Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors?(frontiersin.org) |
Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors?(frontiersin.org) |
But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)!
Nonetheless, most people can "visualize" when they imagine objects, people's faces, places from memory — but it is totally not like AR (i.e. actually overlaying images on top of light perception). Nope, it feels more like you see it with some mysterious "mind's eye", disconnected from real eyes. It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels". And it doesn't require having eyes closed, people often can do it as easily with their eyes open, as it doesn't interfere with the normal vision at all.
I see absolutely nothing. When you say “it” is “faint and tacit”, you are describing an “it” that simply does not exist for me. I see a whole lot of people who don’t have aphantasia get hung up on this. They keep describing an “it” without accepting that for some of us there is no “it”.
The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor.
I then ask them to answer, from memory, simple things like what color was the ball, what kind of table was it, what material was the floor, was there a sound when the ball fell to the floor, what else happened, etc.
No one I’ve known with aphantasia (including myself) has answers for any such questions when asked to recall what they just imagined, but almost all can answer such questions “while imagining”.
My imaginary scene clearly had some "spatial sense" though — I saw (but more like "felt") the flat surface of the table, the edges of it, how it is positioned relative to myself, the roundness of the ball rolling, and how it falls off.
Outside of "notable features" for some characters, I have no concept of what they look like. And by feature, I mean Harry Potter has a scar. I couldn't tell you much about its size or orientation. Just generally lightning shaped.
This also helped solidify to me why some folks are so hung up on casting choices.
Note that it's possible to visualize motion of an object without visualizing the object itself. This is me. I can't hold any imagery in my head, but I can easily imagine the movement of a kickflip or a pirouette, or I can see the bouncing of three balls without seeing the balls themselves.
I can attest you, this is wrong. When I close my eyes I do see stuff... At the very least some geometric fractals, usually some sort of boiling visual association soup, where random images emerge from fractal Eigengrau liquid. I, willfully, got little influence on the stuff coming up. It feels like watching my brain do brain things. It's rather annoying/exhausting by the way.
I think this experience is a spectrum. It's not like you have it or you don't.
Surely its a spectrum, but seeing closed eye visuals isn't considered "being in a normal part of the spectrum" though.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Some people see details, some see colors, some see black and white, some see a misty fog, some see nothing.
It sounds to me like you're somewhere towards the aphantasic end of the spectrum, but I couldn't give you the exact percentile.
So yeah, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule about CEVs.
I suspect I had the visual once, thanks to one time as a teenager I tried a magic spell and the explanation of "I'm capable of self-hypnosis" is much more plausible than the spell having had even the slightest effect.
I can easily create intense overrides for sensory experience whenever I like for my sense of which way down is, and mild overrides for the various kinds of touch.
I tend to process a lot of things through sound, and go around the world recognizing people by voice or unwillingly trying to place people's accents when they talk. I think it might be related somehow.
By my rough count of Figure 2 tests, where Derek is at 0 to Loren at 6 (ignoring F), I have about 3.5 atypical responses.
My experience with Figure 2:
A) I can flip between cone and weird triangle, saw the cone first
B) I see it as if someone placed identical cat stickers on the drawing. I can intellectually understand the perspective, how the upper-right one is supposed to be bigger, but don't experience it that way.
C) I see that there is an implicit rectangle (to me it looks slightly wider than tall). But the color doesn't "spread" to the middle, it's just like 2A -- a boundary in the surrounding shapes implicitly extends into the empty space to form a rectangle shape.
D) It takes minimal, but non-zero effort to see the vase
E) It's trivial to flip between the two orientations of the cube
F) skipped
G) I don't understand what I'm looking for here. I see clouds, sky, and a silhouette with a tree. Is there a face in it somewhere? I can see the smiley face on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
I believe you’re correct, since I commonly see it presented as a spectrum. https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/
Basically a face staring at the tree from above.
More recently I was thinking about gaming, and more specifically Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, City Skylines (all of which I own but get nowhere with) and other games where you play, you fail, you plan, you repeat. Even Minecraft.
Someone else - I presume - plays, fails, learns, repeats and so gain a step toward mastery of the game. (I accept from reading that mastery of DF isn't happening soon). I presume that players visualise mistakes and visualise workrounds. I cannot do that, I do not know how.
I have thousands of hours in gaming but I cannot recall them visually, so I respond in-game to what is happening in-game. That may not make sense. There will be some learning but in a non-visual way.
Is this aphantasia? I have no idea and I'm not about to be diagnosed.
I do have vivid and lucid dreaming but ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.
I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again.
It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished.
Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)
Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.
• Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-...
• Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global...
• Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula...
Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.
“… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.
"Picturing" something in your head is the same, just with the sense of vision instead of the sense of hearing.
I don't think it's meant to be in that dark space / visual eye space.
close your eyes, think of a family member, who is it, where are they, what are they wearing, can you see details about the clothing, can you see details in the background, is there motion, if you open your eyes can you still see it
there will be some very strong yeses in there if you sample people in visual professions
Then you change or introduce things "make the sofa 50% smaller" then a bit more "change the colour of it to deep yellow" etc
Or imagine getting on a bus and their is only one seat left.
So on the one hand I can draw an excellent random generic man or a generic face. If you pose for me I'll do an uncanny portrait. But I can't draw my wife of 30 years -- I can't even see her in my mind. I can't draw an actor I've seen 200 times unless I were to sit with photographs and ingrain their face by deliberate practice
To sort of expand: I'm old enough that a diagnosis makes zero difference. But it does explain so much.
When misophonia became a thing it explained so much of my reactions to certain noises, that I was not alone.
Just knowing that others are experiencing the same removes some of that aloneness.
That's definitely aphantasia as I understand (and suffer from) it.
I've never really considered the "visual learning from failure" aspect of it. I know that in, e.g., Minecraft, I have tremendous trouble with building things because I can't visualise them beforehand and thus things get hodgepodged into these hideous homunculi of buildings or redstone contraptions.
It should be trivial to write up a puzzle game such that, much like those color blind tests where you need to find numbers, will very quickly eliminate people who think in different ways while being a piece of cake for others. And yet I don't think I've ever encountered one.
Are there no capabilities that can not be overcome? Would that puzzle game just be terrible entertainment? Why doesn't it exist?
Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.
I don't even understand how you can begin to plan a user interface without the power of visualisation. I suppose you just have to produce drafts? I can just lie there in bed and iterate for hours, imaging how the user will move through processes, etc. It seems a huge disadvantage to only be able to develop such an idea while actually having the interface in front of you. Maybe this is the real reason some developers never want to leave the back end :)
I feel like even planning architectural code is somewhat visual for me, like I have a mental model of the folder structures and how different components of the system relate to each other.
It's risky business to infer anything from job preferences though. Consider that (as far as I know) an extraordinarily large proportion of professional programmers are male -- obviously a cultural phenomenon. We certainly cannot infer that a talent for programming is located on the y-chromosome.
Edit after reading the paper associated with that link:
> Our aphantasic and hyperphantasic samples were opportunistic, in the sense that our participants had approached us spontaneously following publicity triggered by our original publication
This suggests that many of the participants actually read scientific publications (or reporting thereof). That's an obviously biased set of people who indeed are way more likely to work in STEM (and have an abundance of time to spend browsing the web), rather than as hairdressers.
I've questioned maybe 200 people about this over the years and when someone starts talking about spatial understanding and not seeing pixels, they aren't really talking about seeing anything in mind, but more understanding it. I can do the "feeling" thing, which I reference as "I have the mesh, not the map". People with Aphantasia appear to hold facts about objects, but not actually generate the imagery where they are conscious of seeing it. It would be a little like having Dalle3 generate an image from a Claude Opus 3 prompt, then uploading it to Claude to look at. It can't do generative images, but can look at them and inference.
Maybe someone that visualizes strongly here can confirm that what you are indeed seeing has aspects of light, shadows, color and the things we consider attributes of "pixels"?
I wonder if being good at a specific internal style (e.g. visual, verbal, etc.) translates to being good at specific types of problems, or is the core capability an abstract foundational capability and the different styles are really just a method of presentation.
I also have or have had the ability to do other sensory overrides like distorting my sense of physical space, ie warp the bounds of my room while I stare at ceiling in bed. It’s not really a visual thing, but it makes me think of the spoon bending scene in the matrix.
For my body as a whole, I also don't have an inner sense of a permanent body morphology that is "mine", so with one exception[0] I can't even imagine what it's like to be body-dysmorphic — even if we lived in a world of magic gender/species transformations that might happen with no ill effect, if I woke up and found that had happened, the only concern is if society can cope with it, not one of my own inner psyche.
The one exception is forked tongue. That is a sticky morphology to imagine, and one I don't like at all. It's also something a friend got done surgically. Good for them, they seem to be enjoying it, it makes me go "aaaa".
[0] I assume there are limits beyond my imagination, but my imagination does at least include tails, wings, gender flipping, and I've listened to the We Are Legion (We Are Bob) series.
I know that we can’t get inside each other’s heads to truly understand their perception (yet), so I feel like these conversations can’t possibly go anywhere, but I feel compelled to say that, to me, what you are saying makes no sense whatsoever.
I’m not denying your experience. I’m just saying I can’t begin to comprehend it.
I can describe it as: I see the motion vectors but not the objects. Imagine a dancer in a fog, you don’t see the dancer but see their imprint as they move…
Interesting either way.
Close your eyes and imagine the month March (just the idea of the month). Walk forward 2 months.
That's what a ball rolling off a table is like for some of us.
It took only a small amount of time and steps for the person to leave "the month."
All that just happened. Popped into my thoughts. I don't really control it very well.
Given the month is roughly square with some room for the month name, and then the days in a grid, week by week, the person was about 4 days tall.
Our internal representations are so damn weird. It would be amazing to somehow share them.
Rando thought Sidebar:
Whales have this incredible song language. We really don't understand much yet. And they have those huge brains.
Maybe they can send this stuff to one another. Maybe being under water means a more robust sharing makes sense.
I can imagine them living rich lives, sharing with one another in a more direct way than we are capable of.
End Sidebar
But it's a matter of talent, and you're missing a big component. That can be made up for in other ways, though I think it'd be hard to reach the peak.
[1] Example: https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic...
As someone who has been coding for 45 years, this is absolutely the best analogy describing aphantasia I've ever read. Obviously, it works only when talking to another coder, but that is better than nothing.
Right now I can only visualise with a colour… unless "transparent" counts as "without". But even then, there's a full-colour environment for the transparency to be meaningful, and it can't be total transparency because then it isn't present. Even if I imagine a wireframe grid to show where it is, the grid has a colour.
I wonder if people with aphantasia have trouble with them.
Not that we should expect immediate agreement on any of these things: words can only gain meaning by shared experience, and it's really hard to share the experiences that are confined to the inside our own skulls.
Try it!
If you were to remove those visual pieces and were only left with the abstract concept of a month and the fact that they're ordered then that's as best as I can really describe at least how I personally "visualise" something. It's more about ideas and the "feeling" of how different concepts relate to one another - e.g. March is a month and it is followed by April.
Perception is definitely subjective!
But you claim to not have an inner voice?
Boys, I think we've got one.
I am on that far end of the spectrum where I could just make anything happen in my head visually or auditorily.
