally strong musical memory (borderline encyclopedic). I can quickly memorize music and have near perfect recall even when years go by without listening to it. I'm with you in excitement towards further studies of these phenomena, but just wanted to chip in with my personal experiences with aphantasia! Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

quantumwoke 3y ago
Can you describe your expectation vs reality? What do you think a “normal” person experiences?
- SirRoderic 3y ago
  My understanding is that most people remember past events in the context of their own experience of those events — when they remember, they recall into their minds some version of what they felt/saw/heard at the time, re-experienced from their own perspective. I've heard some people describe it like replaying a film, and they may even get a portion of the original emotional or sensory experience with it. I have none of that at all.
  - foota 3y ago
    No way... really? I think I fall under aphantasia, but I never realized people could potentially relive memories like that.
    - Kubuxu 3y ago
      Welcome in the SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) club. It is highly correlated with Aphantasia.
    - andrelaszlo 3y ago
      I'm thinking of a happy childhood memory. I'm with my grandmother down by the lake. We're getting into a boat. I can see the way the sunlight reflects on the sand in the shallow water and off the oars in the boat (and what their flaking varnish feels like in my hands). The smell of the reeds, grass, and lake water is very clear to me, as is the voice of my grandmother telling me to be careful to not fall into the water. I can also hear a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, kids splashing around by the beach, and rustling of the reeds as they're caught by the wind. It makes me happy, but also nostalgic. Most of the things from this memory are gone now. I believe the English word that best describes this is "wistful". I know memories are peculiar and that parts of this memory are probably borrowed from other memories, or even made up, but it doesn't make it feel less vivid to me.
      - sandspar 3y ago
        Are bad memories also vivid?
        andrelaszlo 3y ago
        Yes, quite. They can be affected by the kind of tunnel vision you get when you're very stressed out. Like remembering a spot on the wallpaper, or a brass part of the handrails on the stairs where my parents gave me some bad news when I was four. Unfortunately I can't seem to decide what sticks and what doesn't. I don't have perfect recall (far from it). I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday, but if I do I can probably still taste it.
- FumblingBear 3y ago
  Echoing SirRoderic here, but my understanding is that many others have the ability to clearly visualize their POV of past memories along with all or some of the sensory experiences associated with those experiences. My lived experience is that I can remember key life events to some extent, but there is no visual experience with it. I don't remember what the last house I lived in looked like (less than 2 years ago) but if I were to visit it, I'd clearly recognize it. One that kind of gets me is that I can't even picture my parent's faces. I can describe them, I have a ton of positive memories associated with them, and feel very strong feelings of love and affection for them, but despite having seen them yesterday for Easter, I can't picture them in my head. In some ways, that's strangely disorienting. It's frustrating to me to feel such a disconnect from things that are __very__ important to me. But in some ways, it's freeing. I think I have a pretty strong resistance to traumatic imagery, because once it's gone, it's just gone. If I see something disturbing, it doesn't haunt me. I can't imagine terrifying things (at least visually), so when I compare my experience to friends who have hyperphantasia (or at least a decent ability to picture things), there's a lot that can get stuck in their heads that I just can't. I try not to view the aphantasia as a good or bad thing. It's just part of how I am.
sixothree 3y ago
Serious question. Do you have trouble with reading fiction novels?
- SirRoderic 3y ago
  I don't read a lot of full-length books in recent years generally, but as a child I read tons of fiction... I was about to say "...so I don't think I have any trouble," but actually, come to think of it, most of the books I liked as a child were things like Redwall or Warriors, where all the characters were distinct species of animals and things like that. If the characters are all humans, I think it's difficult to remember who's who because they're just random collections of syllables (names) tied to a set of facts — "Kirk, a human man, is a captain", etc. I think, though, that this may be more of an aphantasia/faceblindness thing (I have no "theater of the mind" and can't picture characters to distinguish them) than an autobiographical memory thing. On the subject of memory, I will say, though, that perhaps I lack an interest in fiction books nowadays because no fond memories of reading them stick with me; even though I can recount the plot in excruciating detail, the most I might be able to say after the fact is "I liked/disliked that book" in a general sense, and that's just a memorized fact about my immediate feeling at the time. With a nonfiction book on the other hand I acquire information that can be useful to me afterwards.
- alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Ha! This came up on Saturday. I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies… What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head! Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!
  - kybernetikos 3y ago
    Well, I am very word focused and experience imagery by describing it to myself, so for me a novel is almost like replacing my internal monologue - I would say it's potentially more immersive for me to read than for someone without aphantasia. In fact if anything I might blame reading a lot at a young age for my aphantasia.
henriquecm8 3y ago
Now I am wondering how is the thought process of someone with Aphantasia and no inner monologue.
- inbetween 3y ago
  Being in that situation, two things that stand out are: when thinking about a topic, I do sometimes formulate my questions or hypotheses in internal words, but the "answers" come back in non verbal form: for instance I suddenly just "know" where the flaw in the argument is, or what (counter)example I need to think more about. The other striking fact is that when I am very emotional (eg angry), the internal monologue is suddenly very vivid :)
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Language is a crutch for thinking. It's good to be able to think, regardless of the need for words to do so, but even wordy thinkers do lots of things without word thinking. Like juggling. Or playing an instrument. Just because something is done in a way that they don't do it doesn't mean it's weird to be done that way.
solumunus 3y ago
How do you remember routes? If someone stops you on the street and asks for directions what exactly happens in your mind? It seems to me almost impossible to be able to navigate effectively without the power of visualisation, but it’s likely my own intuition is failing me here.
- inbetween 3y ago
  It's really hard to describe, and in my experience, people with mental images tend to have a hard time imagining it (and people with aphantasia seem to differ on how much they use an internal monologue, etc). In a nutshell, for me the directions either 'come out of nowhere' or there is a vague feeling of 'geometrical stuff happening somewhere in my brain, in a mostly non perceptible places'.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- FumblingBear 3y ago
  Sorry I don't have a great answer for this, but generally, just vibes. I'm not great at articulating directions to people due to the lack of visualization, and if someone asks me if I know where the x on y road is, I can't ever imagine it, but my general spatial orientation is totally fine and I can pretty competently navigate in both urban and wilderness spaces. There's like a abstract idea of where I am in relation to other things at any given point, but I don't really know street names or things like that because they're just not that helpful for my ability to get around. It's strange that I find it so difficult to explain—our brains are just good at compensating for shortcomings I suppose!
jijijijij 3y ago
What does it feel like when you are tired/relaxed, lying in bed, eyes closed? Do you get visually dreamy, half-awake? What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau? Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...? Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures? As someone with a sometimes annoyingly wild inner scenery, I would really love for a moment of peace closing my eyes, but I am always visually engaged as long as I am awake. There is no pause "seeing". Incidentally, I am very bad at memorizing music/lyrics. And funnily enough, I don't engage my fantasy much when reading, of all things.
- FumblingBear 3y ago
  >What does it feel like when you are tired/relaxed, lying in bed, eyes closed? Do you get visually dreamy, half-awake? When I'm tired, my inner dialogue is usually less active than normal, though it's never quite silent. It's more of a difficulty focusing on the streams of consciousness that slowly fades over time until sleep takes me. Sometimes, if I'm fading in and out of consciousness, I will have some imagery, but as far as I can tell, only when actually sleeping. This can result in moments where something vivid happens in a dream, like a car crash, where I suddenly jolt awake with my heart pounding rapidly. However, I can't continue to imagine the visuals of what happened. I just know that I dreamed I was in a car crash. >What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau? If I'm in total darkness, only Eigengrau (thanks for the new word btw!) but if I'm in light, I see kind of a reddish hue that is from the light passing through my eyelids I assume. There are no visuals associated with the eyes closing in a conventional sense. The whole "counting sheep" method of falling asleep never made any sense to me because I didn't realize that people could literally visualize sheep jumping. >Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...? Unfortunately, no. I'd love to try some, but in my field of work I have to maintain a security clearance so taking drugs could compromise my job security. In the past, I have been on a cocktail of anti-depressants + anti-anxiety medication that caused me to have vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, but those were with my eyes open, so it just seemed real to me. As soon as I mentioned those symptoms to my psychologist, I was immediately taken off the medications they put me on. >Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures? I can't picture memories at all, but I can describe things from my memories. The way I process them is very strangely abstract. There is no visual portion to the memories at all. For example, as I mentioned in another comment, I can't picture what my parents look like, despite having had lunch with them yesterday for Easter. I can describe certain details about them, and have very pleasant associations with them, but I simply can't picture them. The descriptions I could offer up would be particular details I've explicitly observed and remembered about them. I can't picture pictures either. If someone were to ask me to visualize an "apple" no picture appears, even if I spend a decent amount of time and effort trying to construct a visual. However, I can describe elements of what an apple is. It's sort of like the concept of a platonic ideal of a thing. I know attributes that are associated with the platonic ideal of apple, so by extension I can describe an apple. I just can't picture it. There's no visual reference in my processing for any element of internal thought. Thanks for sharing your experiences with your visualizations! I'm kind of the opposite. My mind is constantly yapping and I find it hard to fall asleep at times due to the persistent monologue in my head. I tend to listen to podcasts or Youtube while I fall asleep because it lets my mind be quiet and get ready for sleep.
drcongo 3y ago
This entire post describes my experience precisely. One flip-side to the poor face recognition is that my brain occasionally massively over compensates, especially when I've not slept well, and I'll have an entire day where I'm convinced I know every single person I see - curious if you get this too given how aligned our other experiences are. Edit: Oh! And one other oddness that I often wonder if it's related - I get exploding head syndrome. You?
- FumblingBear 3y ago
  Interesting! I don't think I've experienced the flip side of facial recognition! It sounds like a very strange phenomenon to have happen! I can pretty much always recognize the people I know in real life, but if there's a drastic change to their appearance, (i.e. shaved head, dyed hair, etc.) I simply don't notice that there's a change. I haven't had any experiences with exploding head syndrome either, though I do suffer from insomnia sometimes. I've gotten better at managing it nowadays, but for a long time I was unable to get good sleep without medication like Ambien. Fascinating that we have so much in common though! It's actually really cool to know that although I'm the odd one out when it comes to most of the people I know, there are other people out there with similar forms of neural processing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences :)
  - drcongo 3y ago
    Thanks for replying! I also have insomnia - partly I think down to the constant internal monologue. I manage it these days with melatonin which works well for me.

quantumwoke 3y ago

Can you describe your expectation vs reality? What do you think a “normal” person experiences?

SirRoderic 3y ago
My understanding is that most people remember past events in the context of their own experience of those events — when they remember, they recall into their minds some version of what they felt/saw/heard at the time, re-experienced from their own perspective. I've heard some people describe it like replaying a film, and they may even get a portion of the original emotional or sensory experience with it. I have none of that at all.
- foota 3y ago
  No way... really? I think I fall under aphantasia, but I never realized people could potentially relive memories like that.
  - Kubuxu 3y ago
    Welcome in the SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) club. It is highly correlated with Aphantasia.
  - andrelaszlo 3y ago
    I'm thinking of a happy childhood memory. I'm with my grandmother down by the lake. We're getting into a boat. I can see the way the sunlight reflects on the sand in the shallow water and off the oars in the boat (and what their flaking varnish feels like in my hands). The smell of the reeds, grass, and lake water is very clear to me, as is the voice of my grandmother telling me to be careful to not fall into the water. I can also hear a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, kids splashing around by the beach, and rustling of the reeds as they're caught by the wind. It makes me happy, but also nostalgic. Most of the things from this memory are gone now. I believe the English word that best describes this is "wistful". I know memories are peculiar and that parts of this memory are probably borrowed from other memories, or even made up, but it doesn't make it feel less vivid to me.
    - sandspar 3y ago
      Are bad memories also vivid?
      - andrelaszlo 3y ago
        Yes, quite. They can be affected by the kind of tunnel vision you get when you're very stressed out. Like remembering a spot on the wallpaper, or a brass part of the handrails on the stairs where my parents gave me some bad news when I was four. Unfortunately I can't seem to decide what sticks and what doesn't. I don't have perfect recall (far from it). I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday, but if I do I can probably still taste it.
FumblingBear 3y ago
Echoing SirRoderic here, but my understanding is that many others have the ability to clearly visualize their POV of past memories along with all or some of the sensory experiences associated with those experiences. My lived experience is that I can remember key life events to some extent, but there is no visual experience with it. I don't remember what the last house I lived in looked like (less than 2 years ago) but if I were to visit it, I'd clearly recognize it. One that kind of gets me is that I can't even picture my parent's faces. I can describe them, I have a ton of positive memories associated with them, and feel very strong feelings of love and affection for them, but despite having seen them yesterday for Easter, I can't picture them in my head. In some ways, that's strangely disorienting. It's frustrating to me to feel such a disconnect from things that are __very__ important to me. But in some ways, it's freeing. I think I have a pretty strong resistance to traumatic imagery, because once it's gone, it's just gone. If I see something disturbing, it doesn't haunt me. I can't imagine terrifying things (at least visually), so when I compare my experience to friends who have hyperphantasia (or at least a decent ability to picture things), there's a lot that can get stuck in their heads that I just can't. I try not to view the aphantasia as a good or bad thing. It's just part of how I am.

sixothree 3y ago

Serious question. Do you have trouble with reading fiction novels?

SirRoderic 3y ago
I don't read a lot of full-length books in recent years generally, but as a child I read tons of fiction... I was about to say "...so I don't think I have any trouble," but actually, come to think of it, most of the books I liked as a child were things like Redwall or Warriors, where all the characters were distinct species of animals and things like that. If the characters are all humans, I think it's difficult to remember who's who because they're just random collections of syllables (names) tied to a set of facts — "Kirk, a human man, is a captain", etc. I think, though, that this may be more of an aphantasia/faceblindness thing (I have no "theater of the mind" and can't picture characters to distinguish them) than an autobiographical memory thing. On the subject of memory, I will say, though, that perhaps I lack an interest in fiction books nowadays because no fond memories of reading them stick with me; even though I can recount the plot in excruciating detail, the most I might be able to say after the fact is "I liked/disliked that book" in a general sense, and that's just a memorized fact about my immediate feeling at the time. With a nonfiction book on the other hand I acquire information that can be useful to me afterwards.
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
Ha! This came up on Saturday. I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies… What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head! Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  Well, I am very word focused and experience imagery by describing it to myself, so for me a novel is almost like replacing my internal monologue - I would say it's potentially more immersive for me to read than for someone without aphantasia. In fact if anything I might blame reading a lot at a young age for my aphantasia.

henriquecm8 3y ago

Now I am wondering how is the thought process of someone with Aphantasia and no inner monologue.

inbetween 3y ago
Being in that situation, two things that stand out are: when thinking about a topic, I do sometimes formulate my questions or hypotheses in internal words, but the "answers" come back in non verbal form: for instance I suddenly just "know" where the flaw in the argument is, or what (counter)example I need to think more about. The other striking fact is that when I am very emotional (eg angry), the internal monologue is suddenly very vivid :)
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Language is a crutch for thinking. It's good to be able to think, regardless of the need for words to do so, but even wordy thinkers do lots of things without word thinking. Like juggling. Or playing an instrument. Just because something is done in a way that they don't do it doesn't mean it's weird to be done that way.

solumunus 3y ago

How do you remember routes? If someone stops you on the street and asks for directions what exactly happens in your mind? It seems to me almost impossible to be able to navigate effectively without the power of visualisation, but it’s likely my own intuition is failing me here.

inbetween 3y ago
It's really hard to describe, and in my experience, people with mental images tend to have a hard time imagining it (and people with aphantasia seem to differ on how much they use an internal monologue, etc). In a nutshell, for me the directions either 'come out of nowhere' or there is a vague feeling of 'geometrical stuff happening somewhere in my brain, in a mostly non perceptible places'.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FumblingBear 3y ago
Sorry I don't have a great answer for this, but generally, just vibes. I'm not great at articulating directions to people due to the lack of visualization, and if someone asks me if I know where the x on y road is, I can't ever imagine it, but my general spatial orientation is totally fine and I can pretty competently navigate in both urban and wilderness spaces. There's like a abstract idea of where I am in relation to other things at any given point, but I don't really know street names or things like that because they're just not that helpful for my ability to get around. It's strange that I find it so difficult to explain—our brains are just good at compensating for shortcomings I suppose!

jijijijij 3y ago

What does it feel like when you are tired/relaxed, lying in bed, eyes closed? Do you get visually dreamy, half-awake? What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau? Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...? Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures? As someone with a sometimes annoyingly wild inner scenery, I would really love for a moment of peace closing my eyes, but I am always visually engaged as long as I am awake. There is no pause "seeing". Incidentally, I am very bad at memorizing music/lyrics. And funnily enough, I don't engage my fantasy much when reading, of all things.

FumblingBear 3y ago
>What does it feel like when you are tired/relaxed, lying in bed, eyes closed? Do you get visually dreamy, half-awake? When I'm tired, my inner dialogue is usually less active than normal, though it's never quite silent. It's more of a difficulty focusing on the streams of consciousness that slowly fades over time until sleep takes me. Sometimes, if I'm fading in and out of consciousness, I will have some imagery, but as far as I can tell, only when actually sleeping. This can result in moments where something vivid happens in a dream, like a car crash, where I suddenly jolt awake with my heart pounding rapidly. However, I can't continue to imagine the visuals of what happened. I just know that I dreamed I was in a car crash. >What do you see when you close your eyes? Only ever Eigengrau? If I'm in total darkness, only Eigengrau (thanks for the new word btw!) but if I'm in light, I see kind of a reddish hue that is from the light passing through my eyelids I assume. There are no visuals associated with the eyes closing in a conventional sense. The whole "counting sheep" method of falling asleep never made any sense to me because I didn't realize that people could literally visualize sheep jumping. >Have you ever done psychedelic drugs? Opiates (medically)? Melatonin, Z substances, ...? Unfortunately, no. I'd love to try some, but in my field of work I have to maintain a security clearance so taking drugs could compromise my job security. In the past, I have been on a cocktail of anti-depressants + anti-anxiety medication that caused me to have vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, but those were with my eyes open, so it just seemed real to me. As soon as I mentioned those symptoms to my psychologist, I was immediately taken off the medications they put me on. >Can you picture memories at all? Can you picture pictures? I can't picture memories at all, but I can describe things from my memories. The way I process them is very strangely abstract. There is no visual portion to the memories at all. For example, as I mentioned in another comment, I can't picture what my parents look like, despite having had lunch with them yesterday for Easter. I can describe certain details about them, and have very pleasant associations with them, but I simply can't picture them. The descriptions I could offer up would be particular details I've explicitly observed and remembered about them. I can't picture pictures either. If someone were to ask me to visualize an "apple" no picture appears, even if I spend a decent amount of time and effort trying to construct a visual. However, I can describe elements of what an apple is. It's sort of like the concept of a platonic ideal of a thing. I know attributes that are associated with the platonic ideal of apple, so by extension I can describe an apple. I just can't picture it. There's no visual reference in my processing for any element of internal thought. Thanks for sharing your experiences with your visualizations! I'm kind of the opposite. My mind is constantly yapping and I find it hard to fall asleep at times due to the persistent monologue in my head. I tend to listen to podcasts or Youtube while I fall asleep because it lets my mind be quiet and get ready for sleep.

drcongo 3y ago

This entire post describes my experience precisely. One flip-side to the poor face recognition is that my brain occasionally massively over compensates, especially when I've not slept well, and I'll have an entire day where I'm convinced I know every single person I see - curious if you get this too given how aligned our other experiences are. Edit: Oh! And one other oddness that I often wonder if it's related - I get exploding head syndrome. You?

FumblingBear 3y ago
Interesting! I don't think I've experienced the flip side of facial recognition! It sounds like a very strange phenomenon to have happen! I can pretty much always recognize the people I know in real life, but if there's a drastic change to their appearance, (i.e. shaved head, dyed hair, etc.) I simply don't notice that there's a change. I haven't had any experiences with exploding head syndrome either, though I do suffer from insomnia sometimes. I've gotten better at managing it nowadays, but for a long time I was unable to get good sleep without medication like Ambien. Fascinating that we have so much in common though! It's actually really cool to know that although I'm the odd one out when it comes to most of the people I know, there are other people out there with similar forms of neural processing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences :)
- drcongo 3y ago
  Thanks for replying! I also have insomnia - partly I think down to the constant internal monologue. I manage it these days with melatonin which works well for me.