39 ms·

What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

• bondarchuk 2y ago
  No article on this topic is complete without mentioning Galton, who described the phenomenon in 1880: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm (By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from almust fully auditory complete with specific voice characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully abstract)
• kolinko 2y ago
  As someone with recently diagnosed aphantasia - it’s surreal that 99% population sees things that aren’t there / literally halucinates, and that it’s considered normal!
  • b800h 2y ago
    So you can't picture your mother's face in your mind's eye (which may or may not be there?) It's not the same as hallucination.
    • FumblingBear 2y ago
      Can only answer for myself, but yes—I am completely unable to picture my parents.
    • SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
      I'm not completely aphantasic, but the way you phrase the rhetorical contains exactly the massive divide that exists in experience. You believe that such an act is obviously easy, whereas for myself, it is difficult and less an image than a fleeting impression that is more conceptual than it is visual.
  • bondarchuk 2y ago
    Yeah, it's quite peculiar how inaccurate the classic discourse around "seeing things" and "hearing voices" turned out to be. Rather than seeing/hearing vs. not seeing/hearing things the dichotomy should probably be something like "having the sense that what you're seeing/hearing is part of your own thoughts vs. externally imposed".
  • notRobot 2y ago
    Questions, out of curiosity: What is your experience of dreaming like? What is your experience of recalling memories like? What is your experience of recalling media you've watched like? What is your experience of imagining like? What is your experience of reading like?
    • Semaphor 2y ago
      I also have it. Dreaming: Normal, and I see stuff. This is apparently normal, but also why I thought I don’t have aphantasia. I even have lucid dreams. Recalling: Similar to imagining things, I usually describe it as a not seeing something, but having the memory of having seen something. Recalling media: Same as other recall. I might be able to still describe parts of it, but I see nothing. Imagining: A memory of those things, very, very rough. More like recalling a dream that is already fading. If I try to imagine a landscape, it would be like a memory of having seen a child’s water painting: 2 mountains, blue water, round sun, roughly. Reading: I love reading, very avid reader. I could never get into Lord of the Rings, and this is apparently somewhat common for people with aphantasia. All those detailed descriptions? They are just that for me, descriptions. I can’t see any of it. Now descriptions of things happening, I can totally get into that. But I don’t see anything. For most of my life I thought people were being metaphorical when they said "imagine X in your mind". I didn’t realize anyone would actually see something. There is also a fantasy writer, Mark Lawrence, who has aphantasia and wrote about it: http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/ http://www.marklawrence.buzz/story/aphantasia/
      • SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
        For the record, I love Lord of the Rings. But yes, there is something about detailed description of objects in books that rarely lands for me. The words have to in and of themselves convey a kind of conceptual beauty, or call upon a great metaphor or the like, otherwise they will bore me since I see very little and will mostly just get annoyed trying to keep all the details in my head.
    • SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
      Not the person you're replying to, but I would call myself "near aphantasic" and the answer to all these is that they are almost entirely conceptual rather than visual. What little visual impression I can form is extremely fleeting, incomplete, low fidelity, and in short nothing like actually seeing something. At some level I can tell my visual system gets activated, but it's completely different from truly seeing something.
  • canes123456 2y ago
    It is very much a spectrum. People that literally halucinates things are just as rare. I am much closer to the aphatasia side of things. I can picture things in my mind but is extremely different from "seeing" things. It more like remembering how something looks. Also, all the stats on this are kind of bullshit because of how hard it is to describe. People just map on "picturing" to whatever they do.
  • tbrake 2y ago
    "Seeing" something in your imagination isn't a literal hallucination. It's an altogether separate form of visualization that doesn't interfere optically.
  • theogravity 2y ago
    How do you get diagnosed?
• b800h 2y ago
  Anecdotally (can't remember the old book references), this had been observed in "new age" and "spiritual" groups in the 1960s, with the conclusion that people could be trained out of it.
  • aphantastic 2y ago
    I’d be careful about trusting spiritual/Word Of Faith groups too much, especially when the condition can’t actually be tested for. An individual in the movement can easily say they were “healed” to bolster group confidence, and a third party individual might say they’ve been “healed” after being requested to stand around in a circle of prayer for five minutes as an easy out from the situation. I’ve certainly been in the latter case, and the former is fairly well documented.
    • b800h 2y ago
      It wasn't a matter of healing in this case; I trust the accounts.
      • aphantastic 2y ago
        [flagged]
• drooby 2y ago
  I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's estimated to be 1-4% of the population. I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad. When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating. It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 2y ago
    Corroborating this anecdata. There is some research into visuals that seems elucidating.[0] [0] https://zugzology.com/blogs/myceliums-gambit/exploring-psychedelics-virtual-reality-the-brain-with-zeus-tipado https://zugzology.com/blogs/myceliums-gambit/exploring-psych...
  • xkcd-sucks 2y ago
    TL;DR This is what you're looking for https://firekasina.org/ https://firekasina.org/ > It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do. On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it. Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)
    • catskul2 2y ago
      Jinx.
• smokel 2y ago
  It may be worth investigating aphantasia from the perspective that space is a latent sequence [1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023
• luxuryballs 2y ago
  I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding, yes I can see the apple in my minds eye in all of its glory and color, but yes it’s still black “behind my eyes”, it all depends on where I am focusing, on my eyes or on the apple. Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are experiencing the same thing.
  • drooby 2y ago
    I would absolutely never write what you wrote though.. What "glory" do you speak of? For me, the apple is more of an idea and I can VERY faintly "see" fuzzy attributes about its geometry. And there is no color.
  • Semaphor 2y ago
    I can’t. There is no apple. I remember how apples look from seeing them before. But I can’t see it. I can’t turn it, it’s a completely abstract thing in my mind.
    • b800h 2y ago
      Can you describe a blemish on an apple to me?
      • Semaphor 2y ago
        Yes, there's a spot on an apple. Probably brown. I remember that.
        • b800h 2y ago
          Can you describe it in any greater detail? What does the periphery of the blemish look like?
          • Semaphor 2y ago
            No idea.
• djeastm 2y ago
  >Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them. I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say they "see" things, I want to say "with what?" To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing? I can imagine things and have vague visual imagery appear in my head, but I can't see them as "floating like holograms". I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.
  • Semaphor 2y ago
    Aphantasia is one end of a spectrum, Hyperphantasia [0] is on the other end. You might simply have a more normal mind that can imagine things, but not have something akin to a manipulable hologram. As I have aphantasia, though, I can’t for sure say if that’s really on that end of it ;) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
  • smokel 2y ago
    Seeing most likely takes place deeper in the brain, not in the eyes. One hint for this is that we see the world upside-down by default. Another is the evidence that visual evidence cannot be trusted in a court case. It then seems likely that the responsible brain areas can be activated by memory, as well as by the eye sensors. The level of reality at which all this is possible in different individuals is obviously an open question. Whether one can train this is also not entirely clear to most.
  • davejohnclark 2y ago
    You've articulated how I'd describe my experience as well. I'd not ever describe something in my mind's eye as 'floating like holograms'. "Vague visual imagery appear in my head" resonates with me. Edit: typo
  • sctb 2y ago
• thornewolf 2y ago
  I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice. First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience. With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too. - I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house. - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests) - I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation. - When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus - I can't mind palace really much at all. - I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article. Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio. Interested in other people's experiences.
  • Semaphor 2y ago
    > - I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests) Interesting, I can reason how it should look and figure it out that way, but I never could just select one from seeing another version of it.
  • catskul2 2y ago
    Do you ever talk to yourself silently? How fast do you read?
    • thornewolf 2y ago
      Yes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time. Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless). I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit. There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these thoughts though. I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.
• vaindil 2y ago
  I've always struggled with descriptions of aphantasia and I don't know if I have it myself because I don't know what's "normal". This article also didn't clarify it. When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual vision stays completely black.
  • a_cardboard_box 2y ago
    > It's like a dim picture You don't have aphantasia. In people with aphantasia, there is no "it" to describe.
  • sebtron 2y ago
    As far as I understand yes, most people actually see something. At some point I figured out this "test" to explain aphantasia to people: ask someone to imagine a car. After that, ask them about visual details of the car: what color is it? what type of car is it? (Other objects might work better than a car; In my experience color is the attribute that will be the most surprising, vwry clear for some completely absent for others.) Most people are going to answer with whatever they "saw". For me these follow-up questions don't make sense.
    • naasking 2y ago
      Not see, but visualize. It's like a different sense. Can you recall what something you touched felt like, what something smelled like, what something tasted like, or sounded like? The recollection of the experience is different than the sensory experience itself, but there's still something of the original sensory experience to it. Visualization is like being able to recall what something looked like in this way, as if you had seen it even though you didn't. Your vision can feed your visualization, but it doesn't go the other way, which would be a hallucination.
    • brotchie 2y ago
      This is an excellent description, especially the “doesn’t make sense” part. Like ask me to “imagine an apple.” I imagine the platonic idea of an apple and not a specific apple. Asking “what color was the apple” is a category error for me! Just wild how everyone is living such different internal lives.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• BananaaRepublik 2y ago
  Aphantasia might occur with other senses too. I'm almost certain I have aphantasia in taste and smells. I simply cannot conjure any in my head, even for extremely common ones like taste of apple or sun dried sheets. When people ask me about my opinion of food I just had, I'm simply recalling facts from my assessment made during the meal. It's very different from how I do it if I had to recall something visual like a painting, because I do have a vivid mental image.
  • bengale 2y ago
    I’m sorry what? pPeople are doing this with taste and smell too? Can people just imagine all of their senses?
    • Izkata 2y ago
      There's a theory that people are in general bad at doing this with taste and smell because we don't have a lot of words specifically for taste/smell to attach the concepts to. Colors, for example, have their own words, but tastes and smells are in the context of objects they come from instead of standing on their own.
    • BananaaRepublik 2y ago
      I asked around and a few people seem to have no problem "visualizing" tastes and smells, especially for common ones. I can imagine sense of touch too, I just assumed it's normal to be able to imagine all senses.
    • edgarvaldes 2y ago
      I can see, taste and touch in my mind. Smell not so much. Its weird because food taste is strongly related to smell. But a fragance alone is very difficult to me.
• jraph 2y ago
  I'm not sure I picture an apple if someone asks me to imagine one. I'm not sure it has a particular color neither. If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a conscious process. So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by default. I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by definition. I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something detailed, maybe it would come with training. Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things to try guessing I'm dreaming xD
• foobiekr 2y ago
  For those who cannot visualize things: try the same experience with your eyes open. I can't visualize anything with my eyes closed - maybe black-and-white shadowy outlines if that - but with my eyes open I can visualize things kind of up above my head outside my visual field. (There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older, perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very things that are you start to become threadbare.)
  • postalrat 2y ago
    I find it's a lot easier to visualize vividly when I have a real problem to solve and harder when I'm just trying to visualize.
• gligorot 2y ago
  I recently learned that people are on a spectrum of thoughts visualization - not everyone _thinks_ the same. If you want to check your personal mix of “visualization” characteristics this questionnaire by Uni of Wisconsin-Madison is useful (you also get your position on the distribution curve): https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNioVhz https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
• jedberg 2y ago
  I have this, as does my wife. We both thought it was normal up until about a year ago, until our kids informed us that they actually see the things they imagine. I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by looking and imagining). But yeah, no mind's eye. I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)
• yodon 2y ago
  Discussion pages like this one are constantly filled with people saying "Aphantasia doesn't exist, it's just differences in how people describe the same thing," when the science in this paper and others is clear. Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.
  • notfed 2y ago
    The science isn't clear at all. The question "To what extent do you actually see an apple?" is completely unscientific. You can't simply ask people questions, that's not science. It's also a question about qualia, which is notoriously a field of study resistant to science.
    • yodon 2y ago
      People who report as aphantasia light up differently in an fMRI than those who do not report as aphantasia, and do so in consistent ways. They also have predictable differences in autobiographical memory and a number of other areas. Pretty sure that counts.
      • notfed 2y ago
        How many people have actually been studied in an fMRI aphantasia study? Like 10? I'll give you those people. But meanwhile on the Internet we have endless people claiming to they have aphantasia because they "only see black when they close their eyes". I don't think we should conflate these two.
• beej71 2y ago
  This reminds me of something that might be related. Someone recently told me that if you look at any object, you can imagine what it feels like to put your tongue on it. (With all kinds of subsequent hilarious and disgusting suggestions.) And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true for most?
  • avalys 2y ago
    A few months ago I took a mental imagery quiz and one of the questions was "Can you imagine what it would feel like to lick a brick wall?"
  • ryankrage77 2y ago
    We have a lot of experience touching things with our fingers (in daily life) and tongues (more when we're younger), and can extrapolate from this experience. In my own experience, this extrapolation is overconfident - I tested licking a few random items, and while my expectation was close to reality, I was always just a little off for the truly novel items. Of course for something gross, most people won't (and shouldn't!) test their expectation, so they go on with the confirmation bias that they got it right. First example that comes to mind is that the roof of my mouth feels much smoother to my tongue than it does to my fingers.
• TomMasz 2y ago
  What I find interesting is that people with aphantasia still dream like everyone else but can't voluntarily evoke images in their mind.
  • Semaphor 2y ago
    Which is why I thought I was completely normal, because when I remember them, I have very vivid dreams. When I found out about that, I did get a bit sad and jealous that there are people who can essentially do that at will, while awake. Sounds close to magic to me.
    • avalys 2y ago
      You're not missing much. As far as I know, I have a very good ability to visualize things mentally. I can picture objects and scenes vividly, with good detail, rotate objects in my mind, etc. However, there's one critical aspect of this that I don't see people talking about - if I picture a scene that is "pleasing" to look at, like a beautiful sunset - I get absolutely no pleasure or enjoyment from doing so, like I would if I saw it in real life. Somehow the fact that it is a deliberately imagined scene bypasses whatever part of my brain would react with pleasure. Part of this is that there's no novelty to it - I know what I'm imagining, so there's no sense of "Oh wow, look at that!" So for me, this is a purely practical ability - I can go to Ikea, look at lawn furniture, and pretty easily picture how it will look in my backyard - but that's it. If I lost this ability, I do think it would make some everyday tasks difficult that I take for granted, but I wouldn't be sad about losing the ability itself.
  • theogravity 2y ago
    I believe I have complete aphantasia - I can't form any images at all with any detail. When I dream, it's conceptual with no images, like reading a story out.
• Frummy 2y ago
  This ability varies with our health and exhaustion. A year or two ago I had less control of conjuring images like these by choice. Only a week or two ago I regained more control of depth, not that it wasn’t 3d before, but making it really pop makes a big difference. The key has been long distance cycling, cardio is important for a clear mind.
• Cupertino95014 2y ago
  .. and then, of course, there's "able to visualize an object when rotated in three dimensions." I think the percentage of people who can't do that is way higher than 1%. I'm not great at it myself.
• declan_roberts 2y ago
  Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.
  • mparnisari 2y ago
    This is exactly why my drawings suck, lol. I know the basic shape of a dog but the details escape me.
  • ajkjk 2y ago
    You still know the shape. But the answer is definitely 'not very well'.
    • 1980phipsi 2y ago
      I’ve heard of artists with aphantasia, just maybe there are fewer as a percent than the general public.
  • elric 2y ago
    Well that would certainly explain why I've always been absolutely terrible at drawing...
  • drooby 2y ago
    It's honestly more confusing to me that most people are bad at drawing but supposedly most people don't have aphantasia. I have aphantasia and I can draw decent images. When I put pencil down on paper, I start drawing and the lines tell me if it the physics or perspective make sense.. then I erase and retry if they don't. The more I practice the more I can anticipate which strokes will make sense.
    • tstrimple 2y ago
      It’s similar for me. It has to be a very iterative process where the image emerges rather than me having a solid idea in my head and bringing it to life.
• ajkjk 2y ago
  I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good at mental math. Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.) Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    Sample size of one. I have aphantasia and cannot picture images at all. I had a “natural” affinity for math and would often zone out extrapolating mathematical patterns in my head during school. Like the trick with multiplying 9s where you hold your fingers up. I remember spending days of class time working on a more generic rule to allow me to multiply any number by 9 in my head. This came to a crashing halt for calculus as I was not able to develop a mental model for it at all during high school. Everything that had been easy and interesting before just disappeared when it came to memorizing formulas with no rhyme or reason.
  • tzs 2y ago
    > Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. Instead of visualizing written numbers on paper, visualize doing the problem with an abacus [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
• jibbit 2y ago
  A couple of things I noticed while teaching drawing to students (who were quite good) and i was a bit obsessed by Aphantasia.. It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable characteristic that isn’t present in drawings from imagination. This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could from life/photo than anyone else.
  • generalizations 2y ago
    Few cameras have the same focal length as the human eye. I wonder if your observation would hold if that were accounted for. Same as the difference between 'attractive' faces and 'photogenic'.
• xpl 2y ago
  I don't actually "see" mental images, but I "feel" them. For example, I can remember a friend's or a celebrity's face — clearly recalling the "feel" of that face — the exact qualia I experience if I actually saw it — but there is no "overlay image", my eyes see pitch black that moment! It is a very high level qualia, totally decoupled from visual perception. But I swear it is the same as if I actually saw a certain face. It is so strange. Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or more imagination than others.
  • smogcutter 2y ago
    Thats just called imagination. Do you think that when other people picture something it literally replaced their vision?
    • iwontberude 2y ago
      When I do mushrooms I like closing my eyes and watching my brain attempt to maintain the image as it swirls and contorts into analogous yet increasingly orthogonal forms
    • cynicalkane 2y ago
      This is a smug non-reply to the parent post. People with imagination might not always “replace” vision, but they can summon images to the mind’s eye other than complete darkness. And personally, I feel I can obscure the world around me if focused on a particularly powerful daydream.
    • neom 2y ago
      For me to do it for long periods of time in high fidelity, I need to either close my eyes or do this blurring/out of focus thing I don't know how to describe. So in a sense, it does have to replace my vision literally. I regularly lead high level strategy meetings with my eyes fully closed so I can use my memory and imagination fully, I've seen other people do this also so I presume I'm not alone.
    • 2y ago
• riiii 2y ago
  I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see" things. Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it black) I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!
  • schneems 2y ago
    It’s not like: visual stimulus. It’s more like when you see something, that experience eventually translates into a picture in your mind. When I close my eyes I “see” black, but I can recall the face of someone I talked to last quite well. It feels like the same circuits as when I was there, but decoupled from the actual optical input. I took a Knowledge based AI course and one interesting thing was that perceptual knowledge (things we experience via sense) was the listed as the furthest from formal logic (knowledge) and the hardest thing to communicate. Even harder than abstract concepts such as “beauty”. So I don’t know if what I said makes sense. Hope it helps though.
    • kodt 2y ago
      This seems to be very similar to the debate on internal monologues. No-one can seem to agree on what exactly they think it means.
      • riiii 2y ago
        The internal monologue is interesting. If you are taking, who is listening?
  • hbosch 2y ago
    Nah, you've identified the problem and IMO it's quite philosophical. Like to me, what the person in this article describes is what someone else would call "seeing the apple". >She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” What is the difference between this, and what another person might describe as a hologram? There is no material way to confirm or disconfirm what someone says happens in their imagination. I can conjure an apple in three dimensions, I can rotate it in my mind with my eyes either opened or closed. I can imagine a wireframe of that apple, or multiple apples rolling down a staircase and I can conjure the physics of them bumping into one another and landing in a bruised pile. I am imagining that vividly, in full color and full holographic clarity, but I am imagining it right now as I type to you here. So... am I "seeing" it in my "mind's eye"? How would either of us know what the other meant if we said yes or no? To me, the person in the article is describing the physical reality (eyelids over eyeballs = darkness) as "seeing" just as much as someone else, say a math wiz, can close their eyes and see colorful geometry playing in spatial relationships with one another or a oil rig worker might start seeing slick black sludge on a piston. I don't see a point in creating taxonomies of imagination.
• jumploops 2y ago
  I have aphantasia, and so does my brother. Neither of our parents do. Both of us are really good at three dimensional thinking, but have no “visual” aspect to said thoughts. The best way for me to describe it, is that, when imagining an object (apple, barn, etc.) my mind thinks about the physical structure of the object. I can’t “rotate” it because there’s nothing to “rotate” however I can describe it in 3D space using my hands. Again, there’s nothing “visual” about the way this works. My mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.
  • UncleOxidant 2y ago
    > Again, there’s nothing “visual” about the way this works. My mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking. It's hard to imagine (for us visual thinkers) how one could think spacially without also visualizing.
    • givinguflac 2y ago
      The best description I’ve come across (as someone with aphantasia myself, which I discovered after reading this article yesterday) is that it’s like describing the metadata and emotional sensations associated with an image in my mind. I really thought people talked about “seeing with the minds eye” as a metaphor, until yesterday.
    • taberiand 2y ago
      I suppose it's all fundamentally just electrical and chemical impulses - presumably for most people those pulses pass through the visualisation part of the brain, and for others it takes another path - yet the end result of the processing is more or less the same, just mapped onto maybe smells or feelings or something instead of images
    • jumploops 2y ago
      Yes, it’s hard to describe with words. The spatial thinking is relational in concept, such that I can think about distances and angles in relationship to one another. I can describe (and build), with my hands, but I can’t “see” the object from a certain angle. It’s as if there’s a bunch of points in virtual space, again not visualized, but accessible to my thinking process. I can imagine how they relate, and how they can fit together, without actually seeing it rendered. Not sure if that makes sense or I’m just muddying the waters. Another example would be Legos, which I played with a ton as a kid. I can think about the exact piece I need, and think about the larger thing I’m building as a composite of said pieces. I keep mentioning my hands, because the way it’s expressed in my mind is more of a “feeling” than anything visual. Another way to think about it would be like a 3d model of the world, where I can think about my route/position/etc. through it, without having any concrete view. It’s like a 3d file without the 2d renderer.
• spelunker 2y ago
  > “It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh,” Ross wrote in a 2016 Facebook post about his personal discovery. All his life, he had thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. It's NOT a metaphor?? People are actually imagining sheep?? Anyway I've suspected before that I have some form of this.
• mondrian 2y ago
  People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it. An imaginary horse pops into your visual field while you're making a tricky maneuver on the highway... Also, presumably ADHD is widespread. But people who don't have aphantasia (most people) can reliably persist accurate imaginary objects in the visual field? Your attention is fragmented and jumping from thing to thing but the horse in your visual field persists there for you to visit and revisit? Highly doubtful. The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention.
  • UncleOxidant 2y ago
    > People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it... > The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention I have on a few occasions woken from a dream, opened my eyes and seen the image from that dream persist for a second in my visual field. It's a pretty freaky experience - probably very much like a hallucination. I've also been walking, deep in thought and then looked up and not known where I was because I had a different picture of a different place in mind. How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any visuals? (the article says that some do)
    • mondrian 2y ago
      > How do those with aphantasia dream? Do they not see any visuals? Pretty sure that they have vivid dreams like everyone else. The aphantasia is limited to the topic of conjuring visual imaginations while awake.
• anentropic 2y ago
  I haven't tried it but this person claims to have a technique you can practice as an aphantasic and learn to visualise: https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/ https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
  • afro88 2y ago
    That's incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm not aphantasic but when deliberately picturing something the image starts correctly but changes to something else quickly. They are also not vivid at all. However when I think or remember things (consciously or day dreaming) the images / video is better. But as soon as I focus on it directly it changes and I lose it so to speak. Gonna give this a try.
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    I read about something a long time ago, maybe in a lucid dreaming context, but it was about a man who was sitting on a train in the early 20th century daydreaming, and the shadows from trees rapidly passing over his eyes basically kickstarted his ability to visualize with his mind's eye. I think he might have even gone on create a device with a spinning circle with slits on it and a lamp behind it in order to play with the effect. Anyways, I tried it a long time ago, and it definitely enhanced my ability to truly "see" mental imagery. Give it a shot! All you need to do is close your eyes and relax in front of something that is generating a lot of bright/dark areas in motion. Even sitting in front of a TV in a dark room with the TV muted would probably work.
  • brotchie 2y ago
    I've tried this for an extended period of time and it hasn't yielded a huge improvement. When I'm laying in bed at night, close to falling asleep, if I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes get a little glimpse of mental imagery. Like a fleeting moment (perhaps ~500ms) of seeing a full scene (a forest, mountains, a city) but then it's gone. I think a mistake people make is trying to "see" things in the blackness of their eyes. I've noticed when I get these fleeting images it's when I'm kind of not "looking" at the black, but kind of relaxing my eyes on turning off my attention to my "photon-based" visual system.
• ghoda 2y ago
  I wonder how this related to the phenomenon where people forget faces or don't realise that it is possible to remeber faces
  • zimpenfish 2y ago
    I have aphantasia and I can remember faces quite happily but I can't visualise them when thinking about the person. Same as I can recognise a tomato, a ship, a train, whatever, but I can't visualise them in my mind.
  • bengale 2y ago
    I have it and I'm terrible with faces. If I spend long enough I can sort of pattern match distinct features but a whole face is generally lost on me. Movies where you see a character that has aged or changed style are a mystery. My wife has to call out if it’s the same person. She’s pretty good at knowing when I’d have lost track.
• tzs 2y ago
  Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play chess? When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they do so by visualizing the board and pieces and them moving those visualized pieces around on that visualized board. They pretty much do with the visualized board what they would do if they had access to a physical or computer analysis board that they could actually move pieces around on. I once wondered if top players do it that way too, or if maybe the see the position in some more abstract way like a graph with pieces as vertices and colored directed edges encoding relationships such as "The rook is attacking that night" and "that knight is defended by that bishop" and moves are then operations that shift edges. I asked GM Nakamura about it on an AMA he did on Reddit, and he said he sees the board just like nearly everybody else does.
  • abetusk 2y ago
    For what it's worth, there's a study (N=123) on recall for people with aphantansia [0]. One of the tests was to take a look at a picture, of a living room with furniture in it, say, and then have the subject try to redraw the room in as much detail as they can. People with aphantansia have better spatial accuracy and fewer memory errors. The basic hypothesis is, I guess, that people with aphantansia develop scaffolding to help them memorize so they're better at some of the details that other folks that rely too heavily on their mental imagery. I don't know of any studies on chess in particular (though I haven't looked) but I would imagine that something similar could be at play here, where it might not be obvious that people with aphantasia are worse for these types of games. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/
  • johnfn 2y ago
    I have aphantasia and I play chess (albeit not very well...) Honestly, I think that aphantasia is a bit overhyped; I can do virtually all the things that people with normal mental imagery can do, except I suppose actually visualize the thing in my mind. The way that it works feels akin to a blind man groping in a dark room. If I try to visualize a chess board, of course I only "see" blackness (or nothing), but if you ask me what square is at e2, I can kind of mentally "feel" in that area and know that there's a king pawn there. And I can kind of "feel" below it that there's a king, and a queen, etc. Normal people see things in their visual imagery by directing their attention at a spot in their mind, seeing it, and then registering what they saw. I just skip the middle step.
• bengale 2y ago
  Yeah I have this. I also can’t hear voices or sounds in my mind. Poor autobiographical memory tracks too, major things stick but a lot just fades pretty quickly.
  • postalrat 2y ago
    If you try to repeat a drum beat without making any noise can you image what it would sound like?
    • bengale 2y ago
      No, just silence.
• lowkey_ 2y ago
  I have aphantasia and similarly didn't realize it until a few years ago, at 22, when someone asked me that "Apple" test. Since then, I've noticed a few interesting things: 1) I remember things by association. I'm great with maps, physics, economics, and topics where things are inter-related, but terrible at memorization and obviously can't visualize anything. 2) I'm relatively unburdened by trauma. A lot of my friends will have a visual memory of things that have happened to them, but for me, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. It's sort of sad to not remember all the good times, though. 3) It's not really related to taste (I think my taste visually is better than most of my friends and they ask me for fashion advice), but I have to see something to know how it will look and make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or designer.
  • brotchie 2y ago
    100% visual aphant here, but have a very strong musical "minds-ear". So not full-sense aphantasic. Best self-described mental model for how my brains feels internally is as objects (in the programming sense) with properties and relations. As I "imagine" something, I'm recalling the object "living room couch", and then enumerating properties of that object "leather, brown, L shape." If I think of something on the couch e.g. "cushion", then it starts off being just a relationship "cushion is on the couch" without any location component. If I then inspect the "location" property of the cushion, then I think "the cushion sitting upright in the L-shaped bend of the couch." I'm pretty damn good at spatial reasoning in my head, e.g. I can "design" a component in my head, and then sit with Fusion 360 and create it as a 3D CAD model... but I'm not actually seeing anything in my head at all. It still remains in that abstract object <> properties <> relations head-space. In some ways, when I'm imagining a 3D object in my head, I'm actually thinking "this sketch" with "this shape" extruded by 10mm. So the actual constructive process by which an object is realized in my mind IS the actual process by which I'd design it.
    • galangalalgol 2y ago
      I'm like you. I have good spacial intelligence, but I never realized until reading this headline that some people actually see what they are imagining? That seems insane.
• sandspar 2y ago
  If you listen carefully, you can hear the rumble of the hordes of people rushing to post "I have this".
• karmakaze 2y ago
  I only recently realized that my mind's eye really isn't. Just now I made the connection maybe why I can't stand descriptive prose. I remember having to read the Scarlett Letter (think that was the one) and there were pages and pages of words painting a picture that did nothing for me, and I was just waiting for it to get on with telling the story. Out of context but "I'm drowning here and you're describing the water." sums it up for me. Another thing that makes sense now is how I could never learn facts and stories in school. I'm guessing that I just couldn't form a conceptual model for me to store it. If I studied a field deeply I could probably be able to connect all the dots and it would make sense. OTOH math and science was super easy as they were all formulas and relationships that touched on each other and naturally all fit into place relative to each other, once I could get a thing to click I wouldn't have to remember it because I'd just know.
• lilyball 2y ago
  > No matter how nascent the research is into these imaging extremes, the scientists all agree on one thing: Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the spectrum don’t have problems navigating the world. I don't know about hyperphantasia, but aphantasia absolutely is a disorder. I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office wall, and I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them out mentally. They've been sitting in a pile for years because I have nowhere to even begin. I can't just start hanging things because I'm going to end up unhappy about where everything is placed. Decorating things in general is very difficult. Or any sort of arranging or laying out where I don't have a representation I can physically (or digitally) manipulate to explore ideas. I also have really poor dreaming. For most of my life I'd say I didn't even have dreams. When I do have dreams, the visual quality is shockingly bad and largely abstract and indistinct. I also have very little autobiographical memory, which I previously didn't think was connected to aphantasia until reading this article. I do know that looking at photos of the past helps with recall, very frequently when my wife tries to describe something to me I'll have no memory of it until I can see a photo. The funny thing is I'm actually fairly visual-driven otherwise. I learn better when I can see things. Although maybe that's actually a consequence as well, maybe other people construct mental images when listening or reading?
  • spacedcowboy 2y ago
    It's funny because I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least. My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual. Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out. So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power. I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
• galkk 2y ago
  I cannot see mental images and it never occurred to me until my late 30s that things like "mental palace", "imagine yourself on a beach", even kind of Feynman ball mean literal picture that people kind of see in front of their eyes. I was trying really hard to do mental imaginary techniques to remember things in games (e.g. "imagine ikea shelf and put number when the next item respawns in corresponding box") until I realized that there is something wrong with me and the entire premise. For everyday life, I think that this is has some weight in the fact that the docs that I'm writing usually text heavy and don't have many illustrations/diagrams and I was/am solving spatial puzzles kind of "analytically" in my head.
• amelius 2y ago
  This may not be for everyone, but I found it interesting: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/sex-and-aphantasia/ https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/sex-and-aphantasia/ (mild nsfw warning)
• hintymad 2y ago
  Just curious, doesn't it happen to everyone for certain abstractions? When we study maths, our teachers encourage us to "see" examples or geometric representations or simply some abstract representations in our mind. Some people couldn't do so at high-school level, some people couldn't do so at college level. Those who can no matter what have a high chance of becoming an accomplished mathematician or scientists, but even for them they can't "see" mental images for every concepts no matter how hard they try. Similarly, someone couldn't see mental images for the things they wanted to draw, and they were miserable in their arts class. I certainly felt so.
  • corysama 2y ago
    As a coder who was reasonably good at math, I’ve always done mental work by tracking the motion of objects in my head. Can’t see them. But, I know where I put them and how I want to shuffle them around. Imaginary proprioception, I guess. Works better for data structures and algorithms than for math.
• boricj 2y ago
  I don't have aphantasia, my mind's eye is composited onto my senses. Obviously I'm aware of what I'm consciously imagining, but I've recently realized that I can't actually tell the difference between imaginary and real sensory inputs. I'm experiencing them the same way. I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.
  • v64 2y ago
    > I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will. I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets my experience apart from others. I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in my head quite well (with verification of this through being a musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.
  • OvbiousError 2y ago
    Sounds like hyperphantasia, so also a bit rare and on the complete opposite side of the spectrum ;) Most people fall in between the two extremes.
    • boricj 2y ago
      I do have a vivid imagination, but I was specifically referring to the way it is subjectively experienced, not its objective quality. If I decide to play a song in my head, I know that it's not real, but I don't hear that it's not real. Not because of the quality of the rendition, but because it would be indistinguishable to me from hearing an identical live reproduction [1]. If I'm really tired and start having sensory hallucinations, I don't know that they're not real and I don't hear that they're not real. Personally, after experimenting with it, I believe that when I'm imagining sights or sounds, I'm actually self-inducing sensory hallucinations. I can do it with other senses too, but I have less practice with those. I don't have to visualize in order to think or conceptualize [2]. All of that is what makes me think that aphantasia is the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will. Depending on the person, it might be limited to one or more senses, the quality might be limited by available bandwidth, but if it's visualized then it would not be distinguishable from an equivalent sensory input. If it's conceptualized, then by definition it's not a sensory input. Of course, I only have my own subjective experience as a data point, so I don't expect this to be an authoritative answer. [1] Excluding other correlated stimuli, like feeling my innards vibrating due to proximity to a speaker emitting a loud base. [2] I'll have to think and experiment on my own to quantify this part. That being said, I haven't managed to read a sentence without having a voice speaking out the words in my head.
• SirMaster 2y ago
  Best I can tell is that I think I have this. Or at least some amount of it. But I find it really hard to understand what people exactly mean when they describe their visualization experience. Like I definitely don't feel like I see anything if I close my eyes and try to think of specific objects. If I close my eyes and rub them I can see sorts of blobs and sparkles that are usually white or a bit yellowish even though my eyes are closed.
  • OvbiousError 2y ago
    The sparkles are real, so they don't count. And yes, most people, when they count sheep, do this literally, i.e. imagine a bunch of sheep and count them. I also can't do that, never could. Realized my brain was different when I knew I couldn't do the memory palace thing, even though I'm among the smarter part of the population. /r/aphantasia has more info and other aphants ;)
• mk12 2y ago
  I've never understood how people talk so objectively and confidently about this. There are subjective things we'll never able to compare, like whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped. Then there are other things like face blindness that have testable effects in the real world. When one person says they see 80% clear mental pictures and another person says 10%, how can we be so sure they aren't just describing the same experience differently? I have no idea how I could accurately report my experience of the apple test. I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing. EDIT: It also reminds me of the "inner monologue". I'm skeptical when people confidently claim they have no inner monologue, as if it's as easy to verify as being right-handed or left-handed. In the context of meditation, it's common for people to confuse "having no thoughts" with "thinking nonstop" -- it's not an easy thing to understand about yourself, let alone claim how it relates to other people's subjective experience.
  • galangalalgol 2y ago
    I think that means that you have aphantasia? I just asked my wife if she can see the apple and she can, no doubts, she pointed to it and asked what I meant, of course she could see it, she was imagining it and that is what imagining means. I feel like I'm missing out now, I kind of wish I hadn't read the story now.
    • mk12 2y ago
      If it means being able to hallucinate on command, i.e. superimpose the apple in your view as if you were wearing AR glasses, indistinguishable from a real apple apart from your knowledge that it's fake -- then that's a much sharper test and I can confidently say I can't do that. I'd be very surprised if anyone told me they could do that. If it's more of a separate mental plane rather than really seeing it, that's where I think it gets tricky to agree we're describing the same thing.
      • jaggederest 2y ago
        People can absolutely do that. I'm very close to that myself. I can "see" through walls, for example. If I'm familiar with a room I can describe to you what it would look like from the angle I'm looking at, with the wall deleted.
• ksec 2y ago
  Why do I sense there are higher percentage of people with aphantasia in Tech Industry?
  • YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
    Because in any other industry, you would not gain social capital for claiming to have it.
    • edgarvaldes 2y ago
      Or maybe the people is not interested in the phenomenom. I shared an article about aphantasia with my friends. They only responded with jokes: "I can't _imagine_ this being possible".
      • ksec 2y ago
        Similar here, but ALL people thinking not possible ( because obviously it is not the norm ) dont work in Tech / Science or Engineering Field. While majority who reported having same issues are all from STEM background.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• MemphisTrain 2y ago
  How vivid is the normal level of visualization? I can barely imagine a red apple, but not detailed or vivid really, certainly don't see it in front of me, can barely imagine it. Would vitamin B12 help?
• hondadriver 2y ago
  I don't think only 1% or even 1% to 4% of the population has this. Most people do not know they are supposed to 'see' something when imagining something. Same goes for hearing. I can't do both and discovered this when I was 45. Like many others I do dream in full colour with sound and I never forget a face. When doing a quick round at work asking people about it, because I was amazed, I've learned two things. 1. About 50% of the persons asked, confirmed they objectively only see black when closing their eyes and imagining something. 2. Most do not care at all about this subject and are not interested to explore this further.
  • kolinko 2y ago
    Asking if they see black is a wrong test, because people with imagination also see black, just they can see other things on top. A better test is: Ask them to imagine a ball on a table, then ask what color is the ball. So far almost everyone I asked answered with a color, no hesitation. Aphants will hesitate, and they will need to think of a color - in their minds a ball is just an abstract concept - it doesn't have a color unless you consciously specify it. So far, from my tests - 1 in 10 people asked is possibly an aphant.
    • taneliv 2y ago
      Yes, exactly. Or at least this matches well with my inner experience. To be specific, I wouldn't even be able to think of a color, just the name of a color. It's all symbolic. If you don't give details, the details very likely will not exist, and if they do, I still don't see them.
    • hondadriver 2y ago
      Thanks that might work better. I think especial the other way around. My wife for sure has a vivid visual experience, and only sees black when asked to see black. So, I don't think people without aphantasia will be identified having it with the question. I also was very specific with all black, not black and an image. Asking a colour might identify people who do not know they have aphantasia Because some people I've asked who think they can visualise, say they actually don't see anything, but imagine seeing. So what they see with eyes closed, is 'black'. That's why I've used that question. But they might not know the colour when not told in advance.
• ep24 2y ago
  E
• ep24 2y ago
  This is a comment out of ignorance but wouldn’t the only people who suffer of aphantasia be blind? How can someone say they don’t remember seeing something? However if I think it about it deeper are there people who actually see see their thoughts like a dream?
• Xeyz0r 2y ago
  Was really interested in taking VVIQ. My results: "You have a fairly vivid visual imagination known as phantasia. This indicates an average ability to visualize mental images. When you try to picture something in your mind, you can "see it" with a reasonable level of clarity and detail."
• moribvndvs 2y ago
  For me, if I try to visualize something context-less, my visual is very faint and smeared. My mind naturally starts to contextualize it, and when it finds one it becomes clearer, although it’s less that I’m visualizing something and more that I’m re-experiencing a memory… what I was doing, how I felt, etc. As a result, I don’t tend to think of an apple. I think of the apples in the fruit drawer that I just looked at, or the apples we turned into cider when I was a child. I don’t see what my mom looks like in my mind so much as remember, and as I’m trying to hold her in my mind to describe her I see a dozen memories of her face that all sort of blend together. I think when I was younger, it was more vivid and simpler. The murky, dark, and fleeting memory/visualization thing has increased over time, and that kind of scares me.