I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.
My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.
It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.
One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.
After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.
It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.
I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.
Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!
I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.
In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.
I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)
So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
According to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
I can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.
Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.
I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.
As somebody who only has closed eye visuals in deep meditation or in dreams, I would maybe describe what you call "knowingness" as "abstract representation"?
As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
Yes this. I have, based on a battery of spatial reasoning tests I took years ago, way above average spatial reasoning capabilities. I also notice a lot IRL that others do not, based on anecdotal evidence.
I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips?
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
Exactly the same here. When I learned that other people actually could visualise things, it made me realise why I've spent my life being a commercial photographer and camera developer. Capture the images - I guess most people get this for free to some extent
I've also had this kind of topological knowingness which I couldn't name. Another comment here says "schematic conceptual" which captures what it feels like for me.
Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.
I feel that I could visualize internally but there's a curtain pulled over the visualization part of it. It's there, i feel it but it's blocked from my sight somehow. I've built intuitive ways to probe the imagination so I technically experience my image-less visualization. However, when I attempt to visualize something more complex (there are a lot of elements or minutiae) I'm reaching my intuitive limits. When it comes to auditory imagination, I can literally listen to a song from my own head all day long with no effort.
Have you worked mostly as documentary photographer, or did you also do stages setups, like portraying people? I am only a photo enthusiast without any mental images and I struggle with portraits. Since I know about aphantasia I am wondering whether it has something to do with the absence of mental images.
Honestly, I’ve done it all. I’ve shot thousands of headshots and portraits and hundreds of events. I’ve not typically been a “conceptual” photographer such as somebody like Art Kane. I started on film and moved to digital in 2003 before I was shooting professionally. I get more of an “idea” in my head, however I don’t “see” a final result. Digital has helped immeasurably to refine my work more quickly. Just as I “know” what a red fire hydrant looks like but I do not “see” an image.
I can't visualize at all when awake, but I have been into lucid dreaming in my past and my dreams were visual and more detailed than real life (no bad lenses for the light to go through, I guess). I can also visualize a little bit when on either edge of sleep. I've been noticing that the occasional images that I see in that state are becoming more colorful and detailed. I'm hoping that means actual phantasia in my future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.
Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.
I've had dreams where I was "there" and it felt like being present in a scene in a very real way (for a dream). But ask me to close my eyes and visualize a blue table with a red apple on it and its nothing but phosphenes at best.
I always assumed that when people say "imagine this image..." that it was about the contextual nature of it. Only several months ago did I learn that aphantasia is a thing and I'm among the ~4% of the population in this group.
With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).
A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]
They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.
Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics
Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.
Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways
Yes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).
I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that.
Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past.
Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!
I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.
Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.
It's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.
Watch people draw, and you'll realize that can't be true, or at least is a very incomplete description of what's going on.
People have processes they go through to eventually get to something reasonably correct. Systems for drawing people, perspective rules, etc. These get extremely elaborate. They shouldn't need any of it if they could fully visualize the scene. They'd just need to copy that image to paper.
You'll hear people say things like "trust the process". They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete. Even when they're doing things correctly, their brain isn't recognizing it.
When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.
I do a lot of thinking by visualizing relationships between concepts in a kind of graph. When I draw, I visualize the scene first. When I build widgets in my wood shop, I visualize the result and all intermediate states. When I was writing 3d renderers (a long time ago), it was immensely helpful to visualize the points and triangles in my head.
I built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.
It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.
So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.
And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.
"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.
I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
That's not really what the article is about:
"Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.
There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.
Interesting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?
If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.
I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".
People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).
As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.
I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.
As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.
I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it.
I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.
1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street.
2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see.
3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times.
4. Can remember a favorite color.
5. Don't have a consistent handwriting.
I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?
i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average.
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.)
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like.
Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head.
Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not.
I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative
I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.
This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.
It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).
If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.
Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.
For me, I sort of imagine the sensation of eating something and observe how I react to it. If it's a strong positive reaction, that's what I'm in the mood for. Otherwise, if it's kind of a more bored reaction, I cast my mind out for another idea and try again.
> If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
Because the interior version is strictly inferior to the real thing, at least for me. It's, maybe, 80% as good, but that last 20% is a real humdinger.
Especially for music, I have a hard time hearing it in my head and not playing/singing/drumming along with it. Currently working on "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions as practice, and it's basically been playing in my head for the last 72 hours.
I do have to listen to it occasionally to refresh, but it certainly makes learning music easier... if not infuriating. Looking at you Lou Bega, and Rob Thomas.
Does 80% mean "tastes like a dull chocolate bar, but still basically a chocolate bar", or more like "like a nice chocolate bar but somehow 20% less enjoyable in some looser way"?
Perhaps this is why I can't identify the beat in the music.
I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.
Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.
Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is.
I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.
It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.
Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.
Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.
But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.
A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.
Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?
Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.
This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.
And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.
My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron.
This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.
There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?
Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.
I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.
My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.
It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.
One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.
After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.
It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.
I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.
Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally.
I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.
In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.
I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)
My lucid dreaming has always been when I'm in danger, like this description of a Sadako dream
https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...
So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
shikantaza (zen meditation, basically) has significantly improved my ability to visualize.
People with no imagination are rewriting my industry as well
Haha, but the subject is not people with no imagination. It’s people whose imaginations aren’t visual.
I see
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For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
According to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
I can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.
Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.
But id still describe myself as an aphant.
Anyone who doesn't believe this is real needs to explain the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia. Good luck with that.
I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.
As somebody who only has closed eye visuals in deep meditation or in dreams, I would maybe describe what you call "knowingness" as "abstract representation"?
As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
Yes this. I have, based on a battery of spatial reasoning tests I took years ago, way above average spatial reasoning capabilities. I also notice a lot IRL that others do not, based on anecdotal evidence.
I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips?
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
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Exactly the same here. When I learned that other people actually could visualise things, it made me realise why I've spent my life being a commercial photographer and camera developer. Capture the images - I guess most people get this for free to some extent
I've also had this kind of topological knowingness which I couldn't name. Another comment here says "schematic conceptual" which captures what it feels like for me.
Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.
I feel that I could visualize internally but there's a curtain pulled over the visualization part of it. It's there, i feel it but it's blocked from my sight somehow. I've built intuitive ways to probe the imagination so I technically experience my image-less visualization. However, when I attempt to visualize something more complex (there are a lot of elements or minutiae) I'm reaching my intuitive limits. When it comes to auditory imagination, I can literally listen to a song from my own head all day long with no effort.
Have you worked mostly as documentary photographer, or did you also do stages setups, like portraying people? I am only a photo enthusiast without any mental images and I struggle with portraits. Since I know about aphantasia I am wondering whether it has something to do with the absence of mental images.
Honestly, I’ve done it all. I’ve shot thousands of headshots and portraits and hundreds of events. I’ve not typically been a “conceptual” photographer such as somebody like Art Kane. I started on film and moved to digital in 2003 before I was shooting professionally. I get more of an “idea” in my head, however I don’t “see” a final result. Digital has helped immeasurably to refine my work more quickly. Just as I “know” what a red fire hydrant looks like but I do not “see” an image.
What’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?
I can't visualize at all when awake, but I have been into lucid dreaming in my past and my dreams were visual and more detailed than real life (no bad lenses for the light to go through, I guess). I can also visualize a little bit when on either edge of sleep. I've been noticing that the occasional images that I see in that state are becoming more colorful and detailed. I'm hoping that means actual phantasia in my future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.
Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.
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I sometimes experience dreams when I go back to sleep repeatedly, but in all normal circumstances it is nothing
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I've had dreams where I was "there" and it felt like being present in a scene in a very real way (for a dream). But ask me to close my eyes and visualize a blue table with a red apple on it and its nothing but phosphenes at best.
I do see images when I dream. It can get pretty immersive. Brains are wild.
I always assumed that when people say "imagine this image..." that it was about the contextual nature of it. Only several months ago did I learn that aphantasia is a thing and I'm among the ~4% of the population in this group.
With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).
A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]
They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.
[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104
Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics
Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.
Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
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Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways
Yes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).
I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that.
Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past.
Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!
I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.
Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.
It's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.
You are hopefully aware though that this is not the norm. Many (if not all) artists tend to visualise their work before and while they are doing it.
Watch people draw, and you'll realize that can't be true, or at least is a very incomplete description of what's going on.
People have processes they go through to eventually get to something reasonably correct. Systems for drawing people, perspective rules, etc. These get extremely elaborate. They shouldn't need any of it if they could fully visualize the scene. They'd just need to copy that image to paper.
You'll hear people say things like "trust the process". They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete. Even when they're doing things correctly, their brain isn't recognizing it.
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When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.
I, for one, find it very practical.
I do a lot of thinking by visualizing relationships between concepts in a kind of graph. When I draw, I visualize the scene first. When I build widgets in my wood shop, I visualize the result and all intermediate states. When I was writing 3d renderers (a long time ago), it was immensely helpful to visualize the points and triangles in my head.
I built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.
It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.
So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.
And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...
High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.
"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.
I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.
That's not really what the article is about: "Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.
There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
Knowing a thing exists is not the same as knowing how it interacts with other things.
The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.
the only internal sense I have is my own voice. I cant even "imagine" music but rather hum it in my own voice at best. Same with others' voices
Interesting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.
Ditto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...
Also an Aphantasiac, the quote
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions
Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?
If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.
I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".
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People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).
As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.
I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.
As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.
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I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
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Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.
1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street. 2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see. 3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times. 4. Can remember a favorite color. 5. Don't have a consistent handwriting.
Do these symptoms count?
Those don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one
I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
I have an inner monologue, that is the extent of my inner senses.
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When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
99.99% of the time, it’s just black. Seeing things like you’re describing sounds like a super power.
The 0.01% of the time, I have seen blue lights. Without trying to look around too much, it’s something like this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0
This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
Nothing, no
So you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like?
https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
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how is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?
i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average.
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
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Proprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range
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When you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after?
I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
The image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing
That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.)
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
I posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi
yeah looks like it triggered a keyword filter to mark it as dead to me. Or a few people flagged it.
Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it.
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I’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out?
When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
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What does you mother look like?
She's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory
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I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like.
This is not a memory nor a detail recall issue. The visual part is just not there, but I know how my mother looks like :)
Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head.
Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not. I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative
(Also aphantasic)
I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
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I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.
This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.
It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).
If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.
Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.
Perhaps it is just spatial facts.
How do you decide what you're in the mood to eat?
For me, I sort of imagine the sensation of eating something and observe how I react to it. If it's a strong positive reaction, that's what I'm in the mood for. Otherwise, if it's kind of a more bored reaction, I cast my mind out for another idea and try again.
> If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
Because the interior version is strictly inferior to the real thing, at least for me. It's, maybe, 80% as good, but that last 20% is a real humdinger.
Especially for music, I have a hard time hearing it in my head and not playing/singing/drumming along with it. Currently working on "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions as practice, and it's basically been playing in my head for the last 72 hours.
I do have to listen to it occasionally to refresh, but it certainly makes learning music easier... if not infuriating. Looking at you Lou Bega, and Rob Thomas.
80% is still pretty high!
Does 80% mean "tastes like a dull chocolate bar, but still basically a chocolate bar", or more like "like a nice chocolate bar but somehow 20% less enjoyable in some looser way"?
Perhaps this is why I can't identify the beat in the music.
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I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.
Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.
Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
It definitely manifests as that to some degree, but since it extends to hair, clothing, what car they drive, I think it's a more general situation.
(But I'm also not specifically aware of face blindness as a condition, and had assumed it was generally some form of aphantasia.)
I would tentatively suggest OP does. I hace aphantasia but meet a lot of people for work and have a very good memory for names once I see a face.
People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is.
I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.
It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.
Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.
Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.
But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.
A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.
Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?
Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.
And how would non visual thinkers solve that?
This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.
And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.
My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.
It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
platos cave, etc
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
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In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
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Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
> Why This Matters
Come on guys at least try.
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.
I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
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Why would I be coping about anything?
“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron.
This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.
There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?
Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.
Aphantasia is fake. I can “see” when dreaming, ergo the brain simply (adaptively) suppresses the same when awake.
The most important thing to remember when discussing this stuff is that how you experience reality can be drastically different from other humans.
I don't see even when dreaming :)
You remember your dreams?
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