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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

• Artgor 1mo ago
  You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically. - Imagine a beach when meditating - If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked - Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast - Undressing someone with your eyes - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading. I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
  • FeistySkink 1mo ago
    Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.
    • croisillon 1mo ago
      and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
  • faeyanpiraat 1mo ago
    Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
  • audidude 1mo ago
    I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.
    • christophilus 1mo ago
      Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
      • audidude 1mo ago
        They are real for some. I have Aphantasia but my wife has Hyperphantasia so we compare notes often. Each of us are at the edge of the spectrum.
        • stephen_g 1mo ago
          Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
      • stephen_g 1mo ago
        I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
      • nephihaha 1mo ago
        Yes, unfortunately they are. I say unfortunately because they are often connected with trauma. When something goes very badly, those memories can go cycling around one's head. PTSD can do that too. Some people relive wars years after they happened. It's very real.
    • vidarh 1mo ago
      I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
  • myhf 1mo ago
    > it opened my eyes to many things
  • sixothree 1mo ago
    > - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading. This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
    • pm215 1mo ago
      FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
    • Noaidi 1mo ago
      Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
      • sixothree 1mo ago
        It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
    • vidarh 1mo ago
      I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
    • mercutio2 1mo ago
      For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions. I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero. I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
  • pjerem 1mo ago
    I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had". And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
    • deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
  • tpoacher 1mo ago
    Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
    • Noaidi 1mo ago
      Aphant and SDAM are linked with many neurological disorders. I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type and OCD. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
    • ajkjk 1mo ago
      I normally have no autobiographical memory, but once I went to a weeklong meditation retreat and around the second day it sorta all showed up at once. Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
    • xerox13ster 1mo ago
      Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is. My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing. I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either. On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic. This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
  • feverzsj 1mo ago
    Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
    • graeme 1mo ago
      From what people report some can see a full picture.
      • feverzsj 1mo ago
        Photographic memory is very rare.
        • NoGravitas 1mo ago
          There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.
  • perrygeo 1mo ago
    I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid. Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick. My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
    • dooglius 1mo ago
      I thought the point of counting sheep was to do something boring and repetitive that puts your brain into a relaxed state
      • perrygeo 1mo ago
        Visualizing a sheep is not something I can even do once. Let alone repetitively until it gets boring. Being asked to visualize is quite frustrating and confusing - especially to a little kid not sure exactly what he's supposed to be "seeing". Hardly relaxing.
        • dooglius 1mo ago
          I don't think you actually had to visualize the sheep for it to work, I never thought of that as being explicitly required
          • perrygeo 1mo ago
            That's just "counting". But for many people (the vast majority of humans), they can and do easily visualize sheep as they count them.
  • davidsojevic 1mo ago
    I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier. I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!" When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
    • theshrike79 1mo ago
      I remember the massive hubbub about the Mortal Engines movie specifically. The only thing I remembered about the main character was that she had a scar on her face. Fans were nitpicking every single strand of hair and I was like "You guys remember that, do you make notes when reading or what?". Apparently people visualize books so hard that they "see" the characters and remember them.
• wmorgan 1mo ago
  An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
  • Noaidi 1mo ago
    We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss. The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
    • LoganDark 1mo ago
      Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
      • physicalecon 1mo ago
        If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory. It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
        • LoganDark 1mo ago
• vonneumannstan 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • anentropic 1mo ago
    then you haven't understood what P zombies are
    • vonneumannstan 1mo ago
      Only a P-zombie would say this.
  • mucha 1mo ago
    Yay, I'm one of "these people" now. Aphants can still have inner monologues, and most do. I do.
    • nephihaha 1mo ago
      Do you dream?
      • mucha 1mo ago
        Yes, and I can visualize in dreams too.
    • vonneumannstan 1mo ago
      Yes thats exactly what a P-zombie would say.
      • inigyou 1mo ago
        A PZ says exactly what a normal human says, including the reports of mental imagery.
• Noaidi 1mo ago
  Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name. It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking. What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
• drakonka 1mo ago
  When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
  • christophilus 1mo ago
    I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
    • _dwt 1mo ago
      I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • Noaidi 1mo ago
        It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
        • _dwt 1mo ago
          I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
• bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
  I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it. But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de924c8 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... including: narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye" There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary? But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic. But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
  • LoganDark 1mo ago
    Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
    • bryanrasmussen 1mo ago
• cocacola1 1mo ago
  That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
  • xerox13ster 1mo ago
    That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it. It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is. But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
    • kstrauser 1mo ago
      That's so bizarre to me. I can "picture" an apple, but I'm not literally seeing something resembling an apple in my mind. It's closer to the classic object-oriented example of "Apple isa Fruit", except not in text but in vague geometric shapes that to me say "appleness".
      • xerox13ster 1mo ago
        I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was. I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple. If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map. I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it. Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat. Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
• boguscoder 1mo ago
  Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
  • jvolkman 1mo ago
    I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison. People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  • techgnosis 1mo ago
    This is the correct conclusion. We have no shared, objective way to label our visual experience. We will never know the truth here. This is indeed a quirk of human psychology powered by internet trends that encourage people to find reasons to feel their health is special and unique.
• boutell 1mo ago
  On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally. Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition. On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation. (My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.) I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
  • sixothree 1mo ago
    > Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      Yep. I remember doing an exercise where we would take a photo of something, divide it into 1cm squares (that's 0.4 freedom units) and then draw the same grid on a block of wood and copy it by chiseling one square at a time. The result was impressively accurate (obviously), not at all what you'd get by drawing freehand.
• vivzkestrel 1mo ago
  - kudos to whoever made this - need one for alzheimers
• dcanelhas 1mo ago
  I find it harder to conjure up the sensory experience of scents and flavors, is that something other people can do instinctively? Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
  • aezart 1mo ago
    I would say taste and touch are my strongest recall senses. I can still remember the experience of my favorite sandwich at a local sandwich shop, discontinued around 2009. For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.
• mucha 1mo ago
  For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
  • fellowniusmonk 1mo ago
    On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't! And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      A boy and his mother are in a serious car accident. The mother dies on scene and the boy is rushed to the hospital where he needs urgent life-saving surgery. But the male surgeon says "I can't operate on this boy - he's my son!" How is this possible?
  • BoardsOfCanada 1mo ago
    Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it. On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.
  • feoren 1mo ago
    Here's my problem with this: take an fMRI of a bunch of professional jugglers while they imagine juggling. Now take an fMRI of a bunch of non-jugglers while they imagine juggling. I promise you they will be strikingly different, with the professionals having all sorts of real-life coordination areas lighting up. Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!? I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.
• kwarcode 1mo ago
  [dead]
• corecoder 1mo ago
  OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on. I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.
• micromacrofoot 1mo ago
  This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory? I can imagine things happening and fill in lots of detail but I never really "see" anything
• LordGrey 1mo ago
  There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims: > This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers. Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
  • dcanelhas 1mo ago
    I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply. Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one. If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
  • imzadi 1mo ago
    Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis
  • hugeBirb 1mo ago
    If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
• jawns 1mo ago
  I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed. Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projector screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves. Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      When I took psychedelics they were still in effect when I went to sleep and I experienced unusually vivid and strange mental imagery. They call it closed-eye hallucinations, as opposed to mis-seeing the world around you while your eyes are open, which I also experienced.
    • t-3 1mo ago
      I've never experienced visualization under the effect of hallucinogens, but I have once when I took very strong opiates.
  • ludicrousdispla 1mo ago
    A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
• asveikau 1mo ago
  I realized I have aphantasia after reading an HN thread about it a few years ago. I talked to my daughter about it and I realized she has it too. I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it. In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
  • nephihaha 1mo ago
    Yes, some of it can be quite wild, especially dreams but most of it isn't. The fun part of it is being able to place people in funny situations. Many people just do a rewind and visualise real life events from earlier. Most of the visualisation I do is extremely mundane, like if I'm planning a route or doing something with the garden.
  • theshrike79 1mo ago
    It does affect things though. Like reading books. I _HATE_ reading books that spend pages and pages explaining how things look to a very detailed degree even when it's not relevant to the plot in any way - it's just set dressing. I can't see that. It's just word noise to me. Now I noticed my kid has the same thing, they like other books and actively dislike others. It's the same as me, without me affecting their judgement in any way. Any book that spends too much explaining the environment is boring, books that just get on with the plot are a bit hit.
• alnwlsn 1mo ago
  For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.
  • gww 1mo ago
    I have multisensory aphantasia. I assumed everyone was like this until I read an HN thread a long time ago. I have a very strong inner monologue. For example, I can hear part of a song in my head. Ie the guitar but it's my inner voice initiating the sound of a guitar. But I cannot hear a whole song. Maybe it's what rhythm had always been a challenge for me with guitar and piano.
• andrewla 1mo ago
  It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc. My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it. It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    > Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition. It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
    • andrewla 1mo ago
      I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?
• childintime 1mo ago
  Why a red apple? Why not a woman? Porn?
• kstrauser 1mo ago
  Well. Today I learned something new about myself. I can't visualize a thing, but I can pull up something vaguely visualish that represents its inherent thingness, while not at all resembling the thing. For instance, the way I might picture program code looks nothing like lines of text, but more like something black on a black background moving through something algorithm-shaped that bends it. I realize I couldn't make that sound more vague if I tried, but it's still accurate. Meanwhile, I can hear every sonic detail of every song I enjoy whenever I want to. Want me to imagine the drum break in "In the Air Tonight"? I can imagine every little bit of the gated snares and the reverb on them, and exactly the way Phil's voice kinda shreds immediately afterward. Go figure. But wow, that bit about meditation hits close to home. I love meditating and try to do it daily. Guided meditations like "imagine you're on a beach..." drive my batty, though. OK, I'm on a beach. I can feel the sand. The sun is nice. But I'm pressed to imagine the sun shining on the waves, it's probably going to resemble something out of The Matrix more than a drawing of the ocean.
• Rooster61 1mo ago
  One thing that I have always noticed about my own internal images (yes, I am not an aphant) is that when I am perceiving something in my mouth (such as a sore spot or tooth), my perception of it visually in my mind is wildly different than if I actually look in my mouth using a mirror. Objects look and feel much larger and more detailed in my mind than they actually are.
• deleted 1mo ago
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• vehemenz 1mo ago
  I wonder what it's like to be born blind and have zero visualization ability. Then I wonder what it must feel like for that person to read sighted people on the Internet debate their supposed lack of visualization abilities.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind. E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.
• nikkaelle 1mo ago
  I have mild visual aphantasia in that I by default do not picture an image for something like the ball test, but instead have something between a concept and a wireframe or flat boxy rendering of it. When pressed for details I can fill those in and form a reasonably vivid mental image, but it is not by any means the default. However, I have almost hyperphantasia for audio. I can hear near perfect recreations of the sound of something in my head, especially if it's music. This turned out to be extremely handy for voice modification training, as I could hear the target sound exactly in my head and then work to match it.
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    Hm, same for me, although my margin for error on how well I know this is now very wide thanks to this thread. I did think I had below average visual phantasia and I get songs stuck in my head all the time. I also read by imagining a voice (I guess my own idealised voice, not what I actually sound like).
• cyberax 1mo ago
  One interesting example: learning Chinese characters. Different people do it differently. I have mild aphantasia, and I initially tried the approach of memorizing the shapes and/or associating the shapes with easy-to-remember pictures ( https://www.chineasy.com/ https://www.chineasy.com/ uses this approach). Some of my classmates could do that easily, but it didn't work for me. Instead, I started memorizing the characters as a series of hand movements. Essentially "serializing" the picture into a series of strokes, and that I can remember easily. I can also "render" them in my mind's eye on demand.
• riffraff 1mo ago
  The Apple test is great, my wife found out with it that she, and our daughter, have aphantasia, we kept bringing this up with other people and turned out quite a few do, and also quite a few do not have an internal monologue. It's very surprising!
• EGreg 1mo ago
  Serious question... are LLMs basically operating like aphantasia? Because phantasia seems to me to be just memory of actual qualia having actually experienced seeing something. No? Can't people with aphantasia remember that experience in any kind of vivid sense? Because "the concept of a beach" is something that an LLM can read from a corpus, and so can a person, even if they never experienced one.
• gtg239a 1mo ago
  As I'm taking music more seriously, I'm encountering a lot more practice instruction that recommends mental practice or visualization. Athletes have been doing this forever too. Essentially, imagining yourself doing something correctly or adjusting to a mistake can help you to perform that thing. In my experience, my issue is not with being able to conjure the mental image + sounds, but holding on to it long enough; which, I suspect is just a matter of my degraded attention. Anyways, this is fascinating stuff. One of the proponents of visualization/mental practice is Molly Gebrian, a brilliant violist, who, by her own admission, can't "visualize" sounds, but relies on conceptual evocations of the act. (https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain)
• tolerance 1mo ago
  This is peak internet banality.
• xlii 1mo ago
  I have aphantasia in both visual and audio forms. And I can tell you audio aphantasia is wild. I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it. Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't remember my own compositions. They usually come back to me as a play on hands and not on audio. I thought I was music deaf for the most of my life. My music teachers mocked me in my youth showing me as an example of someone with zero hearing. My latest music teacher discovered that I actually have absolute hearing skill but... can't recall sound in my head. So I sense even slight shift in toning (e.g. given few variations of same melody I can tell which one is the original tuning) but I can't reproduce it. [0]: https://on.soundcloud.com/Rv6t1jXzyAH8E2jEaY https://on.soundcloud.com/Rv6t1jXzyAH8E2jEaY
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    Very cool
  • iamhamm 1mo ago
    You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!
    • dtkav 1mo ago
      There's been some great research into aphantasia in the last ~5 years - worth reading about if you have aphantasia.
  • dtkav 1mo ago
    I think i have this too (also play piano, have perfect pitch). I have an excellent musical memory, but i have to actually play a song / sing it out loud to hear it if that makes sense. I do have the motion-centric imagination sense (i could "feel" what it would be like to do a layup) without physically moving. No ability to generate audio, visuals, etc "on the inside". Do you have an internal voice?
• lefrenchy 1mo ago
  I struggle with this. I think i'm Aphantic, but then again I can imagine a red apple in my mind. But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes. I just imagine it, with some detail but also limited detail? I guess that puts me slightly on the aphantasia side of the scale, but it feels very hard to understand my own subjective experience in contrast to the written version.
  • Jtsummers 1mo ago
    > But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes. Only the excessively literal think that this is what people mean when they say they "see" an image in their mind. Everyone else understands what you describe (imagining an object and conjuring up an image in your mind) as what the metaphorical "seeing" in "seeing in your mind" means. What you describe, about imagining an apple, that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
    • thirdtruck 1mo ago
      Isn't this contracted by comments in this very thread? e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469205
      • deleted 1mo ago
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      • Jtsummers 1mo ago
        Ever been lost in thought and ignored your external senses? That's what they're describing, but with visual imagery included and not just however you may normally experience thoughts.
        • thirdtruck 1mo ago
          Not really, actually, and not for a lack of trying very very hard at times. Even when we tried LSD the most it did was make us more aware of the actual curvature of our eyes' lenses, lessening the mental illusion of uniformity.
• v64 1mo ago
  I have visual aphantasia but not aphantasia of any other senses, so I can assure you it's not a semantic misunderstanding. I play piano and can hear tunes in my head and use what I hear to play it out on the piano, like playing by ear but without actual sound. And I simply don't have this same ability with visualization. However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.
• edgarvaldes 1mo ago
  To the people who have aphantasia, do you daydream?
  • throw4747283858 1mo ago
    [dead]
  • mercutio2 1mo ago
    Of course! About plot, not scenery.
• jumploops 1mo ago
  Both my brother and I have aphantasia, though neither of our parents have it, nor 3/4 grandparents. What’s maybe most interesting, is that we both seem to have “spatial” perception. To try and be a bit more specific, when I think about “things” I can organize them in my mind in relation to other “things.” The most clear example is a path I’ve walked through a building, where the halls, rooms, and corridors are all connected. I easily know exactly where I am, not because I remember the literal steps I took, but because I have a spatial construction in my mind. I cannot visualize the space, there’s no inherent right side up or preferred perspective. I can model the space with my hands, and create it physically, but am terrible at trying to transform it to 2d. This doesn’t just work for physical “things” but works for purely abstract concepts like software, stories, and songs. I’ve always rationalized aphantasia as something where my brain put “skill points” in one area rather than another, but maybe the neuroplasticity is long gone.
  • mercutio2 1mo ago
    I have a strong sense of the geometry of things, which helps a lot with navigating in buildings. So when people describe a flattened dodecahedron wrapping into its regular form, I have no trouble conceptualizing (I was going to say visualizing, but it's frankly not at all visual; I got nothing, when it comes to visualizing anything but what's in front of my eyes). But if you ask me to think about alternating solid colors on the dodecahedron, I can't do it. Clearly there are many different variations on the theme, not just one modal experience! But it's nice to know we're not alone.
  • theshrike79 1mo ago
    This is exactly how my brain works too, everything is related to everything. A specific set of words can trigger a memory of a song for example. There's a lot of "I know it when I see it" kind of things, I need to find one link in the path to the relevant thing to get there.
• teunispeters 1mo ago
  I have total aphantasia. Can't do pictures. I'm still unsure what I'm missing with sounds. Anyway, it was an article like this that made me realize others could do this "visulization" thing, and it wasn't just pure metaphor. So weird. Next, people say they have "inner voices". That can't be real! (/s) (again, like aphantasia, I found out that others have inner voices, and that explains some more things that made no sense to me!) ... I keep running into people that "cannot imagine this". That is so weird, I can't imagine people HAVING "pictures in their head" and "inner voices". I can comprehend it as an idea, but it just does not seem real. Side note : this is not related to dreams. Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses and complex stories, and almost never related to anything in one's daily life. Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.
  • selcuka 1mo ago
    > Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization. What you can "see" when your eyes are closed has no connection with visualisation either. There are no photons hitting your retina. So aphantasia and dreams can be related. > Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses Why "of course"? It looks like it's a spectrum, too. I have total aphantasia like you do, and my dreams are also greyscale, foggy and vignetted (only the centre is somewhat visible).
    • teunispeters 1mo ago
      The "of course" is actually a nod to "it's not the way for many". Or rather, my assumed perspectives don't actually map to other people, and it took me a long time to learn that. It's a very lonely thing realizing one interacts with the world in ways few others do, really.
• deleted 1mo ago
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• srcreigh 1mo ago
  Do any other aphantasia folks have the experience of like, that one time they saw a very vivid image, but it only ever happened once for a short time? That happened to me a few years ago. It was a very interesting experience. It’s surefire subjective proof that aphantasia is real - the image I saw was so vivid and colorful, even animated. I can say for sure that I almost never have that experience. At the same time, my one experience was surely in many ways much more limited than some others normal visual thoughts. The mind is an interesting place.
  • mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
    Sometimes in the first few minutes after waking up I experience images though I wouldn't call them vivid
  • corysama 1mo ago
    I distinctly remember as a child watching Garfield the cartoon cat walking on the sofa. I remember explaining to my mother how cool that was that I could actually see him as real as anything. I don't know when that ability faded. I think it was early because didn't really notice until people started talking about it recently. I can paint and draw. I can think about how things look. But, I don't see them. If I'm on the edge between awake and asleep I can force visualization as a lightweight lucid dreaming. When I code, I think about data structures and algorithms using a mental proprioception. Putting things in space, moving them around. But, I have to remember where they are. Like playing the shell game with your eyes closed.
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    People have commented this a few times in this rather long thread.
• jibbit 1mo ago
  people who don't have aphantasia are demonstrably and measurably better at .. something, right?
  • mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
    Look up memory castles
    • jibbit 1mo ago
      so you're saying people with aphantasia test worse for memory?
      • mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
        Depends on whether the tests are general or if they give a different score for spatial, semantic, and episodic memory.
    • Jtsummers 1mo ago
      The phrase is "memory palace": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
• smokel 1mo ago
  Would it make sense to guess that humans have something analogous to the latent representations or embeddings found in LLMs or VLMS, with different neural circuitry to experience them? Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all. I don't buy that over 10%+ of HN has proper aphantasia, though. I wouldn't trust my own mind at self-reporting anything.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    Almost certainly there is also a "latent" representation that isn't just based on sensory imagery (i.e. some kinds of logical relations). But it is also not likely that an absence of sensory imagery is without impact, i.e. that only the latent representations matter. You can see this in studies where aphantasics can't be subconsciously primed by images as easily [1], have skin conductance responses to visual stimuli less to imagery compared to normal people [2], and miss more visual details when attempting to redraw complex images from memory [3]. I.e. the visualizations are likely important in some cases, with the latent (non-visual) representations alone being deficient in some very particular cases, at least. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29175093/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29175093/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383478/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383478/
• tintor 1mo ago
  I can visualize algorithms, graphs, 3d objects, 3d environments, but no colors.
• techgnosis 1mo ago
  I love this debate. It'll never be solved, and the best argument is literally "are you sure?". You have no idea what I can see in my head, and I have no idea what you can see.
• greazy 1mo ago
  I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness. I have a theory that Aphantasia is the symptom of something else, and this other thing relates to how the brain of such individuals stores information. I think it's stored in a more "compressed" state. As an example, I find myself remembering where info is and not what the info acrually was. Humans are not homogeneous. I think this is a huge evolutionary advantage, different mental modes improved our survivability. But of course in modern day life such "divergence" can lead to pathology.
  • selcuka 1mo ago
    > I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness. Aphantasia is usually associated with spatial memory difficulties [1]. Anecdotal, but I am aphantasic (almost zero visualisation) and also have low spatial awareness (can't navigate without a map or GPS). I have no issues with driving or map reading, though. In contrast, someone I know can almost perfectly visualise things mentally, but they struggle with reading maps. They can also navigate perfectly without requiring assistance. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393226001648 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...
    • greazy 1mo ago
      Thanks for answering my question! I also have mild aphantasia, I can navigate okay but not as well as my wife. I also get lost or disoriented in big city centres but in a natural park or trek I'm totally fine.
  • marak830 1mo ago
    I have Aphantasia, as well as excellent map reading skills and spatial awareness. BUT I'm pretty sure that spatial awareness is something I developed when cheffing (needing to know where things were rapidly) and map reading I attribute to video games (specifically doom originally haha).
• harel 1mo ago
  I found out that people DO visualise about 10 years ago when that interview with Pixar's animation head came out. I had a bit of a shock at first, then disappointment, then a deeper understanding of why I am like I am. A few metaphorical minutes later I got on with life. I'm not sure how to take this "club" for the "mentally blind". On one hand, I applaud humanity's ability to monentise pretty much everything, and on the other hand, I'm not sure I want to talk about how I can't see in my mind with other people who can't see in their mind. It's a neat conversation piece when in a group of people or friends, but a club?... Jury's out... I did sign up though.... Took the "test"...
• ToyKeeper 1mo ago
  I know someone with aphantasia. It's absolutely wild to me that he can't see things in his head. Totally alien from my perspective, since I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I see what's in my head so vividly that I often won't see things in real life which are right in front of me. But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Refusing to believe aphantasia or hyperphantasia exists. Refusing to believe that other people are telling the truth when they describe their experiences. Insisting that everyone is the same, actually, and anyone who thinks differences are real must be confused or misunderstanding something. I guess these are both types of cognitive disability... but I know what aphantasia is called. Not sure what the other thing is called, but I'd imagine it's something which sounds pretty unflattering.
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    To be polite, it is called "typical-mind fallacy". To be less polite, it is called "cope".
    • selcuka 1mo ago
      In fact, the term typical mind fallacy was born from aphantasia [1]: > Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. [...] Though another psychologist, Dr. Berman, did, at that time, come up with a name for the masking behavior, called the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/1e5vbuu/mind_blown_but_not_in_the_way_you_think/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/1e5vbuu/mind_bl...
  • techgnosis 1mo ago
    I'm one of the naysayers denying aphantasia in the comments. Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantics has created this illusion? You're defaulting to being nice, which is fine, but it doesn't make you any more right than me and my skepticism. We both have no idea what the truth is.
• newswangerd 1mo ago
  One thing I'd like to learn is how to effectively meditate as someone with aphantasia. I took a course in college and all of the exercises involved some variation of tuning out your internal monologue going to your happy place in your minds eye. I'd love to get the benefits of meditation, but I can't visualize anything so none of the meditation tools that are taught in these kinds of courses work for me at all.
  • spoiler 1mo ago
    Read the book Mind Illuminated. Visualisation isn't really necessary for meditation
  • D-Machine 1mo ago
    There are plenty of competent meditation approaches that don't really require visualization of any kind. Most Western "mindfulness" meditations don't require visualizations, nor does e.g. shi-ne / opening awareness, nor most forms of concentration meditations (e.g. transcendental where you focus on a sound like "ohm", meditations that have you focus on your breath, etc).
  • Cider9986 1mo ago
    There's plenty of meditations that don't need it. You don't need to tune out your internal monologue, it's generally more about awareness, so you can be using your internal monologue or just be aware of your thoughts. It's about noticing distraction, which means you are aware. This book is a great, easy to read, science-based explainer. https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7a?&check=1 https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
• deadbabe 1mo ago
  I always get this eerie feeling that if someone has aphantasia, they are possibly also a P-Zombie. If you cannot visualize things in your mind, and seeing is just transforming light into visual imagery, how do you know you're actually "seeing" anything? The data goes to your brain but you just process the image without actively observing visuals, you just know what's there in front of you, but as data. If you can't see visuals, what else can't you see? Conscious processes? The analogy to use would be like an LLM's way of "seeing" an image: it describes it into words and then recognizes what it is. A human brain would just do this much faster. Aphantasiac brains.
• James_K 1mo ago
  Ironic that people without imagination write a page using AI.
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    It's selling you a product. It's spam.
• powerbroker 1mo ago
  What is it called when you can vividly see the silhouette of your hands with your eyes closed -- and particularly if your fingers are brushing against your skull. I didn't discover this 'transparent skull' skill until I was in my 50s -- much like those with aphantasia don't know they perceive things differently than many others. Totally useless of course -- but it was a weird discovery nonetheless.
  • RA2lover 1mo ago
    Does this happen in the absence of light sources? I believe i have aphantasia but can still see those when one is present. My guess is my eyelids don't block off enough light. Coincidentally, i have some trouble sleeping with light sources present.
• woggy 1mo ago
  I had no idea people could conjure images in their head.
  • nephihaha 1mo ago
    How do you think they write novels and film scripts, or draw from memory?
    • woggy 1mo ago
      I'm not sure, when I try to picture something I just get the concept of it in my head. I thought people were just really good at taking that and working out how to draw it out. Makes a lot of sense to me now that some people can be so good at drawing.
      • nephihaha 1mo ago
        When I try to write dialogue or scripts, I do play the conversation out in my head or even talk to myself... But when writing fiction, I definitely visualise. I wrote a failed novel some years ago. There were several problems with it, but the geography was not one of them. I can still visualise the headland it's set on made of dark volcanic rock, the nearby village, the low lying islets off the coast and the rounded mountain at the end of the bay. I can visualise the routes between all of these, and they're entirely imaginary... Although nothing that would seem out of place in the real world. The locations play a large part in the story. The brain does usually distinguish between internal visualisation and real life memories. When it doesn't, and hallucinations occur, that's when mental illness can arise.
• vanderZwan 1mo ago
  I know someone whose partner was murdered in an extremely horrible, brutal way. Years later they told me in a completely unrelated discussion that they have aphantasia. I always wondered if in their case it might be trauma-induced, but obviously don't want to ask given the topic. Either way I think it's for the best in their case.
• xg15 1mo ago
  I don't have aphantasia, but I'd be interested to know how it influences coding and software development. I think, coding typically involves a lot of keeping track of the "runtime state" of the program, i.e. how variables, data structures, objects, resources, threads etc change state during various points of the program. Same goes for the "architecture" of a software system. As a programmer, that's what you're usually do "in your head" when understanding or writing code. I do a lot of that by visualizing. I'd be interested to know how people with aphantasia are doing it.
  • shric 1mo ago
    I have aphantasia and I don’t have much trouble thinking of data structures and so on without visualising them. It’s hard to describe how I do it. I do imagine it would be easier with visualisation. If it gets hard I’ll use a pen and paper or an editor to make diagrams. Things I seem to be average or above average at that I’d expect aphantasia to be a disadvantage for: - the “chimp test” (search if you don’t know what this is) - chess (but I have hit a wall at 1500 on chess.com and I find it very hard to explore future moves in my head more than a few. I feel like if I studied chess 8 hours a day for 30 years I still couldn’t hope to play blindfold chess) - remembering numbers and computer facts. - spelling including remembering spellings of obscure surnames I’ve never heard of before I think even people without aphantasia can’t typically use visualisation for reliable storage of things even in the short term, correct me if I’m wrong. A extremely rare few have a photographic memory.
• cbeach 1mo ago
  I have aphantasia. When I learnt the “mind’s eye” was not a metaphor, it was a wild moment for me! I still find it hard to believe that others are able to visualise using their imagination. I’m curious about a potential link between aphantasia and autism. I’m 37 on the Autism Spectrum Quotient scale (test link below if anyone’s interested in doing it). “Significant autistic traits.” It makes sense to me that my inability to visualise people’s faces might make me less empathetic with others. Aphantasia might explain why I imagine systems, concepts and ideas rather than people, things and events. https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient
• laxpri 1mo ago
  I dont have Aphantasia ,but there is something weird I noticed , when I am trying to visualize something I dont know about or know very little about I have to draw it in my mind instead of instantly visualize it . example - like pretzel , I saw this for the first or second time in my life, so I have to draw it out. not like a house or horse or..
• dtho 1mo ago
  The ultimate test is having them draw a picture. If they can visualize imagery then they should be an excellent artist. If they are bad at drawing, then they must have aphantasia.
  • urban_strike 1mo ago
    I mean, I can look at something physically in front of me, like a still life, all I want and still draw it like shit. So I'm not sure what that would prove?
    • dtho 1mo ago
      You would be able to reproduce the object very accurately, given enough time. You can simply continuously refine the drawing by comparing the drawing to the object.
  • nephihaha 1mo ago
    I'm terrible at drawing but I definitely don't have it.
    • dtho 1mo ago
      If you do not "have it" and you are unable to reproduce the imagery you see in your mind's eye using a pencil on paper, then that is clarifying. Whatever you consider to be visualization is not even close to the same as actually seeing something. If whatever you experience was a "vivid visualization", then you would be able to reproduce it drawing. I personally don't experience anything that I would consider "visualization", and I am also terrible at drawing, but I can reproduce a photorealistic drawing of a photograph if I am allowed to look at the photograph while drawing.
      • nephihaha 1mo ago
        I think you are confusing two separate issues. I struggle to do still life as well, when the subject is right in front of me. That's not due to eyesight problems. My visualisation is not perfect but is much better than anything I can draw. However, when I have taken art classes and I practised, my skills improved... Much like music or chess. If I stop practising drawing then my skills deteriorate. I can write about things in far more detail than I can draw them. Both from my imagination and sometimes memory. I can remember the floor plan of certain buildings I haven't set foot in for over thirty years. (Or at least the parts I had access to.) I can remember which direction they are orientated in, and where the sun rose and set in relation to them. As me to do a drawing, as opposed to a diagram, and I will struggle due to poor art skills. My drawing skills are more to do with the fact I have mild dyspraxia than my ability to visualise. My handwriting is pretty atrocious too for similar reasons. My visualisation skills are far from perfect but still much better than anything I can draw.
• evilbob93 1mo ago
  haven't read the whole comment thread but wanted to mention this: as an "aphant" (never knew that was a word) I get really vivid visuals on certain psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or DMT. Not so much acid, however.
• theshrike79 1mo ago
  My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense? I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause. Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people. For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist. When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear. I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type. It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do. Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I'd get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain