7 ms·

Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article.

by e38383 2y ago

Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA. I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.

antihipocrat 2y ago
When you read a word relating to something you've seen or regularly experienced, how is that processed by your mind? For example if you were asked to draw and color a basketball, how would you approach the task without 'seeing' something in your mind?
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Same way I remember somebody's name. Do you picture name tags on people? It just comes out of nothing in my head.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    I always see a face together with the name, yes. The name is mostly audible but I also visualize the text in a white font.
    - averageRoyalty 2y ago
      That's entirely alien to me. I cannot picture faces nor text in my head.
      - krapp 2y ago
        One of the ways I make myself relax and fall asleep is visualizing a countdown from 1000 to 0. Actually visualizing the shapes of the numbers, to occupy that part of my brain, and then mentally saying the numbers as well. I'm absolutely terrible with faces and names, though, but I think that's mostly due to poor social conditioning.
- e38383 2y ago
  For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown". All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture". OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".
lambdaba 2y ago
Have you ever taken a hallucinogen?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- e38383 2y ago
  No
BigParm 2y ago
Do you dream? Dreams are generally heavy on mental imagery.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Not op, but sleeping and shortly after waking (like seconds not minutes) are it for images. I dunno how often you guys dream but a standard night for me is it's dark out and then it's light out without a dream in between.
  - lambdaba 2y ago
    Ever had a lucid dream?
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Yeah, I can also wake myself from those dreams by raising my heartrate and it won't be throbbing when I actually wake up.
    - e38383 2y ago
      Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description. It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.
- e38383 2y ago
  Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758231 I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book. There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused. And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
boricj 2y ago
Can you hear or imagine sounds in your head?
- uclibc 2y ago
  Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.
  - boricj 2y ago
    Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised. Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
  - jackjeff 2y ago
    Not the GP either I can’t do any of that. Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.
    - uclibc 2y ago
      Can you hear your own thoughts when thinking in sentences? If not what does thinking a sentence through feel like?
      - e38383 2y ago
        I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head. Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
- 2y ago
gnz11 2y ago
I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.
- clwg 2y ago
  I learned about Aphantasia about eight months ago, and it really sent me for a trip. I have no problems visualizing in my mind and sometimes can get lost in it, to me that’s what daydreaming is. I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white. I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
  - e38383 2y ago
    We have these common concepts which are actually very personal everywhere. Even with good eyes the color perception differs a lot between different people. For most it's obvious that this is red and this is blue, but in between the colors it gets very fuzzy. The same goes for sounds and smell and touch, so for every sense.
    - clwg 2y ago
      Totally, the gold/blue dress picture is a perfect example of that[0]. I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue. [0] https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-the-dress-differently.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-th...
- khazhoux 2y ago
bemmu 2y ago
I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words. Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery). So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.
- ownagefool 2y ago
  I can't see things in my minds eye. It's not a thing for me
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    You have no idea what a very simple object or shape, like a Christian cross or a McDonald's logo, looks like without having one in your sight?
    - SaidinWoT 2y ago
      Similar questions throughout this thread make it clear that people assume recognition and/or knowledge of what something looks like is tightly coupled to internal visualization, but (writing as someone with aphantasia) they're not. I can draw both of the examples you gave, thinking about them (including thinking about how I would go about drawing them) just doesn't include an image in my head. Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...
prng2021 2y ago
Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate? That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia. For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.
- SaidinWoT 2y ago
  > it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. > Do you think that's accurate? I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap. With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it. [0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
  - acjohnson55 2y ago

by e38383 2y ago

antihipocrat 2y ago

When you read a word relating to something you've seen or regularly experienced, how is that processed by your mind? For example if you were asked to draw and color a basketball, how would you approach the task without 'seeing' something in your mind?

lesuorac 2y ago
Same way I remember somebody's name. Do you picture name tags on people? It just comes out of nothing in my head.
- Kiro 2y ago
  I always see a face together with the name, yes. The name is mostly audible but I also visualize the text in a white font.
  - averageRoyalty 2y ago
    That's entirely alien to me. I cannot picture faces nor text in my head.
    - krapp 2y ago
      One of the ways I make myself relax and fall asleep is visualizing a countdown from 1000 to 0. Actually visualizing the shapes of the numbers, to occupy that part of my brain, and then mentally saying the numbers as well. I'm absolutely terrible with faces and names, though, but I think that's mostly due to poor social conditioning.
e38383 2y ago
For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown". All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture". OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".

lambdaba 2y ago

Have you ever taken a hallucinogen?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
e38383 2y ago
No

BigParm 2y ago

Do you dream? Dreams are generally heavy on mental imagery.

lesuorac 2y ago
Not op, but sleeping and shortly after waking (like seconds not minutes) are it for images. I dunno how often you guys dream but a standard night for me is it's dark out and then it's light out without a dream in between.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  Ever had a lucid dream?
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Yeah, I can also wake myself from those dreams by raising my heartrate and it won't be throbbing when I actually wake up.
  - e38383 2y ago
    Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description. It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.
e38383 2y ago
Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40758231 I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book. There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused. And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.

boricj 2y ago

Can you hear or imagine sounds in your head?

uclibc 2y ago
Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.
- boricj 2y ago
  Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised. Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
- jackjeff 2y ago
  Not the GP either I can’t do any of that. Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.
  - uclibc 2y ago
    Can you hear your own thoughts when thinking in sentences? If not what does thinking a sentence through feel like?
    - e38383 2y ago
      I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head. Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
2y ago

gnz11 2y ago

I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.

clwg 2y ago
I learned about Aphantasia about eight months ago, and it really sent me for a trip. I have no problems visualizing in my mind and sometimes can get lost in it, to me that’s what daydreaming is. I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white. I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
- e38383 2y ago
  We have these common concepts which are actually very personal everywhere. Even with good eyes the color perception differs a lot between different people. For most it's obvious that this is red and this is blue, but in between the colors it gets very fuzzy. The same goes for sounds and smell and touch, so for every sense.
  - clwg 2y ago
    Totally, the gold/blue dress picture is a perfect example of that[0]. I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue. [0] https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-the-dress-differently.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-th...
khazhoux 2y ago

bemmu 2y ago

I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words. Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery). So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.

ownagefool 2y ago
I can't see things in my minds eye. It's not a thing for me
- listenallyall 2y ago
  You have no idea what a very simple object or shape, like a Christian cross or a McDonald's logo, looks like without having one in your sight?
  - SaidinWoT 2y ago
    Similar questions throughout this thread make it clear that people assume recognition and/or knowledge of what something looks like is tightly coupled to internal visualization, but (writing as someone with aphantasia) they're not. I can draw both of the examples you gave, thinking about them (including thinking about how I would go about drawing them) just doesn't include an image in my head. Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...

prng2021 2y ago

Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate? That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia. For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.

SaidinWoT 2y ago
> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. > Do you think that's accurate? I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap. With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it. [0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
- acjohnson55 2y ago