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I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition. At least I couldn't imagine

I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition. At least I couldn't imagine doing any job I ever head without the ability to manipulate visual information in my head.

wingerlang 2y ago
On the other hand I have a hard time believing people actually fully see visual information in their head.
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying. No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head. The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely. (I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
  - smeej 2y ago
    My "screen" isn't anywhere in space. It's in my internal world. If I want to see only it, I take a step out of reality, into my head, and there it is. Doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or closed, there's just another reality I can enter. I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still. It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming. When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked! I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37. When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Sounds like you actually have the opposite, hyperphantasia, perhaps even of an extreme kind. I also lucid dream, very vividly, but I cannot superimpose things from my mind onto my visual plane, it is more like the above parent for me, it's in a separate area from the visual plane altogether, and I suspect that's most people except for those with hyperphantasia.
      - smeej 2y ago
        Yes, from what I've heard from other people, I have pretty extreme hyperphantasia. The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        That's interesting, how detailed are your models you pull out to observe? Are the models static? It's like you have your very own mind-linked AR setup.
        smeej 2y ago
        They're as detailed as my attention to them. If my eyes stay open, I can add details to the model. It's not like taking a photograph I can look at later, so for example, if there were a playing card on a desk, and all I had consciously noticed was that it was a playing card, not that it was the queen of hearts, I wouldn't be able to close my eyes and then determine what the card was from the model. But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back. I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!
FeistySkink 2y ago
Imagine thinking in concepts instead of images. I can't visualize a hammer or a face, but I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph. So you can visualize a graph, as if it were drawn out on a sheet of paper?
  - FeistySkink 2y ago
    I can't visualize anything. If I close my eyes, I just see some vague light coming through my eyelids. I can "imagine" for a lack of a better word, the graph and all the nodes and edges "existing", and can reason about its properties based on that.
    - madmask 2y ago
      Would you describe this as similar to proprioception? Like one knows the position of his own limbs without looking or visualizing.
floitsch 2y ago
I have aphantasia, and I don't feel handicapped at all. The only thing where I really notice differences is when trying to describe people. Since I can't visualize them in my head, I can only describe "known facts", like "they have brown hair". I would make a lousy crime witness...
- FeistySkink 2y ago
  This was my biggest puzzle as a child: how do all those people in crime shows describe suspects? And was it just made up?
  - floitsch 2y ago
    The other ones for me: - "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..." - counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.
    - e38383 2y ago
      I still counted them, it just didn’t make sense. It was more a spreadsheet - spreadsheep? - than visualizing real sheep. And it didn’t help me fall asleep at all.
      - codesuki 2y ago
        I had to laugh so much because of spreadsheep. Thank you.
    - gmokki 2y ago
      When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame. It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.
  - perrygeo 2y ago
    Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.
iand 2y ago
It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker. When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  Asked to think of the Mona Lisa, there's just... nothing?
  - trescenzi 2y ago
    There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that. The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
    - listenallyall 2y ago
      I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
      - SaidinWoT 2y ago
        Both my wife and one of my co-workers experience hi-res images superimposed over their actual vision when prompted (and occasionally involuntarily). This opposite end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia[0]. There are accounts in this thread of people having trouble reading books because they're too caught up in the visuals the story creates in their head (something that same co-worker has also mentioned happening). I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
sanarothe 2y ago
I draw pictures. Had some difficulty dreaming up a part to create in engineering school but 3D cad programs made my own shortcomings irrelevant. We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice. I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is. The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people. I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
wubbalerfa 2y ago
It's definitely real - I just need to draw/map out things on tos like drawio all the time when things get too complex to hold in my head as just memorised words and relationships
shafyy 2y ago
It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
  - cgio 2y ago
    As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
  - FeistySkink 2y ago
    You can have a conceptual model of how things relate in space. Something like a class diagram or a DB schema. It doesn't need to be visual.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      This seems totally contradictory to me.
      - FeistySkink 2y ago
        How so? A DB schema is not visual: it's something that lives inside a DBMS. Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.
e38383 2y ago
I can confirm that this is real. It also isn’t much of a problem job-wise. I can’t do creative work like drawing a picture, but I can (and do) think up algorithms and write code. I would describe it as: I can’t do creative visual work, everything else is fine.

wingerlang 2y ago

On the other hand I have a hard time believing people actually fully see visual information in their head.

Eric_WVGG 2y ago
It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying. No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head. The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely. (I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
- smeej 2y ago
  My "screen" isn't anywhere in space. It's in my internal world. If I want to see only it, I take a step out of reality, into my head, and there it is. Doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or closed, there's just another reality I can enter. I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still. It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming. When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked! I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37. When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Sounds like you actually have the opposite, hyperphantasia, perhaps even of an extreme kind. I also lucid dream, very vividly, but I cannot superimpose things from my mind onto my visual plane, it is more like the above parent for me, it's in a separate area from the visual plane altogether, and I suspect that's most people except for those with hyperphantasia.
    - smeej 2y ago
      Yes, from what I've heard from other people, I have pretty extreme hyperphantasia. The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        That's interesting, how detailed are your models you pull out to observe? Are the models static? It's like you have your very own mind-linked AR setup.
        smeej 2y ago
        They're as detailed as my attention to them. If my eyes stay open, I can add details to the model. It's not like taking a photograph I can look at later, so for example, if there were a playing card on a desk, and all I had consciously noticed was that it was a playing card, not that it was the queen of hearts, I wouldn't be able to close my eyes and then determine what the card was from the model. But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back. I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!

FeistySkink 2y ago

Imagine thinking in concepts instead of images. I can't visualize a hammer or a face, but I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.

constantcrying 2y ago
>I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph. So you can visualize a graph, as if it were drawn out on a sheet of paper?
- FeistySkink 2y ago
  I can't visualize anything. If I close my eyes, I just see some vague light coming through my eyelids. I can "imagine" for a lack of a better word, the graph and all the nodes and edges "existing", and can reason about its properties based on that.
  - madmask 2y ago
    Would you describe this as similar to proprioception? Like one knows the position of his own limbs without looking or visualizing.

floitsch 2y ago

I have aphantasia, and I don't feel handicapped at all. The only thing where I really notice differences is when trying to describe people. Since I can't visualize them in my head, I can only describe "known facts", like "they have brown hair". I would make a lousy crime witness...

FeistySkink 2y ago
This was my biggest puzzle as a child: how do all those people in crime shows describe suspects? And was it just made up?
- floitsch 2y ago
  The other ones for me: - "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..." - counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.
  - e38383 2y ago
    I still counted them, it just didn’t make sense. It was more a spreadsheet - spreadsheep? - than visualizing real sheep. And it didn’t help me fall asleep at all.
    - codesuki 2y ago
      I had to laugh so much because of spreadsheep. Thank you.
  - gmokki 2y ago
    When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame. It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.
- perrygeo 2y ago
  Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.

iand 2y ago

It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker. When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.

listenallyall 2y ago
Asked to think of the Mona Lisa, there's just... nothing?
- trescenzi 2y ago
  There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that. The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
    - SaidinWoT 2y ago
      Both my wife and one of my co-workers experience hi-res images superimposed over their actual vision when prompted (and occasionally involuntarily). This opposite end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia[0]. There are accounts in this thread of people having trouble reading books because they're too caught up in the visuals the story creates in their head (something that same co-worker has also mentioned happening). I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia

sanarothe 2y ago

I draw pictures. Had some difficulty dreaming up a part to create in engineering school but 3D cad programs made my own shortcomings irrelevant. We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice. I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is. The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people. I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.

wubbalerfa 2y ago

It's definitely real - I just need to draw/map out things on tos like drawio all the time when things get too complex to hold in my head as just memorised words and relationships

shafyy 2y ago

It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.

constantcrying 2y ago
>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
- cgio 2y ago
  As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
- FeistySkink 2y ago
  You can have a conceptual model of how things relate in space. Something like a class diagram or a DB schema. It doesn't need to be visual.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    This seems totally contradictory to me.
    - FeistySkink 2y ago
      How so? A DB schema is not visual: it's something that lives inside a DBMS. Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.

e38383 2y ago

I can confirm that this is real. It also isn’t much of a problem job-wise. I can’t do creative work like drawing a picture, but I can (and do) think up algorithms and write code. I would describe it as: I can’t do creative visual work, everything else is fine.