https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of with what kind of fidelity you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it?

I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several different numbers.

I barely ever dream.

Guided meditation has never worked for me.

I have a crazy good sense of direction. My girlfriend doesn’t understand how that works if I can’t see it in my mind.

I do have vivid recall of what things look like but I don’t see them at all.

It all made so much more sense when I figured this out.

Anecdotally I know someone with aphantasia and they report having an internal monologue.

* presence of internal monologue

* ability for visualization

* ability for audiation

* affective memory (remembering feelings)

* SDAM (weak autobiographical memory)

It speaks to the larger questions around the human experience, and that we are only now discovering the many ways it differs for each individual.

Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are related. Do you have the same?

——

“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”

Yeah!

“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”

Yeah, you don’t have that?

“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“

Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.

——

…and around we go.

Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes. I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.

I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I have to write down in full every intermediate step because I can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two steps in the future.

Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.

For the most part, I can’t “think” about things except maybe mental math. I see things, and I talk to myself in my head.

Close your eyes and try to visualize an apple. Do this for 30 seconds or so. Try to visualize the skin, the reflection, the texture, the stem, the depth, etc. Try to hold a stable mental picture of that apple.

After the 30 seconds, rate your ability to picture the apple from 1 to 5, where 1 is complete inability and 5 is as if you were looking at a picture of an apple for those 30 seconds. 1 is aphantasia.

Another idea is to recall a vivid dream you had. I think most people would describe it as being part of a movie or reality. While awake, are you able to recreate scenes in vivid detail as if you were dreaming? 5 for complete parity and 1 for not at all. 1 is aphantasia.

An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...

Seems like a good test?

For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of self to be.

The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training, training to remain conscious through the process of falling asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image, quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the blank page without access to the reference image}).

there was a long running debate in the literature about how mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like format.

two very different philosophies about how the information was stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be accommodated in the other.

with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based) framework

But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the same species had radically different methods of cognition, since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the broadest possible sense, is not radically different, and neither is our thinking hardware.

The response to that suggestion was unexpectedly strong, People really didn't like the notion of doubt of their experience. Some said I was accusing them of lying.

It was quite odd, I thought it was an uncontroversial notion that what we feel we are experiencing can differ from reality.

I think, perhaps, it was received as me saying "This is the truth, you're the one who is wrong."

I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of charcoal, but I don’t consider this to be ‘acarbographism’ or something, I recognise that other people have put more effort into learning that skill than I have.

In my case, I can distinctly remember my experiences from before the infection, and recall a clear difference in visualization capabilities before and after.

So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in your "minds eye".

If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's imagery but from a different place.

Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.

(I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is something that some/most people do.)

Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just assuming is normal?!

Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.

It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else imagines they have X-Men superpowers.

I told my wife proudly that I could see something in my dream I wanted to. She told me she can imagine ANYTHING ANYWHERE ANYTIME (painter)

My question is: can you see the cat on the table? If not, sorry pal.

I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.

if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.

spacer

spacer

spacer

spacer

then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.

For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.

For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.

I have a fuzzy mental stage for these things. It’s like my mind’s second monitor. It mostly goes ignored but I can focus on it if I want to. Shapes and colors are weak but are definitely there. But still a useful tool.

You can think of it like a bunch of different subsystems responsible for different kinds of tasks and some of them can be broken so the connections between them don't work.

Read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks for a lot of case studies.

You may be "right". What you consider to be "seeing" things in one's head may be not what's happening in that person's mind. What they call "seeing" may be something else.

The best way I can describe it is essentially generating a memory. If I were instructed to picture an apple in my mind, I could imagine a hand holding up an bog standard Red Delicious. I can imagine it free-floating. And it would be much like when I remember what happened yesterday for instance. Of course, we get into whether or not we "see" the memory or not.

So, if you are saying you do not consider yourself to have mental images, what, to your best ability to describe it, do you do when you remember an event?

So it's probably like hearing "inner" sounds, just with motion pictures.

I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly likely.

Different to the case described at the beginning of the article I have lots of memories. But they are stories of what happened, not movies.

So you can't visualize an occluded surface in an active way but your brain still prevents you from running your rear bumper into another car.

Many people with aphantasia still dream at night.

Congenital aphantasia and emergent aphantasia may effect brain structures differently, perhaps some forms just disconnect the pipeline that feeds the brains computed data back into our visual centers for further visual analysis.

It's very interesting, in running down these differences we would probably learn a lot about the brain.

So, for you at least, there is/was a significant difference between "seeing things in your mind" and not being able to. Have you ever gone under any studies or tests to compare your brain activity to others?

My lexical memory is very high, and I have long running echoic memory so I can post process audio but a 0.1 second visual flash?

Unless my brain picked it up and had time to parse out the numbers into lexical storage I would not be able to go back and recall it at all.

I don't have congenital aphantasia and it's clear to me that there are certain kinds of background processing still occurring in my subconscious, it's like a unidirectional connection between parts of my brain that was once bidirectional.

Do 1's see it as clearly as if it was through regular eyesight?

Every personality test I have ever taken, on many of the questions I've felt that I could answer almost anything and still be truthful.

When I see this apple scale, I simultaneously feel that both 1 and 5 apply to how I visualize an apple. It's hard for me to describe what's going on in my brain, and I don't think language or images are very helpful at illuminating it.

If such a meta-trait were to exist, which would have more to do with the narratives and metaphors we use to describe our mental processes than the processes themselves, it would be funny if that's actually a good deal of what was being measured all along.

(Or maybe it just means I'm a 5)

A variant that I've found helpful for teasing out this case: 1. Ask the test subject to visualize an Apple 2. Ask them for a few very specific details about the apple they are currently visualizing (what color is it? does it have a leaf or a bite out of it?, etc)

In many cases aphantastics will not object to the activity in step 1, but they won't be doing the same thing as the folks who are actually visualizing. They'll just do what they do when people talk about "visualizing".

When you get to step 2 someone who is actually visualizing can immediately answer the questions and don't think they are strange, they are just reporting what they are visualizing in front of them.

An aphantastic in step 2 is often confused. They aren't actually visualizing any specific apple so there isn't a reference to answer the questions. You'll get a response like.. well what kind of Apple is it? How should I know if it has a bite out of it? You first have to either provide more context or reword the question to something like: What is a color an Apple could be? or What color is your favorite Apple?

Then I started interrogating all of the people who claimed to “visualise” things and it turned out we were all doing the same thing - conceptualising in our “mind’s eye”.

For example, anyone I’ve asked to visualise something with their eyes closed can also “visualise” the same thing with their eyes open. It’s happening “somewhere else” and not in your vision.

So I think the term “visualise” leads to a lot of the confusion.

It is difficult to describe, but so many people talk about it as if they are seeing something and I never have - I've always assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind to visualize something.

While I'm willing to concede there's probably different degrees of visualization (which in my mind also explains why some people are able to draw "from memory" and others are less apt), there's also people who absolutely cannot visualize at all.

My friend:

- Cannot visualize AT ALL. If you ask him to picture a red circle, he cannot do it. He cannot visualize the color red.

- If you ask him to picture the face of his mother, he cannot do it. All he sees is darkness. (We've wondered about this, how can he tell it's his mother when he sees her? He has no difficulty identifying faces, he just cannot visualize them at all if they are not in front of him. Not "not close enough" -- AT ALL).

- He cannot mentally reproduce music, no matter how imperfectly. I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars (with reasonable fidelity), he cannot.

- He cannot taste in anticipation something he enjoys, like flavorful coffee. I can anticipate drinking a good coffee, and get some sort of sensorial stimulation/anticipation even before I get the coffee. He cannot, at all. And he does enjoy good coffee.

It's not about a difference in terminology, he really cannot visualize/mentally experience anything if it's not actually happening.

----

Finally:

> I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination

I am. It's not exactly a hallucination because there's no confusion about what's real and what's not, but "hallucination" is pretty close to what actually happens in my mind. I can visualize pretty much anything I've experienced, and some things I haven't too, like green elves dancing on my keyboard. I've always been a visual person.

I can draw things "from memory" and it's pretty much putting into paper what I'm seeing in my mind.

To see why your take might be false, many people dreams have a fidelity of images that is comparable to reality, even for people with aphantasia. Do you dream with this fidelity? Can you recreate that fidelity while awake?

There are also testable differences that support the claim that people can actually visualize, in photographic detail, images while awake [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/

If I imagine a particular model of car, for example, I can instantly visualize much of what the entire car looks like. I can also move my attention around parts of the visualization, to see more detail. It's more than facts, and more than feelings.

This visualization is different than seeing with eyes, and is not confused with that, but seems to be using some of the same machinery.

I could sketch a detailed drawing from what I'm visualizing, a bit like the car was physically there, and I could keep looking back to it for references. But when it's in my head, I don't have to take my eyes off the drawing, and I can kinda merge my drawing and the reference in my head.

In contrast, if I try to imagine the scent of tire rubber, or of cooking, or any other scent, I cannot. Not even the tiniest bit. There's just nothing there.

As a point of reference for comparison, that's pretty dramatic and binary.

Of course, when I smell a familiar scent, I often identify it instantly. And while I am physically perceiving it, I can experience it, and move my attention around it, and introspect on its character, and have other reactions to it (e.g., good, bad, etc.), etc. But immediately after I stop physically perceiving it, I again can't imagine it. I can only recall previously registered facts about it: that vanilla smells good, kinda sweet(?), and maybe creamy(?). I could know more facts if I was a baker or cook, and I guess reason about how to use vanilla, but I still doubt I could imagine perceiving the scent of vanilla in my head.

And some scents will quickly surface related memories of previous times I perceived the scent, even decades ago. And those non-scent memories will remain activated and linger after the physical scent is removed. (Any rare accompanying wow deja vu sense is brief.)

I can picture the visual appearance of various glass and plastic bottles of vanilla flavoring I've seen over the decades, and how some vanilla flavoring looks in a particular stainless steel teaspoon with ambient light reflecting through it, etc. I can also visualize in detail the visual appearance of things that come to mind when I try to think about things I've seen that have vanilla flavoring. I just can't imagine what they smell or taste like.

I think it's basically exactly like a hallucination for some people, except it's mentally tagged as originating "internally" instead of "externally" (which is what freaks people out about having a hallucination). I think it's basically the same thing with internal monologue vs. auditory hallucinations.

(for the record I have neither internal monologue nor visualization)

    > Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.

Oh, I've done this! I think many kids have. I remember a moment in my childhood when it was ninja turtles riding on those hoverboards, while I was bored watching outside the window of the back seat. Riding along the power lines, and occasionally katana-cutting something in the way.

Mine was usually some sort of superhero who did flips over things and picked them up and whatnot.

I can’t imagine if you could “actually see” the skateboarder how much less boring those rides would be.

However, the article mentions evidence that there is an actual physical difference here: fMRIs, and contraction of the pupil when imagining a bright light. Clearly something is happening.

FYI, I don't have any part of my self image related to any of this sort of thing (I never think about it except when it comes up in discussions like this, during which I briefly find it a bit interesting and then forget about it again), and I downvoted you because I think you're being confident to the point of cockiness yet talking absolute rubbish.

So please don't assume there's some biased reason behind every downvote you get for that comment, at least some of us just think you're completely wrong.

rsfMRI revealed stronger connectivity between the visual–occipital network and several prefrontal regions (BAs 9, 10, 11) in the hyperphantasic group when compared with the aphantasic group

Here is a link to the paper: https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab035/626...

So there does appear to be a way to potentially test for aphantasia that requires no self-reporting, just an attempt to visualize.

Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of what is missing, but which it is not.

None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are somehow so bland yet over spiced.

I also wonder how much of our differences are often our inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient manner.

I guess you could compare them as if they are API's to different LLM's, and my "consciousness" is the web-browser. So it's like;

  - `fast_facts.llm` is a micro model with good breadth and fast response times, but it has little depth. So it's API can be fetch'd without worrying about it blocking the main-thread/browser.  
  - `all_data.llm` is a full size model, but it's slow to respond, and "costs" more to run. So in the browser, it is only lazily-loaded (ie, not always used), and it has to be called async style because you have to wait for the results to slowly "stream in".

I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe because I have experienced and sometimes still experience seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time it is absolutely impossible.

There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started researching this topic was because a person who had very clear visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his description got this thing started.