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People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
- ajb 22d agoRather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.
- Antipode 22d agoThat's not really what the article is about: "Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
- IAmBroom 22d agoKnowing a thing exists is not the same as knowing how it interacts with other things.
- vidarh 21d agoIt's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure. There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
- misthop 22d agoAphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions
- jibbit 22d agoSo you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like?
- misthop 22d agohttps://aphantasia.com/study/vviq https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
- jibbit 22d agoseems ironic (and not at all trustworthy)! if you're right, you can't actually imagine what being able to do it would be like
- sceptic123 22d agoAre you arguing against the GP having it because you can't imagine what that's like? Is that the irony you're talking about?
- vidarh 22d agoThe people who question this usually turn out to clearly have aphantasia. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have achieved visualisation during meditation, once. I also can visualise while dreaming. I do not visualise while awake other than that one time. The difference is extremely stark and very obvious.
- thom 21d agoI really don't think this is the right definition. I don't think I have aphantasia: I picture things in my mind's eye, can manipulate those images, and I get the various stimulus responses described in some of the literature. But it's totally different than dreaming: it's an act of will, I can dismiss it at any time, and I would never be able to convince myself I was actually 'seeing' what I imagined. But heck, if that's it then hail, brother.
- vidarh 21d agoIt's absolutely not a definition - if you can actually picture things, you don't have aphantasia. I brought it up because it's surprisingly frequent that the people who doubt it exists turns out to doubt it because they don't actually believe people actually picture things, and that it's all just talking in metaphors. It's what I used to think most of my life... Note that some people who do picture things do visualise it so clearly that it is comparable to seeing, and that was my one singular experience with it as well, but that is the far other end of the scale. Most people will definitely be able to tell it apart from "actually" seeing, but it will be distinctly visual. When I draw a comparison to dreaming it's about the images, not about being able to will it or dimiss it.
- ThrowawayTestr 22d agoWhat does you mother look like?
- misthop 22d agoShe's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory
- nelox 22d agoWhat does that mean? You can recite a description you’ve read or heard, but what about looking at a photo and describing it?
- misthop 22d agoAfter looking at a photo? I have a memory of the "facts" of the photograph. I have no image of it
- vidarh 22d agoI can describe someone from memory, and I can draw them, but I can't see them unless they're in front of me (or I'm looking at a photo).
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- jaggederest 21d agoCan you draw them and then look at the drawing? I'm just wondering about the "bootstrap" ability, for lack of a better term.
- vidarh 21d agoI'm not sure what you're asking. Of course I can look at the drawing. But it still doesn't produce any image that persist when I'm not looking at it.
- JoshTriplett 22d agoDoes it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file? If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
- misthop 22d agoI'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
- orta 22d agoTo add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.
- cyclopeanutopia 22d ago> I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.
- misthop 22d agoSome people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery
- vidarh 22d agoSome people hear it more like a recording.
- jareklupinski 22d agohow is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck? i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
- misthop 22d agoProprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range
- jareklupinski 22d agointeresting! i always have to 'see myself' in my head to answer those kinds of questions
- vidarh 22d agoFor my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average. I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
- jareklupinski 22d agothat's interesting too! i can visualize clearly, but have _terrible_ artistic skills; nothing in my head can make it out unless through CAD :)
- vidarh 22d agoMy drawing style is different from memory, though. Clearer lines, vs closer to impressionist if I draw from something in front of my eye. The difference is quite stark.
- cubefox 22d agoThat's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.) Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
- sfink 20d agoSpeaking for myself: I don't miss what I never had. But I can remember or imagine sensations, which seems more relevant to me anyway? (Again, I can't compare to what I've never experienced.) It's an interesting angle to investigate though. Eg is there a reliable or at least common connection between aphantasia and response to porn? Again speaking for myself as someone with pretty total aphantasia, visual porn does very little for me. I guess it did as a kid, but I think that was more about finding things out? Video can work, but only by communicating actions that appeal to me. Most of it seems almost entirely pointless; I had never considered the possibility that it's because vision isn't as connected to experience for me as much as it seems like it is for most other people? I guess I've just always imagined that other people were better at relating to the experience of the people in the images or videos.
- logicallee 22d agoCan you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
- ppalata 22d agoI can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
- fwlr 22d ago(Also aphantasic) I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
- logicallee 22d agoYes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal. 1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure. 2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.) I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it?
- badgersnake 22d agoI’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out?
- misthop 22d agoWhen I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
- al_borland 21d agoI went to some seminars that talked about this a lot. How visualizing doing something perfectly can be as good, or better, than actual practice. There was also a lot of, “close your eyes, imagine a bike, what color is it?” type stuff. Not being able to visualize anything, all of this fell very flat. It wasn’t until later I found out there actually are people who can visualize things as if they were happening. I have trouble wrapping my mind around what that must be like, but I bet all these visualization exercises make a lot more sense.
- sfink 20d agoI am fully aphant, but when i played the trombone it absolutely helped me to rehearse purely mentally during the day before a test. There wasn't anything visual about it, though. I just went through the motions mentally, over and over. Outside of that, the whole visualization to practice idea rarely does anything for me. (I still use the term visualization even now that I've discovered it doesn't mean for most others what it did for me!)
- cyclopeanutopia 22d agoWhen you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after?
- misthop 22d agoThe image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing
- _ink_ 22d agoI am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
- codetiger 22d ago1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street. 2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see. 3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times. 4. Can remember a favorite color. 5. Don't have a consistent handwriting. Do these symptoms count?
- misthop 22d agoThose don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one
- chaps 22d agoWhen you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
- misthop 22d agoNothing, no
- _ink_ 22d agoNot GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
- al_borland 21d ago99.99% of the time, it’s just black. Seeing things like you’re describing sounds like a super power. The 0.01% of the time, I have seen blue lights. Without trying to look around too much, it’s something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0 This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
- chaps 18d agoYeah, that's kind of what I'm talking about! It's a very specific visualization where it comes and goes and feeds into itself. It's really cool. The brightness you're talking about is legit. It's fun to play with bringing that in and out. A thing that seems to kinda trigger the visualizations I've experienced is to focus on where those blueish blobs disappear into nothing. For me, that looks like an intense brightness kinda sorta collapsing into the center of my vision which happens again starting from the edges of my vision. In a way it feels like I'm watching some low level neuron activity. But if I close my eyes and try to force some sort of visualization, it doesn't happen until I slow down and just pay attention to that middle point between my brain and my vision. Not really a meditator, but I've experienced it the strongest when I'm about to fall asleep. Once I'm in that headspace, I can keep it going until I see those wild, megalithic visualizations.
- boothby 22d agoI'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
- cubefox 22d agoI posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi
- suddenlybananas 22d agoI still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.
- ThrowawayTestr 22d agoI think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.
- izzydata 22d agoI think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability. It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
- aeonik 22d agoI hesitate to come to this conclusion. When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field. The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain. E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation. As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field. Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things. So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
- dd8601fn 22d agoI certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great. I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that. I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.
- bethekidyouwant 22d agoAphantasia is fake. I can “see” when dreaming, ergo the brain simply (adaptively) suppresses the same when awake.
- rolisz 22d agoI don't see even when dreaming :)
- bethekidyouwant 22d agoYou remember your dreams?
- rolisz 22d agoSometimes.
- nickthegreek 22d agoThe most important thing to remember when discussing this stuff is that how you experience reality can be drastically different from other humans.
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- chiefgeek 22d agoI’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.
- pohl 22d agoWhat’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?
- _ink_ 22d agoNot GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.
- Akronymus 22d agothat made me realize I never once thought of whether I was hearing stuff in my dreams.
- vidarh 22d agoSame here. The fact that I see things in my dreams is one of the reasons I feel I can know for certain I don't see things when I "imagine" things.
- pohl 22d agoI'm still not sure the real difference isn't just where people draw the line in generalizing what it means to "see" and "hear" things. My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something. How can we be sure that we're not just labeling the experience differently?
- prmph 22d agoThis kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed. And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image. My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
- Swizec 22d agoFor anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book. Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic. It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent. Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really. Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really. Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible. The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
- Akronymus 22d ago> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really. I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on. Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too. But id still describe myself as an aphant.
- vidarh 22d agoAccording to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
- culopatin 21d agoI can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
- _ink_ 22d agoThe article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.
- Akronymus 22d agothe only internal sense I have is my own voice. I cant even "imagine" music but rather hum it in my own voice at best. Same with others' voices
- degamad 22d agoDitto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...
- gilleain 22d agoInteresting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.
- passive 22d agoI've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory. Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person. I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic. Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
- Akronymus 22d ago> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person. Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
- wdutch 22d agoI would tentatively suggest OP does. I hace aphantasia but meet a lot of people for work and have a very good memory for names once I see a face.
- passive 21d agoIt definitely manifests as that to some degree, but since it extends to hair, clothing, what car they drive, I think it's a more general situation. (But I'm also not specifically aware of face blindness as a condition, and had assumed it was generally some form of aphantasia.)
- dataviz1000 22d agoA couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0] They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists. [0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104 https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104
- wongarsu 22d agoOr maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
- nevinera 22d agoI am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly. Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
- D-Machine 21d agoThere is some truth in this, but evidence sometimes suggests worse visuospatial memory, at least under some very specific operationalizations. E.g. less detail can be remembered overall, even though crucial details remembered are the same: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10598423/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10598423/ More likely than not there are tradeoffs to using strictly visual vs. visual+ vs. strictly non-visual mental models in all domains, and there is no universally optimal strategy (and that teams of mixed cognitive styles are best overall). You know, no free lunch.
- thrw9876543 22d agoI thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing. This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible. It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
- jaggederest 21d agoSame but in reverse, a certain psychiatric medication turned on an internal monologue I've never had before and it drove me absolutely, literally insane until it wore off. Never again. The most inane, moronic commentary about my day to day life as it happened, like Barney speaking through me. I normally experience the world wordlessly, mostly visually, and construct ideas and actions that way (thinking about, say, getting a glass of water, I'll picture the process), so having internal speech suddenly thrust upon me was awful.
- nodoodles 21d agoI haven't tried mushrooms, but had some medical trouble and with very high fever + medications there was times of rathr vivid visualisation while awake which I never experience otherwise - full blackness as well. Wouldn't recommend getting sepsis just for that though.. mushrooms seem safer
- polytely 22d agoAlso an Aphantasiac, the quote > “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.” really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment. my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation. I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking. Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated. Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
- r0ze-at-hn 22d agoIt has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that. So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't. And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
- jaggederest 21d agoHigh five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly. "Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks. I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
- red369 21d agoThanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not". I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am! I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not. "...choose to see black" :) Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery. https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_memories_of_elves/?rdt=61269 https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...
- flippingheck 22d agoI'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months). If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music? > Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.” This helps me understand what little I do seem to have. Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot. Perhaps it is just spatial facts.
- jaggederest 21d ago> If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music? Because the interior version is strictly inferior to the real thing, at least for me. It's, maybe, 80% as good, but that last 20% is a real humdinger. Especially for music, I have a hard time hearing it in my head and not playing/singing/drumming along with it. Currently working on "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions as practice, and it's basically been playing in my head for the last 72 hours. I do have to listen to it occasionally to refresh, but it certainly makes learning music easier... if not infuriating. Looking at you Lou Bega, and Rob Thomas.
- flippingheck 21d ago80% is still pretty high! Does 80% mean "tastes like a dull chocolate bar, but still basically a chocolate bar", or more like "like a nice chocolate bar but somehow 20% less enjoyable in some looser way"? Perhaps this is why I can't identify the beat in the music.
- jaggederest 21d agoLike a nice chocolate bar, but echoed - so I can remember what it tastes like enough to want one, but not satisfy the urge to actually have one. Ephemeral, rather than satisfying.
- IAmBroom 22d agoA test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers. Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other? Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.
- dudefeliciano 22d agoAnd how would non visual thinkers solve that?
- jaggederest 21d agoDrawing? doing math around how many edges are common between the two? I turn it and count, but I could also do it other ways, including exploding it into flat shapes or conceptually understanding the nodes and vertices of the graph, or counting the edges and dividing by two since there are 6 total faces.
- saltcured 21d agoI am far along the aphantasia line and have spatial thoughts. They lack visual qualia. I can't directly imagine visual features like color or brightness. It's more like being aware of the spatial positions and structures. Often, but not always, in a volumetric stage reachable by my hands. I too can think of the cube as folded parts, i.e. one forming the top+front+bottom which the problem states are red, and one forming the left+back+right which the problem states would be blue. I don't really fold or unfold them as some sort of imagined movement, but am simultaneously aware of their in situ and flattened forms. For the cube as a whole, rather than seeing and rotating it, I have a direct sense of the manifold and can attend to the faces one at a time. It is my attention that "moves" around this stage a bit like a 3D cursor, not an object or view being rotated or shifted. The faces don't have color, but I can attend to them in the order of the problem description to count off the "red" faces. I can also count the remaining unlisted faces or just re-count all faces if I need to confirm my tacit knowledge that a cube has 6 faces. Both those approaches only work well for relatively simple structures like the cube. It is based in tacit knowledge I have about cubes, boxes, and rectilinear structures. If you asked for some arbitrary polyhedron, I could have a more amorphous sense of the shape and the fact it should be faceted, with ambiguity about its actual shape. I could not count nor attend to individual faces. I can't generalize to reason about origami paper/shape correspondences. I would need actual paper models for trial-and-error. I can also think about dynamic systems with objects moving or even changing shape, but I wouldn't normally use that to "inspect" an object. My attention jumps around the static stage to examine it piecewise. There is no occlusion to avoid nor a viewing angle that improves my access to the topology information. I only think about movement when I am trying to examine a dynamic system's characteristics. And this can flip between thinking of actual animation and something more akin to having a static awareness of the motion vectors or paths.
- nitwit005 21d agoI never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art. Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.
- bamboozled 21d agoI built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.
- shoobiedoo 21d agoIt's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.
- King-Aaron 21d agoYou are hopefully aware though that this is not the norm. Many (if not all) artists tend to visualise their work before and while they are doing it.
- nitwit005 21d agoWatch people draw, and you'll realize that can't be true, or at least is a very incomplete description of what's going on. People have processes they go through to eventually get to something reasonably correct. Systems for drawing people, perspective rules, etc. These get extremely elaborate. They shouldn't need any of it if they could fully visualize the scene. They'd just need to copy that image to paper. You'll hear people say things like "trust the process". They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete. Even when they're doing things correctly, their brain isn't recognizing it.
- asdfman123 21d agoPeople with no imagination are rewriting my industry as well
- antonvs 21d agoHaha, but the subject is not people with no imagination. It’s people whose imaginations aren’t visual.
- asdfman123 21d agoI see
- iamsaitam 21d agoI think it's quite the opposite, they live in an imaginary world with no consequences.
- sowbug 21d agoI'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed. The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it. I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
- saghm 21d agoI have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
- slibhb 21d ago"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
- cgio 21d agoI am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
- hvs 21d agoI'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
- jongjong 21d agoPeople with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is. I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing. It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life. Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual. Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling. But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.
- ButlerianJihad 21d ago“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron. This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents. There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics? Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.
- culopatin 21d agoAphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways
- j_bum 21d agoYes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that. Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past. Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!
- rhdunn 21d agoMy internal thoughts are verbal and don't see pictures as a normal part of my inner though process. When someone says "imagine a pink elephant in the room" I don't see a pink elephant, but instead have an inner dialogue to the effect of "ok, so there's a pink elephant in the corner." I may also recall an image of an elephant, but it's not pink and it's not really in the room. When there is a concrete thing that I have a memory of ("picture a squirrel", specific things from holidays, etc.) I can see flashes of still images from those. I don't see a generic squirrel, but a specific image/memory of a squirrel I have seen. I have general placement/shape awareness but not so much colours or other specific details. I can infer things like colour from context, or have a thought to the effect of "that building was white" but I don't really see the building as white.
- nodoodles 21d agoYup, I consider it just bad (narrative) memory compounded by aphantasia. Can watch a film or read a book and barely remember what was there the next day. Same for life events, with exception of very strong emotional triggers, or very well-connected systems - ie could describe better some system I was building 15 years ago than what last christmas was like (i assume it happened, there are pictures). For me, recall is bad, but recognition is OK - things 'come back' easily with hints or photos. But I guess that's how memory tends to work, and motivation to plenty of pictures/videos.
- Traubenfuchs 21d agoThere is the theory of too many people being born, with not enough souls to populate all those bodies. In that theory, people without an inner monologue and without imagination are soulless, real life NPC. To me, this inner world is an essential property of being human.
- nodoodles 21d agoThat theory sounds rather esoteric and arbitrary - defensible in some circles I'm certain. Lack of visual imagination or inner monologue does not in any way imply lack of 'inner world', nevermind the lack of essence of being human, whatever that is.
- khazhoux 21d agoLet’s do a quick survey for aphantasics: 1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc? 2. Can you visualize pure motion? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense) 3. Can you visualize just colors? I discovered that I can conjure up colors without any associated shape. Takes a bit of patience but the color eventually arrives. Quite a thrill for an aphantasic!
- rhdunn 21d ago1. It's kind of like humming or singing, just internally. 2. Only via memory recall and even then its not stable and I don't "see it" with what my eyes are seeing/processing but more with the memory/recollection part of the brain. As such I can't visualize a unique image of that, but can construct one internally, often recalling different memories/images of the various parts of what I'm constructing. 3. No. I can't visualize (or really "see") colours on their own. When visualizing a colour I recall things that are that colour from memory (an apple, grass from a particular place, the Windows XP background, etc.). It's not that I don't know/remember that something is a specific colour, just that that part is not recalled/imagined visually. Or when I do recall colours of objects/pictures I can't hold onto that image.
- teunispeters 19d ago1. yes. Although I can get distracted when playing so it's harder to play the songs in my head. 2. I have a "movement map" of where and how I'd move to match the same, and sometimes even how muscles feel. But no I cannot picture "a person". But I can map where and how to move to avoid conflicting, if we were in the same space. (I did a lot of dance in the past). 3. no. Colours aren't there without a visual reference.
- cynicalsecurity 21d ago> Why This Matters Move on.
- everybodyknows 21d ago> this backward-seeing picture has run out of road It's a picture with self-locomotion! But strictly on-road -- must have smooth-tread tires.
- sph 21d agoI keep reading about people with aphantasia in threads like these, and I never hear from who don’t have it explain what do they see and how vivid it is. Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?
- applfanboysbgon 21d agoOn an article about left-handedness, would you expect the comments to be full of people talking about how they're right-handed?
- b800h 21d agoYou can't deny it's a bit popular right now. "Aphantasia is the new AuDHD". Doesn't mean it's not real, but I'm sure we'll see it creep into "I have aphantasia because I'm unable to crisply visualise a fully detailed lifelike scene from memory with my eyes closed".
- sph 21d agoWhere are the articles about non-aphantasic people? And those from neurotypical people with rock-solid focus for that matter.
- applfanboysbgon 21d ago"Where are the articles about right-handed people?" Not being written, you'd wager, because normalcy isn't interesting.
- Semaphor 21d agoI don’t have ADHD¹, there. But anyway, while I have aphantasia, almost everyone I talk to reports being able to see images, most being able to manipulate them. From my incredibly small sample size of ~20, my sister was the only one with possibly mild aphantasia, 1 guy online and a girl I know possibly have hyperphantasia (very realistic images coming into their mind’s eye unbidden), and everyone else were confused about me not being able to imagine/see anything. ¹: Though I do (likely) have auditory processing disorder which wikipedia called ADHD for the ears, so maybe it fits.
- mrheosuper 21d agoBrain is crazy. Recently i learnt that some people even don't have inner thought.
- myko 21d agoI can't see pictures in my mind or hear anything. Feels very weird to know that it isn't standard for folks to be like me.
- HarHarVeryFunny 21d agoI just realized for the first time (like 1 minute ago, after reading this), that I also can't conjure up images in my head. If I close my eyes and try to visualize a cat, or a family member's face, I can't. Still have normal visual dreams though. I dunno - seems normal to me! :)
- neverclever 21d ago[dead]
- artembugara 21d agoNice. Just last week my wife (28 yo) realized that most of other people can actually “see” any object in their heads. She has full aphantasia and she thought it’s the default
- vitalnodo 21d agoMnemotechnics is an art of memorizing by linking visual images. A book I have gives these criteria for a proper image: you can roughly draw the object from memory you can name its main parts you can name its main colors you can describe its spatial orientation The image shouldn't be as clear as a hallucination, and it should be a memory of a specific object, not a generic one. Meeting these criteria is already enough to link another image to it, for example by piercing it with another object, though there's also the question of imagining it at a large enough size. Aphants, do these hold for you? Take Doge, the popular meme dog: not a generic Shiba Inu, but that exact picture. Could you sketch it, name its parts and colors, and say which way it's facing? And could you imagine, say, a pencil piercing it?
- atoav 21d agoThis is btw. a very important consideration when you are teaching literally anything. Telling people to imagine a cone, then a plane, then rotating the other slightly and slice through the cone without touching the base, and then looking at a normal angle at the 2D shape of the resulting intersecting surface is a really good way to explain ellipses. IF the person you're talking to can do all these steps. Turns out some people can rotate a cow in their head and some can't. If you cannot, a drawing or animation can help a lot to get the point across. Now I haven't gotten a problem with imagination at all, but I can only imagine how hard some subjects might be if you can't do that in your head.
- teunispeters 19d ago"none of the above". Without a picture, I have no idea what the difference between a "Shiba Inu" and er a Doberman Pinscher is, except they probably have different texture fur and er ... different sizes, maybe? I remember "dog words". (and some textures and smells, but I don't remember ones for those two).
- bitxbitxbitcoin 20d agoI’m curious, for all the aphantasics out there, how many of you also have visual snow?