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!
2. Only via memory recall and even then its not stable and I don't "see it" with what my eyes are seeing/processing but more with the memory/recollection part of the brain. As such I can't visualize a unique image of that, but can construct one internally, often recalling different memories/images of the various parts of what I'm constructing.
3. No. I can't visualize (or really "see") colours on their own. When visualizing a colour I recall things that are that colour from memory (an apple, grass from a particular place, the Windows XP background, etc.). It's not that I don't know/remember that something is a specific colour, just that that part is not recalled/imagined visually. Or when I do recall colours of objects/pictures I can't hold onto that image.
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.
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.
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.
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!
One of the most horrifying recurring dreams when young was "geometric nightmares". This black circle would expand in size while a deafening silence grows. The volume is a void, and it's deafening.
An impending sense of doom as the expanding black void circle approaches. There's a real fear of oblivion, of ceasing to exist. Then you wake up.
Anyone else had similar dreams?
You can train yourself up by looking at your hand, then building a body, then building a room, and maintaining all of it. When you are strong enough, you walk outside.
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 ;)
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 have dreamed visually, sometimes vividly, but not so common these days that I awake remembering a dream. Lucid dreams rarely - and almost exclusively as a flying dream, like at some point I just realise I can fly and then I'm in control for a while until I wake up. Fun when it happens but I have no idea or technique for making it happen.
When falling asleep I can have random visuals but I can't control them, and trying to do so tends to kill them off.
Yeah it does feel somewhat like the rational and external sensory processing parts of my brain are maybe suppressing the inner-generated imagery.
I feel like when asked to 'imagine an apple', some part of my brain is sort of visualising an apple, I just can't "see" it. In other threads about aphantasia, normies have wondered how we enjoy reading. But I have always loved reading fiction and, like with the apple, I get absorbed in the book and am imagining it in some sense, just not 'seeing' it.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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
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.
NOT a picture, I'm aphantasiac. Map, maybe, sort of works. But mapping (mathematics concept) works in some ways superior to the idea of "2d map". GIS associations for instance are intuitive and obvious to me, but so are dictionaries.
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.
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
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).
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.
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...
"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.
Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?
¹: Though I do (likely) have auditory processing disorder which wikipedia called ADHD for the ears, so maybe it fits.
Doesn't mean it's not real, but I'm sure we'll see it creep into "I have aphantasia because I'm unable to crisply visualise a fully detailed lifelike scene from memory with my eyes closed".
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.
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.
Wouldn't recommend getting sepsis just for that though.. mushrooms seem safer
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.
you can roughly draw the object from memory
you can name its main parts
you can name its main colors
you can describe its spatial orientation
The image shouldn't be as clear as a hallucination, and it should be a memory of a specific object, not a generic one. Meeting these criteria is already enough to link another image to it, for example by piercing it with another object, though there's also the question of imagining it at a large enough size.
Aphants, do these hold for you? Take Doge, the popular meme dog: not a generic Shiba Inu, but that exact picture. Could you sketch it, name its parts and colors, and say which way it's facing? And could you imagine, say, a pencil piercing it?
Telling people to imagine a cone, then a plane, then rotating the other slightly and slice through the cone without touching the base, and then looking at a normal angle at the 2D shape of the resulting intersecting surface is a really good way to explain ellipses.
IF the person you're talking to can do all these steps. Turns out some people can rotate a cow in their head and some can't. If you cannot, a drawing or animation can help a lot to get the point across. Now I haven't gotten a problem with imagination at all, but I can only imagine how hard some subjects might be if you can't do that in your head.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
When someone says "imagine a pink elephant in the room" I don't see a pink elephant, but instead have an inner dialogue to the effect of "ok, so there's a pink elephant in the corner." I may also recall an image of an elephant, but it's not pink and it's not really in the room.
When there is a concrete thing that I have a memory of ("picture a squirrel", specific things from holidays, etc.) I can see flashes of still images from those. I don't see a generic squirrel, but a specific image/memory of a squirrel I have seen.
I have general placement/shape awareness but not so much colours or other specific details. I can infer things like colour from context, or have a thought to the effect of "that building was white" but I don't really see the building as white.
For me, recall is bad, but recognition is OK - things 'come back' easily with hints or photos. But I guess that's how memory tends to work, and motivation to plenty of pictures/videos.
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.)!
She has full aphantasia and she thought it’s the default
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.
Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?
(But I'm also not specifically aware of face blindness as a condition, and had assumed it was generally some form of aphantasia.)
Move on.
It's a picture with self-locomotion! But strictly on-road -- must have smooth-tread tires.
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.
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.
As a visual thinker, I could have rotated the cube if I wanted, but I actually looked at all sides at once, if it makes sense. I could "see" all sides of the cube at the same time. I am not sure how common this is, but in addition to seeing it as an "image" I can sometimes, not always, also sense the total structure of a construct and be aware of all of the physical "sides"
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.
I dunno - seems normal to me! :)
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
Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.
The "mind's eye" isn't an actual image. It doesn't pop into view like augmented or virtual reality. It is imaginary.
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.
Nobody does, this is all unfalsifiable nonsense, it's an artifact of the language used to describe imagination.
I think, however, that your reasoning is backwards. Language such as "picture this," "envision yourself on a beach," the concept of the "mind's eye," or especially the word "imagination" from "image" is much more likely to exist as a result of the actual process than to be its cause. Parsimony favors assuming that the description evolved from the experience - if nobody "saw" mental imagery, we would more readily describe the thought process as "thinking about," "reasoning around," that sort of thing.
The language used cannot be used as proof on its own. What makes me think this is more than a description problem is that reported vividness of imagery correlates to unconscious effects: pupils constrict to imagined bright shapes and dilate to imagined dark ones, scaled to how vivid the person says the image was[0]. People reporting aphantasia don't show those effects. Despite this not constituting "proof," I cannot rationalize it being a coincidence.
If it matters, I call myself aphantasic, though I cannot prove it to you. You may relate to my initial thought - "surely all this language is metaphor, and people don't really walk around hallucinating on command." Taking (the vast majority of) people at their word, however, indicates that they really do see things when they think about them - though visual mental imagery is meaningfully different from actually seeing (but is more like seeing than aphantasics assume). Refer to Galton's original 1880 study[1] for 150-year-old rationalizations that are the same as mine.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484 [1] https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
I can also experience a form of closed eye visuals when not tripping but mediating (or while relaxing in bed in the dark, waiting to sleep). But they're of a quite different kind, and remind me more of a very active type of phosphenes morphing with blotches of color and light. But they are also kind of on a different layer (more in the background of the "mind's eye") than the strong "in your face" visuals I experience when tripping.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
Do these symptoms count?
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.
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?)
I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.
Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.
Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it.
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.
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
I just realized that I can't imagine things and visualize a picture of it! If I try to imagine an apple, I've got nothing - although of course I know what one looks like. There is just zero mental imagery if I try to imagine one.
I just asked my daughter to imagine seeing an apple with her eyes closed, and she said yes she can see it. I asked what did she see "an apple sitting on a table". Did it have a color "yes it is red". I've got none of that - not even a fuzzy round grey thing. I know what it looks like but just can't/don't conjure up an image of it.
I don't even understand exactly what my daughter is experiencing. I said I just see dark when my eyes are closed - no image of an apple. She says she of course sees dark too, but there is also some experience of seeing an apple. I asked her to visualize something with her eyes open, and she can do that too (I guess this is normal), she still visualizes it, but somehow separate from the reality she is also seeing with her eyes open.
It seems pretty clear that what I experience, and what my daughter does, when trying (or succeeding) to visualize something are very different.
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.
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 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.
Same with you I imagine?
do you practice?
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.
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 is an actual image?
I ask because you seem to dismiss the notion that some people have stronger inner images than others.
I can't directly imagine visual features like color or brightness. It's more like being aware of the spatial positions and structures. Often, but not always, in a volumetric stage reachable by my hands.
I too can think of the cube as folded parts, i.e. one forming the top+front+bottom which the problem states are red, and one forming the left+back+right which the problem states would be blue. I don't really fold or unfold them as some sort of imagined movement, but am simultaneously aware of their in situ and flattened forms.
For the cube as a whole, rather than seeing and rotating it, I have a direct sense of the manifold and can attend to the faces one at a time. It is my attention that "moves" around this stage a bit like a 3D cursor, not an object or view being rotated or shifted. The faces don't have color, but I can attend to them in the order of the problem description to count off the "red" faces. I can also count the remaining unlisted faces or just re-count all faces if I need to confirm my tacit knowledge that a cube has 6 faces.
Both those approaches only work well for relatively simple structures like the cube. It is based in tacit knowledge I have about cubes, boxes, and rectilinear structures. If you asked for some arbitrary polyhedron, I could have a more amorphous sense of the shape and the fact it should be faceted, with ambiguity about its actual shape. I could not count nor attend to individual faces. I can't generalize to reason about origami paper/shape correspondences. I would need actual paper models for trial-and-error.
I can also think about dynamic systems with objects moving or even changing shape, but I wouldn't normally use that to "inspect" an object. My attention jumps around the static stage to examine it piecewise. There is no occlusion to avoid nor a viewing angle that improves my access to the topology information. I only think about movement when I am trying to examine a dynamic system's characteristics. And this can flip between thinking of actual animation and something more akin to having a static awareness of the motion vectors or paths.
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”.
More seriously, that's fascinating. I don't think I experience this?
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?
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
{ out-cube | in-cube out-pyramid | in-cube in-pyramid out-sphere | in-cube in-pyramid in-sphere }
{ out-cube (=0) | in-cube(2) out-pyramid (=2) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) out-sphere (=4) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) in-sphere(2) (=6 }
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Designer/illustrator/animator, now software engineering.)
I think that language is hard and it sounds, again, to me, like there are people who think there are AR/VR like experiences when someone closes their eyes. That makes as much sense to me as not seeing the back of your eyelids. People are not "seeing" things - they are "imagining" things to various fidelities.
Conversely, I have aphantasia but can draw reasonably well from memory (at one point well above average, but I'm about 30 years out of practice).
There are people who can "trace" what they imagine, but it doesn't appear that being skilled at drawing is that closely linked to ability to visualise.
An interesting thing, though, is that if I draw from memory my lines are more precise, while if I draw from something I can see, I will sketch out and refine. I think the two are quite different skill sets - drawing what you see often requires paying attention to spatial relationships and transferring those to the drawing to get proportions right etc.
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.
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 "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.
See also my post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707079
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.
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.
But heck, if that's it then hail, brother.
No wonder it feels it's hard to explain things to people a lot of the time...
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.
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.
For reference, she didn't know the twins from "Property Brothers" were twins until I told her, after watching about, say, 6 seasons together.
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.
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.
We have a hard time communicating about things. She sometimes can’t express herself at all, she sees things she thinks I should be able to see. I have very good ability to remember schemata, maps. I move really quickly in pages and pages of text. I can summarize the pages and pages of llm output in less time than it is generated. She can easily put 8 grammatical mistakes in a 5 word sentence. We can communicate easily when i write the code quickly and she can checks the visual output in the browser, this is really fluid.
Want more examples ? :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Either way, you've established a difference in subjective phenomenology and there are people on either side of that divide.
It's what I used to think most of my life...
Note that some people who do picture things do visualise it so clearly that it is comparable to seeing, and that was my one singular experience with it as well, but that is the far other end of the scale. Most people will definitely be able to tell it apart from "actually" seeing, but it will be distinctly visual.
When I draw a comparison to dreaming it's about the images, not about being able to will it or dimiss it.
for me, it's much less detailed unless I focus my imagination on the less detailed part.
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).
Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.
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.
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!
As someone who can hear music "on demand" in my head I can say that's not the case. I can hear the music with instruments and the original singer's voice. It's not as clear as listening to actual music, and in some cases it may be incomplete if I havent' listened to the song for a while, but it's definitely a playback.
As an example, right now I am thinking of The Trooper by Iron Maiden, and I can hear the drums, base, guitars and the lead singer's own voice. I can also separate the different instruments if I want to listen to just the guitar or the singer's voice because I know the song well. I can also change the lyrics or the guitar solo if I want.
It's the same as imagining an image. It is not a perfect reproduction of a "photo" that pops up in my mind, but it is still an image with colours, shapes and faces.
I understand where you are coming from, because you don't have the necessary context. When I read about people who "see" music in colours or smells, or even simple colour blindness, it is hard to imagine. But I still accept that it exists
I know the vast chasm between the two states from direct first hand experience.
So do many others.
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.
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.
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.
That a larger proportion of HN users are aware of their aphantasia is another matter - the renewed research over the last 10 years got a lot of attention.
It is very clear that there is a spectrum - hence why the typical test goes from seeing nothing at all via various degrees of seeing blurry or monochrome shapes to full colour vision. Going by Ed Catmull's survey of staff at Pixar, you will also find it extending further into hyperphantasia: People (and there's at least one in this thread too) who can "watch movies" in their head and can rewind and fast forward.
> 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.
People at the lowest end of the scale absolutely have aphantasia, but there's no "official threshold".
but also, if I could see even the vague outlines that'd place me one level up, it'd be very obviously different to my experience. I score the minimum possible 32 on the VVIQ2 test:
https://davidfmarks.net/vividness-of-visual-imagery-question...
And the minimum 16 on the older VVIQ test.
https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq
The median score on VVIQ2 is 79. The median for VVIQ is around 60, and the thresholds used for aphantasia on the VVIQ test is 24 or 33 depending on who you ask.
I can very occasionally possibly see brief flashes of vague imagery, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have had a single experience of what was probably at hyperphantasia levels, so I don't think there's some inherent physical limitation preventing me from seeing more. But it is also very clear to me especially because of that experience that I do in fact not see more.
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 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?
My monologue uses several languages... But my monologue has always been there, since years before I learnt my second language.