Anecdotally I know someone with aphantasia and they report having an internal monologue.
Really the only thing in my head is my internal monologue. If I'm thinking about something I've seen, it's my internal monologue "saying," with words, physical attributes I remember about it. If a song is stuck in my head, it's my internal monologue (in my own voice) signing the lyrics or my own voice humming the tune in my head. No sensation of it being the original artist or the actual instruments, it's 100% my own voice in my own head.
I have a friend who says she does not have any inner monologue at all, and thinks entirely visually. I can't imagine! We're on the pretty extreme opposite ends of the spectrum of how we think, apparently.
I still remember (semantically) that my parents laughed at me, when they told me to count sheep to fall asleep and I told them all I can see is darkness and white dots when I close my eyes. They probably thought I was joking.
* 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?
When I was younger I was much worse at recognizing people and names, as an adult it's gotten much better
——
“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.
If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?
I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can see the yellow light it casts.
It depends on what you mean by “see”.
It’s nothing like seeing with my eyes, and it’s nothing like dreaming.
When I “see” it is abstract. There are impressions and sensations. I can recall the qualities of something - even the visual qualities - but it doesn’t feel like sight.
Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty much exactly like the sensation I have when I "see" stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close my eyes while awake — I can continue where I left off, and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.
But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the physical act of seeing with your eyes.
Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not with most other foods so I think it's more mouth preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov saliva before feeding reaction.
It's like watching a movie; the people are not there, but you still see them.
The cinema is in my mind. People here describe it as "thinking of seeing", but to me that's nonsense. It's definitely a visual thing, I bet it's activating some of the same regions in the brain. Seeing is thinking anyway, in the sense the brain is interpreting signals from the optic nerve.
It's never an hallucination in the sense of being confused about what's real and what's not.
I can also anticipate the taste of something I like, feel it in my mouth, and start salivating. Is it tasting or "thinking of tasting"?
It's not a list of abstract properties, it's an understanding of the shape of a candle. Why would you need to be able to see it to remember its shape?
I meant remember, not understand. You can understand something, but I specifically mean remember.
Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand, like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual information, it's far more topologically structural than bound to 3D physicality.
But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.
What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.
So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.
My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't any different than those hallucinations, with the exception of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting, shading, and so on are all like what you would see with your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.
Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg instead of a live feed.
Pull up the image on your phone and look at it. Now close your eyes and imagine the image as accurately as you can.
Is it as though you didn’t close your eyes at all? Do you see it the same way as when your eyes are open?
When I'm fully awake, the mental images are more like someone attached a new camera with a field of view that ends at the edges of the object/scene I try to generate.
If you could crop your real field of view somehow to just the photo in question, then would it be as though nothing changed?
(Like, I get that things outside the phone image would change, but does the image your imagining change? Does the sensation change?)
Does your photograph allow you to faithfully recall details you didn’t notice at the time or is it a simulation of an image?
The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously, you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels" (not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very early embryonic development). The better I know the object the better this internal concept-image, but far from what looking at the real thing is like.
I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague without details unless I concentrate on them specifically, and it is very dark in there.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones. Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for fantastical landscapes and architecture.
The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even though I read the books long before those movies were made. People like me need graphically talented people around, or my mental images will be very much limited to drastically reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to all graphical artists).
but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc).
I'm fairly good at remembering faces, and if they're next to a name when I see them, I can even associate the name! The flip side, of course, is that if I don't see the name, I won't remember it.
I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response viz".
I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.
It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.
1. Actually seeing something like in a dream.
2. A mental scratch pad I can draw on and use spatial awareness to navigate. (I see the code of applications as flying over a landscape or walking through a forest.)
3. Imagination, which uses whatever data vision gets turned into.
I'm not sure how common 2 is. A lot of my brain has broken parts and this scratchpad is used in place of logic. This works fine until I need to work on linear list of similar tokens and keep them in order, like math and some functional programming languages.
If I dream I don't ever remember them - I assume I must, I think everyone (barring medical issues) has REM sleep.
I envy people that, dreams sound amazing.
I have an active imagination and I read a lot of fiction and I don't think I have aphantasia, I just go to sleep, wake up and never remember a thing in between.
That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with me, because together we realized that people can relate to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments after I wake.
It was just hours and hours of random junk every night.
I threw away the journal and realized forgetting dreams is good.
When I'm looking at it, the only thing I can see is whatever object is being imagined. However, yes - it's similar to the sensation of seeing with your own actual eyes. The reason it seems so foreign is because our real eyes can see more than one thing at a time. Our mind's eye can only see exactly one subject at a time (though I should mention that when I navigate cities, I do so by imagining a birds-eye view, so there are many objects IN the map, but I cannot see anything other than the map, and it becomes extremely blurry outside of the section I'm focusing on).
For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.
That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".
I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).
In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications.
One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_ what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving them into place.
I can make an educated guess based on their length/width but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged without physically moving them.
It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!
The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench but certainly not the one in front of me.
When I am coding for fun, or I’m trying to think through a problem I visualise the thing I my mind as a kind of interactive physical thing I can manipulate. It’s useful as I have another dimension I can problem solve in. As an adult it also Helped me understand why I wasn’t so academic as a child and had to work a bit harder than some of my peers.
I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch, smell, visuals.
And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it. Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and going to chat with women.
I don't have any trouble following your path of increased detail, but if someone says "imagine an apple", I get a vaguely apple-shaped, generally redish object (I like cosmic crisp), which only becomes detailed if I "navigate my mental eye" closer.
Like when in school I'd imagine graphs lines before drawn or best example is a cad test and from reading the directions I could get an idea of what I was about to draw in cad
Man made computers in our image, it use to be a job title.
In college, especially when I was studying Japanese and had to memorize a lot of shapes, I could look at a poster filled with characters and recall it hours later to translate those characters. Your mind is a muscle and it gets better with exercise, and grows weaker when lazy.
"imagine a ball, can you see it?"
"yes"
"ok what color is it? "
I never heard anyone say anything other than a variation of "hm I don't know". It's just an anecdote but still
That's classic complete aphantasia. I have it too.
The "kind of different. I’m not really seeing it" would apply just as well to dream images. If you're interrogating people, you might try asking them whether it's similar to that.
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.
I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdVBzuGWr4
You can easily understand where the difference is because the data is different between the eyes. The difference appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's eye is different from data from the physical eyes when those two 'streams of data' are blended.
Anyways, this is nothing like what I experience when I imagine something.
your imagination is more like it's in the the back of the head, yeah?
What helped me 'move' where my imagination was (to the front and center), was to do the flame meditation. Which is to focus on a flame in a dark room for a few seconds, close your eyes, and try to retain the phosphene afterglow in the flame shape. and repeating that until you are able to retain image of the flame while your eyes are closed.
Similarly: 'drawing from memory' - particularly from recent short term memory - was another method that had a profound impact on my ability to visualize.
Both of these take time and commitment, but they have worked for me. They may work for you.
It's similar to replaying music in your head (if you can do that), you can hear the tune but your ears "know" no music is actually playing.
I was shocked to realize that when people said "imagine in your minds eye", they meant it literally. This seems to be a common experience for people with aphantasia [0].
Note that when I'm close to sleep or dreaming, then yes, my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity. While awake, its almost completely non-existent.
[0] "I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...
Just now, what you wrote for example.
> my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.
What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of your head?
When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not "seeing".
Sometimes when I'm close to sleep or when I'm lucid dreaming, I can visualize things with good fidelity. While I'm awake, I'm almost completely unable to.
I experience visual dreams the same way I described imagining the environment when I read. It's a completely different experience than seeing with my eyes open.
I think for many people, even people with aphantasia, dreaming is akin to watching a movie or actually experiencing the event (myself included). I know the experience is immersive because it's the same feeling as watching a movie, but I can't recall it visually the same way after the fact, while I'm awake.
Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30 seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye, an image of an apple as if you were looking at on your computer screen? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is complete parity as if you were looking at it from your computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what is your ability to do so?
It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.
I know it sounds crazy but I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.
Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.
Here are some other articles of note:
"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
"I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...
Based on what evidence?
Here's an article I found recently:
"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own at night, not letting me fall asleep.
Imagination is weird.
A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I never quite landed on an understanding of how much a person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is (assumed to be) innate or genetic.
Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not been trained for years in music.
I can keep a visualization as long as it keeps moving or rotating. As soon as I try to visualize it as still, it disappears.
Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground. But then ask them" "What was the color of the ball? What was the size of the ball? What was the gender of the person pushing the ball, what clothes were they wearing?"
People with aphantasia are usually stunned by the follow up questions. People who don't have aphantasia really have seen the table, the material its made of, imagined a ball of certain size/type color (e.g. multicolor beach ball, or basketball or what ever), and they saw an actual person pushing the ball, they saw the ball rolling on the table an falling to the ground and can answer details about their vision.
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...
I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a monument to my goof.
Some children don't see any differentiation between their imagination and reality, so it's a matter of paying attention to how others' behave to know what to do.
Because you can't trust that the reality that you're in is shared by the people around you.
That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.
Today, 30 years later, I have vivid representations of calligraphy or art, especially when I fall asleep. I fall asleep within at worst minutes so I cannot really take full pleasure of watching these ilages and during the day I am too surrounded by sources of sound, images etc. to meaningfully repeat the exercise.
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.
"thinking in code" means "render their ideas in code", like you render your ideas in English.
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."
They don't understand that each of us composes a novel reality from our senses.
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.
I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't have aphantasia.
It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access data/information about things that the brain is presumably constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not very strong": none.
Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.
No? Thanks for stopping by. :)
For example: without any internal monologue, think of the Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it resembles.
Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
(Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/12/05/865...
Yet I am very good at recognizing faces, have okay memory of past events (not outstanding, but acceptable) and can describe places and people with reasonable accuracy.
So, I'm not sure.
I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple" less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?
The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look up the references if you're interested.
When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a large study found. Probably there are critiques of his methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for trying to figure out how exactly you think.
It’s not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no internal voice so that wouldn’t make sense. It’s just like the concept of what I’m thinking of is right there in all its detail. Its extremely spatial - I’m thinking in 3D even if I’m not visualising it.
On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is very hard, especially faces.
Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a second and can’t be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of thinking isn’t visual.
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.
This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.
But dreams are ultra-visual experiences for me, to the extent where I will occasionally have flashbacks or deja vu to dream images that were exceptionally strong.
So that nullified my suspicion! That said, I do wonder if it's a spectrum, in that some people are more or less visual in their thinking, and on the extremes people may get the capability snipped, as the dim visual hum fades to black and background noise.
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?
You don't remember sensations about an experience, like touch, smells, etc?
My wife, who has a very visual and auditory memory, to the point that she can basically re-watch movies in her head, is still dumbfounded by this fact.
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.
My friend is one such person. He is amazed I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars. I'm amazed there are people who cannot.
It's probably a related phenomenon to visual aphantasia. My friend, poor thing, has it all.
(I can’t ‘hear’ lyrics though and have great difficulty remembering them)
I can very clearly imagine sound or music in my head. My visual imagination is at like 20% of that and it's a struggle
It would definitely be interesting if there were more discussion on other imagined sensory modalities, too. For example, as a choir singer I'd guess that, say, keeping a given starting pitch in your head is easier for people who can mentally "hear" it. Myself I can sort of imagine sounds, but keeping a pitch in my head is more about the physically preparing my larynx to produce that pitch.
I have no abstract canvas to write anything on that I've ever seen.
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.
Evaluating qualia in others is extremely difficult/philosophically impossible, I have pre/post expierence with both states of being.
I can still somewhat conjure up imagery from prior to the procedure series, it almost feels like I can see them, my mother's face, my father face, kinda of, it did not effect my dreams or ability to have imagery in my edge of dreaming state, not immediately at least.
I went from being very imaginative to trying to surf that half awake state in the mornings because it was such a loss.
At this point it's all mostly gone. My memory is entirely text strings now.
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?
You'll see a bunch of people always pile into these aphantasia threads and basically show a bias towards their own qualia being the only type of existing experience and the whole thing being mere semantic differences to describe the same mental function.
It really boggles my mind, it's like in HS when I told people I was mildly color blind and they literally took it as being "like, blind?". I get that from a bunch of high schoolers, it's very odd to see in what are presumably adults on this site.
Those people are simply incorrect, I and many like me didn't have congenital aphantasia, it's well established in the literature.
However, you present an interesting point of view. As someone who remembers being able to visualize but is no longer able to.
And while I feel you on the MRI thing, I don't think you could have known you'd lose the ability to visualize. But I think there would be some value in comparing you against people who both claim to be able to visualize and those who claim to not be able to. You would serve as a sort of marker. Someone who we could be relatively comfortable categorizing as you have distinct memories of being able to visualize and now have a different experience.
I guess I just find qualia skeptism to be generally unhelpful and on a purely personal level I find it annoying and think of it as an almost brain dead take. Uncharitable though that may be, I guess I need an explanation for the behavior because I just don't get it.
I distinguish this from being skeptical about specific qualia explanations (the voices in my head are demons talking to me) which I think is fair, you don't have to accept the attempt to explain.
People who were skeptical of post covid health complications (also called long covid) who just straight up asserted it must be false and it's not worth looking into.
I don't understand the knee jerk denialism of qualia, a thing widely understood to be essentially irreducible and "unsharable".
We only really know what goes on inside our own heads. And unlike other things, like long covid, there's no outward expression of not being able to visualize.
And even for those who claim to be able to visualize, they'll admit that they aren't "seeing" the object. But it's difficult to explain what I mean when I say "I can see it in my head". But it's not. So it's hard to say whether what we're doing is the same or not.
Like the old bit about whether or not the blue you see is the blue I see. In the end, it kind of doesn't matter. If something is "blue", we both agree that the thing is blue, it occupies a certain wavelength, etc. So even though we agree that the thing is blue, we cannot know if we actually see it the same. But since the results are the same, the particular qualia doesn't matter.
We can't make that comparison with inner monologue or visualization. Which is why I guess it fascinates people.
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.
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 as to the fidelity with which 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.
Also see my sibling comment about contrasting and tasks!
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)
That is: if you show this photo to people that you know and you compare and contrast _how detailedly_ you can imagine the apples, that can help.
For example: are you imagining a _specific_ apple? What high-level color is it? How about more specifically? How does the color change across the surface? If so, does it have any distinguishing features? Leaves on the stem or no? What does the bottom look like? Can you turn it around and describe that?
Folks who are high up on the spectrum (like 1) can often answer these questions specifically, whereas as you go down the spectrum these tasks seem progressively more impossible.
I guess what I'm saying is that image / not-image binary doesn't really map on to how I perceive the experience of my own imagination.
But again, maybe that just means I'm a 5 and I'm coping.
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?
Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.
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.
When it happened to me the few times it was an otherwise very mundane day and it felt very natural. It was overlayed onto whatever else I was looking at and could persist with eyes closed.
Honestly the experience kind of cheapened art for me to an extent since you either have that cheat code or you don’t.
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].
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)
I definitely have aphantasia, but this description really didn't connect with me. I don't have a mental image of something, I have the vague sense of knowing what that thing looks like. I read both fiction and non-fiction fervently. I frequently am annoyed at film adaptation, since they conflict with what (I have a vague sense of knowing) the character looked like.
However:
>Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine.
I do find that, once I've seen a movie or show adaptation, that portrayal becomes much more compelling in the mind than the book. The quintessential example for me is the snake exhibit's glass in the first Harry Potter book/movie.
> 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.
The longer I think about a specific part the more detail I can see in that part. Unlike when I look around and see infinite detail all at once, my minds eye only sees the detail when I really focus on generating it.
Note that people aphantasia tend to score better at scene recall, at least in some metrics, than people without ("Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" [0]). I think the idea is that people with aphantasia tend to build language "scaffolding" to describe relations rather than relying on a visual representation.
If true, this might be why people with aphantasia tend to gravitate towards some engineering and science disciplines.
There's a lot of people lamenting the loss of minds eye visual imagery but a potential benefit is to have a lifetime's practice of using language to reason and quantify relationships between pieces of knowledge.
A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.
It's not literally overriding my vision, it's almost like a thin layer, less than transparent, over reality. But specifically, it's entirely in my mind. I would never confuse that imagery with reality...
Having said that, I think that is related to the way our brains process visual information. I've had an experience when I'm driving that, when I recognize where I am, coming from a new location in not familiar with, I feel like suddenly my vision expands in my peripheral vision. I think this is because my brain offloads processing to a faster mental model of the road because I'm familiar with it. I wonder if that extra "vision" is actually as ephemeral as my imagined skateboarder.
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.
I can 'imagine' in great detail, have a good visual/ auditory memory, but there is no real picture or sound. It is black / silent. I never forget a face just can't picture them.
I found out about this via an article posted here when I was 45 years old, now 4 years ago.
It never felt and does feel like a disability in any way.
Dreams in contrast are a full sensory experience for me, so the route back from memory to senses is there, only it is blocked when I am awake.
I couldn't say whether I, myself, have any mental images. I wouldn't even know what it meant to see without eyes. Does that mean that I don't have mental images, or does that mean that I have them so easily that they pass without notice? Or does it mean that this is horseshit, and the consequences of it very much not profound or even detectable?
People's self-reported subjective experiences, about any subject, are almost worthless. You are even an unreliable narrator to yourself. The burden of proof lies on the people who would claim these mind ghosts, not the people that deny them. These descriptions are all so much poetry, so literary.
Eric Schwitzgebel has done a lot of work on introspection, and reminds us of things like how we thought we all dreamed in black and white before the invention of the color television, and we thought that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness; and how blind people who experienced "blindsight" had no idea that they were reflexively echolocating until you covered their ears and tested them again.
People can have entire, sound chains of reasoning that they are only aware of the conclusions of (and unaware of the process even existing.) We are not aware of all of what we're thinking or how. Our self-perception relies as much or more on our self-images than actual recall of our experiences.
Also, going through severe trauma and saying you see the world differently afterwards is not evidence of anything. If it was brain trauma, it'd be surprising if you didn't have a different understanding of the world during and after your recovery.
I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as mysterious superpowers. I do think it helps to remind ourselves in these times how far just babbling the most likely thing can get us, now that we're in the age of LLMs. There doesn't have to be anything inside.
edit: I've been paid as an artist at times in my life, and very much like to draw, and I still have no idea if I have any mental imagery. It's just not a concept I can attach any meaning to.
-----
edit2: I entirely forgot that there's a specific essay on this subject by Schwitzgebel.
How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery
> Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or "phenomenology". I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory.
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm
other links:
Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm
How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
The Unreliability of Naive Introspection https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm
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.
Profound. I'm convinced. Ever consider speaking to the argument, or is this just easier?
> 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.
I'm guessing from the comment that you self-describe in this way? If so, why in the world would I change my assumption? I have to be honest: your taking my (confident) disbelief as an insult seems like a hit dog barking.
edit: and no degree of upset is going to make me understand what a mental image is. So apparently, I don't have them either.
I was solely addressing your bullshit attempt to dismiss any downvotes as being people defending their own self images, by pointing out that I downvoted you without that being even slightly the reason. I used to think that what you believe was quite likely the case, and that people just have different ways of describing it, and if scientists were to prove that is indeed the case I'd be perfectly happy to change my mind again, I couldn't give a shit other than being curious to know the truth. Whether or not I can visualise things more or less than the next person is no more an important part of my self image than the exact number of hairs on my left leg is - it technically does make up a part of who I am, but not a part I'd ever bother thinking about if thinking about the subject of "me".
> "I'm guessing from the comment that you self-describe in this way?"
Your comment is confusingly worded such that I don't know what "this way" means, but no, unless someone specifically asked me how my mind works with regards to this specific subject, I wouldn't self-describe anything to do with this at all.
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.
I never thought about it until you brought it up, but my ability to manipulate images in my head is nonetheless top notch, I can solve visual puzzles that seem difficult for most people with hardly any effort at all. And my ability to draw/paint is not something people would pay me for but is still well above average, and that also requires “holding” an image in your mind. So either these skills are unrelated to being able to “see” your imagination or we are really failing to communicate about it.
This is an clear shortcoming of LLMs/RLHF. They can talk a good line about any subject, but become hopelessly confused when discussing a physical system. Because they just knows the words, they dont really have any idea about the physical world.
Many, many people are so very imprecise with words. And we humans are generally bad at analyzing ourselves vs others.
(Note: lists of previous threads aren't meant as criticism for a topic being repetitive! On the contrary, the classic topics always reappear and that's fine when the new article is interesting. Lists like this are just for curious readers who might want more.)
Aphantasia and Psychedelics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438296 - Oct 2025 (117 comments)
I do not remember my life and it's fine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196576 - June 2025 (223 comments)
Most self-reported aphantasics also reported weak or absent auditory imagery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42534859 - Dec 2024 (6 comments)
What do you visualize while programming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237 - Oct 2024 (167 comments)
What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138338 - Aug 2024 (432 comments)
Aphantasia Is No Creativity-Killer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40810777 - June 2024 (1 comment)
Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40757775 - June 2024 (401 comments)
Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951990 - April 2024 (114 comments)
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887661 - March 2024 (89 comments)
Aphantasics less likely to be engaged with a short story, but still enjoy it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113343 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)
Aphantasia: The inability to create mental imagery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877146 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Poll: Can you visualize details with your eyes closed? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660632 - Dec 2023 (60 comments)
What happens in the brain while daydreaming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38654388 - Dec 2023 (146 comments)
My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37789989 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)
My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784984 - Oct 2023 (60 comments)
How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37718999 - Sept 2023 (232 comments)
Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807533 - July 2023 (88 comments)
Aphantasia: Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36723060 - July 2023 (2 comments)
How blind photographers visualize the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719490 - July 2023 (48 comments)
Ask HN: It seems I lost imagination, what to do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34862427 - Feb 2023 (41 comments)
Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862468 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Ask HN: Do you think in words or pictures? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684070 - June 2022 (29 comments)
Aphantasia: Not Everyone Can Picture Things - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377295 - May 2022 (5 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153061 - April 2022 (1 comment)
Pupils Reveal ‘Aphantasia’ – The Absence of Visual Imagination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121556 - April 2022 (111 comments)
Aphantasia, or how not to do math in your head (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30573004 - March 2022 (2 comments)
How do you visualize code? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29979958 - Jan 2022 (86 comments)
I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551579 - Dec 2021 (306 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277 - Nov 2021 (276 comments)
Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27669211 - June 2021 (146 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment)
Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27437001 - June 2021 (31 comments)
Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23689667 - June 2020 (147 comments)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments)
Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (424 comments)
The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments)
What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments)
Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments)
Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
My partner is on the opposite side of the spectrum; she can conjure mental images with ease. Our differences in that respect have led to a lot of interesting conversations.
I think aphantasia is quite misunderstood by people able to visualize. I can remember how things look, have no issues identifying faces, have a strong spatial understanding of places I've been, etc. It's hard to describe precisely; we just remember things differently.
I should clarify that I can still imagine what a room looks like and what’s in it. I just don’t see it. It’s more like I feel the layout or know where things are, almost like navigating a mental map without any visuals. Specific details like colors, patterns, etc. are much harder to recall unless I am intimately familiar with the object or whatever.
This. If you ask me to imagine a triangle I'll start thinking about having three sides and three angles and the area is half of the base times the height and it's a rigid body and the angles add up to 180 degrees... but there's no visual aspect to it.
Sometimes I wonder if aphantasia gave me an advantage in mathematics, because I had no trouble whatsoever with the concept of "abstract symbols".
I also think it makes sense why a lot of software engineers (myself included) have aphantasia. Being “rational” is arguably easier when you’re not influenced by the emotional weight of images. Maybe we’re even less predisposed to PTSD, since we can’t visually relive things in the same way. My mind still races at night like anyone else’s, but it’s all non-visual. Just endless inner monologue instead of a reel of images. Couldn't count sheep if I tried!
Our children appear to have a mind's eye though.
In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti & meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking, as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or different techniques to follow.
I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes. Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.
I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me and develop image visualization abilities over time.
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 wonder if some people grow to develop an inner monologue, but also immediately start developing an ability to silence it, to the point they don't have to try.
Mine is basically always on, and it can be problematic.
Continuing with the post-it-note analogy, the note can only hold a small amount of information, and so the grudge will be recorded as something simple like "fuck ___, they're an arrogant twat". So then the situation arises where you're talking to someone else and they ask "what do you think about ___?"; and so you answer "I can't stand them, they're so arrogant"; to which they respond "oh really, how so?"; and you can't give an answer, because it wasn't written on the note.
I think this ties in with memories not making you feel the relevant emotions, because the emotion you felt was also just saved as a "fact". I have found though that if I step through all the facts of an "event" and consider each "moment" along the way, that I can often generate the relevant emotion. So say I was remembering an argument, I can remember various facts about the argument and that I was angry about it, but I can't feel that anger. But if I walk through the moments, like `they said this, which made me think that, to which I rightly responded with...`, then eventually I'll start to feel angry just like I would have.
For an analogy on how I think memories are stored differently: then for non-aphantasiacs, I reckon their brain must save `memory.zip`, which contains `video, audio, smells, emotions, etc`. For a person like myself with aphantasia however, it's like I asked ChatGPT for a summary of `memory.zip`, and then I only saved the summary.
Saying that though, I do wonder about the connection between "fact based memories" and aphantasia's lack of mental imagery. Because if >50% of the usefulness of `memory.zip` is from the video, but you can't "see" the video because you aphantasia — then has your brain decided/learned to not bother saving `memory.zip` and instead just save the summary, or are all components of `memory.zip` also corrupt/unplayable?
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".
- Seeing images (what we usually talk about). Can you see your loved ones’ faces in your mind’s eye? Can you picture an elephant? Can you hold an image still or is it an ever-shifting scramble?
- Seeing color. In your mind’s eye, can you conjure up just the colors green, red, yellow…? No shape or imagery needed, but only the plain color. To my surprise and delight I discovered I can visualize colors without being able to see any actual image.
- Seeing movement. Independent of actual imagery, can you visualize pure motion. Again to my surprise, I can visualize movement without any associated imagery. Like, I can imagine a runner on a treadmill and clearly see the motion of the arms and legs going back and forth — but I don’t actually see the arms and legs at all. I’m seeing only the first derivative of an image, like a Schlieren image.
- Hearing music in your head. Can you pick out the different instruments? Can you anticipate the guitar stab in the 2nd verse. Can you hear the harmonica in Karma Chameleon even though you’ve only ever listened to that song a couple of times, and probably not in over 20 years?
- (might be same as above) Can you hear people’s voices? Can you randomly conjure up your parents or Obama or Tina Fey counting to ten?
Any others I’ve missed?
People vary in their capacity to reason with things. People who “see” things with their eyes closed probably don’t believe that they are physically seeing them (i.e., with their actual eyeballs). People who can’t...probably can; they just expect to actually see what it is that they're thinking about.
This is a sensitive subject. At its core it beckons forth for questions of spiritual import.
Is society fit to address something as abstract as this problem in an age where “Chatbot psychosis” is becoming a thing?
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.
speaking to people who claim to be able to visualize colorful scenes in 3d, with sound, etc., and truly see the scene before them --- there is probably _some_ variance. i wouldn't say it affects my cognition, but how could i really know? i've never asked my friends, but i imagine the percentage of people who use 3d visualization to reason, e.g., complex math, is small, given the number of people i've seen use the right-hand rule on exams :) (especially given aphantasia is supposedly quite rare).
i attended a talk recently on experience with organic chemistry pedagogy at a university for deaf students. few requisite terms are defined in american sign language, so the professor formed a committee to create 400 or so signs. "tetrahedral" uses four fingers in a tetrahedral formation, "chiral" moves one hand about the other to simulate a mirror, etc. education of stereochemistry wasn't necessarily heavy on visualization, as you can draw the molecule and reason about it without conceptualization in 3d, but i caught that i'd often look at clocks for R/S rotation problems (where clockwise-counterclockwise in 3d was relevant).
This seems like a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/xgtyd3/trad...
I can imagine how a specific voice sounds, or singing, etc.; and I can summon a vague visual impression of something,
But ITT people are describing a level of detail I can't comprehend. I have no images I can "study" and I can't solve visual puzzles in my head. I can't rotate arbitrary objects and tell you the shape of their outline.
I guess some of you can do this? Jealous AF.
Words exist for me in the space beyond my lips, or my fingertips; what that feels like, in the moment, is that it is the act of externalization of words which makes them come into being, but not for a moment are they ever out of my control.
I can't remember the sound of my mother's voice. Not really. Of course if I heard it in a recording it would be as recognizable as any voice, and in fact when I watch animated shows, like classic King of the Hill for example, I'm extremely good at picking out all the celebrity voices and I'm often surprised that I can identify a voice I didn't know that I knew.
I used to have an internal monologue. I used to be able to picture things. That all went away in my teens. Not only can I somewhat remember what that was like, I'm able to experience vivid internal pictures and internal sounds sometimes in the moments just before I'm fully asleep. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it's enjoyable when it does.
And that's it. If you have any questions for thisaphantasic non-self-speaker, have at it.
Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except for some spatial or topological feeling.
I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel a subset of recognition features are present or there is something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct triggering on the recognizable features.
I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective. I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger was a very disturbing perspective shift.
But also, how do you solve math problems? Often the you need to draw a graph and look at some crossing points. For me, I can conjure up a video in my mind similar to 3B1B, and I use that to think about the problem. It can even get complicated enough that it would take me a while to draw on paper. How do you solve such problems?
ourguile•5h ago
I have aphantasia and it always astounds me when I see an article like this, or hear a friend talking about it (about not having it) and realize that their experience of the world is so fundamentally different than my own.
tekacs•4h ago
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.
ourguile•4h ago
Now, I've chatted with friends, and my one friend is close to a 2, or maybe a 1 from how he described it (being able to visualize the apple and rotate it 3-dimensionally).
seneca•3h ago
Even this feels like only a partial scale. I can picture what an apple looks like, rotate it in my, and see how light would reflect off of it as it moves.
How about smell? Can you call you mind what it would smell like to slice open an apple and experience that in some sense? Or what it would sound or feel like? I'm curious if it's literally "seeing" or if it's the entire experience of imagining an event.
Xiol•2h ago
I can do none of the things you describe. I know how an apple looks, smells, tastes and sounds when you cut into it, but I can't visualise or hear those sounds at will. I cannot call to mind any visual image of an apple.
I also can't visualise my wife or children's faces, although again, I know what they look like (so it's not face blindness).
I do think I also have SDAM as well, which I think quite often goes hand in hand with total aphantasia.
Hasn't really affected how I go about in the world. I don't feel deficient in any way. It was only a few years ago I found out my experience isn't what the majority experiences.
seneca•2h ago
I find this absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you sharing.
hyperbolablabla•2h ago
I'm very adept at conjuring up sound, though. Maybe it doesn't apply in the same way, but I can hear full symphonies and pick out individual instruments and harmonies and the like.
nogha•3h ago
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.