I keep reading about people with aphantasia in threads like these, and I never hear from who don’t have it explain what do they see and how vivid it is.
Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?
I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.
My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.
It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.
One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.
After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.
It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.
I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.
Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!
I'm not aphantasic, but that's exactly the experience I get when coming out of a lucid dream. Except it's my expected surroundings not black. Gets a bit weird and inceptiony when it's the wrong surroundings! Given the number of cultural references along these lines, I suspect it's not uncommon.
I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.
In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.
I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)
FWIW I’m exactly like you. My ability to replay music sometimes surprises me.
Sometimes I’ll hear a song on the radio I haven’t heard in decades and be able to anticipate tiny details precisely (like, “here’s where the harmonica comes in in Karma Chameleon” or “here’s where the fretless bass is gonna bend a note”. You?
I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.
Interesting that you say you had no visuals from LSD. How high a dose?
It's surprising to me, because as far as I understand it, psychedelic visuals aren't really akin to daydreams or internally generated imagery, but abnormal processing of external imagery. At least for relatively mild experiences. Something like a DMT breakthrough is a whole other story from what I hear, though I've never been there myself.
That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the highest I went for was about 4-500ug (according to the vendor, it was on a postal stamp so there can be quite some variance). I was exploring psychedelics several months in a row while increasing the dose, so there might have been some tolerance buildup. And it wasn't that I had no visuals at all - juar there was nothing visually profound, just some things shifting and moving here and there, people outside looking a bit strange, etc. Felt more like strange, weird drunkenness than anything. It was not at at all an uninteresting experience - just extremely cerebral. I tried DMT several times by the way, but couldn't break through - it gets very scary very fast, and the taste is like smoking a plastic bag, which was in itself quite off-putting.
How’s your sleep quality? I (aphantasic) only ever dream on weekends when I sleep in over 8 hours (rare), and having to get up to pee after 4 hours also cuts in.
Depends on the coffee intake and stress; when I am on vacation, I sleep 7-8 hours without waking up. I am lucky that I don't need to pee during the night, though.
I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)
When you express you have aphantasia to someone, one of the most common questions is whether you can dream. As someone with it: Yes I can dream. They're so real they are lifelike. And not just visually. In my dreams, reality and history itself can be different and to me, history didn't change. It just is.
I rememeber in one dream I was some sort of captain and I saw one of my closest friends. We'd been crewmates for the past 40 years and I remember all my memories with him and why I trusted him with my life. I was 22 when I had the dream.
I don't have aphantasia but I sometimes also have dreams that are so realistic that when I wake up I feel as if it was some type of alternative reality. In some cases it is also as if I am watching a "movie" where the life I am experiencing is not my own, but I will still know each person.
That's fascinating. Do you gain access to facts or knowledge that are verifiable afterwards? Have you ever become fluent in a foreign language for a dream?
It is a good question because aphantasics that can dream normally are far less likely to engage in the sort of "aphantasia is just semantics" denalism that is largely disproven given modern science and online discourse. I.e. it is a very strong credibility signal that what follows is not just cope / self-delusion, but actually potentially useful and interesting self-report.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
Question for visualizers: is imagery held steady in your dream, or does it constantly shift and morph?
I’m aphantasic and like I’ve seen many people report here, I can kinda almost conjure up images but can’t hold them steady even for a microsecond. It immediately disintegrates and can’t be brought back.
In my dreams the imagery always shifts, but not in the same way. It’s held enough to be recognizable before changing into some other random nonsense like happens in dreams.
(I dreamt last night a StarCraft 2 YouTuber I follow was spamming raven auto-turrets over some people from a helicopter, which they shot down with a machine gun, and the youtuber survived the crash but he didn’t look at all like himself and that confused me, but we were in an Italian castle, and I was hiding from gangsters, but my boss had traveled to Italy and we were in a hospital where he was getting “torso reduction” and I put my hand on the small of his back, and it was my wife)
Certain types of meditation training involve specifically this faculty - the ability to hold a particular image steady in the visual imagination. Having the ability to vividly imagine a visual scene or a simple geometric shape is very much a muscle which can be trained; the brain is very plastic in this regard.
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
According to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
I can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.
Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.
I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.
Exactly the same here. When I learned that other people actually could visualise things, it made me realise why I've spent my life being a commercial photographer and camera developer. Capture the images - I guess most people get this for free to some extent
As somebody who only has closed eye visuals in deep meditation or in dreams, I would maybe describe what you call "knowingness" as "abstract representation"?
As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
Yes this. I have, based on a battery of spatial reasoning tests I took years ago, way above average spatial reasoning capabilities. I also notice a lot IRL that others do not, based on anecdotal evidence.
I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips?
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
I've just spent the past 20 minutes thinking about how I do it, I can do both eyes closed and eyes open, at work, I mostly talk with my eyes closed actually because my thinking style is generally quite visual. I then spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain it, and it sounds a bit nuts...for eyes open there are generally 2 things involved for me, one is what I could describe as "disassociating from my eyes" my eyes are open but somehow my brain just kinda suppresses the image into what becomes an out of focus low contrast blur, and then my eyes typically look up a bit. The images themselves appear in an area that feels like it's in the top of my head where a darker area has formed, in that space I can think about what I want to visualize, or my brain serves me images if I'm thinking. I googled around a bit, according to this research, folks who have strong minds eye report a few different places that they use to build the image within, some people report they built it out in front of them, other like me build it "inside", other folks report other spots: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.30.679629v2.... - this one is also pretty interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381002...
My takeaway from all of the discussions is that the ability to 'see' an imagined visual representation of something exists on a spectrum from absolutely nothing ever, into a minds eye abstract idea of an image (like a melody heard in your mind rather than your ears) toward a full ability to see an image overlay in the visual space. There's a lot of debate as to whether this is a trainable ability.
This makes no sense if you can visualize things when you’re dreaming your brain has no problem visualizing things it’s just correctly suppressed when you are awake
I've also had this kind of topological knowingness which I couldn't name. Another comment here says "schematic conceptual" which captures what it feels like for me.
Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.
I feel that I could visualize internally but there's a curtain pulled over the visualization part of it. It's there, i feel it but it's blocked from my sight somehow. I've built intuitive ways to probe the imagination so I technically experience my image-less visualization. However, when I attempt to visualize something more complex (there are a lot of elements or minutiae) I'm reaching my intuitive limits. When it comes to auditory imagination, I can literally listen to a song from my own head all day long with no effort.
Have you worked mostly as documentary photographer, or did you also do stages setups, like portraying people? I am only a photo enthusiast without any mental images and I struggle with portraits. Since I know about aphantasia I am wondering whether it has something to do with the absence of mental images.
Honestly, I’ve done it all. I’ve shot thousands of headshots and portraits and hundreds of events. I’ve not typically been a “conceptual” photographer such as somebody like Art Kane. I started on film and moved to digital in 2003 before I was shooting professionally. I get more of an “idea” in my head, however I don’t “see” a final result. Digital has helped immeasurably to refine my work more quickly. Just as I “know” what a red fire hydrant looks like but I do not “see” an image.
I can't visualize at all when awake, but I have been into lucid dreaming in my past and my dreams were visual and more detailed than real life (no bad lenses for the light to go through, I guess). I can also visualize a little bit when on either edge of sleep. I've been noticing that the occasional images that I see in that state are becoming more colorful and detailed. I'm hoping that means actual phantasia in my future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.
Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.
I'm still not sure the real difference isn't just where people draw the line in generalizing what it means to "see" and "hear" things.
My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something.
How can we be sure that we're not just labeling the experience differently?
When I "see something in my head" while dreaming, it is like seeing: There is a clear visual image. I don't see the black behind my eyelids. I can tell colours. I can tell shapes.
When I "imagine" something while I awake, it is not remotely like seeing. There is no image overlaid on the "real world" whether obscuring the black behind my eyelids or anything else when they are open. I can't tell shapes, or colours. If my eyes are closed, I just see the inside of my eyelids, nothing more.
My one experience of seeing something while awake during meditation was like being inside a movie. Everything was as clear as if I had been walking around in that setting for real.
I don't know what it will take to make you sure, but for me, I have experienced three entirely different "modes" of imagining things, ranging from no visuals, to shifting and unclear visual, to crystal clear images, and the distinction is stark and obvious - there's no ambiguity in it.
I don't think "imagination" should be remotely like seeing.
it's completely different than dreaming or seeing with your real eyes, I would qualify it as a "different sense" if you will.
for me, it's much less detailed unless I focus my imagination on the less detailed part.
The distinction between imagination and seeing is regularly blurred, most commonly in dreams, but also on psychedelics or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis), and also in altered spiritual states (meditative practices).
The two experiences are different, most of the time, yes, but only "completely 100% different" IMO to aphantasics, or those who are high in aphantasia. I.e. hyperphantasia is a thing, and a normal thing for most people in altered states (and schizophrenia might be seen as involving an extreme form of hyperphantasia intruding where it shouldn't, in some cases).
I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences. The recent use of brain imaging to examine this question is sort of interesting, in that perhaps it could concretely and relatively objectively answer that question. Though my interest is somewhat diminished by the questions that have been raised around the entire premise of brain imaging as a solution to this problem, e.g., https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1602413113 (2016), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32483374/ (2020), https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/8/e53/4032512 (2017).
I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers trying to study aphantasia and come to your own conclusions about whether they're actually doing all that much. My own suggested that while there are some improvements since the papers I cited that it is still difficult to say that they've solved the problems in those studies.
Still, directionally, while inferring from "brain activations" to qualia is a difficult path, if there was enough data to show big and consistent correlations that would tend to satisfy me that maybe there is some sort of real difference and we're not just talking past each other. It's not such a shocking claim that I need truly shocking evidence to believe it, just some support.
> I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences
This is fairly conclusively disproven by far more than just fMRI / brain-imaging studies. E.g. aphantasics have problem with visual memory recall, visual priming, pupil dilatory and skin conductance responses when imagining light and/or fearful stimuli, and many other results (especially acquired aphantasia) that don't depend on brain imaging and obviously rule out semantic explanations. Likewise, rejecting the reality of the phenomenon also seems to require believing an extraordinary amount of error and/or conspiracy on the part of highly educated and insightful people that explicitly are saying the issue is not one of semantics / description. This is also not to mention the rich history of visualization practices in much of the worlds religions and esoteric practices (which make basically zero sense if this is all metaphor). See e.g. the discussion in a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464414).
> I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers [...]
Likewise, an unbiased AI prompt (or two prompts in separate sessions, with opposite biases) will clearly reveal the "semantics denialist" case has very little to stand on here. Yes, there are communication and linguistic issues, but these only cover a subset of ambiguous cases. Rejecting or denying the reality of aphantasia is an extremely strong indicator you are aphantasic, to some considerable degree.
It's possible, but "aphantasia is fairly rare" and "aphastastics abound on HN, even moreso than is apparent if there's a number of people like jerf who are aphantastic and still unaware despite even posting on stories about it" is a bit of an odd combination that I'm struggling with. Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlations that could lead to our industry abounding in them. Though prior to this I would have thought quite the opposite given the association between visual processing and success in STEM and engineering.
One easy answer up there with "more study is needed" in terms of being a bit cliche, but cliche because it's often true, is that there may be a richer spectrum or something that isn't even 1-dimensional then we're currently able to grasp, which will become more clear over time and more study. Perhaps it's less rare than we think and the rareness is only those we can talk into agreeing their qualia really is different from others. Or the way we are describing it leads people in the "1-2 out of 5" category to declare themselves aphantastic on HN when they aren't really properly so.
> Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlations that could lead to our industry abounding in them. Though prior to this I would have thought quite the opposite given the association between visual processing and success in STEM and engineering.
I agree this is an annoying confound, and also that it feels highly intuitive that being able to consciously visualize ought to correlate with better visuospatial (and thus much mathematical) cognitive ability.
I think the solution is recognizing that the reason cognitive deficits are mostly unobserved (visual memory recall studies aside) is recognizing that aphantasia is almost certainly a conscious access problem, i.e. most aphantasics are still using imagery too, just unawares. Last I checked, this is the leading hypothesis / explanation.
Also, plasticity and the ingenuity of the brain is clearly such that an aphantasic can also find other ways (e.g. other sensory modality imagery, pure logical relations, etc) of representing the problems that seem like they should rely on visualization. It seems obvious to me that these other ways can be both advantageous/disadvantageous, depending on the situation / phenomenon.
This is partly why only aphantasics argue for the "it is only semantics" explanation. For anyone else, this explanation makes no sense, because they have at least one vivid example showing otherwise. Only if you have no vivid visual experiences does this argument have any appeal.
Also the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia are especially troubling for the skeptical "semantic disagreement" cases, given that acquired aphantasia is entirely within-person.
Yeah, that is my experience too. I consider myself to have aphantasia - I have had that one vivid experience outside my dreams. Outside of that it's all been blank my whole life. Without that one experience maybe I'd doubt it too, but it really is fascinating how many of the people who insist it can't exist give descriptions of their experience that suggest they have it.
I've had dreams where I was "there" and it felt like being present in a scene in a very real way (for a dream). But ask me to close my eyes and visualize a blue table with a red apple on it and its nothing but phosphenes at best.
I always assumed that when people say "imagine this image..." that it was about the contextual nature of it. Only several months ago did I learn that aphantasia is a thing and I'm among the ~4% of the population in this group.
With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).
A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]
They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.
Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics
Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.
Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
There is some truth in this, but evidence sometimes suggests worse visuospatial memory, at least under some very specific operationalizations. E.g. less detail can be remembered overall, even though crucial details remembered are the same: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10598423/
More likely than not there are tradeoffs to using strictly visual vs. visual+ vs. strictly non-visual mental models in all domains, and there is no universally optimal strategy (and that teams of mixed cognitive styles are best overall). You know, no free lunch.
It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.
So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.
And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.
"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.
I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.
Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.
It's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.
Watch people draw, and you'll realize that can't be true, or at least is a very incomplete description of what's going on.
People have processes they go through to eventually get to something reasonably correct. Systems for drawing people, perspective rules, etc. These get extremely elaborate. They shouldn't need any of it if they could fully visualize the scene. They'd just need to copy that image to paper.
You'll hear people say things like "trust the process". They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete. Even when they're doing things correctly, their brain isn't recognizing it.
> They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete.
In general I agree, but I have a counter example. I have a friend that has always been very good at drawing, and when he draws, it's immediately obvious that he has a very precise idea of what is going to happen. People often gather around him because it is entertaining to look at the drawing and suddenly understand what it represents. It's a similar experience to uncovering a photo frame covered with dust.
I assume that this ability is not uncommon among professional drawers.
Yep, I often find the hardest thing is coordinating the hands to produce what the brain is showing. My frustration often stems from the meat gloves just not being fast or accurate enough to keep up.
(Designer/illustrator/animator, now software engineering.)
When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.
I do a lot of thinking by visualizing relationships between concepts in a kind of graph. When I draw, I visualize the scene first. When I build widgets in my wood shop, I visualize the result and all intermediate states. When I was writing 3d renderers (a long time ago), it was immensely helpful to visualize the points and triangles in my head.
I built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.
That's not really what the article is about:
"Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.
There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.
Interesting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.
Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways
Yes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).
I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that.
Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past.
Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!
I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.
This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.
It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
Same but in reverse, a certain psychiatric medication turned on an internal monologue I've never had before and it drove me absolutely, literally insane until it wore off. Never again. The most inane, moronic commentary about my day to day life as it happened, like Barney speaking through me. I normally experience the world wordlessly, mostly visually, and construct ideas and actions that way (thinking about, say, getting a glass of water, I'll picture the process), so having internal speech suddenly thrust upon me was awful.
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?
If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.
I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".
Some people have inner dialogues. Some authors are literally writing down what characters are saying in their head, and sometimes what they see them "do" as well.
Me here, inner dialogue frequently, inner monologue never (self-directed speech like "okay now I need to pick up the ...")
My inner dialogues almost always come with full fidelity, visual, audio, tactile, I can still smell the Marlboros on my dad's flannel even though he stopped smoking 20+ years ago.
People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).
As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.
I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.
As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.
I have no idea if I'm anywhere on the spectrum, but I really don't visualize images, but I can definitely hear sounds in my mind's ear. Not smells, tho. When I dream, it's almost no images. It's feelings, with a story associated. To the extent i do have images, they are very washed out, basically no color or detail.
I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it.
I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
Some people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery
Hearing your own voice Vs high fidelity musical instruments and other people's voices seems like a very wide spectrum. And indeed, it is wider as some people don't hear anything at all, including no inner monologue (I know someone like that - she's a good writer, and it freaks people out to realise the she can't 'hear' the words before she writes them, which is weird, because my vocalisation of words I wrote noticeably lags my writing)
This entire conversation is new and fascinating to me. I used to be much more visual but I would say that my primary mode of thinking now is monologic. However I would never think to describe it as hearing. It is more like an imaginary 'voice' that is not the one I use with other people (it is absent timbre etc and just a much simpler more efficient voice abstracted from physical constraints). I use it to write out my thoughts in my mind. I quasi-visualize the chain of words just in a very abstract, largely amorphous way using this 'voice' and play them through my mind while 'speaking'/'hearing' them. In this sense I pretty literally get 'lost in my train of thought' when thinking about something interesting.
I don't know how much this style of thought came about because I really didn't enjoy constantly visualizing things and consistently fought against it; mainly due to the constant intrusive visual sequences of various types, of which I still have far too many for my taste. I use schematic and visual imaginations all the time, but I guess I feel safer using the monologue and so it has become the bulk of my thought. At the same time the fact that I have learned several languages and have had to consciously focus on language over the years undoubtedly plays a big part. I wonder how many polyglots who learned languages later in life use a similar monologic imagination style?
For my part I have a constant droning monologue on my voice I can only stop by sleeping or intensely focusing, like meditation. It's unambiguously my voice, as if I'm about to speak, but my vocal chords just don't engage but the sound appears in my head instead.
My monologue uses several languages... But my monologue has always been there, since years before I learnt my second language.
To add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.
I have music running in my head most of the time, at least in the background unless I’m concentrating deeply on something. I’m also a musician and the best way I can describe it is that the music I’m hearing in my head somehow comes out of my instrument.
I have aphantasia, and I think my experience with music is similar.
I can think about a song, think about the melody, lyrics, etc… but I don’t hear it. If I hear a couple notes that remind me of a song, I can go through the rest of the intro, get to where the lyrics start, and get to the chorus and remember the name of the song (if it doesn’t come to me instantly), but it’s nothing like playback. It’s more like my inner monologue doing a bad a cappella cover version.
I sometimes wonder if everyone is talking about the same thing, but using different language to describe it. Some being more vivid and metaphorical in their speech than others.
It reminds me of a joke. It's better told in person but you get the idea:
A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks.
"Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?"
"Yeah?"
"Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?"
hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture!
Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.
1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street.
2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see.
3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times.
4. Can remember a favorite color.
5. Don't have a consistent handwriting.
I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?
i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average.
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
My drawing style is different from memory, though. Clearer lines, vs closer to impressionist if I draw from something in front of my eye. The difference is quite stark.
I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.)
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
I went to some seminars that talked about this a lot. How visualizing doing something perfectly can be as good, or better, than actual practice. There was also a lot of, “close your eyes, imagine a bike, what color is it?” type stuff.
Not being able to visualize anything, all of this fell very flat. It wasn’t until later I found out there actually are people who can visualize things as if they were happening. I have trouble wrapping my mind around what that must be like, but I bet all these visualization exercises make a lot more sense.
I'm also an aphant. Recognition still happens. I'll see a person I haven't seen in years, know that I know them, then finally remember who they are much later. Even though I can't picture them after seeing them, I'll still remember who they are much later. Usually, anyway.
I get stressed out having to meet someone I haven't seen for a long time in a cafe or something. I have to scan everyone and wait for that ping of recognition to happen.
No, memory is not limited to facts. There's just no visualization to go along with the recollection of faces etc. You can absolutely still recognize people correctly when looking at them.
That's a fascinating question - I'm aphantasic and mildly face blind (I thought the two female leads in Disclosure Day were the same person for most of the movie and that we were jumping back and forth in her timeline). I've always assumed I'm face blind because of the aphantasia, but I know several aphantasics who have no problem recognising faces.
In answer to the question though, no - even as someone with face blindness, the faces of people I've known and loved for a long time are burned in somewhere - I just can't access that part of my brain at will.
I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like.
Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head.
Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not.
I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative
I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
Yes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal.
1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure.
2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.)
I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it?
This is a bit more stream of thought, hopefully that is helpful.
The pyramid can’t take up all the space inside the cube, only another cube could do that. So there must be some points that are “inside cube, outside pyramid” and other points “inside cube, inside pyramid”. The pyramid is given as wholly inside the cube so there are no “outside cube, inside pyramid” points. Same for sphere inside the pyramid. So it’s
I struggle parsing the ray description, “horizontal” must meaningfully constrain the ray somehow (otherwise it wouldn’t have been mentioned), but I don’t know what that changes. Then I think about facts I know about rays - they can be uniquely specified with two points, or one point and one direction - oh, and we are given the direction is always “horizontal”, so we only need one point. The ray goes on forever so every “in” is “enter+exit”, so add 2 for every “in”. So it’s
1) Maximum, that’s 6, from the last option, so “cube, pyramid, sphere…”, have to exit the innermost first, so “…sphere, pyramid, cube”. I don’t know where this ray is positioned, “halfway” might be a good guess, or maybe pyramid is half of square and circle is half of pyramid so “a quarter way up”.
2) Distinct, that’s `0 2 4 6`. `0` doesn’t count because we want “still passes through the cube”, so 3 counts exist. Thankful that “tangents don’t count” so I don’t have to think about them, because nothing immediately comes to mind on how to handle them.
yes this is correct. Thanks for writing that out, it's really interesting to read how you solved this without picturing it.
It's a bit surprising to me that it was unclear what I meant by horizontal/level, I thought this word is well-known and easy to understand. Here's what I mean by horizontal: For me, it means that with respect to the ground, the ray isn't rising or falling as it travels, i.e. it's level (like a plane flying in level flight with respect to the ground, not rising or falling). This constraint doesn't really matter I guess, except that I said that the cube is also level on the ground on one of its surfaces, so since you have to cast the ray in a horizontal/level way, you can't cast the ray at an angle through one of the corners so it goes through the opposite corner of the cube, since - if you think of the ray like a plane - you can only move the angle of the ray side to side not up and down, it stays in level flight = horizontal, so you can't cast it through both opposite corners if the cube is lying flat on the horizontal on one of its surfaces. As I just wrote this paragraph, I pictured what my description of casting through both corners the would look like and why it's not level with the ground anymore. I guess it's harder to follow my words without picturing it.
You mentioned it's not clear how being horizontal constrains the ray, based on what I wrote and what I meant about it being level, is it now clearer how this constrains some of the rays that can be cast? (Like how you can't cast a ray through the opposite ends of the cube now)? Or is that hard for you to follow? For me I think maybe my words could be written in a bit confusing way but I think someone can understand them if they can picture what I referred to. Without that mental picture it could be difficult though.
Your words are not unclear! You are doing a fantastic job of using words that work very easily with mental imagery, and but not at all without. I said I didn’t understand horizontal because without mental imagery I have no “floor” for the ray to be parallel to - I could have found something to be the referent for the horizontal if I had to, but once I thought I had explained why “horizontal” was mentioned I stopped trying to figure it out further.
I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc?
2. Can you visualize pure motion? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense)
3. Can you visualize just colors? I discovered that I can conjure up colors without any associated shape. Takes a bit of patience but the color eventually arrives. Quite a thrill for an aphantasic!
I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).
If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.
Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.
For me, I sort of imagine the sensation of eating something and observe how I react to it. If it's a strong positive reaction, that's what I'm in the mood for. Otherwise, if it's kind of a more bored reaction, I cast my mind out for another idea and try again.
> If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
Because the interior version is strictly inferior to the real thing, at least for me. It's, maybe, 80% as good, but that last 20% is a real humdinger.
Especially for music, I have a hard time hearing it in my head and not playing/singing/drumming along with it. Currently working on "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions as practice, and it's basically been playing in my head for the last 72 hours.
I do have to listen to it occasionally to refresh, but it certainly makes learning music easier... if not infuriating. Looking at you Lou Bega, and Rob Thomas.
Does 80% mean "tastes like a dull chocolate bar, but still basically a chocolate bar", or more like "like a nice chocolate bar but somehow 20% less enjoyable in some looser way"?
Perhaps this is why I can't identify the beat in the music.
Like a nice chocolate bar, but echoed - so I can remember what it tastes like enough to want one, but not satisfy the urge to actually have one. Ephemeral, rather than satisfying.
I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.
Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.
Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is.
I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.
It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.
Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.
Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.
But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.
A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.
Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?
Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.
Drawing? doing math around how many edges are common between the two? I turn it and count, but I could also do it other ways, including exploding it into flat shapes or conceptually understanding the nodes and vertices of the graph, or counting the edges and dividing by two since there are 6 total faces.
This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.
And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.
My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron.
This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.
There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?
Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.
It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
Prove is a strong word. But it supports the existence of the condition as it coheres with our scientific models of visual experience. You can always reach for obscure philosophical puzzles about phenomenal experience to try to invalidate the science, but at that point you're just having a different debate than the rest of us.
In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?”
If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.
Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.
For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.
I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.
The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.
Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.
> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).
While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.
I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)
Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.
But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.
I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.
I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
I feel you, in the same boat, though I can't actually isolate any trauma or anything like that, reliving unpleasant experiences verbatim is no fun. And the early 2000s was not a fun time with all the pop earworms running around.
It's funny, I've never met anyone but my family who can do this like I can, so cheers! I always say I don't have a perfect memory, but I don't know anyone I can test myself against except my mother, who can "relive a trail ride she took 45 years ago down to the plants and opening and closing the gates". Having to remind people about significant shared life events is a real downer.
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.
I keep reading about people with aphantasia in threads like these, and I never hear from who don’t have it explain what do they see and how vivid it is.
Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?
I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.
My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.
It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.
One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.
After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.
It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.
I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.
Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!
I'm not aphantasic, but that's exactly the experience I get when coming out of a lucid dream. Except it's my expected surroundings not black. Gets a bit weird and inceptiony when it's the wrong surroundings! Given the number of cultural references along these lines, I suspect it's not uncommon.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally.
I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.
In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.
I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)
FWIW I’m exactly like you. My ability to replay music sometimes surprises me.
Sometimes I’ll hear a song on the radio I haven’t heard in decades and be able to anticipate tiny details precisely (like, “here’s where the harmonica comes in in Karma Chameleon” or “here’s where the fretless bass is gonna bend a note”. You?
I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.
Interesting that you say you had no visuals from LSD. How high a dose?
It's surprising to me, because as far as I understand it, psychedelic visuals aren't really akin to daydreams or internally generated imagery, but abnormal processing of external imagery. At least for relatively mild experiences. Something like a DMT breakthrough is a whole other story from what I hear, though I've never been there myself.
That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the highest I went for was about 4-500ug (according to the vendor, it was on a postal stamp so there can be quite some variance). I was exploring psychedelics several months in a row while increasing the dose, so there might have been some tolerance buildup. And it wasn't that I had no visuals at all - juar there was nothing visually profound, just some things shifting and moving here and there, people outside looking a bit strange, etc. Felt more like strange, weird drunkenness than anything. It was not at at all an uninteresting experience - just extremely cerebral. I tried DMT several times by the way, but couldn't break through - it gets very scary very fast, and the taste is like smoking a plastic bag, which was in itself quite off-putting.
How’s your sleep quality? I (aphantasic) only ever dream on weekends when I sleep in over 8 hours (rare), and having to get up to pee after 4 hours also cuts in.
Depends on the coffee intake and stress; when I am on vacation, I sleep 7-8 hours without waking up. I am lucky that I don't need to pee during the night, though.
I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
My lucid dreaming has always been when I'm in danger, like this description of a Sadako dream
https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...
So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)
Interesting to me that three different people have responded with the same "I'm also aphantasic and dream normally" start to their message.
When you express you have aphantasia to someone, one of the most common questions is whether you can dream. As someone with it: Yes I can dream. They're so real they are lifelike. And not just visually. In my dreams, reality and history itself can be different and to me, history didn't change. It just is.
I rememeber in one dream I was some sort of captain and I saw one of my closest friends. We'd been crewmates for the past 40 years and I remember all my memories with him and why I trusted him with my life. I was 22 when I had the dream.
I don't have aphantasia but I sometimes also have dreams that are so realistic that when I wake up I feel as if it was some type of alternative reality. In some cases it is also as if I am watching a "movie" where the life I am experiencing is not my own, but I will still know each person.
That's fascinating. Do you gain access to facts or knowledge that are verifiable afterwards? Have you ever become fluent in a foreign language for a dream?
It is a good question because aphantasics that can dream normally are far less likely to engage in the sort of "aphantasia is just semantics" denalism that is largely disproven given modern science and online discourse. I.e. it is a very strong credibility signal that what follows is not just cope / self-delusion, but actually potentially useful and interesting self-report.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
Question for visualizers: is imagery held steady in your dream, or does it constantly shift and morph?
I’m aphantasic and like I’ve seen many people report here, I can kinda almost conjure up images but can’t hold them steady even for a microsecond. It immediately disintegrates and can’t be brought back.
In my dreams the imagery always shifts, but not in the same way. It’s held enough to be recognizable before changing into some other random nonsense like happens in dreams.
(I dreamt last night a StarCraft 2 YouTuber I follow was spamming raven auto-turrets over some people from a helicopter, which they shot down with a machine gun, and the youtuber survived the crash but he didn’t look at all like himself and that confused me, but we were in an Italian castle, and I was hiding from gangsters, but my boss had traveled to Italy and we were in a hospital where he was getting “torso reduction” and I put my hand on the small of his back, and it was my wife)
Certain types of meditation training involve specifically this faculty - the ability to hold a particular image steady in the visual imagination. Having the ability to vividly imagine a visual scene or a simple geometric shape is very much a muscle which can be trained; the brain is very plastic in this regard.
shikantaza (zen meditation, basically) has significantly improved my ability to visualize.
People with no imagination are rewriting my industry as well
Haha, but the subject is not people with no imagination. It’s people whose imaginations aren’t visual.
I see
We don't... at least not in our minds anyway.
Insensitive comment for this thread, but I suspect on purpose ;-)
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.
Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.
It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.
Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.
Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.
The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo
According to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.
I can personally watch a movie in my head, eyes open and I’m super not artistic but very engineer oriented. To the point that I realized I should be dropping software for mech eng
> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.
I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.
Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.
But id still describe myself as an aphant.
Anyone who doesn't believe this is real needs to explain the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia. Good luck with that.
I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.
Exactly the same here. When I learned that other people actually could visualise things, it made me realise why I've spent my life being a commercial photographer and camera developer. Capture the images - I guess most people get this for free to some extent
As somebody who only has closed eye visuals in deep meditation or in dreams, I would maybe describe what you call "knowingness" as "abstract representation"?
As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye
Yes this. I have, based on a battery of spatial reasoning tests I took years ago, way above average spatial reasoning capabilities. I also notice a lot IRL that others do not, based on anecdotal evidence.
I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips?
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
I've just spent the past 20 minutes thinking about how I do it, I can do both eyes closed and eyes open, at work, I mostly talk with my eyes closed actually because my thinking style is generally quite visual. I then spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain it, and it sounds a bit nuts...for eyes open there are generally 2 things involved for me, one is what I could describe as "disassociating from my eyes" my eyes are open but somehow my brain just kinda suppresses the image into what becomes an out of focus low contrast blur, and then my eyes typically look up a bit. The images themselves appear in an area that feels like it's in the top of my head where a darker area has formed, in that space I can think about what I want to visualize, or my brain serves me images if I'm thinking. I googled around a bit, according to this research, folks who have strong minds eye report a few different places that they use to build the image within, some people report they built it out in front of them, other like me build it "inside", other folks report other spots: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.30.679629v2.... - this one is also pretty interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381002...
This is always a hot topic on HN.
My takeaway from all of the discussions is that the ability to 'see' an imagined visual representation of something exists on a spectrum from absolutely nothing ever, into a minds eye abstract idea of an image (like a melody heard in your mind rather than your ears) toward a full ability to see an image overlay in the visual space. There's a lot of debate as to whether this is a trainable ability.
This makes no sense if you can visualize things when you’re dreaming your brain has no problem visualizing things it’s just correctly suppressed when you are awake
It's not suppressed for the vast majority of people. If you consider that "correct", odds are you too have aphantasia.
I've also had this kind of topological knowingness which I couldn't name. Another comment here says "schematic conceptual" which captures what it feels like for me.
Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.
I feel that I could visualize internally but there's a curtain pulled over the visualization part of it. It's there, i feel it but it's blocked from my sight somehow. I've built intuitive ways to probe the imagination so I technically experience my image-less visualization. However, when I attempt to visualize something more complex (there are a lot of elements or minutiae) I'm reaching my intuitive limits. When it comes to auditory imagination, I can literally listen to a song from my own head all day long with no effort.
Have you worked mostly as documentary photographer, or did you also do stages setups, like portraying people? I am only a photo enthusiast without any mental images and I struggle with portraits. Since I know about aphantasia I am wondering whether it has something to do with the absence of mental images.
Honestly, I’ve done it all. I’ve shot thousands of headshots and portraits and hundreds of events. I’ve not typically been a “conceptual” photographer such as somebody like Art Kane. I started on film and moved to digital in 2003 before I was shooting professionally. I get more of an “idea” in my head, however I don’t “see” a final result. Digital has helped immeasurably to refine my work more quickly. Just as I “know” what a red fire hydrant looks like but I do not “see” an image.
What’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?
I can't visualize at all when awake, but I have been into lucid dreaming in my past and my dreams were visual and more detailed than real life (no bad lenses for the light to go through, I guess). I can also visualize a little bit when on either edge of sleep. I've been noticing that the occasional images that I see in that state are becoming more colorful and detailed. I'm hoping that means actual phantasia in my future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.
I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.
Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.
Same here. The fact that I see things in my dreams is one of the reasons I feel I can know for certain I don't see things when I "imagine" things.
I'm still not sure the real difference isn't just where people draw the line in generalizing what it means to "see" and "hear" things.
My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something.
How can we be sure that we're not just labeling the experience differently?
When I "see something in my head" while dreaming, it is like seeing: There is a clear visual image. I don't see the black behind my eyelids. I can tell colours. I can tell shapes.
When I "imagine" something while I awake, it is not remotely like seeing. There is no image overlaid on the "real world" whether obscuring the black behind my eyelids or anything else when they are open. I can't tell shapes, or colours. If my eyes are closed, I just see the inside of my eyelids, nothing more.
My one experience of seeing something while awake during meditation was like being inside a movie. Everything was as clear as if I had been walking around in that setting for real.
I don't know what it will take to make you sure, but for me, I have experienced three entirely different "modes" of imagining things, ranging from no visuals, to shifting and unclear visual, to crystal clear images, and the distinction is stark and obvious - there's no ambiguity in it.
I don't think "imagination" should be remotely like seeing. it's completely different than dreaming or seeing with your real eyes, I would qualify it as a "different sense" if you will.
for me, it's much less detailed unless I focus my imagination on the less detailed part.
The distinction between imagination and seeing is regularly blurred, most commonly in dreams, but also on psychedelics or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis), and also in altered spiritual states (meditative practices).
The two experiences are different, most of the time, yes, but only "completely 100% different" IMO to aphantasics, or those who are high in aphantasia. I.e. hyperphantasia is a thing, and a normal thing for most people in altered states (and schizophrenia might be seen as involving an extreme form of hyperphantasia intruding where it shouldn't, in some cases).
Your theory is fairly conclusively disproven, most damningly by acquired aphantasia.
See also my post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707079
I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences. The recent use of brain imaging to examine this question is sort of interesting, in that perhaps it could concretely and relatively objectively answer that question. Though my interest is somewhat diminished by the questions that have been raised around the entire premise of brain imaging as a solution to this problem, e.g., https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1602413113 (2016), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32483374/ (2020), https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/8/e53/4032512 (2017).
I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers trying to study aphantasia and come to your own conclusions about whether they're actually doing all that much. My own suggested that while there are some improvements since the papers I cited that it is still difficult to say that they've solved the problems in those studies.
Still, directionally, while inferring from "brain activations" to qualia is a difficult path, if there was enough data to show big and consistent correlations that would tend to satisfy me that maybe there is some sort of real difference and we're not just talking past each other. It's not such a shocking claim that I need truly shocking evidence to believe it, just some support.
> I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences
This is fairly conclusively disproven by far more than just fMRI / brain-imaging studies. E.g. aphantasics have problem with visual memory recall, visual priming, pupil dilatory and skin conductance responses when imagining light and/or fearful stimuli, and many other results (especially acquired aphantasia) that don't depend on brain imaging and obviously rule out semantic explanations. Likewise, rejecting the reality of the phenomenon also seems to require believing an extraordinary amount of error and/or conspiracy on the part of highly educated and insightful people that explicitly are saying the issue is not one of semantics / description. This is also not to mention the rich history of visualization practices in much of the worlds religions and esoteric practices (which make basically zero sense if this is all metaphor). See e.g. the discussion in a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464414).
> I invite you to feed your own friendly AI these references then ask it to analyze the recent papers [...]
Likewise, an unbiased AI prompt (or two prompts in separate sessions, with opposite biases) will clearly reveal the "semantics denialist" case has very little to stand on here. Yes, there are communication and linguistic issues, but these only cover a subset of ambiguous cases. Rejecting or denying the reality of aphantasia is an extremely strong indicator you are aphantasic, to some considerable degree.
It's possible, but "aphantasia is fairly rare" and "aphastastics abound on HN, even moreso than is apparent if there's a number of people like jerf who are aphantastic and still unaware despite even posting on stories about it" is a bit of an odd combination that I'm struggling with. Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlations that could lead to our industry abounding in them. Though prior to this I would have thought quite the opposite given the association between visual processing and success in STEM and engineering.
One easy answer up there with "more study is needed" in terms of being a bit cliche, but cliche because it's often true, is that there may be a richer spectrum or something that isn't even 1-dimensional then we're currently able to grasp, which will become more clear over time and more study. Perhaps it's less rare than we think and the rareness is only those we can talk into agreeing their qualia really is different from others. Or the way we are describing it leads people in the "1-2 out of 5" category to declare themselves aphantastic on HN when they aren't really properly so.
> Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlations that could lead to our industry abounding in them. Though prior to this I would have thought quite the opposite given the association between visual processing and success in STEM and engineering.
I agree this is an annoying confound, and also that it feels highly intuitive that being able to consciously visualize ought to correlate with better visuospatial (and thus much mathematical) cognitive ability.
I think the solution is recognizing that the reason cognitive deficits are mostly unobserved (visual memory recall studies aside) is recognizing that aphantasia is almost certainly a conscious access problem, i.e. most aphantasics are still using imagery too, just unawares. Last I checked, this is the leading hypothesis / explanation.
Also, plasticity and the ingenuity of the brain is clearly such that an aphantasic can also find other ways (e.g. other sensory modality imagery, pure logical relations, etc) of representing the problems that seem like they should rely on visualization. It seems obvious to me that these other ways can be both advantageous/disadvantageous, depending on the situation / phenomenon.
I find these takes kinda insulting because they directly dismiss as false direct personal experience of a lot of us. I have experienced visualisation.
I know the vast chasm between the two states from direct first hand experience.
So do many others.
This is partly why only aphantasics argue for the "it is only semantics" explanation. For anyone else, this explanation makes no sense, because they have at least one vivid example showing otherwise. Only if you have no vivid visual experiences does this argument have any appeal.
Also the well-documented cases of acquired aphantasia are especially troubling for the skeptical "semantic disagreement" cases, given that acquired aphantasia is entirely within-person.
Yeah, that is my experience too. I consider myself to have aphantasia - I have had that one vivid experience outside my dreams. Outside of that it's all been blank my whole life. Without that one experience maybe I'd doubt it too, but it really is fascinating how many of the people who insist it can't exist give descriptions of their experience that suggest they have it.
that made me realize I never once thought of whether I was hearing stuff in my dreams.
I sometimes experience dreams when I go back to sleep repeatedly, but in all normal circumstances it is nothing
Are you sure you're simply forgetting your dreams and you assume you don't dream?
I've had dreams where I was "there" and it felt like being present in a scene in a very real way (for a dream). But ask me to close my eyes and visualize a blue table with a red apple on it and its nothing but phosphenes at best.
I do see images when I dream. It can get pretty immersive. Brains are wild.
I always assumed that when people say "imagine this image..." that it was about the contextual nature of it. Only several months ago did I learn that aphantasia is a thing and I'm among the ~4% of the population in this group.
With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).
A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]
They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.
[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104
Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics
Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display
I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.
Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).
There is some truth in this, but evidence sometimes suggests worse visuospatial memory, at least under some very specific operationalizations. E.g. less detail can be remembered overall, even though crucial details remembered are the same: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10598423/
More likely than not there are tradeoffs to using strictly visual vs. visual+ vs. strictly non-visual mental models in all domains, and there is no universally optimal strategy (and that teams of mixed cognitive styles are best overall). You know, no free lunch.
It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.
So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.
And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.
Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...
High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.
"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.
I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.
Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.
It's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.
You are hopefully aware though that this is not the norm. Many (if not all) artists tend to visualise their work before and while they are doing it.
Watch people draw, and you'll realize that can't be true, or at least is a very incomplete description of what's going on.
People have processes they go through to eventually get to something reasonably correct. Systems for drawing people, perspective rules, etc. These get extremely elaborate. They shouldn't need any of it if they could fully visualize the scene. They'd just need to copy that image to paper.
You'll hear people say things like "trust the process". They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete. Even when they're doing things correctly, their brain isn't recognizing it.
> They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete.
In general I agree, but I have a counter example. I have a friend that has always been very good at drawing, and when he draws, it's immediately obvious that he has a very precise idea of what is going to happen. People often gather around him because it is entertaining to look at the drawing and suddenly understand what it represents. It's a similar experience to uncovering a photo frame covered with dust.
I assume that this ability is not uncommon among professional drawers.
Yep, I often find the hardest thing is coordinating the hands to produce what the brain is showing. My frustration often stems from the meat gloves just not being fast or accurate enough to keep up.
(Designer/illustrator/animator, now software engineering.)
When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.
I, for one, find it very practical.
I do a lot of thinking by visualizing relationships between concepts in a kind of graph. When I draw, I visualize the scene first. When I build widgets in my wood shop, I visualize the result and all intermediate states. When I was writing 3d renderers (a long time ago), it was immensely helpful to visualize the points and triangles in my head.
I built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.
Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.
That's not really what the article is about: "Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.
There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
Knowing a thing exists is not the same as knowing how it interacts with other things.
The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.
the only internal sense I have is my own voice. I cant even "imagine" music but rather hum it in my own voice at best. Same with others' voices
Interesting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.
Ditto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...
Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways
Yes. It’s called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).
I suffer from it quite badly. I can remember broad and important details, but struggle to remember even moderate details from anything beyond the past 2-3 months, with sharp falloff after that.
Once I started using Immich and was able to see my old photos from across adulthood and childhood (I used to just dump them onto HDDs), I experienced a sharp reconnection with myself and my past.
Maybe they could find something similar (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Immich, etc.)!
I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.
This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.
It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.
Same but in reverse, a certain psychiatric medication turned on an internal monologue I've never had before and it drove me absolutely, literally insane until it wore off. Never again. The most inane, moronic commentary about my day to day life as it happened, like Barney speaking through me. I normally experience the world wordlessly, mostly visually, and construct ideas and actions that way (thinking about, say, getting a glass of water, I'll picture the process), so having internal speech suddenly thrust upon me was awful.
Also an Aphantasiac, the quote
> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.
my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.
I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.
Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.
Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.
Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions
Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?
If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?
Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.
I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".
Some people have inner dialogues. Some authors are literally writing down what characters are saying in their head, and sometimes what they see them "do" as well.
Me here, inner dialogue frequently, inner monologue never (self-directed speech like "okay now I need to pick up the ...")
My inner dialogues almost always come with full fidelity, visual, audio, tactile, I can still smell the Marlboros on my dad's flannel even though he stopped smoking 20+ years ago.
People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).
As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.
I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.
As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.
I have no idea if I'm anywhere on the spectrum, but I really don't visualize images, but I can definitely hear sounds in my mind's ear. Not smells, tho. When I dream, it's almost no images. It's feelings, with a story associated. To the extent i do have images, they are very washed out, basically no color or detail.
I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word
> I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it
Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.
Some people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery
Some people hear it more like a recording.
Yeah, I can do that, but I think it is the same thing on a spectrum, just like the visual imagination.
Hearing your own voice Vs high fidelity musical instruments and other people's voices seems like a very wide spectrum. And indeed, it is wider as some people don't hear anything at all, including no inner monologue (I know someone like that - she's a good writer, and it freaks people out to realise the she can't 'hear' the words before she writes them, which is weird, because my vocalisation of words I wrote noticeably lags my writing)
This entire conversation is new and fascinating to me. I used to be much more visual but I would say that my primary mode of thinking now is monologic. However I would never think to describe it as hearing. It is more like an imaginary 'voice' that is not the one I use with other people (it is absent timbre etc and just a much simpler more efficient voice abstracted from physical constraints). I use it to write out my thoughts in my mind. I quasi-visualize the chain of words just in a very abstract, largely amorphous way using this 'voice' and play them through my mind while 'speaking'/'hearing' them. In this sense I pretty literally get 'lost in my train of thought' when thinking about something interesting.
I don't know how much this style of thought came about because I really didn't enjoy constantly visualizing things and consistently fought against it; mainly due to the constant intrusive visual sequences of various types, of which I still have far too many for my taste. I use schematic and visual imaginations all the time, but I guess I feel safer using the monologue and so it has become the bulk of my thought. At the same time the fact that I have learned several languages and have had to consciously focus on language over the years undoubtedly plays a big part. I wonder how many polyglots who learned languages later in life use a similar monologic imagination style?
For my part I have a constant droning monologue on my voice I can only stop by sleeping or intensely focusing, like meditation. It's unambiguously my voice, as if I'm about to speak, but my vocal chords just don't engage but the sound appears in my head instead.
My monologue uses several languages... But my monologue has always been there, since years before I learnt my second language.
To add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.
I'm pretty sure this is the default. Who literally hears music when thinking of it.
I have music running in my head most of the time, at least in the background unless I’m concentrating deeply on something. I’m also a musician and the best way I can describe it is that the music I’m hearing in my head somehow comes out of my instrument.
I do. I can "play it back" in my head, with full music/lyrics/chords/etc.
I have aphantasia, and I think my experience with music is similar.
I can think about a song, think about the melody, lyrics, etc… but I don’t hear it. If I hear a couple notes that remind me of a song, I can go through the rest of the intro, get to where the lyrics start, and get to the chorus and remember the name of the song (if it doesn’t come to me instantly), but it’s nothing like playback. It’s more like my inner monologue doing a bad a cappella cover version.
I sometimes wonder if everyone is talking about the same thing, but using different language to describe it. Some being more vivid and metaphorical in their speech than others.
I do and just asked around among friends. Everyone did.
Most I think, especially among musicians, which makes the GP fascinating to me!
I can play the piano, saxaphone, and guitar, and I've never considered being able to think about music to be actually hearing it.
Can you literally hear music in a dream have you never had an auditorial hallucination?
Yes I've had auditorial hallucinations. It was clearly inside my head, I was not "hearing" it
It reminds me of a joke. It's better told in person but you get the idea:
A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks.
"Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?"
"Yeah?"
"Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?"
hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture!
Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.
So you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like?
https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
Hmm turns out I have hyperphantasia?
No wonder it feels it's hard to explain things to people a lot of the time...
seems ironic (and not at all trustworthy)! if you're right, you can't actually imagine what being able to do it would be like
Are you arguing against the GP having it because you can't imagine what that's like? Is that the irony you're talking about?
The people who question this usually turn out to clearly have aphantasia.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have achieved visualisation during meditation, once.
I also can visualise while dreaming.
I do not visualise while awake other than that one time.
The difference is extremely stark and very obvious.
1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street. 2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see. 3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times. 4. Can remember a favorite color. 5. Don't have a consistent handwriting.
Do these symptoms count?
Those don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one
I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?
I have an inner monologue, that is the extent of my inner senses.
do you have inner music or just your voice serving as the instrument like me?
Just inner voice
When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.
99.99% of the time, it’s just black. Seeing things like you’re describing sounds like a super power.
The 0.01% of the time, I have seen blue lights. Without trying to look around too much, it’s something like this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzQ0zAtFL0
This has only happened a handful of times, maybe 5, definitely less than 10. I was in my mid-30s the first time it happened, at some house learning transcendental meditation. I opened my eyes for a second, thinking they were shining some lights to make it seem like something was happening. Sadly, I was never able to repeat this through meditation, but it has happened a few times as I try and fall asleep. I wish I could trigger it on demand. It’s super cool when it happens.
Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.
Nothing, no
how is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?
i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)
For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average.
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
that's interesting too! i can visualize clearly, but have _terrible_ artistic skills; nothing in my head can make it out unless through CAD :)
My drawing style is different from memory, though. Clearer lines, vs closer to impressionist if I draw from something in front of my eye. The difference is quite stark.
Proprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range
interesting! i always have to 'see myself' in my head to answer those kinds of questions
When you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after?
I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.
The image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing
That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.)
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
I posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi
yeah looks like it triggered a keyword filter to mark it as dead to me. Or a few people flagged it.
Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it.
Thanks for vouching, it seems to have helped.
I’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out?
When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.
I went to some seminars that talked about this a lot. How visualizing doing something perfectly can be as good, or better, than actual practice. There was also a lot of, “close your eyes, imagine a bike, what color is it?” type stuff.
Not being able to visualize anything, all of this fell very flat. It wasn’t until later I found out there actually are people who can visualize things as if they were happening. I have trouble wrapping my mind around what that must be like, but I bet all these visualization exercises make a lot more sense.
What does you mother look like?
She's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory
But if you only remember facts, can someone else pretend to be that person you remember with those facts?
I'm also an aphant. Recognition still happens. I'll see a person I haven't seen in years, know that I know them, then finally remember who they are much later. Even though I can't picture them after seeing them, I'll still remember who they are much later. Usually, anyway.
I get stressed out having to meet someone I haven't seen for a long time in a cafe or something. I have to scan everyone and wait for that ping of recognition to happen.
No, memory is not limited to facts. There's just no visualization to go along with the recollection of faces etc. You can absolutely still recognize people correctly when looking at them.
That's a fascinating question - I'm aphantasic and mildly face blind (I thought the two female leads in Disclosure Day were the same person for most of the movie and that we were jumping back and forth in her timeline). I've always assumed I'm face blind because of the aphantasia, but I know several aphantasics who have no problem recognising faces.
In answer to the question though, no - even as someone with face blindness, the faces of people I've known and loved for a long time are burned in somewhere - I just can't access that part of my brain at will.
Wife is the opposite - I still surprise her when I shave my beard without telling her. She doesn't seem to have any trouble visualizing though.
For reference, she didn't know the twins from "Property Brothers" were twins until I told her, after watching about, say, 6 seasons together.
What does that mean? You can recite a description you’ve read or heard, but what about looking at a photo and describing it?
I can describe someone from memory, and I can draw them, but I can't see them unless they're in front of me (or I'm looking at a photo).
Can you draw them and then look at the drawing? I'm just wondering about the "bootstrap" ability, for lack of a better term.
I'm not sure what you're asking. Of course I can look at the drawing. But it still doesn't produce any image that persist when I'm not looking at it.
After looking at a photo? I have a memory of the "facts" of the photograph. I have no image of it
I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like.
This is not a memory nor a detail recall issue. The visual part is just not there, but I know how my mother looks like :)
Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head.
Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?
It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not. I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative
(Also aphantasic)
I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.
Yes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal.
1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure.
2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.)
I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it?
This is a bit more stream of thought, hopefully that is helpful.
The pyramid can’t take up all the space inside the cube, only another cube could do that. So there must be some points that are “inside cube, outside pyramid” and other points “inside cube, inside pyramid”. The pyramid is given as wholly inside the cube so there are no “outside cube, inside pyramid” points. Same for sphere inside the pyramid. So it’s
I struggle parsing the ray description, “horizontal” must meaningfully constrain the ray somehow (otherwise it wouldn’t have been mentioned), but I don’t know what that changes. Then I think about facts I know about rays - they can be uniquely specified with two points, or one point and one direction - oh, and we are given the direction is always “horizontal”, so we only need one point. The ray goes on forever so every “in” is “enter+exit”, so add 2 for every “in”. So it’s 1) Maximum, that’s 6, from the last option, so “cube, pyramid, sphere…”, have to exit the innermost first, so “…sphere, pyramid, cube”. I don’t know where this ray is positioned, “halfway” might be a good guess, or maybe pyramid is half of square and circle is half of pyramid so “a quarter way up”.2) Distinct, that’s `0 2 4 6`. `0` doesn’t count because we want “still passes through the cube”, so 3 counts exist. Thankful that “tangents don’t count” so I don’t have to think about them, because nothing immediately comes to mind on how to handle them.
yes this is correct. Thanks for writing that out, it's really interesting to read how you solved this without picturing it.
It's a bit surprising to me that it was unclear what I meant by horizontal/level, I thought this word is well-known and easy to understand. Here's what I mean by horizontal: For me, it means that with respect to the ground, the ray isn't rising or falling as it travels, i.e. it's level (like a plane flying in level flight with respect to the ground, not rising or falling). This constraint doesn't really matter I guess, except that I said that the cube is also level on the ground on one of its surfaces, so since you have to cast the ray in a horizontal/level way, you can't cast the ray at an angle through one of the corners so it goes through the opposite corner of the cube, since - if you think of the ray like a plane - you can only move the angle of the ray side to side not up and down, it stays in level flight = horizontal, so you can't cast it through both opposite corners if the cube is lying flat on the horizontal on one of its surfaces. As I just wrote this paragraph, I pictured what my description of casting through both corners the would look like and why it's not level with the ground anymore. I guess it's harder to follow my words without picturing it.
You mentioned it's not clear how being horizontal constrains the ray, based on what I wrote and what I meant about it being level, is it now clearer how this constrains some of the rays that can be cast? (Like how you can't cast a ray through the opposite ends of the cube now)? Or is that hard for you to follow? For me I think maybe my words could be written in a bit confusing way but I think someone can understand them if they can picture what I referred to. Without that mental picture it could be difficult though.
Your words are not unclear! You are doing a fantastic job of using words that work very easily with mental imagery, and but not at all without. I said I didn’t understand horizontal because without mental imagery I have no “floor” for the ray to be parallel to - I could have found something to be the referent for the horizontal if I had to, but once I thought I had explained why “horizontal” was mentioned I stopped trying to figure it out further.
That's really interesting, thanks for your answers!
I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)
> Why This Matters
Move on.
Let’s do a quick survey for aphantasics:
1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc?
2. Can you visualize pure motion? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense)
3. Can you visualize just colors? I discovered that I can conjure up colors without any associated shape. Takes a bit of patience but the color eventually arrives. Quite a thrill for an aphantasic!
I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).
If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”
This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.
Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.
Perhaps it is just spatial facts.
How do you decide what you're in the mood to eat?
For me, I sort of imagine the sensation of eating something and observe how I react to it. If it's a strong positive reaction, that's what I'm in the mood for. Otherwise, if it's kind of a more bored reaction, I cast my mind out for another idea and try again.
> If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?
Because the interior version is strictly inferior to the real thing, at least for me. It's, maybe, 80% as good, but that last 20% is a real humdinger.
Especially for music, I have a hard time hearing it in my head and not playing/singing/drumming along with it. Currently working on "Winds of Change" by the Scorpions as practice, and it's basically been playing in my head for the last 72 hours.
I do have to listen to it occasionally to refresh, but it certainly makes learning music easier... if not infuriating. Looking at you Lou Bega, and Rob Thomas.
80% is still pretty high!
Does 80% mean "tastes like a dull chocolate bar, but still basically a chocolate bar", or more like "like a nice chocolate bar but somehow 20% less enjoyable in some looser way"?
Perhaps this is why I can't identify the beat in the music.
Like a nice chocolate bar, but echoed - so I can remember what it tastes like enough to want one, but not satisfy the urge to actually have one. Ephemeral, rather than satisfying.
There is the theory of too many people being born, with not enough souls to populate all those bodies.
In that theory, people without an inner monologue and without imagination are soulless, real life NPC.
To me, this inner world is an essential property of being human.
I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.
Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.
Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.
> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
It definitely manifests as that to some degree, but since it extends to hair, clothing, what car they drive, I think it's a more general situation.
(But I'm also not specifically aware of face blindness as a condition, and had assumed it was generally some form of aphantasia.)
I would tentatively suggest OP does. I hace aphantasia but meet a lot of people for work and have a very good memory for names once I see a face.
People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is.
I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.
It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.
Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.
Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.
But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.
A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.
Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?
Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.
And how would non visual thinkers solve that?
Drawing? doing math around how many edges are common between the two? I turn it and count, but I could also do it other ways, including exploding it into flat shapes or conceptually understanding the nodes and vertices of the graph, or counting the edges and dividing by two since there are 6 total faces.
This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.
And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.
My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.
“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron.
This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.
There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?
Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.
I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.
It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
platos cave, etc
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
Prove is a strong word. But it supports the existence of the condition as it coheres with our scientific models of visual experience. You can always reach for obscure philosophical puzzles about phenomenal experience to try to invalidate the science, but at that point you're just having a different debate than the rest of us.
In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?”
If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.
Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.
For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.
I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.
The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.
Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.
> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).
While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.
I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.
I hesitate to come to this conclusion.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great.
I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.
I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.
I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)
Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.
But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.
I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
Here's an easy test: If you imagine something, is it more or less vivid than your dreams?
Either way, you've established a difference in subjective phenomenology and there are people on either side of that divide.
But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.
I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
I feel you, in the same boat, though I can't actually isolate any trauma or anything like that, reliving unpleasant experiences verbatim is no fun. And the early 2000s was not a fun time with all the pop earworms running around.
It's funny, I've never met anyone but my family who can do this like I can, so cheers! I always say I don't have a perfect memory, but I don't know anyone I can test myself against except my mother, who can "relive a trail ride she took 45 years ago down to the plants and opening and closing the gates". Having to remind people about significant shared life events is a real downer.
Why would I be coping about anything?
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
> Why This Matters
Come on guys at least try.
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.
Aphantasia is fake. I can “see” when dreaming, ergo the brain simply (adaptively) suppresses the same when awake.
The most important thing to remember when discussing this stuff is that how you experience reality can be drastically different from other humans.
I don't see even when dreaming :)
You remember your dreams?
Sometimes.