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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 expe

by 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.
    - mk12 2y ago
      Do you find drawing easy then, since you could trace around a visualization? That seems like it could be a useful test. I would expect those without aphantasia to be better at contour drawings (e.g. cartoon characters) if it really feels superimposed on normal vision.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        I can not see a thing with my minds eye most times (it has happened once) but I can easily sketch out the rooms in my house from a specific vantage point. All the information is there, not just a visual, so I don't think it'd be a viable test at all.
        mk12 2y ago
        I think it should work in the other direction though. You might draw well even without mental pictures, but if someone has AR-glasses-style superimposed images but can't trace them on paper, that would seem strange to me.
        jaggederest 2y ago
        The limiting factor is the sketching skill, I'm afraid!
    - listenallyall 2y ago
      No, what you are stating is not what he asked. > indistinguishable from a real apple This is like saying what you perceive in your head through the wall is exactly as real, vibrant and tangible as if that wall was actually replaced by a window. Most everybody can describe, or "picture," a familiar room in their head - even from long ago like walking through the house you grew up in - but it is not the same as saying it is indistinguishable from actually being in the room and your eyeballs actually looking at it.
JadeNB 2y ago
> 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. Same on my end. As far as I'm concerned, I don't see an apple, but basically just in the sense that I'm not hallucinating—with my eyes open, there is no apple before me, and with my eyes closed, there is no apple on the insides of my eyelids, and I don't think that there is. I feel like I could answer questions about the appearance of my imagined apple, but I don't literally see it. But does that mean that I have aphantasia? Since this seems to be the main diagnostic instrument for a casual Googler, and since, as you say, there's no way for me to understand whether or not other people "really" see an apple, I have no idea. (If people think that your point about never really knowing what other people are seeing is merely academic or philosophical, I'll mention that my mother went a long time before getting her amblyopia treated because she assumed that's what things looked like for everybody. Nothing in ordinary conversation told her, or anyone else, that her vision was different, and so no-one ever thought to test her for it.)
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  Similar to colour blindness, someone with amblyopia cannot fake not having it, and it’s actually difficult for someone without it to fake having it. The same cannot be said of aphantasia, which is trivial to fake and almost as trivial to mask. Combine this with some social desirability bias, and you have a perfect recipe for a complete non-condition.
jrm4 2y ago
Right? I literally don't believe that aphantasia meaningfully "exists" given what we've learned about brains. I'm reminded of the great article I saw about how "Your mind is not a computer?" No one remembers "images" in the way a computer does, we (re)construct them via association. So I think our brains "remember" enough to do what it needs to do and no more, and so called aphantasia people are perhaps doing what subjectively feels like less reconstruction based on what they read.
- trescenzi 2y ago
  I’d say this is pretty accurate as someone who considers themselves to have aphantasia. When I remember what apples look like there’s no feeling of reconstruction. It’s just a list of facts. The idea that reconstruction would even be necessary, or part of, remembering things seems surprising to me. What it practically means? I have no idea. I’m absolutely worse at remembering things like clothes someone left the house in but that could also just be me paying less attention to things like that.
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    When I realized I have aphantasia and told my wife, she said that makes total sense. For example, when imagining how a piece of clothing looks on someone, she can take it, put it on someone, change the color even. All those things sound ridiculous to me.
  - jrm4 2y ago
    I'm using "reconstruction" loosely here. What I'm trying to describe is the process that our brains use to think about ANYTHING and why it's nothing at all like how computers reread a series of ones and zeros.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I have once seen clear mental images, but consider myself to have aphantasia because I've only experienced that once. I also have mental images while dreaming, but not so clear, that persist for short periods as I'm aware I'm waking up. The three experiences are nothing remotely alike.
omgin 2y ago
> how people talk so objectively and confidently about this I can visualise things in my head exactly the same as someone with their eyeballs removed can see real things. I think that's relatively objective. And I say this with confidence.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  There are billions of people who have claimed with absolute confidence that they can talk to the disembodied spirit of a man who was nailed to a tree two thousand years ago, and that this is objective fact.
dfan 2y ago
The thing that finally made me very confident that I had aphantasia (back in 1998, before it was A Thing) is that I realized that my ability to "hallucinate" sounds is excellent. I can re-hear songs in my head, I can compose music and hear it as I think about it, I can hear my friends and family talking with their particular cadences and accents. I can't do anything remotely like that with visual images. Before I had that realization, I thought it was pretty possible that I was "just describing the same experience differently".
- gamerDude 2y ago
  Conversely, I discovered I had anauralia (finally got a name for my inability to "hallucinate" sounds). I found it when I was hosting a weekly event and meeting lots of people. And we talked about senses and memory, etc. And one day I realized I have no sounds in my memory, nor do I get songs stuck in my head. I asked others and it was instantly clear they had a different experience than mine.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    We have algorithms that can hallucinate now. LLMs basically are examples of how humans visualize things. With a few differences. Humans have more fine grained control over the result and understanding of a query. LLMs have greater detail in the sense that the LLMs knows the location of every wrinkle on a face while our imagination delivers an approximation with detail only being rendered if we decide to focus on the details.
    - shafyy 2y ago
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  - ghshephard 2y ago
    This is interesting - if you think of a popular tune, say, the opening chords to Hells Bells, (or whatever is popular for you) doesn't it make an impression in your head from chord to chord? I'm not saying it's identical to hearing a sound, but loud enough to kind of crowd out everything else in your head (to the point of actually being annoying?) The thing I never got with the "Close your eyes, can you visualize a Red Star" - is that I can "conceive" what a red-star is like but I can't even imagine what "visualizing" a red star would be - do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head? Or are there people who can actually pick up the actual image in exactly the same way they hear a sound? (I'm presuming not) There is zero difficulty in my mind distinguishing between the sound I hear and the sound in my "head" - but at least I have an ability to hear sounds. On the flip side while I have absolutely no ability to view images in my head 99.9% of the time, about 0.1% of the time, usually just in the 5 or so minutes before I fall asleep - I do see thinks in my head - to the point of being fascinated by them - but in this case - I'm actually seeing things, even though I have no control over it. It's different from when I'm hearing things - because that is mentally hearing things, whereas when I'm seeing things as I fall asleep - it's not mental at all - I actually see them (albeit with my eyes closed). It's a real image - not a mental one. You are the first person to have given me a sense of what it means to "visualize" if it means something similar to "hearing" a song in your head. It's also different from the inner monologue, btw. That's identical to my ability to hear sounds. Clearly there. Clearly mental. Sometimes chatty to the point of being distracting - but there is no doubt whatsoever that it's a mental dialogue - nothing whatsoever like actual sounds.
ericmcer 2y ago
Memories are also highly fallible, there are many experiments that prove people will rewrite what they did and why they did it and believe the new version of reality fully. I remember reading somewhere that consciousness is like a public relations manager. It makes sense that highly social creatures that will die if shunned by their tribe would have a complex system for explaining their actions in the most positive light possible.
leventov 2y ago
Every once in a while, before falling asleep I enter a "mellow" state in which I can conjure mental images dramatically more vividly than normally. I would say that normally it varies between 10-50% of vividness (also depends on the state of mind, the day, whether I'm under the influence of different chemicals), and in this state of mind it's 90%+ vivid. And I don't confuse this state of mind with lucid dreaming: I had spontaneous lucid dreams a few times. They were not very vivid, just as my normal dreams (I dream in images, and they are maybe around 50% vivid). So, there is definitely a way to experience variation of vividness of mental imagery, by a single observer.
- phantompeace 2y ago
  I have this too, especially when I’m really tired. It’s such a surreal yet refreshing experience. I can hear the most beautiful melodies my ears have ever heard, even though I don’t have a musical bone in my body. And I jump in and out of various vague visual scenes (like staring into deep space) during this. It always makes me question if I’m dreaming or not - and often, it’s the last thought I remember before I actually drift off to sleep. All of this seems to happen during the span of 60 seconds max (judging from my heartbeats), but this has categorically been debunked when my wife once told me I was actually snoring for a couple of minutes.
  - bemmu 2y ago
    The melody thing I assume I have not suddenly become a master composer, rather the part of my mind capable of judging whether the music is any good has become impaired.
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  I don't consume chemicals but do meditate. As I drift off to sleep sometimes it's fun to shift the inner eye to observe the mind and watch images float across my "viewport".
kstenerud 2y ago
> They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them. This is the line in the article that gets confusing for me. Like, are some people actually seeing an actual image of an apple, as if they were wearing VR goggles or something?
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  Where you fall on the imagination spectrum depends on how clear the object you are asked to visualize is in your mind. For example if asked to visualize a green banana, and you can only see vague, unclear, faint outlines of a banana, that's hypophantasia. If you cannot see an image at all, it's aphantasia. Some might see vivid details of the banana, like the matte skin and subtle green gradient, they fall under hyperphantasia. Others who lack the details but are still clear considered phantasia. This also applies to all other senses, like being able to imagine a sound or smell.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    But surely nobody sees the fruit rendered into their actual vision as if all mental imagery appears as a literal hallucination in their vision.
    - jaggederest 2y ago
      Visual hallucinations due to mental illness are uncommon but not unknown. I'd be reluctant to dismiss the idea that someone on earth can and does do that. I'm pretty far down the visualization direction myself.
    - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
      I've done a meditation where you sit open eyed and visualize something within the space. It was cool. Sort of like a hazy projection over the visual field. Normally when I visualize something with my minds eye it is on a black background. When the visualization ends my visual field snaps back to reality.
- 2y ago
Dylan16807 2y ago
> 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? Who uses raw abstract percents? Even the meme version is much more competent than that: https://preview.redd.it/o1lktd5no9t61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=aa27e70c2013753401b6a4a1be7f9e2850e06e8f https://preview.redd.it/o1lktd5no9t61.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...
- mk12 2y ago
  I was imagining people saying this in reference to a diagram like that (labelled with percentages instead of 1-5).
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    It's possible that two people would say numbers like this despite having the same experience and referencing the same diagram, but I would bet that very few people are that bad at interpreting the diagram.
    - mk12 2y ago
      Maybe I am one of those few people :) I don't know how to interpret that diagram. Based on some of the comments here I would put myself at #1, and based on others at #5.
      - kolinko 2y ago
        A simpler test. Imagine a ball on a desk. What color is the ball? People who are #1 respond immediately, just as if you asked them about a real object in front of them. #4/#5 will ask “what do you mean what’s the color? I can imagine it to be a certain color” - in their head the ball is just an abstract concept labelled “ball”, it doesn’t have a color by itself.
bondarchuk 2y ago
You doubt that people can talk objectively and confidently about this, but then it seems like you conclude (implicitly or not) that we should therefore stick to the default of assuming everyone's experience is the same (and therefore the same as yours, btw). Alternatively you could take the difficulty of communication as a sign that we have at least just that much leeway concerning the difference between each others' experience. You are skeptical when people say they have an internal monologue. Those without internal monologue would be skeptical when you say you do have an internal monologue. Your confidence is also based on nothing more than your personal experience + bias. PS I firmly doubt those "swapped colour experience" ideas make any sense at all. Probably the thing that is assumed to be flipped is just that part of the experience that only seems to exist as an absolute, yet is actually not defined at all beyond its relations to other experiences.
- mk12 2y ago
  I wasn't trying to convey that conclusion. I'm skeptical at people's confidence; I'm not confident that they're wrong. I think they discount how big a factor the difficulty in communication is. On internal monologue, I said the opposite. I'm skeptical when people say things like "I also don't have an internal monologue. I don't passively think thoughts. I have to actively think everything."[1] I have a reason for this beyond personal experience and bias: that it's easy to be shockingly wrong in this direction. For example, many people will think they can count 60 breaths without being distracted by thoughts, only to find it impossible when they try and pay close attention. Maybe the swapped color was a bad example. I just mean any direct comparison of qualia in different minds which is impossible to do, and therefore pointless to talk about. [1] The first Reddit post I found searching for "no inner monologue"
TheHumanist 2y ago
Apt comment. I was sitting here thinking to myself, "Do I see mental images often? At all? Yes I think I do... But is it less than others? Or about normal? How would I know?" Also, I think people who say they have no inner monologue think an inner monologue is like JD on Scrubs thinking to himself.
- vidarh 2y ago
  To me, my inner monologue is like that, and it is constant, every waking moment unless I make conscious efforts to suppress it, like while meditating. As for mental images, I have them all the time while dreaming, but I've only experienced them once in my life while fully awake, and profoundly clearer than any dream. I can remember what some of the images in a few dreams looked like, but once I start waking up, the visuals fade within 30 seconds or so of being aware.
MaulingMonkey 2y ago
> There are subjective things we'll never able to compare It's certainly difficult to perfectly compare qualia in absolute terms across minds. It's less difficult to compare qualia within the same mind. And if one person reports they experience two things equivalently, and another person reports they experience two things incredibly differently... it's hard to claim the two people must be experiencing the world equivallently. Some people hallucinate through drugs or mental illness, and find themselves unable to distinguish said hallucinations from reality. If only one of us sees the pink elephant tap dancing in the middle of the room... it's likely that one person is hallucinating. Some people dream vividly, to the point where they can't always immediately discern if a memory was from when they were awake or when they were asleep. I have had such dreams. Others are able to identify specific diminished senses that they were able to use to immediately distinguish the dream from reality. I have had such dreams. Some people are able to visualize scenes and describe them in far greater detail than I ever could from mere imagination, which helps back up their claims to being able to effectively vividly hallucinate/dream at-will in ways I've never accomplished. > I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing. I can see an apple in reality. I can see an apple in vivid dreams. I could presumably see an apple if I ever hallucinated one. I cannot in good conscious say I can "see" an apple through visualization alone without a great deal of effort to get an incredibly mediocre result that even a toddler's enthusiastic and proud parents would have qualms about pinning to the fridge. Some people will be able to go into immediate detail about the color and texture of the apple they have a specific concrete memory of imagining years ago. Others, such as myself, will readily admit they completely forgot to even consider that the apple they're trying to imagine might have colors, even as they try to imagine it. Red? Green? A rainbow mac apple logo with a bite out of it? ...and you say this thing is supposed to have lighting from a direction and cast shadows?!? I can barely imagine a circle! Give me a break! And maybe some dice, so I can decide on a color to attempt to imagine! ...I think it's fairly safe to say that those two experiences are at least marginally different.
jncfhnb 2y ago
It is not at all difficult to understand that I’m “hearing” my thoughts and imagined sounds It would be unfathomable for me to have this experience and not acknowledge that my mind is simulating sound
causality0 2y ago
whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped. God this is a tired argument. Your visual cortex is not special. Your red isn't any more different from my red than my "circular" is different from your "circular".
- mk12 2y ago
  It's a well known thought experiment: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/. I'm not arguing for or against it being true.
- kristiandupont 2y ago
  >God this is a tired argument. We literally can't know, and never will. The fact that you assert that assert otherwise (as far as I can tell) with such staunch confidence seems to be exactly the kind of thing OP is calling into question.
kazinator 2y ago
What is somewhat objective, in a sense, is someone's report of how closely their imagination matches what they see with their eyes. If you can close your eyes and get your mind to produce something like a photo of an apple, you know it. If you can't even remotely obtain anything like that you know that too.
afpx 2y ago
Apparently, you can know by how you recall a memory. Do you "see" it as a film? Or, do you recall it as a list of facts?
- jaggederest 2y ago
  There's more than that going on. There's recall, but there's also constructing counterfactuals and extrapolating from existing detail. "where did I leave my keys", "what would it look like if I moved that couch", and "how big is the room I can only see one wall of", are decent examples.
mortify 2y ago
Although not truly the point... we do know that people don't seen red and green flipped because color's don't work in isolation. It's also how they work together. If a person with flipped red/green mixed what they saw as red (actually green) with blue, they wouldn't get purple. We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The point he's making is that colors do not "really" exist - they're simply different levels of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum. How we perceive those colors is exclusively a product of our brain using input filtering from our eyes and then converting this into signals that we then perceive. But there's no reason to think that this processing and filtering eventually results in the exact same perceived color for every person. My red, blue, and purple could all be perceived simply differently than yours - even though every physical law interacting with what we perceive as color would behave identically. And the even more interesting thing is that this nuance of reality extends to everything. The world as we perceive is only after extensive processing and filtering by our brain, driven by millennia of evolution. And it's very safe to say that our perception of the world has changed over those millennia and will continue to change in the future. So it seems essentially illogical to then assume that everybody at the current time shares the exact same 'experience' of perception.
  - mk12 2y ago
    Yeah by "my red" I'm talking about qualia as in the knowledge argument https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
- OJFord 2y ago
  You're just introducing more and compound things that we don't know if we have the same experience of. Consider an enum type: we agree on labels (colour names) for different stimuli; as those stimuli combine they correspond to some other enum variant, and we interpret them as the same label. But we don't know, and I agree with the top-level comment that we can't know, whether our perception of the stimuli with that label is the same. This is distinct from colourblindness, which is inability to distinguish stimuli for some of the enum variants, and so the labels get merged/boundaries between labels move. (Ok fine we also need a hashmap from stimuli to the enum..) We agree to call the rose pink, and it's the same pink we see when we look at a colour card and agree it's the colour of the rose, but we don't know that what our brains reconstruct from the light when we look at 'pink'-labelled things is the same.
bilalq 2y ago
You've put into words how I've always felt about this as well.
strogonoff 2y ago
Comparing subjective experience is ultimately futile. That said, humans can be very similar beings to each other, and perhaps similar enough that we can communicate a enough for a useful (if very lossy) comparison. The key here is to remember that what makes us capable of sharing a world view and understanding each other is not just speaking the same language, there is also a degree of required shared cultural background—and it is not shared by all humans or even just speakers of a language. In order to make sure a question about inner experience yields a useful answer at all from person on Earth who has a sufficiently different life from yours, you may first need to establish a common world view basis of sorts (unlikely to happen in, for example, a mass survey, but perhaps possible in a long-form discussion on an online forum). Of course, even after all that, any comparison will still necessarily be very low fidelity.
- rini17 2y ago
  Low fidelity information transmission is not "ultimately futile" but instead something to build on. Or what do you measure it against?
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    It is ultimately futile for the reasons outlined in the top-level comment. What one person experiences cannot be precisely conveyed to another person without round-tripping very lossy means of communication, such as language. If you have an example of some existing means of lossless communication between two humans, bring it forth. If you believe it is a technical possibility, then be my guest—however, I do not see such a way (that would also maintain humans as a set of diverse individual conscious agents, so homogenizing society to reduce everyone to a shared baseline does not count).
    - rini17 2y ago
      Absolutely everything we have achieved as a civilization, depended on lossy communication between humans. And all experience is inherently subjective. Why is all that somehow ultimately futile and requires counterexample not to be? I don't get it. We don't have to totally understand each other to achieve something together.
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ineptech 2y ago
Not to be that guy, but the article discusses this at some length. Find this bit: > However, such tests rely on introspection and self-reported experience, which made some neuroscientists doubt that aphantasia was real. Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds? “It could be the case that we’re all actually experiencing the exact same apple, we’re just describing it differently,” said Rebecca Keogh, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience... The following ~8 paragraphs discuss the evidence for it beyond subjective reports.
- mk12 2y ago
  I'm not entirely convinced by it. But even if I was, I'd still stand by my claim that many people speak about this with unwarranted confidence. This comment thread has lots of people who seem to know for sure that they do/don't have it, and also several definitions such that I could easily self-diagnose in either direction by picking the right one.
dagaci 2y ago
Mental Images (of things) 1/10, Inner Voice 9/10 (reading) So these are be relative to what i see with my open eyes and hear with my ears. I think this is the only way you can measure. (What i see vividly with eyes shut is more like something random a kalidescope.)
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vidarh 2y ago
I can not see images in my inner eye most of the time, but I do while dreaming, and I have had a single experience of doing so while meditating, which was clearer than anything I've experienced. So I have basis for comparison. The difference is sharp and unmistakable. What is frustrating is that my one experience suggests it ought to be possible for me to train my ability to, but no attempts have succeeded (I've not made that many - it was an interesting experience, and I'd enjoy having it again, but it wasn't earthshattering enough to spend a lot of time on)
maxglute 2y ago
I remember reading that some inventors could form mental images accurate / with enough fidelity to visualize complex machinery interacting. In architecture school there was gradient in how well people could mentally visualize spatial relationships including measurements. I remember a project on a fairly narrow site and during initial sketch exercises, people were coming up with (to me), obviously unworkable solutions because the programming (i.e. rooms) they'd need to fit into certain volumes, couldn't. Spectrum in spatial visualization becomes very obvious when you see tacticle / visual learners iterate through a bunch of designs, whether with modelling or with CAD, and after a few lines, I (and some others) knew immediately the proportions / scale was wrong. Became very obvious when projects started incorporating building codes and designs needed to account for required # egress (fire exists etc) XYZ meters from any point in floor plan. Some people can mentally iterate through designs/measurements in their heads, some people have to draw things out to figure out.
- moritonal 2y ago
  For what it's worth this is believed to be a measurable skill sometimes referred to as "spatial reasoning"
sorokod 2y ago
fMRI is mentioned in the article several times.
kolinko 2y ago
There are some surprisingly objective tests for aphantasia - fmri shows it pretty clearly, but also imagining bright things causes iris to change in normal people but not in people with aphantasia. You could say that aphants just may not be trying enough - there are tests for that as well. But there is hope that in many people aphantasia is something that can be overcome, because it’s just a matter of a lack of a proper skill, or some sort of childhood trauma.
verisimi 2y ago
I agree completely. No one has access to another's mental state. When you think of linguistics, and commonly misunderstood terms even though we have an objective way to convey the meaning (dictionaries, words) eg 'emigrate', how many more misunderstandings are possible when there is no objective access?
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ckw 2y ago
Some people can play chess blindfolded. There is a popular method of memorizing which has one visualize the placement of objects in a familiar space. Both of these seem absurd to me, as I can at best conjure a fleeting glimpse of an object in greyscale. When I calculate chess tactics I do so in a manner which seems almost kinesthetic, as if I’m feeling the movements of the pieces, and I have to look at the board while I do it. When I memorize things, like poems or the digits of pi, I just repeat them until each element of the sequence magically evokes the next. There is no visualization.
- Xeyz0r 2y ago
  Some can play the piano blindfolded. Is it also connected?
  - argon81 2y ago
    No, that is muscle memory. If I play the piano with my eyes closed, I'm not visualising the piano, I'm focusing on the feel and positions of my fingers
    - ckw 2y ago
      This is my experience as well. I would also say that when improvising I’m not really thinking consciously about the movements, but rather the notes I want to hear.
    - Xeyz0r 2y ago
      [dead]
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Those two example skills are probably unrelated, like two aspects of the same what-are-your-brain-interconnects problem. I can place symbols and move them, but I can't imagine a realistic flower; if I tried hard enough I could memorize a chess boards, but the pieces wouldn't have exact shapes as such, everything would be just a representation of a thing, not comparable to a visual memory of seeing the layout. In programmer speak, I think in nodes, graphs, connections. I can imagine people moving in a room to great detail, but not at all their faces or clothing. I'm strongly spatial but not photographic at all. You're probably strongly tactile, and you learn a poem as if it was muscle memory of a movement.
lupusreal 2y ago
The difference between "10% clear and 80% clear" may be subjective, but when people assert with complete conviction they cannot see anything in their mind and cannot even picture their own parents, I can be confident that their experience is not like mine. I suspect it probably could be if they practiced, maybe picked up an artistic hobby or two, but if they're insist they're not visualizing presently then I'll believe them.
theGnuMe 2y ago
I dunno. I can hear music, it is muted in my brain but I basically have a audiographic memory. I can't visualize anything though. It is so weird. Basically my internal DNN can record and playback but not yet generate new things like stable diffusion either.. I suspect my musical training at a young age played a role in this as well as listening to lots of classical music. Psychologists and neuroscientists can tease these things apart.. in the article they talk about it. But aphantasia is only recently being understood so methods to quantify the degree will improve.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Yeah, I have the same feelings when I read these articles. For example: "Behind her eyes, it was completely black” "They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly" This seems weird, but both of these describe my subjective experience of imagining an apple equally well.
kordlessagain 2y ago
Misconceptions about subjective experiences often stem from a narrow view of what constitutes internal perception. The very nature of subjectivity means that each person's internal process is unique to them. It's erroneous to insist that we must "see" something as if it's physically present for it to count as a subjective experience. From the article: "but somehow they cannot integrate this information in a subjective experience". Consider a conversation with a blind person. Claiming they aren't having a subjective experience because they can't visually perceive you would be fundamentally biased. Clearly, one doesn't need visual input to engage in meaningful interaction or to have rich internal experiences. Over time, it's become clear that people have a wide range of internal experiences. While individuals often try to compare their experiences to some imagined baseline, this baseline itself is subjective and variable. Many mistakenly assume that their own subjective experience is universal or "correct," failing to recognize the vast diversity of internal processes across different people. Recognizing this diversity is crucial. It helps us understand that subjective experiences can vary greatly between individuals, yet all are equally valid. This broader understanding moves us away from judging others' internal experiences based on our own limited perspective, and towards appreciating the rich tapestry of human cognition and perception.
sohex 2y ago
Pretty much this. For further consideration it may be worth looking into Daniel Dennett's writing on qualia (notably that they're ineffable and private).

by mk12 2y ago

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.
  - mk12 2y ago
    Do you find drawing easy then, since you could trace around a visualization? That seems like it could be a useful test. I would expect those without aphantasia to be better at contour drawings (e.g. cartoon characters) if it really feels superimposed on normal vision.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      I can not see a thing with my minds eye most times (it has happened once) but I can easily sketch out the rooms in my house from a specific vantage point. All the information is there, not just a visual, so I don't think it'd be a viable test at all.
      - mk12 2y ago
        I think it should work in the other direction though. You might draw well even without mental pictures, but if someone has AR-glasses-style superimposed images but can't trace them on paper, that would seem strange to me.
        jaggederest 2y ago
        The limiting factor is the sketching skill, I'm afraid!
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    No, what you are stating is not what he asked. > indistinguishable from a real apple This is like saying what you perceive in your head through the wall is exactly as real, vibrant and tangible as if that wall was actually replaced by a window. Most everybody can describe, or "picture," a familiar room in their head - even from long ago like walking through the house you grew up in - but it is not the same as saying it is indistinguishable from actually being in the room and your eyeballs actually looking at it.

JadeNB 2y ago

> 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. Same on my end. As far as I'm concerned, I don't see an apple, but basically just in the sense that I'm not hallucinating—with my eyes open, there is no apple before me, and with my eyes closed, there is no apple on the insides of my eyelids, and I don't think that there is. I feel like I could answer questions about the appearance of my imagined apple, but I don't literally see it. But does that mean that I have aphantasia? Since this seems to be the main diagnostic instrument for a casual Googler, and since, as you say, there's no way for me to understand whether or not other people "really" see an apple, I have no idea. (If people think that your point about never really knowing what other people are seeing is merely academic or philosophical, I'll mention that my mother went a long time before getting her amblyopia treated because she assumed that's what things looked like for everybody. Nothing in ordinary conversation told her, or anyone else, that her vision was different, and so no-one ever thought to test her for it.)

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
Similar to colour blindness, someone with amblyopia cannot fake not having it, and it’s actually difficult for someone without it to fake having it. The same cannot be said of aphantasia, which is trivial to fake and almost as trivial to mask. Combine this with some social desirability bias, and you have a perfect recipe for a complete non-condition.

jrm4 2y ago

Right? I literally don't believe that aphantasia meaningfully "exists" given what we've learned about brains. I'm reminded of the great article I saw about how "Your mind is not a computer?" No one remembers "images" in the way a computer does, we (re)construct them via association. So I think our brains "remember" enough to do what it needs to do and no more, and so called aphantasia people are perhaps doing what subjectively feels like less reconstruction based on what they read.

trescenzi 2y ago
I’d say this is pretty accurate as someone who considers themselves to have aphantasia. When I remember what apples look like there’s no feeling of reconstruction. It’s just a list of facts. The idea that reconstruction would even be necessary, or part of, remembering things seems surprising to me. What it practically means? I have no idea. I’m absolutely worse at remembering things like clothes someone left the house in but that could also just be me paying less attention to things like that.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  When I realized I have aphantasia and told my wife, she said that makes total sense. For example, when imagining how a piece of clothing looks on someone, she can take it, put it on someone, change the color even. All those things sound ridiculous to me.
- jrm4 2y ago
  I'm using "reconstruction" loosely here. What I'm trying to describe is the process that our brains use to think about ANYTHING and why it's nothing at all like how computers reread a series of ones and zeros.
vidarh 2y ago
I have once seen clear mental images, but consider myself to have aphantasia because I've only experienced that once. I also have mental images while dreaming, but not so clear, that persist for short periods as I'm aware I'm waking up. The three experiences are nothing remotely alike.

omgin 2y ago

> how people talk so objectively and confidently about this I can visualise things in my head exactly the same as someone with their eyeballs removed can see real things. I think that's relatively objective. And I say this with confidence.

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
There are billions of people who have claimed with absolute confidence that they can talk to the disembodied spirit of a man who was nailed to a tree two thousand years ago, and that this is objective fact.

dfan 2y ago

The thing that finally made me very confident that I had aphantasia (back in 1998, before it was A Thing) is that I realized that my ability to "hallucinate" sounds is excellent. I can re-hear songs in my head, I can compose music and hear it as I think about it, I can hear my friends and family talking with their particular cadences and accents. I can't do anything remotely like that with visual images. Before I had that realization, I thought it was pretty possible that I was "just describing the same experience differently".

gamerDude 2y ago
Conversely, I discovered I had anauralia (finally got a name for my inability to "hallucinate" sounds). I found it when I was hosting a weekly event and meeting lots of people. And we talked about senses and memory, etc. And one day I realized I have no sounds in my memory, nor do I get songs stuck in my head. I asked others and it was instantly clear they had a different experience than mine.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  We have algorithms that can hallucinate now. LLMs basically are examples of how humans visualize things. With a few differences. Humans have more fine grained control over the result and understanding of a query. LLMs have greater detail in the sense that the LLMs knows the location of every wrinkle on a face while our imagination delivers an approximation with detail only being rendered if we decide to focus on the details.
  - shafyy 2y ago
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- ghshephard 2y ago
  This is interesting - if you think of a popular tune, say, the opening chords to Hells Bells, (or whatever is popular for you) doesn't it make an impression in your head from chord to chord? I'm not saying it's identical to hearing a sound, but loud enough to kind of crowd out everything else in your head (to the point of actually being annoying?) The thing I never got with the "Close your eyes, can you visualize a Red Star" - is that I can "conceive" what a red-star is like but I can't even imagine what "visualizing" a red star would be - do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head? Or are there people who can actually pick up the actual image in exactly the same way they hear a sound? (I'm presuming not) There is zero difficulty in my mind distinguishing between the sound I hear and the sound in my "head" - but at least I have an ability to hear sounds. On the flip side while I have absolutely no ability to view images in my head 99.9% of the time, about 0.1% of the time, usually just in the 5 or so minutes before I fall asleep - I do see thinks in my head - to the point of being fascinated by them - but in this case - I'm actually seeing things, even though I have no control over it. It's different from when I'm hearing things - because that is mentally hearing things, whereas when I'm seeing things as I fall asleep - it's not mental at all - I actually see them (albeit with my eyes closed). It's a real image - not a mental one. You are the first person to have given me a sense of what it means to "visualize" if it means something similar to "hearing" a song in your head. It's also different from the inner monologue, btw. That's identical to my ability to hear sounds. Clearly there. Clearly mental. Sometimes chatty to the point of being distracting - but there is no doubt whatsoever that it's a mental dialogue - nothing whatsoever like actual sounds.

ericmcer 2y ago

Memories are also highly fallible, there are many experiments that prove people will rewrite what they did and why they did it and believe the new version of reality fully. I remember reading somewhere that consciousness is like a public relations manager. It makes sense that highly social creatures that will die if shunned by their tribe would have a complex system for explaining their actions in the most positive light possible.

leventov 2y ago

Every once in a while, before falling asleep I enter a "mellow" state in which I can conjure mental images dramatically more vividly than normally. I would say that normally it varies between 10-50% of vividness (also depends on the state of mind, the day, whether I'm under the influence of different chemicals), and in this state of mind it's 90%+ vivid. And I don't confuse this state of mind with lucid dreaming: I had spontaneous lucid dreams a few times. They were not very vivid, just as my normal dreams (I dream in images, and they are maybe around 50% vivid). So, there is definitely a way to experience variation of vividness of mental imagery, by a single observer.

phantompeace 2y ago
I have this too, especially when I’m really tired. It’s such a surreal yet refreshing experience. I can hear the most beautiful melodies my ears have ever heard, even though I don’t have a musical bone in my body. And I jump in and out of various vague visual scenes (like staring into deep space) during this. It always makes me question if I’m dreaming or not - and often, it’s the last thought I remember before I actually drift off to sleep. All of this seems to happen during the span of 60 seconds max (judging from my heartbeats), but this has categorically been debunked when my wife once told me I was actually snoring for a couple of minutes.
- bemmu 2y ago
  The melody thing I assume I have not suddenly become a master composer, rather the part of my mind capable of judging whether the music is any good has become impaired.
CTDOCodebases 2y ago
I don't consume chemicals but do meditate. As I drift off to sleep sometimes it's fun to shift the inner eye to observe the mind and watch images float across my "viewport".

kstenerud 2y ago

> They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them. This is the line in the article that gets confusing for me. Like, are some people actually seeing an actual image of an apple, as if they were wearing VR goggles or something?

lovethevoid 2y ago
Where you fall on the imagination spectrum depends on how clear the object you are asked to visualize is in your mind. For example if asked to visualize a green banana, and you can only see vague, unclear, faint outlines of a banana, that's hypophantasia. If you cannot see an image at all, it's aphantasia. Some might see vivid details of the banana, like the matte skin and subtle green gradient, they fall under hyperphantasia. Others who lack the details but are still clear considered phantasia. This also applies to all other senses, like being able to imagine a sound or smell.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  But surely nobody sees the fruit rendered into their actual vision as if all mental imagery appears as a literal hallucination in their vision.
  - jaggederest 2y ago
    Visual hallucinations due to mental illness are uncommon but not unknown. I'd be reluctant to dismiss the idea that someone on earth can and does do that. I'm pretty far down the visualization direction myself.
  - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
    I've done a meditation where you sit open eyed and visualize something within the space. It was cool. Sort of like a hazy projection over the visual field. Normally when I visualize something with my minds eye it is on a black background. When the visualization ends my visual field snaps back to reality.
2y ago

Dylan16807 2y ago

> 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? Who uses raw abstract percents? Even the meme version is much more competent than that: https://preview.redd.it/o1lktd5no9t61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=aa27e70c2013753401b6a4a1be7f9e2850e06e8f https://preview.redd.it/o1lktd5no9t61.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...

mk12 2y ago
I was imagining people saying this in reference to a diagram like that (labelled with percentages instead of 1-5).
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  It's possible that two people would say numbers like this despite having the same experience and referencing the same diagram, but I would bet that very few people are that bad at interpreting the diagram.
  - mk12 2y ago
    Maybe I am one of those few people :) I don't know how to interpret that diagram. Based on some of the comments here I would put myself at #1, and based on others at #5.
    - kolinko 2y ago
      A simpler test. Imagine a ball on a desk. What color is the ball? People who are #1 respond immediately, just as if you asked them about a real object in front of them. #4/#5 will ask “what do you mean what’s the color? I can imagine it to be a certain color” - in their head the ball is just an abstract concept labelled “ball”, it doesn’t have a color by itself.

bondarchuk 2y ago

You doubt that people can talk objectively and confidently about this, but then it seems like you conclude (implicitly or not) that we should therefore stick to the default of assuming everyone's experience is the same (and therefore the same as yours, btw). Alternatively you could take the difficulty of communication as a sign that we have at least just that much leeway concerning the difference between each others' experience. You are skeptical when people say they have an internal monologue. Those without internal monologue would be skeptical when you say you do have an internal monologue. Your confidence is also based on nothing more than your personal experience + bias. PS I firmly doubt those "swapped colour experience" ideas make any sense at all. Probably the thing that is assumed to be flipped is just that part of the experience that only seems to exist as an absolute, yet is actually not defined at all beyond its relations to other experiences.

mk12 2y ago
I wasn't trying to convey that conclusion. I'm skeptical at people's confidence; I'm not confident that they're wrong. I think they discount how big a factor the difficulty in communication is. On internal monologue, I said the opposite. I'm skeptical when people say things like "I also don't have an internal monologue. I don't passively think thoughts. I have to actively think everything."[1] I have a reason for this beyond personal experience and bias: that it's easy to be shockingly wrong in this direction. For example, many people will think they can count 60 breaths without being distracted by thoughts, only to find it impossible when they try and pay close attention. Maybe the swapped color was a bad example. I just mean any direct comparison of qualia in different minds which is impossible to do, and therefore pointless to talk about. [1] The first Reddit post I found searching for "no inner monologue"

TheHumanist 2y ago

Apt comment. I was sitting here thinking to myself, "Do I see mental images often? At all? Yes I think I do... But is it less than others? Or about normal? How would I know?" Also, I think people who say they have no inner monologue think an inner monologue is like JD on Scrubs thinking to himself.

vidarh 2y ago
To me, my inner monologue is like that, and it is constant, every waking moment unless I make conscious efforts to suppress it, like while meditating. As for mental images, I have them all the time while dreaming, but I've only experienced them once in my life while fully awake, and profoundly clearer than any dream. I can remember what some of the images in a few dreams looked like, but once I start waking up, the visuals fade within 30 seconds or so of being aware.

MaulingMonkey 2y ago

> There are subjective things we'll never able to compare It's certainly difficult to perfectly compare qualia in absolute terms across minds. It's less difficult to compare qualia within the same mind. And if one person reports they experience two things equivalently, and another person reports they experience two things incredibly differently... it's hard to claim the two people must be experiencing the world equivallently. Some people hallucinate through drugs or mental illness, and find themselves unable to distinguish said hallucinations from reality. If only one of us sees the pink elephant tap dancing in the middle of the room... it's likely that one person is hallucinating. Some people dream vividly, to the point where they can't always immediately discern if a memory was from when they were awake or when they were asleep. I have had such dreams. Others are able to identify specific diminished senses that they were able to use to immediately distinguish the dream from reality. I have had such dreams. Some people are able to visualize scenes and describe them in far greater detail than I ever could from mere imagination, which helps back up their claims to being able to effectively vividly hallucinate/dream at-will in ways I've never accomplished. > I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing. I can see an apple in reality. I can see an apple in vivid dreams. I could presumably see an apple if I ever hallucinated one. I cannot in good conscious say I can "see" an apple through visualization alone without a great deal of effort to get an incredibly mediocre result that even a toddler's enthusiastic and proud parents would have qualms about pinning to the fridge. Some people will be able to go into immediate detail about the color and texture of the apple they have a specific concrete memory of imagining years ago. Others, such as myself, will readily admit they completely forgot to even consider that the apple they're trying to imagine might have colors, even as they try to imagine it. Red? Green? A rainbow mac apple logo with a bite out of it? ...and you say this thing is supposed to have lighting from a direction and cast shadows?!? I can barely imagine a circle! Give me a break! And maybe some dice, so I can decide on a color to attempt to imagine! ...I think it's fairly safe to say that those two experiences are at least marginally different.

jncfhnb 2y ago

It is not at all difficult to understand that I’m “hearing” my thoughts and imagined sounds It would be unfathomable for me to have this experience and not acknowledge that my mind is simulating sound

causality0 2y ago

whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped. God this is a tired argument. Your visual cortex is not special. Your red isn't any more different from my red than my "circular" is different from your "circular".

mk12 2y ago
It's a well known thought experiment: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/. I'm not arguing for or against it being true.
kristiandupont 2y ago
>God this is a tired argument. We literally can't know, and never will. The fact that you assert that assert otherwise (as far as I can tell) with such staunch confidence seems to be exactly the kind of thing OP is calling into question.

kazinator 2y ago

What is somewhat objective, in a sense, is someone's report of how closely their imagination matches what they see with their eyes. If you can close your eyes and get your mind to produce something like a photo of an apple, you know it. If you can't even remotely obtain anything like that you know that too.

afpx 2y ago

Apparently, you can know by how you recall a memory. Do you "see" it as a film? Or, do you recall it as a list of facts?

jaggederest 2y ago
There's more than that going on. There's recall, but there's also constructing counterfactuals and extrapolating from existing detail. "where did I leave my keys", "what would it look like if I moved that couch", and "how big is the room I can only see one wall of", are decent examples.

mortify 2y ago

Although not truly the point... we do know that people don't seen red and green flipped because color's don't work in isolation. It's also how they work together. If a person with flipped red/green mixed what they saw as red (actually green) with blue, they wouldn't get purple. We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.

somenameforme 2y ago
The point he's making is that colors do not "really" exist - they're simply different levels of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum. How we perceive those colors is exclusively a product of our brain using input filtering from our eyes and then converting this into signals that we then perceive. But there's no reason to think that this processing and filtering eventually results in the exact same perceived color for every person. My red, blue, and purple could all be perceived simply differently than yours - even though every physical law interacting with what we perceive as color would behave identically. And the even more interesting thing is that this nuance of reality extends to everything. The world as we perceive is only after extensive processing and filtering by our brain, driven by millennia of evolution. And it's very safe to say that our perception of the world has changed over those millennia and will continue to change in the future. So it seems essentially illogical to then assume that everybody at the current time shares the exact same 'experience' of perception.
- mk12 2y ago
  Yeah by "my red" I'm talking about qualia as in the knowledge argument https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
OJFord 2y ago
You're just introducing more and compound things that we don't know if we have the same experience of. Consider an enum type: we agree on labels (colour names) for different stimuli; as those stimuli combine they correspond to some other enum variant, and we interpret them as the same label. But we don't know, and I agree with the top-level comment that we can't know, whether our perception of the stimuli with that label is the same. This is distinct from colourblindness, which is inability to distinguish stimuli for some of the enum variants, and so the labels get merged/boundaries between labels move. (Ok fine we also need a hashmap from stimuli to the enum..) We agree to call the rose pink, and it's the same pink we see when we look at a colour card and agree it's the colour of the rose, but we don't know that what our brains reconstruct from the light when we look at 'pink'-labelled things is the same.

bilalq 2y ago

You've put into words how I've always felt about this as well.

strogonoff 2y ago

Comparing subjective experience is ultimately futile. That said, humans can be very similar beings to each other, and perhaps similar enough that we can communicate a enough for a useful (if very lossy) comparison. The key here is to remember that what makes us capable of sharing a world view and understanding each other is not just speaking the same language, there is also a degree of required shared cultural background—and it is not shared by all humans or even just speakers of a language. In order to make sure a question about inner experience yields a useful answer at all from person on Earth who has a sufficiently different life from yours, you may first need to establish a common world view basis of sorts (unlikely to happen in, for example, a mass survey, but perhaps possible in a long-form discussion on an online forum). Of course, even after all that, any comparison will still necessarily be very low fidelity.

rini17 2y ago
Low fidelity information transmission is not "ultimately futile" but instead something to build on. Or what do you measure it against?
- strogonoff 2y ago
  It is ultimately futile for the reasons outlined in the top-level comment. What one person experiences cannot be precisely conveyed to another person without round-tripping very lossy means of communication, such as language. If you have an example of some existing means of lossless communication between two humans, bring it forth. If you believe it is a technical possibility, then be my guest—however, I do not see such a way (that would also maintain humans as a set of diverse individual conscious agents, so homogenizing society to reduce everyone to a shared baseline does not count).
  - rini17 2y ago
    Absolutely everything we have achieved as a civilization, depended on lossy communication between humans. And all experience is inherently subjective. Why is all that somehow ultimately futile and requires counterexample not to be? I don't get it. We don't have to totally understand each other to achieve something together.

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ineptech 2y ago

Not to be that guy, but the article discusses this at some length. Find this bit: > However, such tests rely on introspection and self-reported experience, which made some neuroscientists doubt that aphantasia was real. Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds? “It could be the case that we’re all actually experiencing the exact same apple, we’re just describing it differently,” said Rebecca Keogh, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience... The following ~8 paragraphs discuss the evidence for it beyond subjective reports.

mk12 2y ago
I'm not entirely convinced by it. But even if I was, I'd still stand by my claim that many people speak about this with unwarranted confidence. This comment thread has lots of people who seem to know for sure that they do/don't have it, and also several definitions such that I could easily self-diagnose in either direction by picking the right one.

dagaci 2y ago

Mental Images (of things) 1/10, Inner Voice 9/10 (reading) So these are be relative to what i see with my open eyes and hear with my ears. I think this is the only way you can measure. (What i see vividly with eyes shut is more like something random a kalidescope.)

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vidarh 2y ago

I can not see images in my inner eye most of the time, but I do while dreaming, and I have had a single experience of doing so while meditating, which was clearer than anything I've experienced. So I have basis for comparison. The difference is sharp and unmistakable. What is frustrating is that my one experience suggests it ought to be possible for me to train my ability to, but no attempts have succeeded (I've not made that many - it was an interesting experience, and I'd enjoy having it again, but it wasn't earthshattering enough to spend a lot of time on)

maxglute 2y ago

I remember reading that some inventors could form mental images accurate / with enough fidelity to visualize complex machinery interacting. In architecture school there was gradient in how well people could mentally visualize spatial relationships including measurements. I remember a project on a fairly narrow site and during initial sketch exercises, people were coming up with (to me), obviously unworkable solutions because the programming (i.e. rooms) they'd need to fit into certain volumes, couldn't. Spectrum in spatial visualization becomes very obvious when you see tacticle / visual learners iterate through a bunch of designs, whether with modelling or with CAD, and after a few lines, I (and some others) knew immediately the proportions / scale was wrong. Became very obvious when projects started incorporating building codes and designs needed to account for required # egress (fire exists etc) XYZ meters from any point in floor plan. Some people can mentally iterate through designs/measurements in their heads, some people have to draw things out to figure out.

moritonal 2y ago
For what it's worth this is believed to be a measurable skill sometimes referred to as "spatial reasoning"

sorokod 2y ago

fMRI is mentioned in the article several times.

kolinko 2y ago

There are some surprisingly objective tests for aphantasia - fmri shows it pretty clearly, but also imagining bright things causes iris to change in normal people but not in people with aphantasia. You could say that aphants just may not be trying enough - there are tests for that as well. But there is hope that in many people aphantasia is something that can be overcome, because it’s just a matter of a lack of a proper skill, or some sort of childhood trauma.

verisimi 2y ago

I agree completely. No one has access to another's mental state. When you think of linguistics, and commonly misunderstood terms even though we have an objective way to convey the meaning (dictionaries, words) eg 'emigrate', how many more misunderstandings are possible when there is no objective access?

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ckw 2y ago

Some people can play chess blindfolded. There is a popular method of memorizing which has one visualize the placement of objects in a familiar space. Both of these seem absurd to me, as I can at best conjure a fleeting glimpse of an object in greyscale. When I calculate chess tactics I do so in a manner which seems almost kinesthetic, as if I’m feeling the movements of the pieces, and I have to look at the board while I do it. When I memorize things, like poems or the digits of pi, I just repeat them until each element of the sequence magically evokes the next. There is no visualization.

Xeyz0r 2y ago
Some can play the piano blindfolded. Is it also connected?
- argon81 2y ago
  No, that is muscle memory. If I play the piano with my eyes closed, I'm not visualising the piano, I'm focusing on the feel and positions of my fingers
  - ckw 2y ago
    This is my experience as well. I would also say that when improvising I’m not really thinking consciously about the movements, but rather the notes I want to hear.
  - Xeyz0r 2y ago
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yencabulator 2y ago
Those two example skills are probably unrelated, like two aspects of the same what-are-your-brain-interconnects problem. I can place symbols and move them, but I can't imagine a realistic flower; if I tried hard enough I could memorize a chess boards, but the pieces wouldn't have exact shapes as such, everything would be just a representation of a thing, not comparable to a visual memory of seeing the layout. In programmer speak, I think in nodes, graphs, connections. I can imagine people moving in a room to great detail, but not at all their faces or clothing. I'm strongly spatial but not photographic at all. You're probably strongly tactile, and you learn a poem as if it was muscle memory of a movement.

lupusreal 2y ago

The difference between "10% clear and 80% clear" may be subjective, but when people assert with complete conviction they cannot see anything in their mind and cannot even picture their own parents, I can be confident that their experience is not like mine. I suspect it probably could be if they practiced, maybe picked up an artistic hobby or two, but if they're insist they're not visualizing presently then I'll believe them.

theGnuMe 2y ago

I dunno. I can hear music, it is muted in my brain but I basically have a audiographic memory. I can't visualize anything though. It is so weird. Basically my internal DNN can record and playback but not yet generate new things like stable diffusion either.. I suspect my musical training at a young age played a role in this as well as listening to lots of classical music. Psychologists and neuroscientists can tease these things apart.. in the article they talk about it. But aphantasia is only recently being understood so methods to quantify the degree will improve.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

Yeah, I have the same feelings when I read these articles. For example: "Behind her eyes, it was completely black” "They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly" This seems weird, but both of these describe my subjective experience of imagining an apple equally well.

kordlessagain 2y ago

Misconceptions about subjective experiences often stem from a narrow view of what constitutes internal perception. The very nature of subjectivity means that each person's internal process is unique to them. It's erroneous to insist that we must "see" something as if it's physically present for it to count as a subjective experience. From the article: "but somehow they cannot integrate this information in a subjective experience". Consider a conversation with a blind person. Claiming they aren't having a subjective experience because they can't visually perceive you would be fundamentally biased. Clearly, one doesn't need visual input to engage in meaningful interaction or to have rich internal experiences. Over time, it's become clear that people have a wide range of internal experiences. While individuals often try to compare their experiences to some imagined baseline, this baseline itself is subjective and variable. Many mistakenly assume that their own subjective experience is universal or "correct," failing to recognize the vast diversity of internal processes across different people. Recognizing this diversity is crucial. It helps us understand that subjective experiences can vary greatly between individuals, yet all are equally valid. This broader understanding moves us away from judging others' internal experiences based on our own limited perspective, and towards appreciating the rich tapestry of human cognition and perception.

sohex 2y ago

Pretty much this. For further consideration it may be worth looking into Daniel Dennett's writing on qualia (notably that they're ineffable and private).