It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projection screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists almost on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.
I realized I have aphantasia after reading an HN thread about it a few years ago. I talked to my daughter about it and I realized she has it too.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization."
Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.
On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.
On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).
A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:
1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake
2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery
Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.
This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.
It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.
It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.
Those tests could also depend on some third thing, such as not believing that you're visualizing a bright light. I can't see their methodology. "Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength." Really, objective measures of how bright an imaginary light is, how on earth do they think they can measure that!? Was it like "we gave them a sheet of paper where they had to score how bright a light they were imagining, and the sheet of paper objectively existed so it was an objective test"?
Well anyway the whole concept, and the science, seems like a giant troll.
In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..
In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"
It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.
That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?
For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.
> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mathematical rules that is easy to abstract and rotate. It gets more complicated with complex objects and that’s where visualizing things really matters. Here’s a question, can you accurately visualize a loved one’s face, see it in your mind and describe all the features if you were for instance talking to a police sketch artist. I couldn’t even do that for my daughter or my wife.
I definitely can't - if I had to describe my wife or son, I would be hard pressed to go beyond very generic descriptors (long black hair, brown eyes, and so on), nothing useful to create an accurate sketch. And I wouldn't be able to draw them from memory even if I were good at drawing. This could also be explained simply by having bad memory for faces, though.
But yes, little bits of subjective introspective evidence (like that one, and also mostly ignoring visual descriptions in books, and the perception of having no mental images at all that is asked by the standard self-report tests, and so on) add up and make me 99.9% sure I have aphantasia. It's just that it would be nice to have the objective unambiguous external test, the silver bullet, to be totally sure that they're not a bunch of busses in a trench coat as so many honest beliefs are.
You might need to take a person's background into account as well.
I, for instance, am an avid billiards player. A "ball on a table" naturally makes me think of a billiard ball on a billiards table. A whole host of detail was filled in for me, but all specifically in that context. I could answer some of the answers as if I could visualize, but most of them as someone who could not.
n = 1, I know, but sometimes it takes only one example.
Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.
I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.
With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.
This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
Right. Details come in, for me, based on:
- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.
- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.
- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.
And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.
I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.
But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.
Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".
Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
I see actual images, but at least for me its not anywhere near the same as actually looking at something. Its sort of like watching a low fidelity movie for me and I can't really "focus" in on specific details of what I'm visualizing. I think there is definitely a spectrum.
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims:
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply.
Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.
I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.
You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory? I can imagine things happening and fill in lots of detail but I never really "see" anything
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?
When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pretzel with their eyes closed.
Later on, I realized that my mind's eye doesn't actually work like that. It's not like turning on a projection screen against one's closed eyelids and magically seeing things that aren't there. The imagery exists almost on another plane, such that I can visualize an apple with my eyes open or closed, because what I am "seeing" has nothing to do with my eyes themselves.
Which makes me wonder whether people who think they have aphantasia might not be missing a mind's eye, but rather are unaware of how to active it.
This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
For those that have this, how is your auditory imagination? I would not describe my thinking as especially visual, but I can hear things. It's much easier for me to imagine the crunch of someone biting an apple than the image of an apple itself. The effect is quite strong - I can hear music almost as well inside my head as actually listening to it; the sound of instruments, pitches (I don't think it's perfect pitch but it's close), the inflection of someone's voice, etc. I had a lot of trouble learning to read music, because it was a lot easier for me to remember what things were supposed to sound like and just play that than to actually read it.
I realized I have aphantasia after reading an HN thread about it a few years ago. I talked to my daughter about it and I realized she has it too.
I've tried to explain it to people and they get confused. Just as I get confused about their perception; their imagination sounds to me rather like a psychotic hallucination, to exaggerate slightly. I've had some funny discussions about it.
In the end there doesn't seem to me to be any reason to get hung up on these topics. Everybody's inner world and perception can be different from others. That's fine and not a big deal.
For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization."
(edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.
On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.
On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!
And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).
A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:
1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake
2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery
Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.
This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.
It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.
It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.
Those tests could also depend on some third thing, such as not believing that you're visualizing a bright light. I can't see their methodology. "Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength." Really, objective measures of how bright an imaginary light is, how on earth do they think they can measure that!? Was it like "we gave them a sheet of paper where they had to score how bright a light they were imagining, and the sheet of paper objectively existed so it was an objective test"?
Well anyway the whole concept, and the science, seems like a giant troll.
It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.
In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..
In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"
It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.
That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?
For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.
> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mathematical rules that is easy to abstract and rotate. It gets more complicated with complex objects and that’s where visualizing things really matters. Here’s a question, can you accurately visualize a loved one’s face, see it in your mind and describe all the features if you were for instance talking to a police sketch artist. I couldn’t even do that for my daughter or my wife.
I definitely can't - if I had to describe my wife or son, I would be hard pressed to go beyond very generic descriptors (long black hair, brown eyes, and so on), nothing useful to create an accurate sketch. And I wouldn't be able to draw them from memory even if I were good at drawing. This could also be explained simply by having bad memory for faces, though.
But yes, little bits of subjective introspective evidence (like that one, and also mostly ignoring visual descriptions in books, and the perception of having no mental images at all that is asked by the standard self-report tests, and so on) add up and make me 99.9% sure I have aphantasia. It's just that it would be nice to have the objective unambiguous external test, the silver bullet, to be totally sure that they're not a bunch of busses in a trench coat as so many honest beliefs are.
I think this is a better self-test.
Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?
Now, answer these questions:
- What color was the ball?
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
- What did they look like?
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?
You might need to take a person's background into account as well.
I, for instance, am an avid billiards player. A "ball on a table" naturally makes me think of a billiard ball on a billiards table. A whole host of detail was filled in for me, but all specifically in that context. I could answer some of the answers as if I could visualize, but most of them as someone who could not.
n = 1, I know, but sometimes it takes only one example.
Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.
I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.
With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.
This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
Right. Details come in, for me, based on:
- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.
- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.
- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.
And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.
I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.
But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.
Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.
That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.
Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
I think a couple of the comments in this very thread above, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467695 and https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=slibhb are quite relevant to your case. Thinking this is just semantics is a strong indicator you are likely highly aphantasic.
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".
Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
I'm sure it's not, because most of the time I'm aphantasic and rarely I'm not and they're completely different phenomenological experiences.
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia can be measured. See section 6 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11437436/
I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
It's not semantics.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
I see actual images, but at least for me its not anywhere near the same as actually looking at something. Its sort of like watching a low fidelity movie for me and I can't really "focus" in on specific details of what I'm visualizing. I think there is definitely a spectrum.
exactly the same for me
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
There is a section titled "What's It Like To Visualize?" that provides instructions for creating a temporary after-image, then claims:
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization. For those with aphantasia, it's a rare opportunity to "see" what visualization might be like for some visualizers.
Is that really what it is like for those of you who can visualize?
On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."
(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)
But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).
Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.
If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR
I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply. Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.
If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...
Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.
I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.
You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is.
My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing.
I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either.
On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic.
This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
I normally have no autobiographical memory, but once I went to a weeklong meditation retreat and around the second day it sorta all showed up at once.
Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
Aphant and SDAM are linked with many neurological disorders. I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type and OCD.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
They are real for some. I have Aphantasia but my wife has Hyperphantasia so we compare notes often. Each of us are at the edge of the spectrum.
Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
> it opened my eyes to many things
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
From what people report some can see a full picture.
Photographic memory is very rare.
There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
I find it harder to conjure up the sensory experience of scents and flavors, is that something other people can do instinctively?
Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
This always confuses the hell out of me, because I don't think I "see" an apple in the apple test... but I have very good spatial memory and can draw one really well from memory? I can imagine things happening and fill in lots of detail but I never really "see" anything
- kudos to whoever made this
- need one for alzheimers
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92...
including:
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
Can you reach the ground? If not, you may have Short Arms.