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.
I believe some people have aphantasia and hyperphantasia, but a lot of people who claim they have either are somewhere on the bell curve between them.
I also suspect that some of the people who think they have aphantasia could learn. I personally am not good at visualising and don't naturally do it, but these days I can imagine a not very good apple if I try hard, and I trained this by building on my existing ability to imagine the tactile feel of holding an apple and on spatial awareness.
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.
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.
That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.
> there are suddenly two types of people
This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.
Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.
For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.
Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).
> why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people
Because we know that there are already more than two types of people, even when we ignore aphantasia? So there is nothing new here.
Also if you read the FA, it explains that there are objective differences:
> People have taken various physiological and behavioral tests in a research lab. Researchers have observed that people who report vivid imagery respond differently to these more objective measures than aphantasics. Although this doesn't let us know definitively that they vividly see an image, it all points to the fact that something is truly different between people who claim to see vividly and those who don't.
It was funny to watch this discussion turn from skepticism at the top to then a bunch of proponents moving in and crowding out the rational voices. It feels a bit religious to me, at least unscientific, there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions, and so people seem to dig in on their sides more than if there was a real basis for comparison. I default to not believing in it until there is actual strong evidence, same as ghosts and the Loch Ness monster and whatnot.
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.
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it?
If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
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.
I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
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.
It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
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.
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.
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.
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
Those people here (not you) telling all of us what is and what is not possible have their view based on how they see things. That's it. I hear they don't see things in mind, visually like a phone or a screen. Or do overlays. I remember finding out and being incredulous about whether others did something I don't.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will.
Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people.
I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack.
Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at.
When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would basically describe it as effectively identical to seeing them.
So now I'm confused about if these few people are the exceptions or the norm, and to what extent I'm lacking something that some others have.
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
The cube test is an interesting one, but, to pile on another stupid internet trend, that seems more like a "shape-rotator" vs. "word-cel" question. For very simple fold-ups I can do this, but for more complex decompositions (like if you have me an octahedron) I doubt that I could reliably do this.
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
> 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.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.
When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.
Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
> 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.
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?
"Exist" is probably the wrong framing. It doesn't seem unreasonable that such a phenomenon could occur after a traumatic brain injury, for instance. I'm sure there's some evidence of it, neurologically (like split-brain syndrome). But it's also true that people who say they "aphantasia", in 99.9% cases, don't experience that phenomenon.
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Can you explain why people who report aphantasia don't show physical responses (like sweat or pupil dilation) in response to imagined visual stimulus (like being described a scary scene), while people who report mental imagery do show these physical responses to the same stimulus?
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
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."
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.
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.
Learning to juggle involves easily observed objective activities that other people can check, and which can be learned that way--you can watch someone else juggling, read book that describes the tossing of the balls, etc.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
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.
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.
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.
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?
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
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?).
I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
Neither, they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
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"...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
No, it is nothing like retinal fatigue, which is what they are referencing in that sentence.
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
The potential value of the after-image test was (hopefully) a concrete way for me to understand better what a visualizer could actually see. From the replies, it seems that it is really a very poor example.
For someone with aphantasia, the failure of the "What Do Most Visualizers See?" section is that it is still just a wall of words. I have to imagine what a visualizer might see, which is, of course, difficult for me!
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
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...
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
That's an oversimplification. I have a friend who says that they can visualise things mentally exactly like in real life, with their eyes closed or open, and that they can also make changes to those images, such as changing the colour of an apple from red to blue, or rearranging furniture in an imagined room.
Of course they might be lying, but if we ignore that possibility, it definitely doesn't sound like a figure of speech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We strongly suspect we have SDAM as well and only more so after reading your description here. Only got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and as on the autism spectrum this year, here in our forties as well.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
I didn't realize they were correlated. I have total visual and auditory aphantasia and can count childhood memories on one hand. But I have great semantic memory and could probably win a game of jeapordy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> - 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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/ 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
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.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
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.
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
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.
I believe some people have aphantasia and hyperphantasia, but a lot of people who claim they have either are somewhere on the bell curve between them.
I also suspect that some of the people who think they have aphantasia could learn. I personally am not good at visualising and don't naturally do it, but these days I can imagine a not very good apple if I try hard, and I trained this by building on my existing ability to imagine the tactile feel of holding an apple and on spatial awareness.
To be polite, it is called "typical-mind fallacy". To be less polite, it is called "cope".
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_bl...
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.
> zero evidence
That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.
> there are suddenly two types of people
This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.
Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.
For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.
Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).
> why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people
Because we know that there are already more than two types of people, even when we ignore aphantasia? So there is nothing new here.
Also if you read the FA, it explains that there are objective differences:
> People have taken various physiological and behavioral tests in a research lab. Researchers have observed that people who report vivid imagery respond differently to these more objective measures than aphantasics. Although this doesn't let us know definitively that they vividly see an image, it all points to the fact that something is truly different between people who claim to see vividly and those who don't.
> zero evidence besides a self-reported experience
There are clear differences in brain scans [1].
[1] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/01/mind-blindness...
I believe it, because I tend to have a hard time visualizing even the faces of people I love and know well. It takes great effort.
It was funny to watch this discussion turn from skepticism at the top to then a bunch of proponents moving in and crowding out the rational voices. It feels a bit religious to me, at least unscientific, there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions, and so people seem to dig in on their sides more than if there was a real basis for comparison. I default to not believing in it until there is actual strong evidence, same as ghosts and the Loch Ness monster and whatnot.
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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.
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize.
So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story.
I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
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Reducing it to a binary "it is / isn't a skill issue" is surely wrong and unhelpful, but given that practicing visualization can enhance the richness and durability of those images (or that e.g. psychedelics or meditative and spiritual practices also can), there is clearly some skill involved, and so obviously for some people, some aspects of aphantasia can plausibly involve a skill issue.
Fwiw, I can visualize things, I can hear noises in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, smell things in my head.
So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue.
You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar. I'd be willing to accept that about 1 in 10,000 people are born without some mental capability that others have that tends to be called "visualizing", but that is well under 1% of the people who say they have aphantasia.
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I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.
I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.
Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
Greetings fellow music-hearer.
My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there.
I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.
How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.
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Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
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can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?
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So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.
If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it? If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.
Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.
Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).
I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.
A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.
So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.
With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:
For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.
I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
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One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?
It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.
Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
i've always used this image [1] as an example; it's there, but there's no "seeing" attached, just the conceptual understanding.
[1] https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq...
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.
Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.
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.
I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
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I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
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.
It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.
I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.
It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
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Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
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.
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
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.
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Here’s a helpful overview of anendophasia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/anendophasia
And a few active communities for anyone interested:
Aphantasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
Anendophasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anendophasia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/silentminds/
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
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They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
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I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.
I have 3 kinds of mental vision.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
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Those people here (not you) telling all of us what is and what is not possible have their view based on how they see things. That's it. I hear they don't see things in mind, visually like a phone or a screen. Or do overlays. I remember finding out and being incredulous about whether others did something I don't.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will.
Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.
It is a red flag to me too.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
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> Of course, this is not possible.
I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people.
I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack.
Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at.
When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would basically describe it as effectively identical to seeing them.
So now I'm confused about if these few people are the exceptions or the norm, and to what extent I'm lacking something that some others have.
I'm going to second you for a different reason:
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
> most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like
Not only people. LLMs too.
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
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It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
The cube test is an interesting one, but, to pile on another stupid internet trend, that seems more like a "shape-rotator" vs. "word-cel" question. For very simple fold-ups I can do this, but for more complex decompositions (like if you have me an octahedron) I doubt that I could reliably do this.
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
> 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.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.
When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.
I have hypophantasia, so it's very easy to convince me that both exist (because I'm right in the middle between the two)
Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
> 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.
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?
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"Exist" is probably the wrong framing. It doesn't seem unreasonable that such a phenomenon could occur after a traumatic brain injury, for instance. I'm sure there's some evidence of it, neurologically (like split-brain syndrome). But it's also true that people who say they "aphantasia", in 99.9% cases, don't experience that phenomenon.
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
See also Reddit, there has been lots of discussion and some similar polls. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/, and https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/comments/kkbxom/when... for the specific poll.
Not sure about phantasia, but aphantasia exists. I don't know why you say it doesn't?
Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
It exists. You're wrong. Update. Thanks.
You're absolutely right.
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Can you explain why people who report aphantasia don't show physical responses (like sweat or pupil dilation) in response to imagined visual stimulus (like being described a scary scene), while people who report mental imagery do show these physical responses to the same stimulus?
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
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> Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object
Prove it.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I won't respond again.
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I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
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.h...
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.
there are also people who have become aphantasiac after neurological damage, which seems like pretty cut and dry evidence against the qualia argument.
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.
Learning to juggle involves easily observed objective activities that other people can check, and which can be learned that way--you can watch someone else juggling, read book that describes the tossing of the balls, etc.
How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that. How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to do?
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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.
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.
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.
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?
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
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Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
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Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia can be measured. See section 6 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11437436/
I'm sure it's not, because most of the time I'm aphantasic and rarely I'm not and they're completely different phenomenological experiences.
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
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?).
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I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
It's not semantics.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
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exactly the same for me
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
Neither, they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
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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"...
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.
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.
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).
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/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
Read the book Mind Illuminated. Visualisation isn't really necessary for meditation
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes in the first few minutes after waking up I experience images though I wouldn't call them vivid
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.
> 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/S002839322...
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383478/
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?
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
No, it is nothing like retinal fatigue, which is what they are referencing in that sentence.
The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.
And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.
The potential value of the after-image test was (hopefully) a concrete way for me to understand better what a visualizer could actually see. From the replies, it seems that it is really a very poor example.
For someone with aphantasia, the failure of the "What Do Most Visualizers See?" section is that it is still just a wall of words. I have to imagine what a visualizer might see, which is, of course, difficult for me!
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
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...
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.
That's an oversimplification. I have a friend who says that they can visualise things mentally exactly like in real life, with their eyes closed or open, and that they can also make changes to those images, such as changing the colour of an apple from red to blue, or rearranging furniture in an imagined room.
Of course they might be lying, but if we ignore that possibility, it definitely doesn't sound like a figure of speech.
Isn't this contracted by comments in this very thread? e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469205
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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.
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.
I thought the point of counting sheep was to do something boring and repetitive that puts your brain into a relaxed state
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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.
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.
We strongly suspect we have SDAM as well and only more so after reading your description here. Only got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and as on the autism spectrum this year, here in our forties as well.
This whole topic fascinates us in no small part because we've gained or regained marked visualization capacity within the last year or so. Our change unequivocally correlates with our escape from and ongoing recovery from a long-term abusive relationship and all the dissociation that required of us and caused in us. That and no doubt some pharmacological assistance. It's been a wild ride, to remember having greater powers of visualization and then to come back into them.
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.
I didn't realize they were correlated. I have total visual and auditory aphantasia and can count childhood memories on one hand. But I have great semantic memory and could probably win a game of jeapordy.
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/
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.
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.
Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
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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.
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.
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
> it opened my eyes to many things
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.
From what people report some can see a full picture.
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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
> - 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
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.
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!
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?
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.h...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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I can visualize algorithms, graphs, 3d objects, 3d environments, but no colors.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ironic that people without imagination write a page using AI.
people who don't have aphantasia are demonstrably and measurably better at .. something, right?
Look up memory castles
The phrase is "memory palace": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
To the people who have aphantasia, do you daydream?
Of course! About plot, not scenery.
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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/ 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.
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)
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.
This is peak internet banality.
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.
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.
- kudos to whoever made this
- need one for alzheimers
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-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.
> 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?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
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.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
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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.
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
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Yay, I'm one of "these people" now. Aphants can still have inner monologues, and most do. I do.
Yes thats exactly what a P-zombie would say.
Do you dream?
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then you haven't understood what P zombies are
Only a P-zombie would say this.
Can you reach the ground? If not, you may have Short Arms.
Why a red apple? Why not a woman? Porn?