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I was once watching an episode of House with my college roommate and the doctors had a machine that let them see a visual image of what the patient was seeing in their head. I laughed to roommate and observed that it was a stupid machine because, of course, people don't really "see" things in their head.
In the ensuing discussion (and Google searches) I learned about the word aphantasia and about the phenomenon where people do actually (claim to) visualize things in their head. Until that moment I assumed that language was just figurative.
I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things. One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I know my brain doesn't create visuals. When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
"One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately."
Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things.
Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that.
If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing.
If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy.
I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week.
Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try.
A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen.
The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig...
Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is.
For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.
I think what OP is referring to with the bicycle example is that even when asked to draw a simple line drawing of a bike people connect the wrong pieces together in a way which makes no sense, while if theyāre looking at a bike in front of them they can easily connect the proper components with lines.
https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
Yeah. To me, that suggests that either people are "visualizing" the silly machines they draw or they aren't visualizing. Since I produce the same silly (or abstract) representations with no visualizing I tend to think that other people are doing the same thing I am but with the delusion that they visualize something. Although, admittedly, I cannot explain exactly what the difference between visualizing and thinking you visualized something would be.
I think there is a confusion that visualisation must be photo-realistic. I can visualise the entire city in which I live in my head, and fly around its streets, parks, and landmarks in a handful of seconds. The map is fully accurate and the broad-brush image is. But if I stop and focus on any one detail, I cannot always remember exactly what lies there. Clearly my memory depends on filling this in 'as-if' to sustain my vision, and I think this is true in general. We don't have memories that can zoom in to ever greater microscopic detail, and we don't have every detail of a picture, but this doesn't stop us from imagining.
It's similar to the way in which when we're presented with words that are jumbled up apart from their first and last letter, our brain fills in what's happening. Vision in general is not just the mechanical encoding of sense data from light. It is as much psychological as physiological. We see the world in stable colours and contrasts because our mind controls for illumination and processes the colour of one detail relative to the whole picture. I think our mind's eye depends on similar kinds of psychological support.
Isnāt it more likely that memory isnāt perfect? I can picture a bike in my head. I can rotate it, crush it with a giant boulder, splash it with paint etc. Those are very visual things in my head. But do I remember the exact configuration of spokes on my own bike? Not really.
When you dream, do you "see" things? Ever tried doing math or remembering a password or phone number in a dream? It's similar to that. A blurry picture is a pretty good analogy, except it seems sharp. If you look at the bottom of the bike you see gears, pedals, chains, but it's hard to see how they connect. It's a patchwork of concepts.
Imagination is such a weird function. I've dreamed that I'm reading a book, and the letters are clear, the words readable, but the text barely made any sense.
Since we're talking internal experience here, I have no idea what your distinction is between visualization and a delusion of visualization. Fwiw, even though I don't think you'll really believe me given your other comments, visualization of actual real life stuff for me is similar seeing stuff in the corner of your eye where you're brain kind of automatically fills things in but in a way that isn't very legible. As long as you don't have tunnel vision, surely you can relate to having seen something without knowing the details?
My actual complaint runs deeper though. My experience of visualizing can't be a delusion because I'm describing my internal experience. You can claim I'm lying about my experience, but what you can't do is claim I'm actually experiencing something else and not noticing. If I didn't notice, then no, I did not experience that other thing.
A bicycle shop owner would surely draw it perfectly from memory because he's familiar with their workings. People who have used them occasionally for transportation are aware of the general appearance of a bicycle, but will have trouble visualizing the details unless they've actually paid attention to them, and start guessing, just like it happens in dreams. they won't have trouble imagining the parts they're familiar with, like wheels, pedals and handlebars.
Also, I can imagine my wife's face almost perfectly, but any attempt to draw her will result in a monstrosity because I suck at drawing.
That's those specific people. I can draw a correct image of a bicycle from memory. It won't look exactly like my visualization because I'm only average at the physical act of drawing, but there won't be anything technically wrong with it.
> but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination.
This part is untrue. I'm not a great artist, but despite aphantasia I can draw from memory just fine, and usually with _more precision_ than if I have an object in front of me, though if I draw from something in front of me it will look more "life-like" - my drawings from memory tends to be more abstract and stylised.
But here's also an article about aphantasia at Pixar[1] that talks about how Ed Catmull realised how vastly different the ability to visualise was between members of staff, including among artists who ranged from not able to visualise at all to being able to move backwards and forwards "in a movie".
[1]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
That's really interesting. The first thing that occurs to me is that the process of constructing a representative image in the brain might be distinct from the process of consciously experiencing it. Clearly, if a person can draw something from memory, there is some guiding representation in their brain. If they can't picture it consciously, that seems to mean that they cannot subjectively experience that representation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
That sounds a little far fetched, but I've had an experience that suggests to me that it might be true, nonetheless.
I am a lifelong migraine sufferer, though migraines have become much less common and much less unpleasant in recent years. One common feature of migraines is a visual effect called scotoma, in which a glowing or scintillating aura occupies a large area of the visual field. The scotoma commonly precedes the more painful and unpleasant symptoms.
Once, few years ago, I was reading an interesting book when my scotoma started to fade in. It was a bright, geometric thing, vivid and spectacular, and it was fading in right in the middle of my visual field, covering the pages of the book.
I was very interested in what I was reading, and resolved to keep going until unable to continue. I never reached that point.
Instead, I got distracted by the fact that, although the scotoma prevented me from seeing the book, it didn't prevent me from reading it. Fascinated, I began to read aloud from this book that I could not see. I was able to continue without difficulty. After a little while, the scotoma faded away, as it always does, the worse symptoms did not ensue--which happens sometimes--and I was able to confirm that I really had been reading what was on the page, even though I couldn't see it.
The best explanation I could invent was that the process of seeing and reading the book was separate from the process of being conscious of seeing it. Obviously, if I could read it, I could see it, even though my conscious experience was that I couldn't.
Perhaps when an aphantastic person draws accurately from memory, that's a manifestation of the same sort of thing. Again if you can draw from memory, there must be some sort of representation in your nervous system of what you're drawing, even if you don't consciously experience it as images.
> If they can't picture it consciously, that seems to mean that they cannot subjectively experience that representation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think realising that other people actually visualises things gave me a lot greater understanding of what blind people experience, in a way. Before I found it hard to imagine, because I had nothing to compare it to. It's hard to imagine, but at the same time we navigate spatially without sight all the time, e.g. when our hands move outside of our field of vision and we still know where to move it.
> I never reached that point.
This is really fascinating.
> Again if you can draw from memory, there must be some sort of representation in your nervous system of what you're drawing, even if you don't consciously experience it as images.
Sure, I absolutely "know" what something looks like even when I can't see it. I can verbally describe it, I can relate to it spatially, so yeah, there's certainly a lot of detail that's still available. I can even "visualise" in a sense the process of drawing an object I remember, in that I can "spatially" "look" at a point that I can't see and move it around (when I do I get a strong urge to move my eyes to track the point, but I can suppress that). I sometimes think I might get an "afterimage" of a line when I do that, but I'm not sure. Maybe that's a path to try to train up an ability to actually visualise things. I keep meaning to try.
"I sometimes think I might get an "afterimage" of a line when I do that, but I'm not sure. Maybe that's a path to try to train up an ability to actually visualise things. I keep meaning to try."
Another commenter here gave a nice description of some exercises in visualiztion. You might try the simplest of those for a while and see if you get results. If you do, you can try moving to more complicated ones.
One exercise was one in which you start with a line and incrementally add more and more 2D figures. I learned a somewhat similar exercise, but using arrangements of 3D figures. The exercise was to start with something simple, like a blue cube, and begin to add more and more additional 3D objects, assign different colors and movements to each, and keep them going stably for as long as possible. I did that exercise for maybe a year or two, and definitely got better at it.
That was many years ago; I have since regressed. I had no trouble with the 2D exercises the other commenter gave, but the most complex of them felt like they were getting near my current limit.
There are a couple of other things I've done that involved exercising the ability to visualize. I don't know if they'll be helpful to you, but in case they are:
One is lucid dreaming. I got this to work by keeping a dream journal next to my bed and writing down my dreams any time I woke up from them. The first effect was that I began to remember a much greater number of my dreams. (According to sleep researchers, everyone dreams every night; we just don't remember most of our dreams at all.) Some time later I began to dream lucidly--that is, I began to have dreams in which I realized I was dreaming.
That was pretty exciting at first; I naively thought that I would be able to control my dreams and have wonderful adventures by directing them. That turned out not to really be true. I had some control, but it was not unlimited. To give a representative example, I realized one night that I was dreaming, and resolved to fly to Washington, D.C. to visit some places I knew well. I discovered that I could fly really high and fast, but I couldn't navigate when I did it. I could navigate where I wanted to go, but as soon as I started thinking about that, I would always descend to the ground and switch to walking.
But I digress. The relevant point is that during the period when I was practicing lucid dreaming, the world of dreams seemed extra accessible, even when I was awake, and it was easier to conjure vivid imaginary environments in my mind's eye. Perhaps that would be of some help.
A second, somewhat similar, thing is that for a few years in the 1980s I was interested in shamanism and in shamanic trance techniques. I had a little training in them and experimented with them for a while. You could look at shamanic trance techniques as ways of initiating lucid dreaming while you're awake. Again, when I was doing that, I had an easier time of conjuring up vivid imagined landscapes, people, and objects.
Keeping a journal seemed helpful in both activities. It helped me remember what I experienced, and also seemed to help make those experiences easier to induce.
> Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things.
I'm not good at drawing and I have been suffering(?) from some degree of Aphantasia but I can assure you that none of the bicycles in that art project would be mine because I know my objects.
I can still probably disassemble and assemble my rifle blindfolded. I can draw it but if I try to visualize it in my head I only get a very vague picture of my room at boot camp and I feel it more than I see it.
Actually the images I can reproduce to so degree are the ones I've seen unusually often:
- my driveway
- my kitchen
- but most of all photos from my albums.
I don't dream much either but this summer I did some experiments, trying to sleep as much as possible each night (ended up with an average of 7 or something) and during that time I dreamt and also felt I was able to visualize slightly better.
I canāt see shit when I close my eyes but if you ask me to draw a helicopter Iāll ask you which one and I can draw it pretty darn well. That said my drawings would be quite ātechnicalā. And I pretty much tend to draw by almost connecting dots. For example if I were to draw a helicopter it would start with a bounding box(s) then define the ratio lines, sketch the outline / silhouette and finish it up with the details.
People with aphantasia can recognize things visually still.
People have different levels of āvisual imaginationā my GF claims to be able to visualize objects as an overlay of the real world which to me is pretty freaky. Itās not that I donāt believe her I just canāt related to that at all.
> _Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately._
Can you accurately draw something while looking at a photo of it? Most people can't. Seeing something and drawing it are obviously different skills.
What you may not understand about other people's mental visualizations is that they're somewhat fuzzy and unstable. It's very difficult to zoom in and out or to focus on the details. The better you know something, the better you can visualize it. There are also degrees of the ability -- some people are very good, and some aren't.
> _Other people think they have a visualization but do not._
I know someone with aphantasia, and he was confused about whether or not he had it for a long time. I think this makes sense: you can't imagine being 100% certain you see something in your mind because it's a "sense" that you don't possess, so you assume other people aren't certain.
I assure you that you're absolutely wrong. I am absolutely certain I see things in my mind and that it's common for people to be able to do so (with varying degrees of stability, accuracy, clarity, etc.). Especially faces, I can see them very clearly. It is somewhat a function of memory.
I think you nailed the important distinction of instability of visualization.
I think people that dont visualize much or at all get the wrong impression on the fidelity and stability of the ability to visualize.
My visualization as a kid was more vivid than they are now.
Lately, since I had been taking Lionās Mane as a supplement, my visualizations and visual experience has been slowly regaining in clarity, stability, and fidelity.
I take Trazodone most nights to sleep, and thereās a period of a few minutes most nights where my visualization skills greatly increase.
I wouldn't be surprised if people that do visualize (including myself) overestimate the fidelity and stability. If the same brain is responsible for constructing the image and finding flaws, it will contain the most obvious flaws you could conceivably miss.
Iām unconvinced, but maybe because Iām āone of those people who canātā (no, seriously). How would you describe the limits of what you can visualize? Especially with memory, thereās a clear tendency for people to inject details upon recall and as part of the process of communication.
The limits to what I can visualise? Well, I'd put it this way - there definitely are limits, but what they are is a matter of training. There are traditions of mental training that challenge the practitioner to visualise increasingly complex things, so I've run into them.
A standard example of such visualisation is 'in bluish-white light on a dark background, imagine a line. from the same light, imagine drawing a circle using the line as a diameter. Now draw an equilateral triangle touching the boundary of the circle. Then a square around the triangle. Finally, draw another circle around the square, and hold the resulting image stable in your mind' (yes, this shape probably inspired Rowling's description of the deathly Hallows. It's a very old exercise).
I can visualise the line and the first circle easily. I can add the triangle, but at this point it already takes some effort, I can't do it if I'm even a little distracted. Typically, adding the square makes me 'lose' an earlier detail, usually the line, from my visualization.
That's probably not very informative to your question though, because visualization doesn't have the same sorts of rules around complexity a graphics screen does, the brain definitely uses some form of internal shorthand. I can picture a particular celebrity as easily as I can picture a circle, and picturing her holding an item from my grocery list in each hand is if anything somewhat easier than picturing two other elementary shapes connected to the circle. Maybe because humans are used to imagining other humans holding things, I'm not sure.
In any case, there are definitely limits to what a person can visualize, and they're pretty modest for the untrained mind, but it's quite unlike a graphics program where one could simply count the number of pixels required. Not sure if that helps or not...
> A standard example of such visualisation is 'in bluish-white light on a dark background, imagine a line. from the same light, imagine drawing a circle using the line as a diameter. Now draw an equilateral triangle touching the boundary of the circle. Then a square around the triangle. Finally, draw another circle around the square, and hold the resulting image stable in your mind' (yes, this shape probably inspired Rowling's description of the deathly Hallows. It's a very old exercise).
I can't even visualise the dark background or the light.
When you look at a photograph and then look away but try to recall details, how is your memory of it encoded? Do you immediately have a verbal description of it in your head?
I canāt see the light in your example either. If I shut my eyes, and try to see it, I just see blackness though I have no problems with the concept of a blue light (or even the entire scene) - I just donāt _see_ it. To answer the photo question, I donāt have a verbal definition of a photo, I have a relational one. I can still describe the photo reasonably well, but I donāt āseeā anything.
Iāve thought quite a bit on how my mind works once I discovered that āthe mindās eyeā wasnāt just a euphemism for other people. I think my mind works with rules rather than visuals, and it constructs/deconstructs a _lot_ of them as needed to describe something it can work with.
Iām a software engineer, an ICT5, working at Apple. I tell people my primary skill is āsolving problemsā, and thatās accurate as a 10k-foot view. Iām good at mentally modeling the intricacies of how a system works, what the dependencies are, what the interactions are between sub-parts, how that effects corner-cases. I can ārunā this mental simulation in my head forwards and backwards a bit (not too far) and get a grasp of how it fits together. But thereās no visual to any of this, whether Iām thinking about a bicycle or server-side cryptographic mail storage and transport. Itās all just interacting rules. Iām often the one to point out a flaw in a systems model well before we get to implementation, and Iām good at ābreaking new groundā when it comes to implementing something, even for a different group - I get āloaned outā a fair bit.
So I think there are upsides to not having a mindās eye - I chose physics at college, and found it easier than most I think; equally there are upsides to _having_ the ability to visualise things, I expect. Itās probably a species-optimization to have the capacity for bothā¦
This fits me very well as well. It did not connect with me that people weren't talking figuratively when talking about seeing stuff until I read an article saying some people didn't, and I realised I was the outlier.
If I were to try to remember code, or try to remember a photograph, or try to remember how to get to the closest Super-Market, it's all structured in my mind in the same way. I might remember details, but only if I have paid attention to those details and understand why those things are important to remember. If those details happened to be based on visual details, I would use that, but it is no way close to the same amount of details of a photograph.
I think the best way to answer this might be for you to imagine what a blind person imagines when they take a trip.
I don't know how it is encoded, but I certainly can verbally describe things relatively easily, but I also tends to have a mental spatial understanding of what I see, so I can move through a model of what I've seen and describe element by element on the basis of e.g. that I know how elements of what I've seen is connected.
I'm fairly sure I fall on the aphantasia side of things (or at least _mostly_ - I've had what I'd consider "flashes" occasionally over a couple decades, which serve as a contrast to what I normally experience), but I don't really have any trouble "knowing" what a triangle-in-a-circle-in-a-square-in-a-circle looks like. I can even draw intersections and segments in isolation, or rotate the thing (or the square and circle in opposite directions) and basically immediately tell you how the edges / corners will align with each other.
But I don't "see" any of that. In any way. You tell me it's drawn in a blue light, or the square is an inch thick piece of plaid: sure. now it's plaid. I already have colors picked out and I'm remembering how the threads in the fabric produce patterns when viewed up close, especially where the stripes overlap. I'm not seeing anything though.
It's closer to how I deal with math - 5x7 is 35 because I know it is. I memorized single-digit multiplication _long_ ago, and if I ever want to reassure myself I can just do repeated addition. It's not accompanied by literally any metaphor or mnemonic or whatever, it's just equal to thirty five, and 35 is äøåäŗ is Ł£Ł„ regardless of where it comes from. Similarly, rotating the deathly hallows by 90 degrees is just a rotated deathly hallows - the line is now sideways, the triangle has a vertical edge on the left, the green stripes in the plaid are now sideways and the diagonal-hashed intersections at the overlaps are in the opposite direction, etc.
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Maybe also oddly, I have a very good visual memory in practical terms. I disassemble and reassemble stuff with no trouble, and when I'm looking for a phrase in a book I read a year ago I can generally find it within an inch of where I remember it on a page (but not usually what page it is). When I'm looking for things I lost, I generally hunt by looking for colors or textures that were adjacent to where I last remember it. I'd never describe how I remember that or how I look for it as _seeing_ though - there's just a wadded up blanket near it with a big fold that tangents with the far right corner of my phone, so I go looking for wadded up blankets.
I feel like this is probably mostly a sensory-qualia thing, almost totally orthogonal to what is being thought about / done. People who can see things in their mind's eye can't necessarily do anything with it beyond having the experience, and people who are totally internally blind can do things that seem to be based on sight. And to some degree both of those are train-able.
The instability and detail-injection has been a fairly big question-mark for me as well. I can completely believe people "see" things at will, and many I've run across claim it's "as real as real-life", but then they immediately fail to answer any simple questions about it. Like if the seat on their visualized bicycle is in front of or behind the rear wheel. Even ignoring _if their answer makes physical sense_, most of the time there's a significant pause while they try to decide, and something like half of the time they change their mind later.
I suspect it's more like dreaming of a thing than a photograph-like construct, at least in a significant number of cases. It'd also explain why it seems so dream-like when you get into specifics, where the _pieces_ may make sense but they do not even remotely add up to a _coherent whole_ - context or something is lost each time it's visualized. The main important part is that it _feels like seeing a thing_, which is both 1) something not everyone can do/achieve, and 2) _more_ than sufficient for individual use or broad concepts.
And it can probably be trained to be more stable and detailed, and there are rare outliers where it's _significantly_ better - there do seem to be people capable of maintaining a stable "thing" from inception through real-world construction.
When I try to visualize an apple, itās amorphous. One minute it might be red, the next green, the next itās a cartoon. I canāt āholdā the image in my head, and focusing on specific details is easier than the whole apple at once.
What are the limits of what you can dream about?
I have aphantasia (when I'm awake) and visual imagery in my dreams that is sharper and more detailed than real life. I'm also able to lucidly dream although I try not to as it messes with my long term memory.
I would say that we can dream about most things but there are a few obvious limits as there are types of thoughts that will make you wake up:
* Reading is difficult and typically books in dreams don't have words in them.
* "Pushing" (there is no good word for this) the direction of a dream in a particular way too hard will wake you up. It has to be done very gently.
* Abstract reasoning / logic is difficult in dreams, it causes you to concentrate too hard and then you wake up.
In general the limits are to do with the two dominant modes of thought: spontaneous unquestioning creation of ideas is very compatible with dreaming and you can float easily between multiple "perspectives" or versions without any problem. Analytical / questioning / critical thinking is incompatible with dreaming and causes you to wake up. Lucid dreaming is typically learning how to float in the sweet spot between the two modes.
> I have aphantasia (when I'm awake) and visual imagery in my dreams that is sharper and more detailed than real life.
I'm not being snarky, but... how do you know? I mean, if you can't visualize when you are awake, how do you even know what you see/saw when you were dreaming?
I'm guessing they can remember having seen things in the dream in the same way that they can remember having seen things in waking life, but cannot voluntarily conjure arbitrary images while awake.
I think the range of abilities and experiences around visualization, perceptual memory, and so forth, suggests that seeing and remembering are pretty complicated collections of multiple simultaneous processes that are a little differently expressed in different people, and that are not necessarily perfectly coordinated.
More generally, I think we tend to think of ourselves as singular, but we have pretty good reasons to think that a person isn't actually a singular thing, but is instead a collection of many processes that are only more or less coordinated and cooperating.
I don't really understand your question - do you experience dreaming in a different way? I can remember what I saw in a dream, but I cannot visualize it. This is the same as waking memories - I can remember what I saw but I cannot see it again.
The only exception would be the hypnogogic state when I have visual imagery but I'm not entirely present to process it.
Why would you need to be visualize when you were awake to remember what you saw when you were dreaming? As someone who has Aphantasia but does see when they dream this question in really puzzling.
I wouldn't know... I have aphantasia and sometimes I'm not even convinced that I even dream (I'm being facetious but at the same time I'm really not). Many others with aphantasia report similarly that they do not have recollections of their dreams.
I think that I know that I dream, deep down, because of things that former roommates and my wife have told me, but... I am trusting them at their word. And I know they're not lying to me, because why would they, but... I don't know it myself because I haven't experienced it.
Dreams are different from imagining things. When I dream, I'm seeing the dream out of my 'eyes', but its more floaty and out of body.
But when I wake up, I'm remembering what I experienced and it's like a fuzzy movie playing in my head. Imagining things, I think, is very closely tied to remembering and manipulating visual input.
different person, also have aphantasia. My dreams are completely devoid of sensory content except sometimes the entire dream is music.
I sound pretty far down a different path - my dreams are nearly always entirely audio-free in any form, but I can read just fine in them, which I've heard described as "impossible" many, many times.
Your comment really caught my eye. Would you mind saying a few words about what a dream that's devoid of sensory content is like (i.e. what is it that remains that makes it a dream)?
> sometimes the entire dream is music
What does this mean?
How are we to convince a blind man that we can see?
You could convince a blind man that you could see quite easily, by doing things that require vision and that blind people couldn't reproduce. Since the alleged visualizers don't seem to be able to do anything aphantasia-people can't - it makes me think visualization isn't real.
I remember hearing about a study on mental rotation. The time it takes most people to determine whether two shapes are identical (but rotated) is roughly proportional to the angle of rotation between those two shapes. That seems to be close to what you're asking for.
Whenever I have to mentally rotate shapes (only on tests of mental rotation / IQ) I do it by just comparing the features of the original shape to each of the candidates and ruling out options. e.g. noticing that one option has too many vertices or not enough. It's tedious but pretty reliable.
Your comment made me Google "aphantasia mental rotation" and the summary of the first result I got makes me think I'm probably right. As I read the summary, aphantasia people were slower but more accurate. In other words, the aphantasians know they don't have visual imagery and therefore do the slow but steady thing whereas the visualizers think they have visual imagery and are fast but wrong.
Granted, I haven't read the paper, but at first glance I'm counting it as evidence for me.
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2700106
Or we've spent a whole lifetime training spatial recall, and so we can do _that part_ better. I can spatially "manipulate" scenes I remember well with great precision, and I don't visualise anything. As such I don't think you can reasonably say anything at all about the ability to visualise based on this.
But why would it take visualizers longer to just _pretend_ to rotate a shape over a greater angle? I think the best explanation is that something is really being rotated, however inaccurate, simplistic, or vague.
So here is one potential discriminator. A person that can visualize sees something traumatizing. For example, witnessing someone being killed, or a gruesome accident on the highway. That person will repeatedly have flashbacks re-playing those images again and again. It's horrific.
How do you distinguish that from normal memory recall?
> it makes me think visualization isn't real.
It is. The problem is that it's not a pixel-perfect reproduction of things on a screen. It's not a movie theater, or a computer screen.
The brain is a powerful pattern-recognition machine that gets exceedingly more complex with age and experience. So:
If you ask the person visualize a bicycle, the person will visualize an amalgamation of bicycles that roughly has two wheels, a saddle, and a handlebar. And this will differ from person to person.
A kid will vividly imagine the bicycle he/she has, or the bicycle he/she wants. Same is likely for avid cyclers. For most people it will probably be a superimposed image of many bikes they've seen over the course of their lives blurring together.
The reason is probably because recollection of details is costly, and usually not that important for our very ancient very lizard brain whose primary reaction to things is still fight or fight :)
But then if you ask a person to visualize "a yellow bycice with red tyres", the visualization will become clearer, but still fuzzy and different for different people. If you've seen such a bicycle (esp. recently), you will visualize that, with high degree of fidelity. If not, your brain will once again create an amalgamation of bicycles, and create an overlay of yellow and red that may or may not be of high fidelity (I can't imagine red tyres on a bike for some reason, but I can imagine red rims on a bike, go figure).
Kids are better at visualising and imagining things because they have fewer sources to draw from, and they don't interfere with each other.
For adults it's more like a combination of camera obscura and long exposure:
- You visualize certain details in a sea of recognizable fuzziness. Example: "vizualize a street vendor" can be something similar to this (long exposure):
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/kIDQANDGRgVD91zdzZpg...
- You visualize a regonizable pattern without specific details. Example: "visualize a passage" can be similar to this (camera obscura):
https://i.shgcdn.com/dea29cf1-c27d-4f55-a029-9443222c0a0b/-/...
It definitely is real for 95% of people, you just don't have it. I doubt you could draw well from imagination even with artistic training, so there's that. Everything else is just pure cope.
The research a decade ago around face visualisation and recognition was indicating that the neural pathways and areas surrounding the ability differed from the pathways used for visualising/recognising non-facial objects. I don't know where the research stands today - I haven't kept up for it.
I remember being utterly astonished when I learned that other people had a seemingly magical ability to instantly recognise people - especially over time - which I lacked. Discovering I had developmental prosopagnosia was both a revelation and a relief!
> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately.
For two reasons.
One. They actually have the wrong mental model of the machines and really imagine them incorrectly. Basically, they've never paid attention to the details, so they get them wrong mentally, but because they aren't sure anyway so they never notice a discrepancy. If they had to rebuild the machine, that's the mess they would probably build unless they stopped to really think about it.
Two. They don't know how to draw. One aspect of learning to draw from memory is to learn how to focus on specific detailed areas and then build out. You need to train this skill before you can do it well.
> When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
As you learn to draw, if you have a good imagination, you begin to learn how to interrogate your mental images systematically. To rotate the drawing, focus in on specific details, etc.
This reminds me of a friend I had who was born with one eye, and would swear up and down that binocular depth perception basically doesn't actually exist. You don't have to feel like you've missed out in life, but you also don't need to act smug about yourself either.
Even if I'm looking directly at a thing, trying to do a still life, I can't draw for crap. Visualization and drawing ability are not the same thing.
Another commenter provided a link that I should have[1]. My point is not about drawing ability but that having access to pictures dramatically changes the kind of things people draw.
Unless you're a bike mechanic, or unusually attentive, you probably don't really know what a bike looks like or how it works. You have some of the basic ideas but not enough to wire it together. So, when people draw a bicycle from memory what they draw doesn't really make sense from a mechanical perspective. The bikes they draw couldn't work. It's not about being good or bad at drawing, it's a question of "are you poorly drawing a workable bike, or are you poorly drawing a nonsense contraption?"
If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct. As you cannot you just draw the same abstractions that I might. e.g. I know there are handlebars, pedals, wheels, connected together by metal poles. The fact that your drawing would be very different if you had a photo of the bike in front of you when you were drawing, no matter the objective quality, tells me that you probably don't have a picture of the bike available to you in your mind.
Regarding your one eyed friend, the solution is pretty simple. Demonstrate what you can do with binocular vision that he cannot with ocular vision. I assume you could estimate distances better, throw more accurately, similarly describe three-d visuals as someone else, etc. If you couldn't actually do anything to differentiate your binocular vision from your friend's vision then I'd say he has a point.
Same argument applies to aphantasia. If phantasia people really do have a mind's eye, I'd expect them to have some ability that aphantasia people lack. As is, I doubt that it's a real phenomenon.
1 -
https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
> If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct.
This contains the presupposition that the ability to visualize a bike draws on a precise memory of what that something actually looks like, rather than is a construction from a heavily compressed representation that may or may not include the information necessary to reproduce something accurate.
I don't think it's a valid assumption at all.
Even if the information is there, it presumes that the visualisation functions like displaying a photo rather than symbolically reconstructing an image the way you might e.g. draw it, equally limited by skill as your ability to draw.
From the descriptions here, I'm not convinced it's a valid presumption to think it's like a photo for most people vs. "drawing" an image either.
You are going to extraordinary lengths to insist an internal mental phenomenon you donāt experiment doesnāt exist. Your argument is basically: I donāt experience it and everyone else is too stupid to actually be able to do it. So weird.
Here's a couple examples of what I experience. I apologize that one is a little gory. This morning I walked past my kid's room and they had a pencil in their hand and were jumping on the bed. I literally saw her falling and getting stabbed in the face. I saw her falling down many different ways, and scrapes and blood. And in real life I ran in and stopped her and everything is fine. But those images are like memories to me that I can still see.
As a less gory example, I do computational geometry and I'm visualizing all of the time. I'm rotating objects around and fitting them into and next to each other in my mind. I'm slicing them, scaling them, projecting them. And yes, I can later draw a picture of or write a textual description of what I imagined.
Edit: Again, I'm not saying that you've missed out on anything in your life. The point is just that this is something people really do experience.
I think you're confusing "visualization" and "a photographic memory".
I don't think they are. If you see a picture of a wrong bike you can immediately see that it is wrong. So it is probably not the case that people are vividly visualising a picture of a wrong bike and then drawing that.
So you donāt dream, when you read a book you donāt see those wonderful scenarios and you are unable to imagine things.
The proof that it is a real phenomenon is exactly in your inability to imagine things.
I can imagine how people with Aphantasia experience the world. You, by your own admission, canāt imagine how other people experience it.
To me imagination seems a pretty real and powerful ability.
I do dream. I just don't think people have access to the visual imagery system used in dreams while they're awake.
I do read books, and, if visualizers were real, I'd expect that my enjoyment of books would be naturally greater. The narrative format of a book is similar to how I think and perceive of reality - as words. Books are more like a native format for thoughts and experiences than I'd expect them to be for visual minds.
I don't think I ever said I can't imagine what it would be like to have visuals in my mental experience. I'm familiar with images and vision and expect it would be like being able to "see" things without seeing them or calling images up on a screen. That people who claim to be able to visualize don't seem to have that ability makes me doubt their claims. (see: bicycle example)
I do have an imagination too and agree it is a real and powerful ability. I just doubt that other people actually have visual imagery in their imaginations.
> I do read books, and, if visualizers were real, I'd expect that my enjoyment of books would be naturally greater.
What? This must be satire
> The narrative format of a book is similar to how I think and perceive of reality - as words.
What else could a book be but words?
> Books are more like a native format for thoughts and experiences than I'd expect them to be for visual minds.
Youāve read every book? And you claim to know what happens in my mind when I read?
Also ā have you ever noticed that literature often uses a lot of similes? Youāve never wondered what thatās about?
What do you make of visual descriptions in books? Did the author just randomly assign attributes like colour to things? Things that don't and never will exist?
> I do read books, and, if visualizers were real, I'd expect that my enjoyment of books would be naturally greater.
Ok, youāre trolling.
Where would one see things other than in their mind? The visual field isn't an accurate representation of reality. It's constructed by the brain.
I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.
I would describe myself as having aphantasia. Anything I can visualize is basically black on black in the fog. It certainly seems to me that in describing visualizing a helicopter, you're really seeing your mental model of one. And when people describe the rare phenomenon of eidetic memory, it's more as if they're able to review the actual image in all its detail.
This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that people's mental models succumb to a sort of cartographic compression. Your mind doesn't remember detail which seem unimportant at the time, which makes them impossible to draw later. If your visualization was complete, certainly you could draw the parts, even if you couldn't draw them accurately.
It sounds like you do have aphantasia yes.
I am a part of a large fb group that was formed when the 2015 study was released and we all discovered it.
Hereās something you may find interesting: people seem to have a variety of combinations of āmindās sensesā as well as typically a single sense that their mind functions in normally.
Some examples to hopefully illustrate what I mean:
- Seeing clear pictures in their mindās eye, and processing things visually
- Having colours and blur in their mindās eye, almost like it needs glasses, and processing things visually
- Having compete blackness in their mindās eye and processing things through a āmindās earā (for example: by having a complex inner monologue/dialog)
- Bonus: thereās even a difference in inner monologues. Some have a distinct voice, some have an absolutely flat monotone voice, some have a voice that blabs about everything going on combined with memories and perceptions, some have a voice that is only stating literal observations... I find it fascinating how different we all are.
I donāt think I know of anyone who processed everything through a āmindās noseā, but we have definitely had discussions about the different ways peopleās ānosesā work.
Kinaesthetic senses (āmindās handā/āmindās sense of physical spaceā) seems to be a rare one, even among aphants, and thatās what I have: my brain processes things by ātouchā. Memories are recalled much like fumbling for threads in a black room. If I can find the right thread (rare: I have a terrible memory), and if I can follow it patiently enough, then I find that everything is connected on the other side. (Who is X?.... [some small detail of their shirt is found on the edge of my awareness]... Aha! I met X at Y, and this is what the day was like, and there was something about a burrito, and some time later we went for great Mexican food).
It took a while before I could properly learn complex topics as I had to translate them all to a sort of mental āmuscle memoryā. I couldnāt tell you what the name of something is, but I can tell you the mechanics of how it works.
So yes, I think youāre entirely on to something with the cartographic compression of a mental model, but that does not seem to be the majority of people. On the contrary it seems that weāre in the minority.
Youād think that this kind of topic is impossible to understand properly because of how poorly most people know themselves but I have seen the initial discussions first-hand and if you saw what I saw you would know that those people were not faking but were instead self aware enough and open enough to reveal some hidden truths about human beings in general.
Where can I read more about the mind's senses?
Thatās an excellent question, and I donāt have a good answer. Weāre in such an early stage of our understanding.
If anyone has good resources Iād also be interested.
It's a question of whether you're "seeing" a helicopter, or just a semi-conceptual representation of one.
E.g., I can hear music pretty much perfectly in my head. I can stop it, rewind it, separate the parts... and I can transcribe it into my music software, with pretty reasonable accuracy. That's the aural equivalent of drawing an accurate helicopter from memory.
> I can hear music pretty much perfectly in my head. I can stop it, rewind it, separate the parts... and I can transcribe it into my music software
do you see the notes of the music in your head, as music plays? so itās like memorizing lines from a story or play?
No, nothing visual about it. I can just hear it internally, and command the playback (start over, ever). It's not 100% perfect recall, though, I should note. Parts will be blurry, especially if it's only a song I ever heard a couple of times years ago. But the key thing is that I'm not hearing a conceptualized representation of the music, but the original audio (though somewhat compressed). So it's not that I'm just hearing/remembering a chord progression -- I can recall the original sound source, effortlessly.
I don't think this is super rare, btw.
But your drawing of a helicopter would be better if you were looking at one. That's what I'm trying to get at - you aren't looking at a helicopter if you don't have a picture in front of you, otherwise your drawing wouldn't get better.
Are you visualizing a weird looking helicopter or do you think you're visualizing while actually not?
Being able to visualize doesn't mean being able to visualize everything you've ever seen perfectly. I have friends who work on helicopters (technical work behind the scenes, engineering stuffs), some who could draw a detailed helicopter (happen to be excellent at technical drawing) and some who couldn't (like me, lousy artists). And if you're not familiar with the object, it will be even harder to draw it accurately (even if you _are_ a good artist).
No, my drawing would be quite awful either way. With a picture for reference, it might be more "accurate" in the sense of discrete details, like say it has two blades while my imagined one had four, but I wouldn't be any better at drawing the relative dimensions or shape.
In this scenario, I happened to visualize (rather accurately, after checking) an AH-64. Not some abstract helicopter concept.
I'm someone who can copy a picture or scene in front of me to near photo-realism level of detail, but usually makes cartoon-like pictures without a reference. I can visualize 3-D Tetris blocks in my head and rotate them at will, and read off information (like, if letters were assigned to the faces of the blocks, I could spin the whole chunk around and read off according to instructions). I think the main difference here is due to two factors: 1. Time investment, and behind that, 2. Contextual demands. With a reference, one may feel more _expected_ to produce a high-fidelity drawing, and take the appropriate time. But if someone simply asks, "Draw a horse", I would usually try to make a basic outline, and not worry too much about the details. The difference between a photo-realistic drawing, and one that is like a child's, is tens of hours of focused work, because reality is very easy to picture for many people, but reproducing that level of detail requires a lot of pencil-strokes.
This comment reads like a blind person arguing that everyone else is blind as well. For seeing people it's just nonsense. You're clearly in denial.
"I have this magical ability. I can generate the feeling of warmth whenever I want."
"Oh neat, you can mentally generate warmth and we can measure with a thermometer!"
"No, no. It's mental warmth only."
"Okay, so you never get cold?"
"Well, no, true cold overwhelms my mental warmth, I get cold as easily as anyone else."
"But, you could make yourself sweat on demand, right?"
"No, sweating is a response to actual warmth..."
That's what it's like in this thread. People claim to have an ability that produces no actual difference. Elsewhere in this thread we see that mental imagery folks aren't better at shape rotation (they're worse), they can't draw from their images the way the could from real images, their mental imagery is vague, low resolution, and imprecise.
A blind person easily discovers the sighted can do things they cannot. Read text, spot distant objects, etc. A person with aphantasia discovers there is nothing the visualizer can do that they cannot. How could this be so?
I think you're just confused about which of us the blind one is.
The point is not that it's superior to your experience. The point is that you saying "you can't do it either" is so obviously false. We know what we experience. Someone telling me I can't see images in my head is like someone telling me I'm blind.
With that said, I actually can't phantom how I would function without mental imagery. How do you recognize things? How do memories play out in your head? How do you even know where to put "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" in your drawing if you can't visualize it? It feels like I would be completely handicapped and not far from being blind for real or having amnesia. However, I presume you're a functioning individual so I guess I'm equally surprised but from the other end.
I donāt think either is superior, but I do think they have different advantages. Hereās my take on my lack of a mindās eye, from above:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370518
Recognition via rules and properties works just as well as visual recognition. What you and I essentially have are two different algebras for the same underlying knowledge. The towers we build on top of those foundations will be fairly similar, even if the coding is different at the lowest levels.
You're looking for concrete proof of something that happens in people's minds, but you go about it by evidence of how well they transpose that into other things (like drawing). I think brain scans could be that proof, but I suspect your disbelief may not be satisfied.
My experience of visualization is like this: focus on your peripheral vision, and that's what my whole vision becomes like--peripheral. Then another layer of peripheral-like focused vision is on top of it featuring things that aren't really there. it's unclear and always morphing
> I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things
I can't imagine not visualizing things. My undergrad was in mechanical engg, so it was kinda central to our field.
Imagining a 2d machine drawing as a 3d figure, imagining the interactions between various moving parts or system of joints and levers is expected of you.
The way I think reflects the visualization itself. Usually, it takes quite long to 'load' a complex system in your head and visualize it. But after it is done, I can describe intricate details of it. I also get irrationally irritated when someone interrupts me in the 'loading' phase, cuz I have to start all over again.
For a similar reason, I have a very natural affinity to graphs = undirected-trees and flow charts as they serve as a visual representation of what is a symbolic relationship. I am also completely unable to recall language or isolated-facts perfectly, but can do the same for visual systems.
I am famously 'the whiteboard guy' at what is now an ML job, so I can believe that not everyone thinks of these systems visually. But, visual intuition in some form is and has always been core to how to how I understand stuff.
> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines?
In my case, the key points of interaction are visualized clearly. (eg: point of contact for gears, or a joint, or multi head attention on a single node). The rest is invisible in an out of focus sort of way, like things in our peripheral vision are out of focus and practically invisible, but you're still seeing them.
> I tend to think that I have a better understanding,
I maintain that vision is a crutch. It helps develop an easy to grok intuition, that works within the realm of visible way you'd think of interacting with the system. True intuition of things requires moving away from the visual intuition, and one that is grounded purely in the key axioms of that idea itself.
An example would be us thinking of differentiation as slope of a curve. The visual grounding is helpful but a more axiomatic understanding would allow you to grok concepts like [1], where the slop method falls short.
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfW845LNObM
I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia, but I didn't struggle at all in my Engineering or Physics undergrads.
I guess can visualize the abstract aspects of it, if it makes any sense? Kinda like I'd imagine having a Daredevil-like radar sense would feel, or Toph's sense in Avatar. I can kind of have a feeling for shapes, movement, position without the sight itself.
Art is a skill that has to be developed, though. People who are talented artists weren't born being able to draw or paint. So if someone is untrained them just drawing "two wheels, pedals and handlebars" may be because they're concerned to convey the _idea_ of a bike.
In any case, at least some people do have visualizations. There are artists that can look at something and then draw it from memory. For myself-- and I'm a fairly talented amateur-- I can see nothing in my head as I also have aphantasia. I can draw nothing from memory. When I draw something from scratch I'm having to build it on the paper and I can never repeat a drawing.
Aside from my anecdata there's another key piece here that the article mentions: people with aphantasia lack _voluntary_ visualizations: they can still have them involuntarily, such as when they dream. I know I get pictures in my head when I dream. It's an experience that's quite distinct from the normal day to day blackness in my mind's eye.
I can't visualize complex things very clearly, but I have no doubt that I can "see" something simple like a white square on a black background, and "manipulate" it voluntarily. I can do stuff more complex than that too but I image if aphantasia is a thing, those people couldn't even do something that simple.
I'm sure that's the closest description of what I observe. For me it works in this way: I'm bad at recalling past moments and if they form, they are vague vanishing grey photographs, but I can create and transform 3D models, all of that is done entirely in my head without any visual effects coming from eyes. Just like you I also have really good auditory memory, in fact I can sense Giant Steps playing at the moment and I'd say only the drums are hard to remember.
I'm not sure myself. Growing up, I remember being frustrated anytime I was asked to imagine something. I imagined what other people's imaginations were capable of, which seemed like so much more. Where reading a book would lead to a movie playing in your mind's eye.
But still, I can see a short column of numbers and add them, move the carry, etc. But it never seemed like the visualizers could.
In my experience, "a movie playing" wouldn't be the right description. I never have a super clear image of characters in my head. More like a vague cartoony idea that can morph drastically through-out the book or even when re-reading. Once I see a movie though, I'd have to force the imaginary version back. Without effort, it's probably the actor in my head, but still not super clear.
Environmental descriptions seem a littler clearer and consistent, both man-made stuff, like buildings and vehicles, and nature, but still nowhere near stable.
One thing I just realized is that, when it comes to audio, I can both imagine and recall far more clearly than anything visual. And, now that I think about it, it feels 100 times more clear.
Can you "hear" in your head?
I sometimes get portions of songs stuck in my head for a day or two, but otherwise no music unless I'm really tired. The depiction of hearing someone else's voice when reading a letter from them always fell flat with me.
People who can't draw typically don't draw what they see (or visualize). They draw symbols or icons. To draw a face, they draw a mouth, a nose and a couple of eyes. A house is a box with a door and some windows, etc. Pretty much everything they draw for the first time will be goofy, unless they can fall back on a standardized set of icons they have picked up from other drawings. They just don't have the skill to go from what they visualize to a drawing without the reduction to icons in between.
Their visualizations are fine but most people haven't trained in the fine motor skills required to produce a compelling image.
Visualization and ability to draw are separate. The latter can be trained, and I imagine that if I learned to draw better I would probably visualize more accurately, but I am convinced that the limiting factor in my ability to draw a bicycle is my lack of ability to draw and not my lack of visualization.
I think you're on to something with how people describe their experience of visualizing. On the one hand, I don't doubt there are artists and architects who can visualization clearly, or musicians who hear music and can transcribe what they hear. But I can't help but think the description of these capabilities are exaggerated for the majority of the population.
I've asked someone to visualize a house then asked them how many windows it has. They didn't have a answer. This isn't any different from what I'd say. I can try to imagine an apple. I know it's red. I know there's a stem and a green leaf on the stem. I know the shape of a Macintosh, with the wide top narrowing at the base. But the serrations and veins of the leaf, I'm not sure of. And I'm fairly confident that most people who claim to be able to visualize couldn't describe the leaf well enough to distinguish it as an apple leaf and not some idealized idea of a leaf. Could they describe it well enough that an artist could draw it?
I think some of this comes down to the way the question is asked. If you asked me to imagine "a house", I would have a somewhat abstract, child-like template in mind. Some of that would be due to expectation -- that you probably will have me do something with respect to the _concept_ of a house, rather than asking details of it. If you asked me to picture, instead "a specific house, perhaps one on your street", then it would be a detailed image, and I could easily count the windows, give the colors of roof, siding, and trim, etc. But I suppose thinking about it now, I couldn't even in that case provide you with the number of rows of siding on the house. It's something I would imagine one could do with practice, but the brain seems to naturally drop some level of detail when recalling or imagining an object.
Iām inside my house right now with my eyes open. I couldnāt tell you how many windows it has without either looking at each wall or going through my memories, yet Iām not blind. So it is with visualisation. Your minds eye has a field of vision and just like in real life, you can focus on whatever you find interesting, manipulate it and move about.
Youāre conflating memory and visualisation. You think that a visualisation of an imperfect memory isnāt a visualisation. Nobodyās claiming itās a superpower, or really any different a way to live in the main, but I find your denial of peopleās lived experience slightly odd.
For me the visualization loses precision in the periphery. And if I focus on one part of the house then switch to focus on another part and then return, things wonāt be the same. Itās not stable.
So answering the question āhow many windowsā changes from moment to moment.
Iām not saying everyone is this way, but I am.
That's interesting. To the degree I can visualize, it's the same for me.
I can easily visualise an house with how many windows you want.
I can even visualise a cat with how many windows you want.
We all have this moment.
I'm not sure asking someone to draw "a helicopter" or "a bicycle" (inherently an abstraction) is a good way to get non-nonsense simplifications. It's like asking for "a face" and expecting something that isn't cartoonish? Also, I doubt all non-aphantasiacs can draw tolerably. That said, I do sort of assume it's a spectrum, and that there's a similar-ish 1-10% of people on the far end who visualize very well.
Perhaps if you ask them to _describe_ their first bike in as much detail as they can?
>Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can?
That is not a task that requires the ability to visualize.
Neither does drawing one, as shown by the numerous artists (painters, illustrators, etc.) with aphantasia.
Can you hear in your head? If you can hear someone else's voice in your head can you reproduce it in your own vocal chords? If you can hear a song played on guitar can you fret the correct frets and pluck the correct strings? I will agree that there is probably some trickery going on in the minds eye; I can see parts of images created in great detail, but I doubt that detail existed before I looked for it.
My wife has aphantasia. She knows she has aphantasia. It isnāt that she gets no visuals in her head at all. It sometimes happen on their own. But she does not know how to voluntarily do it. So she knows that other people are capable of visualizing even if she cannot.
When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting.
I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually āseeingā it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger.
Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They canāt visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
> _It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines._
In the industrialized west we simply call that "doing drugs".
I live and work in the industrialized west, and that characterization misses a lot of things.
Ingesting DMT is doing drugs, no matter how much hippie shaman woo or "traditional herbal medicine" adjectival touch-ups one sprinkles on top.
This isn't derogatory, but let's call a spade a spade.
I would like there to be less stigma around doing drugs. The stigma around boring ones like THC is already starting to fade. There never seemed to be any around the most commonly used drugs (nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine) in the first place, despite all of their massive harm (alcohol and the inhaled combustion byproducts involved in smoking primarily).
Pretending that hallucinogens are some special "medicine" in a different class than someone with an anxiety disorder slamming a double rye neat after work (or a double espresso beforehand, or a smoke on their lunch break) is doing neither drug user any favors.
We are all drug users.
I wasnāt necessarily talking about DMT. I was calling these plant medicine because there are interactions with the consciousness of the plant, and not just the material body of what is being ingested. As such, it is even possible to participate without ingestion. Certainly, the shaman and ceremony involved have a big impact on the experience and what is being worked on.
So yes. You want to call a āspade a spadeā, and that is true from a mechanistic worldview, but it misses the point from a different worldview.
If you can "participate" in your "medicine" "without ingestion", then it ain't medicine.
Plants also don't have consciousness. Whoever told you that they do was lying to you.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w
All medicines are drugs, not all drugs are medicines. Depending on the purpose and use of a substance, pointing out that it is a drug is trivial and does not disqualify it from being a medicine.
It's really like explaining vision to a blind person. It's kinda like dreaming if you could control the dream.
Eh I wouldn't say it's _necessarily_ like lucid dreaming. My lucid dreams were much more stable than visualizations, maybe because in a dream I'm not distracted by the outside world.
I live with someone who has Aphantasia, when they recall their dreams it's in the form of 'words', not images. They have no concept of 'visual dreams'.
To do math, I may literally visualize the numbers in my head, like an extra piece of paper I can manipulate numbers on, but it's not literal paper so it doesn't have to conform to annoying IRL properties like fixed transparency and permanent ink that can't be slid around.
It gets difficult to do more than simple calculus and algebra problems purely in my head, so I start offloading parts of my virtual workspace to a meatspace page.
Does "mindbleach" make sense to you? I suppose you do not experience the phenomenon of having disturbing imagery "stuck in your head"?
I have aphantasia, but I don't doubt that people actually do visualize things, for two reasons:
1. Dreams. I have "after-images" of dreams for brief moments after I wake up, but then rapidly fade, as do memories of what happened in the dreams unless I quickly make sure to fix memories of specific details in memory by thinking about them after I wake up. And so I have memories of having the dreams and seeing images in them, though I can't recall the dreams themselves.
2. I've meditated for years, and _once_ I had an experience where I suddenly could see clearly, as if I was on a movie-set. Everything was clear. I could turn around and see what was around me. I was lucid - I could have fallen asleep for a moment, it's possible, but I was controlling the "camera", and I was fully aware it was not real, which sets it apart from most dreams for me. It was also a far clearer image than I recall from dreams. I call it a "movie set" because it was clear to me it was not real _and_ it felt like a "replay" of events happening around me that I was not taking part in, which also does not match how dreams feel to me.
3. I occasionally see very brief, fuzzy flashes. E.g. in writing #1 above, I for a fraction of a second saw a flash of my grandparents cabin, which was the subject of a weird recurring nightmare I used to have where on one side of the cabin it was sunny, while on the other side there was a torrential downpour that eventually became a wall of green water. I can _describe_ the cabin in great detail, but I can only _see_ that very brief flash of an image, even that inconsistently.
So, I know my brain _can_ create visuals of different fidelity under different circumstances.
At the same time, when I "visualise" things, the "visualisations" are entirely spatial, not visual, and I can reproduce abstract drawings with a level of precision that I can't copy if I sit down in front of something and try to draw it. I remember a particular time in school (as I type that, I can recall the layout of the class-room, down to where I sat, how we were seated in groups of four, what the desks and chairs looked like, but I can't _see it_) where we were given the task of doing two drawings of our shoes: For one we were to draw purely from memory. For the other we were to put a shoe in front of us and copy it.
My drawing from memory was very precise. I remembered almost exactly what my shoe looked like, and drew a stylised and precise representation of the concept of that shoe that incorporated most details of it. My drawing from having it front of me was far more fuzzy and impressionist, with lots of imprecision and imperfections that were not there in the stylised drawing from memory. But it looked more like the real-life shoe.
My point being that I see no reason for you to assume that how people draw things are linked to their ability to visualise the thing. I can draw things I can't visualise in ways that are many ways better than how I can draw things sitting on my desk in front of me, but in some ways worse. I think it is in part because the lack of visual recall forces me to compensate by learning the details of something.
E.g. another comment asked about number of windows in their house. Well, I can't _see_ my house, but I can "spatially walk around it" and count, but if I do I quickly realise that if I _could_ visualise the house it'd likely be fuzzy in parts because I need to think about certain rooms because I mostly see the house from the inside and in some rooms the curtains towards the road are usually drawn shut. I see no reason why someone would accurately be able to recall or visualise most objects, because most of the time we don't really _look at_ objects properly. People superficially pay attention to just some details and never bother to actually fully take in enough detail to ever remember an object the way it actually looks.
So when you say other people think they have a visualisation but do not, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion: People don't _have an accurate memory_, as you point out. And whether or not it is limited that way for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that visualisation is limited by recall and imagination, and that you can't "test" whether or not people can produce visualisations by judging their ability to recall an object precisely.
I have to acknowledge that my supposition that aphantastic people would have trouble drawing from memory or imagination was wrong. It was pure speculation, based, I presume, on the fact that I lean hard on visualization to draw from memory or imagination.
I must say, the truth of the matter is much more interesting than my incorrect speculation.
It's really fascinating, because the variety of experiences here is so broad. And my experience during meditation suggests to me that even the level of visual experience I can recall having had during dreams are nothing compared to what is possible. I really want to find a way of triggering that level of fidelity again, but I'd settle for much less. It's not that I really feel like I'm missing out per se, as that it's intriguing that it's possible. At the same time my spatial reasoning is well above average, and I can't help wondering what, if any, link there is between that an the aphantasia. E.g. have I learned to reason spatially because I can't reason visually? Or do people tend to learn one or the other? Or are they entirely separate?
My guess (and it's definitely just a guess) is that they're separate. I visualize vividly, and also score pretty high in spatial reasoning.
Claim to? We just do.
Why canāt we draw perfect helicopters from mind?
The same reason most canāt draw a perfect helicopter when having one in front of them.
How do police sketches work? If a person is describing who or what they saw, are they only recalling metadata or ascribed properties?
I am absolutely sure that I can visualize images. But I can also visualize sound.
What do you visualize? Just words? Must be some kind of image, sound or something.
My mental experience is something like a voice that rapidly narrates my every thought at all times (and is indeed reading along with me as or slightly before I type this). Saying "narrates my every thought" is kind of a weird construction because those essentially are my thoughts not just narration. I also have what I think of as a separate thread that is barely at the edge of awareness and has thoughts that aren't quite words but more like feelings. There are no images of any kind that accompany any of this nor a black void on which images might be rendered.
In another comment I likened it to reading a book. When I read a book that voice is just enunciating the stream of text instead of my thoughts (except when I get distracted and the internal voice starts narrating my thoughts again).
So, for contrast, my mental experience is mainly visual with some other constructed senses, and intermittent verbalizations. Sometimes the verbalizations are sentences. Sometimes they're phrases, or single words. Sometimes they're entirely absent.
Sometimes my mental experience is something I might call spatializations, rather than visualizations, especially when I'm solving problems with data structures. These will be 3-dimensional spatial arrangements of symbolic objects without any specific shapes, colors, or textures.
I've been a programmer and a technical writer for a little over thirty years. I have a lot of practice converting my thoughts into words. It's pretty much always a distinct conversion process, though. I usually cannot speak my thoughts because they mostly aren't words. I have to go through a process of translation to represent them as words.
I was like you until the age of 34 or so.
Now I can make full corporeal models that move in time and walk around them.
Learn.
And people don't visualize things the way I learned. They "see" the same spotty attention-point cloud they move around in in real life, one spot at a time. Plus many didn't learn to draw. Also learn.
You can't simply say to "learn" to cure yourself from aphantasia and leave it at that. Please elaborate.
The way you learn anything. 0_o
You need a journal. You need deliberate practice. You need progressive goals.
I did about 5 minutes every 2 to 10 days.
First, no other thoughts. I did mindful boxed breathing for about 3-4 minutes.
Then, a point. Something that is in a spot.
Then two points. Something like a distance.
When you have that, advance to a triangle. Then colored triangle.
Then a pyramid that you spin around, coloring different faces in different colors.
That alone took about 6 months of practice. Then it gets easier.
I also did this process, but my experience was different. When I first realized that others could visualize things and I could not. I practiced trying to visualize a simple cube for months, relaxing and meditating as you did. Then one day I actually saw something. I was fully awake, and I saw a crystal clear image of a large granite slab, slowly rotating. I could see the texture of the surface, the physical detail of the shape. It was a truly amazing experience, the likes of which I had never experienced.
And then I had what was the most frightening thought I've ever had: "I don't know how to make this thing go away - what if I can't make it go away? Have I just taught and meditated myself into psychosis? Oh shit!!!"
I then pulled out of the visualization (no idea how that happened, it just ended with no fanfare, presumably as I started to think about other things) and have never seen another mental image like that, even though I've tried. This happened perhaps ten years ago.
That experience was not entirely unlike my experience with lucid dreaming some years earlier. I essentially never dreamed (never recalled my dreams), but I read all about lucid dreaming, thought about it, and used Richard Feynman's dream study approach to try to focus on it. Then one night I had a lucid dream, and the next night, and the next. Each night for almost a week I had an incredibly vivid lucid dream, absolutely amazing experiences, waking up the next morning with full recall of it and feeling exhausted and entirely unrefreshed from my sleep. At the end of that week I had a final dream. In that final dream the subject of my dream was the realization that I couldn't lucid dream any more. I never had another lucid dream, and have almost never remembered any dreams since then.
The hardware is clearly there for this stuff, at least in my case, but it seems the OS is also clearly working to "protect" me from some of those hardware features.
Given that there absolutely are people who are subject to uncontrolled hallucinations and mental breakdowns between the real and the imaginary, I've concluded that at least for my mind these experiences are too close to the boundary for whatever circuitry protects me from that sort of breakdown. Others will have their own journeys, but for me based on my personal experiences I've concluded it's not a case of the mind "can't" it's a case of the mind "shouldn't" or "wont."
As with any extreme training, be careful not to injure yourself. You might be fine, but not everyone who engages in extreme training does so without injury. I'm glad to have walked away from the process safely and can easily imagine not having done so.
Well, there really is no boundary of insanity. Not one that you can define clearly, anyway. You shouldn't be afraid of yourself, that's not productive to learning. You're not that many people, hardware and software and all that, that's nonsense. There isn't a war going on inside you unless you imagine there to be one.
Be more bold.
I was like you, very ambitious. Started with a cube, after many attempts getting nothing saw something incredibly vivid, very much like lucid dreams that I've had when I was younger.
And then three months of nothing again.
I got SO EXCITED. It's there! I was right, people condition themselves largely, into a form of acceptable experience. But there is more.
So I took smaller steps. A point. A spot of magnitude. Add color. Add one more spot, at a measure from the first. Rotate that around, then rotate that in three dimensions. Trace letters, one by one. Read backwards the result. Light a surface, texture a surface, bend a surface.
The smaller the steps the more success you'll have. It's important to feel grounded, and it's important to be motivated to invest the time. Success is non-negotiable, it has to be there.
Frustration is the mind killer.
Sorry friend, but most of your comments regarding "growing out of aphantasia" sound like we just need to pray it away, or similar nonsense. Have you thought perhaps it's not just a matter of "being more bold"? If being bold worked for you, have you thought that perhaps it might be harder for other people? Your advice feels a little too condescending to me.
It's like going to a short-sighted person and telling them to just to open their eyes more and everything will work out in the end. I don't think you understand what this phenomenon is.
I'm not here to talk you out of your disability.
I'm here to point out that it doesn't actually exist, because you can work at it and improve. That's not a disability, at that point. This is not to do with what you're born with, but what you're raised with.
This is conditioning. I am a sample of one, but there is no contrary evidence that I can find; and plenty to support my experience.
How do you start to visualise a spot when you have no mind's eye whatsoever?
You know what, I just might do a training app for you all.
After all, I know a thing or two about that.
How?
It's not an infectious disease, and in my case wasn't a disorder of some kind. I just never was told that it's a learnable skill. I just told you it is.
You might have luck starting with a point, or maybe with a word ā try tracing letters and read it backwards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367198
How do you masturbate (without video stimulation)? Do you make up a story/setting? How do you visualize an attractive nude body without visualizing?
I was reading a biography of Nikola Tesla and they mentioned he could visualize entire machines in his head, rotate, tear them down, revise and redesign.
My first thought was "wait...not everyone does that?"
When I am describing a mechanical device the description builds in my vision...to the point where if I focus on it I can nearly block what I am actually seeing with what I am visualizing. My hand gestures are actually me mentally manipulating the device as I describe it. And immediately when I stop...my vision restores and the "real world" is back.
When I was a child I was a "daydreamer"...constantly looking out the window. Now that I am older I realize this is why. Not everyone is like this...that was something I had no concept of...I have always been this way.
I am not an exceptional artist...but I have a near photographic memory for things I read and conversations I have had. On the flip side though...I am for the most part totally face blind. I have trouble finding people in a crowd...especially if they change clothes, difficulty placing where I know someone from (but once they say "you know...at that one party"...I can remember the entire conversation we had).
My suspicion is the mind typically balances these things and somehow I am "off balance". It is very much a gift and a curse.
FWIW I have aphantasia, but my abstract visualisation skills such as imagining and tearing down machines in my head, or even daydreaming, is on point. Which is why software engineering is my career path, as most of it is keeping a complex abstract idea in your mind to flesh it out and think most of the corner cases before sitting down to write code.
I just do all this visualisation without seeing anything, but I describe myself as a visual thinker.
I describe aphantasia as not being able to literally see things with my mind's eye, but still having the feeling of seeing them. Like running a headless browser.
Similar here. Abstract and spatial models are easy, but I can't "see" them.
I am also unusually obsessive about what my code _looks_ like, because even though I can't see it, my recall is very much linked to an idea of what it looks like. I can navigate code by remembering what the right part of a piece of code looks like on screen. Just writing that made me recall the visual structure (without seeing it) of parts of the text editor I use and develop, as well as the appearance of a page of a paper I read 25 years ago.
Wow, this confuses the hell out of me and I will have to think about it. I describe my self as definitely not having aphantasia because...basically I can do what you describe.
I can also visualize real things to a degree, but it's kind of like when you see something in the corner of your eye, the brain has some visual info that makes it to your experience, but it isn't super legible. I can visualize pretty much whatever to that extent. But it is the other stuff, what you were describing, that made me totally sure I couldn't possibly have aphantasia. That's the visualizing I'm actually really good at.
Edit: Also, what is the difference between mentally seeing something and having the feeling of having mentally seen it? How are these not the same thing?
> what is the difference between mentally seeing something and having the feeling of having mentally seen it?
The same difference between seeing an apple with your own eyes right in front of you, and the memory of having seen an apple. In the first case, the apple has a specific colour, shape, size. In the second case, it's just the idea of an apple. Many people can conjure vivid imagery as if seeing the object right in front of them, or at least so I understand. I can't.
Sorry if I can't explain it better, our own minds are so unique it's not easy to explain concepts like these with words. I have written and deleted this comment half a dozen times, I can't do better than this.
I think I see what you mean after some thought. For me, "the memory of having seen an apple" includes imagery. I had thought the memory actually was the imagery, but thinking about it I decided that's not entirely true, but it is _mostly_ true for me.
Thinking about how I remember conversation is a metaphor that worked for me to get what you're saying. I often remember the voices and inflections and everything, but after some time, especially with less important conversation, I might remember the conversation having happened but only remember a kind of summary without the vocal/auditory details.
From the sheer amount of different descriptions of this Aphantasia it should be obvious that most of it will cluster not in "disorder of the brain" or some such, but in "different levels of ability, due to skill".
I was blanker than you describe it. Nothing moving, nothing seen, nothing.
Now I can light subjects, take measurements, walk around things with moving parts, roll them forward and backward through time.
I went on a hunch that it just doesn't fit. Has to be learnable.
And it was.
> From the sheer amount of different descriptions of this Aphantasia it should be obvious that most of it will cluster not in "disorder of the brain" or some such, but in "different levels of ability, due to skill".
Yes, though it was a shock to learn of its existence in my 30s, but probably explains why getting into drawing has always felt so hard for me, especially as I've never used reference images. I guess it's perfectly fine not to be good at everything, and it's never impacted me in any way in my life.
You have wings. Don't talk yourself into not trying flying.
Not learnable for everyone, in my opinion. I have no evidence of this except my own failed attempts. But I think your only evidence, also, was your successful attempt
Or maybe we just don't have a good understanding of how to learn it (and/or most people don't try). I can't visualise anything but the briefest of fuzzy flashes, and I'd love to learn, but I have no real idea how and not sure I'd invest enough time into it if I did because most of the time it doesn't affect me, so I'd "love to learn" the same way I'd "love to learn" better French (he says while 2 days overdue with his Anki deck) - it's an aspiration that often falls flat in the face of having to invest time.
To be motivated to invest the time you want successes. Small ones will do.
You can't be failing all the time, that's frustrating.
How do you approach learning?
I'm very good at learning, can I maybe help? Talk to me.
How did you teach yourself?
I started with a journal, 5 minutes or so of practice every 2 to 10 days.
First three I spent with my eyes closed, boxed breathing and not thinking of anything. It is hard to engage your mind in something while it's thinking this and that. That has to stop first.
Then I'd try to localize a point. Move it around. A spot of my attention.
Then try to understand what it would feel for it to be red, or green.
Then I'd add a second point, and spread them apart or move them in closer together.
Then I'd make one larger, a spot. The other smaller, and move one around the other.
All of those are exercises for different days, and are progressively unlocked by succeeding at the previous exercise, not once but thoroughly.
Then you could try tracing letters, imagining yourself following the motion.
Putting letters together, one after the other.
Reading that backwards.
You should expect just that to take about 6 months of practice. Then it gets easier faster.
Aphantasiac here. Not quite _pure_ aphantasiac, as I do on rare occasions experience momentary flashes of mental imagery, but it's so rare that it never occurred to me anyone could actually do anything useful with mental images.
Once the penny finally dropped it was mind-melting. It's been three or four years now since I realized my experience is unusual, and I'm _still_ discovering ways it impacts how I experience life differently than most.
A memorable moment was telling a friend who already knew I was aphantasiac that I struggle with mental arithmetic, and being completely lost when he replied, "oh, right, because you can't make the numbers dance in your head."
I said, "what?"
After a minute of confusion, he was finally able to get across that when he does mental math, he actually writes the problem in his mind's eye and does it on virtual paper.
I think that was the day I first realized that it really is a handicap in many ways.
OTOH, an upside is that I've never had to wish for "brain bleach". I didn't understand that phrase at all until the past year or three. I occasionally think that aphantasiacs should be preferentially chosen for high-trauma-exposure jobs, like EMT - we simply can't retain those horrible moments.
I'm not on HN super-regularly, but I'd be happy to take a few minutes to answer questions the next time I check in.
Iām not doubting your friend, but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability. I would say that ability depends much more on short term memory capacity than anything else. I think the visualization aspect is incidental.
> but that kind of mental visualization ability (doing arithmetic on visualized paper) has to be extremely rare. That is savant level capability
No way. I would say most of the math students I've taught at the university level could do it to some extent.
It's not all that helpful. The problem is that your visual scratch pad is quite limited. If you're forced to always rely on it you won't get far without having to unlearn bad habits.
This happens to people with amazing memories too. I can't name a single colleague at my top 10 university that has an eidetic memory. The people I've met with amazing memories have systematically had a lot of issues because of their memory. It's too easy to rely on remembering things and then you never build good heuristics and don't generalize well.
It is pretty handy in a related concept - rotating stereoisomers in organic chemistry
I can definitely see things in great detail in my mind, I don't feel like it's too hard, is it really that uncommon?
My wife always loses things, and when she is looking I just virtually walk around my house to figure out where it is. I'm not sure I see every detail, but I see most of the home. Same for if I am talking about where something is for driving, I just virtually drive there in my head and explain the major turns to them as I go. I can also picture math and programming in my head; the former usually as geometric shapes forming to solve a problem and the latter as flow charts.
I'm not the smartest person, so I'm pretty sure it's just practice that allows me to do this, as I've always been a sort of loner and had to picture books and worlds in my head to entertain myself.
I visualize mental math but anything more than 2 digits by 2 digits is hard to keep track of. Short term memory is very much the limiting factor.
Surely it isn't that rare? I can track about 8 digits total while doing mental mul/div, and I don't think of that as anything special.
Iām probably just an idiot, but I am absolutely terrible and anything that requires me to retain information in my head for a calculation.
So you could multiply or divide two four digit numbers by visualizing them?
To me that is pretty incredible!
How do you figure? Just the two inputs would take up all 8 digits, but you need to keep track of a bunch of intermediate results too.
Yeah 4x4 would be a bit much, 3x3 is doable, 3x2 is easy.
A few years back I couldn't visualize a point.
Recently I learned to read words backwards in my mind.
It's a skill.
Paramedic with aphantasia here. You're spot on that it's a huge blessing in that regard (I don't think there's any particular selection pressure for it in EMS though, I've yet to come across anyone else in the field)
What was the point at which it "clicked" for you? For me it was an AskReddit thread a few years back with a prompt of "When you hear a 'three X walk into a bar' joke, what does the bar look like?" It had just never occurred to me that people can actually visualize a bar when they hear that joke.
It clicked for me when I read Blake Ross's article on his own discovery of aphantasia:
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...
I read that and went "huh. I guess I'm weirder than I thought."
Do you read fiction? I stopped when I realized I simply didnāt enjoy it, and I think thatās because I donāt see the scenes.
I do. I love reading fiction and got through thousands of fiction books in my teens.
My experience of it is quite different from most, as I have come to understand.
I never understood what people meant when they said "That character in the movie didn't look at all like I imagined him."
I always thought they just meant "I don't think the movie makers came up with a good version."
I did try my hand at writing fiction once, and I was boggled at how hard it was to do something like write a military skirmish. I was sketching maps and trying to work out topography and all kinds of details.
Now that I know people can visualize the scene then describe it, well... my difficulties make a lot more sense.
I listen to fiction audiobooks (I love reading physical non-fiction books, but can't do that for fiction).
I can certainly still enjoy the plot of a fiction story, but yeah, the fact that my experience of stories told through text/audio is apparently really limited is sad...
I'm similar. For me, I can get a "flash", but it immediately morphs into another shapeless shape.. constantly morphs, in fact.
Try this neat trick I _just_ discovered: Try to visualize colors. Close your eyes, and just try to picture a red, then a green, then a blue. I never realized I could do this, and it actually requires a good bit of concentration. But it's _super_ satisfying, especially given my aphantasia. I really can "see" the color like it's right there.
How's your "inner ear"? Can you hear music perfectly? I can.
I just tried your suggestion, but at least on a first attempt I can't get anything to appear.
Thanks for the idea, though!
My inner ear is nothing compared to a good composer's, but it's waaaaay better than my mind's eye, I think mostly due to years of heavy musical practice routines.
There was one memorable occasion when I was able to page through a set of flute/clarinet duets and actually hear in my head how they sounded based on sightreading the scores mentally.
I was playing a lot back then and doubt I could do it now. Two monophonic instruments also helped - I can recall individual voices or instruments fairly well, but whole arrangements much at all.
_not_ whole arrangements, is what I meant to type.
This was one of the things that convinced me aphantasia is real (and that it's how my brain works).
I was concentrating very hard, trying to visualize _anything_ and suddenly managed to imagine a green blob. I can occasionally visualize purple as well. It's so incredibly vivid though... It makes me genuinely sad to realize most people can do that (and so much more) at will.
I don't "hear" any more than I "see" in my brain.
I definitely have aphantasia - it makes meditating both easier and more difficult. I donāt get to traverse beautifully intricate mandalas but I can very easily engage in focused metta without distraction. On occasion I will see a blue light that fades in and out.
Keep practising. Try imagining the blob turning into simple shapes. Try to imagine what the blob would look like from the other side.
I have, trust me. Most nights lying in bed I'll spend at least a little time doing exactly that, with little change (that's how I figured out I could make it purple though)
Don't do it when you're trying to fall asleep, do it when you're bored and have nothing else to do. I think I'm really good at visualizing because I spent most recesses by myself imagining I had friends.
> OTOH, an upside is that I've never had to wish for "brain bleach". I didn't understand that phrase at all until the past year or three. I occasionally think that aphantasiacs should be preferentially chosen for high-trauma-exposure jobs, like EMT - we simply can't retain those horrible moments.
I'm also an aphantasiac, as it were, and I've got some considerable trauma behind me that doesn't phase me the way that people who learn of it think that it ought to. I've never seen that expressed before but I understand what you mean. Thanks for sharing.
I've recently realized that the difference between facts I remember like some numbers and names, and things I don't remember, is that I recall them as an extremely rough image of text. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. Sometimes I just can't. This stands out when putting in verification codes: sometimes I can hold the whole thing in my head as an image sort of like when you look at a bright object and it gets stuck in your vision where the receptors are overloaded. Sometimes I have to keep referring back every 1-3 characters.
Oddly, I can visualize things very well in specific circumstances. For example: if I spend a lot of time playing a new game, I can recall images from it and manipulate them with ease. There are times where I listen to podcasts while playing a game and images from the game pop up when I recall anything related to what was in the podcast.
> make the numbers dance in your head
That is the best description of mental arithmetic Iāve heard, I love it.
Thinking about it, I guess I solve problems by moving numbers into certain positions relative to each other based on the operations then watch them split apart/combine, grow/shrink, etc. I always assumed it was a weakness in my math skills but the dance metaphor is a profound reframing, thanks!
I still see my father in law and my step father dying (separately) very clearly, and wish I couldn't. I can see the life draining from my stepfathers half open eyes and his face as the nurse, thankfully, "made him more comfortable" [0] as he was taken off the ventilator. I can also see my father in law's blood drain from his swollen face as the heart-lung machine was disconnected. It's horrible.
[0]: I suspect that's just code for pumping him with an overdose of opiates so he would die quicker and with less spasms and no pain, but I can't be sure. I kind of think it's an open secret in medicine that they do this, though not sure, and I appreciate her service in helping us all be more comfortable in that room with her action that day.
Have you ever tried doing CAD work and if so, are you any good at it? What is that process like?
I've dabbled a bit with that kind of work and I find my mind's eye to be critical for it and I would have no idea how to undertake it if I couldn't visualize something.
I've never done CAD, but I did try 3D modeling and animation in my teens.
I was not any good at it.
I did slowly improve, but never got to where I could make anything genuinely visually compelling.
I got to be okay at working in traditional 2D media, as long as I was working from a reference photo.
may I ask if youāre circumcised? Iāve read some literature on aphantasia and it may stem from early childhood trauma
I am.
I'd not heard of an early childhood trauma angle before. Thanks for mentioning it.
Facebook needs to recruit aphantasics for moderators! I wonder if they could even find potentials with all of their data.
Aphantasic here. This is an odd subject for me because growing up I was always "the kid who could draw." I can paint surprisingly good portraits from life, and my sketchbooks and old canvases have lots of gems. And... a ton of crap, which now I realize was me struggling with my lack of mental imagery.
If I try to conjure an image in my mind's eye, I get zilch. Just a scramble of shapes that won't hold still, not for one moment.
So ask me to draw Obama, whose face I've seen a thousand times, and it'll be a miserable failure. Ask me to draw a hand, and (because I know how to "construct" it) and it will be expressive and fluid.
But at the same time, I have excellent musical memory. I can recall music from 20 years ago, and pick out the exact synth line that comes in at the 2-minute mark. I can easily separate the winds and the strings and the brass in my head from whatever symphonies I'm familiar with. And I hear them back as near-perfect recordings. Only thing is: I can't play back the lyrics accurately. They'll be muddy usually and mostly indiscernible.
The brain, huh?
I remember reading, when I first learned that I also had this weird thing people were calling "aphantasia," that Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar, had aphantasia [0]. I took inspiration from that fact and I've since learned how to draw.
[0]:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
Did you actually try and do a progression, with a journal?
From point, to colored points, to simple shapes, to textured surfaces, to lit and moving mechanisms?
I learned. You can too.
Years ago I spent time trying to improve my mental eye, similar to your suggestion. I would try to imagine and/or remember simple shapes. Didn't help much. Maybe if I had stuck with it (for a long long long time).
It took 3 years of practice to develop an internal movie-CAD.
But now I have it. It's worth it.
Ooh, let me ask a question of HNers who identify with this.
What I get is occasional flashes of specific images. E.g., if you tell me to think of a beach what I'll get is a flashbulb photo of a specific beach I have been to. That image then quickly fades and I'm left with something more like a tactile representation, as if you 3D-modeled the beach and printed it in monochrome grey resin and I were running my hands over it to get the shape.
Is it like that for anybody else?
Oh, and I do get more visuals on the edge of sleep. Vivid hypnagogic imagery, I'm pretty sure. But whenever I become aware of it and get interested, it quickly recedes from me. So I suspect that I have some hardware ability to visualize, but that it's suppressed by other things when I'm alert.
Very similar. I can conjure a brief glimpse of an image but never hold onto it for longer than a few hundred ms. I'm left with a notion just as much tactile and 3D/spatial but without any visual imagery attached. At best, it's like abstract chalk drawings with rough shapes on a black canvas. Very little _recall_.
But the strange part is I experience above-average visual _recognition_ memory. It's like I can take those "chalk drawings" and pattern match them ridiculously fast against real stimulus. I can recognize faces and street corners from decades ago - but only if I see them again in real life. I can't conjure the image up in my head without the corresponding stimulus no matter how hard I try.
Personally, I find it strange that non-aphantasic people can effectively hallucinate on demand. It's the equivalent of hearing voices in your head - a disconnect between sensation and perception that, honestly, reduces my trust in their judgement. I know people who are strong visualizers (can play movies on demand behind their eyelids) and find they tend to have a terrible ability to accurately convey a story - presumably they've visualized their fantasy scenario so much they're unable to differentiate it from reality? My narrative + chalk drawing memories are consistently more reliable, if not more sparse.
This is the exact same for me. The exception for this is when I dream, in which case I perceive mental imagery the way I assume most people do. Sometimes, a dream will turn lucid, and in that case, the mental imagery quickly devolves into the tactile/proprioceptive representation you describe.
An interesting note: taking bupropion (or, I assume, any similar stimulant) at bedtime drastically improves both the frequency and visual imagery of my dreams. Moreover, while taking it, should a dream turn lucid, my subjective experience in the dream is one of suddenly being unable to fixate on specific details of objects or direct my gaze (as if my visual field is entirely peripheral), rather than the 3D-modeled resin.
My brain is definitely capable of generating mental imagery, and I'll get flashbulb imagery as an automatic response to cues, but something interferes with the ability to visualize things while I'm awake.
Have you tried spending any serious amount of time in VR?
After about 30 hours in I was getting really wild enhancements to my dreams and some changes to my āmindās eyeā. Almost like mono vs stereo or black and white vs colour, but it was more like what I _thought_ was 3d was actually 2d and I only found out after it smacked me in the face.
Out of interest, how real are these "tactile representations"?
I've had tactile hallucinations for many years now, sometimes when I'm in bed with my eyes closed (but nowhere near asleep) it feels like something is grabbing or poking at my face, or at times that sometimes is under the bed and breathing but at a different rate to my own breathing. Especially the tactile hallucinations on the face, these feel incredibly real, to the point that I usually open my eyes at least once just to confirm.
However, thats clearly nothing I can control. The ability to be able to control that seems amazing to me
For me, not very real. It's just my way of describing the kind of spatial representation that is left behind for me after the visual fades.
For example if I think of a relative's home that I haven't been too for a while, I'll see one or more quick images like post card snapshots. When those fade, I'm left with a spatial map that I can mentally walk around in and touch. Or if it's of a beach, I can run an imaginary hand down the curve of the land. I don't see it. Or really, feel if it I "touch" it. It's just a sort of knowledge of filled and empty 3D space.
Those hallucinations sound freaky! I'm glad you've adjusted to them.
This is exactly what I experience. The only time I perceive anything like "seeing in the mind's eye" is on the edge of sleep and it vanishes if I pay any attention to it. (I do see in dreams, which is distinctly different from the hypnagogic imagery.)
I usually describe what you refer to as a sense of space on a monochrome model as being as if I've loaded a JSON file listing out all of the points on a 3D model, but there's no renderer to view it with.
Yes that's a great way to describe it. All shape, no render.
This may sound like a silly question, but "where" does that image appear for you? That's what doesn't make any sense to me (and why I assume all the talk of "visualizing" things was figurative for most of my life).
In front of my eyes. It's sort of like returning with my eyes closed to a spot where I once stood, opening my eyes for a quarter-second, and closing them again. Or like somebody briefly holding up a post-card in front of my face. The image quickly fades.
That seems so different to my own experiences. I think I can visualize fairly easily and it's very much a 'mental' thing, distinct from 'seeing'. If I had to describe the location it would probably be a few inches behind the eyes with a sensation not dissimilar to mulling over a problem.
There's a thing called Flashbulb Memory, but I think you're talking about something else.
Very similar, a more green hue then grey but very much like that.
Thanks! Glad to know there's at least two of us!
Well, here's a reference that's technically semantically relevant to the specifics of your description, but objectively 100% off the deep end in terms of subject matter. I occasionally think about this for a little while then re-bury it because it's simultaneously intriguing and challenging.
> A blind [astral] projector gave me the following explanation regarding his perceptions during dreams and OBEs. Being blind since birth and being a successful projector is a fairly unusual combination, to say the least. Over the years, my investigations in this area have unearthed many important clues concerning the nature of perception. These provided me with further clues as to the nature and dynamics of other aspects of OBE. In the out-of-body environment, perception is absolutely everything. Therefore, understanding the nature of perception is paramount to understanding the dynamics of OBE and the entire range of related phenomena.
> My question to CB was "Could you please expound on your nonsighted condition and how you perceive things during your OBEs?"
> _C.B.: I've been blind since birth. My optic nerves didn't develop while I was in the womb, but I still have vivid OBEs and dreams. It's hard to explain just how I sense things and get around while I'm out of my body, but I'll give it a try. I experience no real difference between my OBE and dream perceptions. When I have a dream or OBE, I am very aware of what is around me, but everything is always three-dimensional. I can't perceive anything as two-dimensional, such as what's on the surface of a picture, but can perceive the canvas and frame as a whole very clearly. The area around me is extremely vivid in my mind, in all directions, and is very detailed. This awareness is much stronger than my normal awake perceptions are in my own home. When I project it's like I can feel everything around me, as if I am continually touching everything with my fingers, with my mind, with my senses reaching out and touching everything around me all at once. My senses extend a long way, much further than usual, and I can feel into the distance around me in probably much the same way as sighted people do with their eyes. I get around fine when I'm out of my body, with no hesitation or doubt about my surroundings at all. I never worry about bumping into things and can sense exactly what is ahead of me and around me at all times. If I meet people during an OBE or dream, I can instantly tell what they look like and what they are wearing, just as if I were running my hands all over them. This isn't really sight, as I have no idea of what color or light is, but my dream and OBE perceptions are about as close to sight as it gets for me._
From page 42 of
https://ia902904.us.archive.org/28/items/AstralDynamicsANEWA...
My question about that has always been where the dividing line is between the people that can supposedly accurately describe places they haven't physically been and whatnot, and the mental blueprint of the brain going brrt :P
It's arguably half-tangentially related to what you describe, mostly because of the reference to hands.
Neat! Thanks for posting this. Yes, that's totally relevant. Much more intense, of course, but it make sense that's how a blind person would "visualise".
It also reminds me of some descriptions I hear of _zanshin_, the zen state of total awareness.
When I close my eyes and visualize I see two things simultaneously, first is the blackness of having the eyes closed, but then I also can see vivid imagery being animated, only it seems like itās running elsewhere, like in another session, or another channel, itās not being rendered out to my primary visual buffer, but it is rendering somewhere.
Is anyone able to make the imaginary imagery appear in the primary context, right before their very eyes, replacing whatever the current input may be?
Yes. This is "your mind's eye".
This is how I went from not being aware "picture yourself on a beach" was more than a figure of speech to being able to decompose mechanisms and take measurements all in my mind.
This is exactly how you do it.
Your eyes have nothing to do with it. Your brain fakes your eyes seeing stuff for you, and it can fake other things for you if you ask it.
So can you, for example, picture a black square which takes up the entirety of your vision? So your eyes are open, but you perceive nothing in front of you?
Not quite like that, but yes, sure.
I can decide not to process what comes in my eye, as long as it's not a tiger or something. Then I don't see it. If it's a familiar face or a threat, then it's harder to phase out, almost impossible.
It's useful to have something better to fidget with than a black square. But I can do black square.
Also your actual vision is like a spot, not like a square.
This is the best description of how I experience my mind's eye that I've read so far.
I never have trouble imagining things as they do clearly 'render'āI can picture scenes, shapes, faces, motion, the styling of text I remember, basically anythingābut it doesn't result in true visual output where I can see things as if I have my eyes open. If the latter is something that people can truly do, then I guess I do have some form of aphantasia.
For what it's worth, I can't do what you're describing as your experience (let alone replacing other imagery).
Start with motion.
Focus on a point. Move that focus around.
Get to two points. Spread them apart, move them closer together.
Advance to tracing letters. One after the other, into a word.
Movement is key. Try reading that backwards.
And so on.
Myself, it took about six months from nothing to colored triangle.
Are you aphantasic?
Yep
I have this! It made so much sense to me when I found out.
An example: I was always amazed and somewhat confused how police photo-fit artists could create such a perfect likeness of someone. I thought they must have been endowed with magical drawing skills. What I couldnāt comprehend was that other people would be able to _describe_ someone theyād seen in that level of detail.
Even if I think of my wife and kids I can only see the faintest fleeting flicker of their faces in my mindās eye, and even that is in very murky black and white.
I donāt know- Iām still convinced the police artists are wizards. I donāt think I could verbally describe anybody well enough to draw a good likeness even with a photo in my hand. Yet those artists do it.
Most people can't describe someone that well. Forensic artists ask lots of questions. They can change things until it looks right to the witness. And the successes get more attention than the failures.
+100!
I'm an aphant and police sketch artists seemed like sorcerors of the Dark Arts to me up until the day I realized most people can visualize.
Itās funny I can see other comments where people still donāt really understand what itās like. Nice to meet someone who gets it!
Did you realise after finding out you had any coping strategies?
I realised itās why I loved using a computer - photoshop can be my mindās eye. I even studied graphic design. Iām not a ānaturalā designer that just instantly creates great designs, but I can put stuff in there and just move it around until I like it!
I'm mostly just avisual.
I did spend several years in high school working on traditional art skills because I thought it would be neat to be a 3D animator.
I eventually concluded that while I was making progress, I clearly didn't have the natural abilities some of my friends did, and that it would be a constant struggle to have a career in the field.
Obviously, I now understand better _why_ my friends had better natural skills than I did.
I used to use mindmapping software extensively to process and think through ideas and their connections (Tinderbox, specifically:
http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
).
I now suspect that my other friends weren't as excited by it because they could do a lot of that stuff mentally.
These days I mostly figure things out by writing plain text in Markdown files. My inner world is pretty much just words, and that's how I output things now.
> _Even if I think of my wife and kids I can only see the faintest fleeting flicker of their faces in my mindās eye, and even that is in very murky black and white._
Hmmm. Supposing that problem were to be applied at a subconscious level to the mechanism that recalls faces, perhaps poor connectivity between visualization and (that area) is one potential reason/mechanism why people have face blindness?
I do sometimes struggle to recognise people if I donāt know them that well / theyāve changed their appearance substantially.
Iām also terrible at finding things. Iāll be looking for, say, the butter in the fridge and itāll be right there in my field of vision. And then when I find it I think āooooh, thatās what that looks like!ā. This brand of butter Iāve used for years and I couldnāt even remember what colour it was.
It's almost impossible to compare the level of aphantasia people may or may not have, since all they can share is their opinions of their experiences. It's difficult to do an objective comparison.
That aside, I do believe I have some form of aphantasia. I was talking to an artist colleague about his process, and he said that essentially he just visualises something on the paper and more or less just traces the outline of the mental image that he projects.
At the time, I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like. Then one day while I was half asleep, I suddenly was able to picture simple geometric shapes and even human faces on the white wall next to my bed. Like black and white holograms, they were seemingly "right there", floating just above the surface of the wall. I reached out and I could trace the outlines with my finger.
I haven't been able to reproduce that, and it only happened a few times during the period of a few weeks.
Ah well, I guess I'll never be an artist...
Don't lose hope! I linked this article in another comment in this thread. You may be surprised to learn that the co-founder of Pixar and many of the animators they surveyed internally also have aphantasia. [0]
I have been learning how to draw over the last 2.5 years, since discovering both that I also have aphantasia and that some of the best animators in the world do, too. I always thought it was unapproachable for the same reasons. I started with the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."
[0]:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
Drawing is a technical skill you develop with directed practice like anything else. It has nothing to do with tracing magical images from your head.
I've heard this, and I did take a class in drawing once. I improved, and could see a path towards becoming good, but it was not "the same".
The artist I was referring to didn't draw "iteratively", like most people. He didn't start with a pencil sketch outline that he refined progressively until it looked like the subject. Instead, he'd pick up a pen, put it on the paper, and then he just traced a single continuous outline, moving the pen inwards to fill in details. All in one movement, without picking up the pen.
I saw him draw a "dwarf with a hammer" character like this, complete with clothes down to the buttons. A detailed beard and expressive face. Boots with the tops turned down. Wrinkles in the pants. A belt with a buckle. Detail upon detail. But he just... traced it. From the outside in. You couldn't even tell what he was going to draw until a couple of minutes.
PS: I've also met a guy who could do the same kind of thing with programming. Most people build up code iteratively, "sketching" the structure using interfaces or function definitions, building them up and refining them one piece at a time. Not this guy. He'd just stare off into space, and then _start typing_. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, non-stop. I saw him open seven consecutive brackets and the close the last one a page and a half later.
He did this for a couple of hours at a fast typing rate, then hit compile. There were 3 typos due to a sticky shift key. He fixed those, and then the code compiled, ran, and successfully completed the (very complex!) problem.
These were some of the freakiest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Some people's brains just work _differently_ to mine, and I won't ever be able to "think like them".
Anyone like me who can āseeā images in dreams and in near sleep, but almost no voluntary ability to visually imagine when fully awake?
Sometimes I sleep deprevate on purpose if I need an extra kick of creativityā¦
I don't have any dream recall whatsoever. I'm not sure if I ever did. I do believe that I dream but that belief is based on anecdotes from friends and family who have observed me while I am sleeping.
Heh, I was contemplating this HN post and thinking how would I explain visual fantasy to an aphantasic person when a tought came to my mind: What about dreams?!
I had to quickly open the post and search for a word 'dream' and found your comment.
Btw. for me visual imagination during pre-sleep even when very sleep deprived is same as when being wide awake.
Dreams themselfs are a little more vivid perhaps, I'm not completely sure. Which reminds me a phrase 'lucid dreaming'.. a supposed state where can you volountarily control your dream to utilize it as some kind of matrix/construct.
That's my experience. Dreams can be vivid, or close enough to real life including color. Occasionally I'll see hypnagogic imagery, but more likely I'll hear music when I'm really tired.
I see dreams but have no visualization in any state of wakefulness
Reminds me (pun not intended) of Funes, the Memorious (Borges short story):
_A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge-all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. [...] With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence._
I'd never thought about idiot savant behavior quite like _that_ before, but it gels really well.
One aspect of aphantasia that I haven't seen mentioned yet is memory of Chinese characters / kanji.
I absolutely cannot for the life of me visualize any* of the characters I can easily read and write. However, there is a trick I can do for the ones I can write: I can trace the strokes in my head in the correct direction, order, and proportion. And I have to do it by imagining the muscle movements I would use. Although I can't visualize the result, it's the closest thing I can get to seeing anything in my mind's eye.
That's similar to how I started learning.
Did you try advancing past that though? Trace a word letter by letter, read it backwards? Take two points, move them apart? Make one green, one blue?
It took me months to get from points to a spinning pyramid with colored sides.
Since I started learning chess my visualisation has improved immeasurably. And not just for chess. I have much more control and can hold an image in my head longer without fatigue, although the vividness of my mental images has not improved. I lost the ability to make vivid mental images around adolescence.
I'd be curious what happens when a person with aphantasia tries to learn chess. Would they simply not progress, or would they develop the ability to visualise?
I have (as best I can tell...) total aphantasia. I'm also ok-ish at chess. For me it feels a lot like imaging a map. There's no visual component to it at all, but a strong sense of where everything is in relation to everything else.
It feels a lot more like proprioception than visualization.
Let's try to visualize (A little mind-game for GPT-4):
-Take a piece of A4 paper
-A real one in the 3D world, with grain and texture.
-The 1000 first digits of pi have been written on it in black Arial 12.
(How many lines are there ?).
(Read back the third line)
(Read back the fourth line from right to left)
-Wrap the paper page into a cylinder so that the first digit of the line of the over-wrap match with the first digit of Pi by transparency.
-After the over-wrap, let the page go straight and not in a cylinder such that the wrapped paper look like a manuscript o.
-Now take a red laser, and shine it through the the paper such that you highlight the same number through the 3 folds of paper.
(What is the highlighted digit ?)
-Color this digit green for all instances on the page.
Unwrap the page, (on what line is there the most green numbers).
-Change the font size to 20 and do the same exercise, but color the number blue while still keeping the previous colors.
-Change the font size to 32 and do the same exercise, but color the number red while still keeping the previous colors.
-The password is the first four consecutive red-green-blue-black, what is the password ?
I work in Computer Vision with a passion for image synthesis. I recently discoverer I have aphantasia when I heard someone else in the synthesis community talking about it.
I never realized I was āmissingā something because I have a very strong sense of internal spatial mathematics and can keep track of geometric folds, twists, transforms, etc in my head very well. But once I read this I realized most people have color. My internal world is all black.
I can _feel_ colors and shapes. But I canāt see them.
Related to :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)
Read the article on Reality Shifting (daydreaming) and wanted to share that for some of us it is impossible
Would suggest
and their twitter as well. As Someone with aphantasia I was still amazed as how different the level of aphantasia can vary between people.
I tried taking their little quiz and couldn't get past the first page. It asks me to imagine somebody I know, then asks which details I can observe. But those details are unobserved until the quiz asks me about them. The color of their clothing? I wasn't thinking about any specific clothing at all, but when prompted to I'm able to imagine that person in many different outfits. Vivid details of those clothes? Sure, I can imagine details, but the details aren't necessarily there in the "image" until I'm prompted to invent them. The possible answers to the question just seem... invalid. The details are neither dim nor vivid; the details are undetermined and flexible.
Maybe the quiz should first ask me to imagine that person in a _specific circumstance_, where those details are predetermined by my memory of that circumstance? Even then I still don't understand what the quiz really means by half these answers. What does it mean for an image to be "lively"? That it's moving around? Am I meant to be imagining a still image or a moving image? Depending on how I interpret these questions and answers, I could get completely different outcomes from this quiz.
I think that part of what I discovered in the multiple degrees/kind of aphantasia. And like you most of those questions dot make sens. For many aphantasic people they do. And a lot of question I get is "how do you remember color if you don't see them in your head". One of the analogies I have is that my memory is a bit like a hash/bloom filter. I can't really get the original value, but I can tell you wether it's the same or not. I think the other part where aphantasic differ is WRT math. Others in this thread said that can't do math in their head as they can't see the number/equations. I have no issues with it but I don't rely at all on the number symbols in my head (or on paper) to do arithmetic. I wouldn't be surprised if aphantasia get more subcategories in the following decades.
I think an interesting thing to discuss is how Aphantasia impacts people who have it, if at all?
Are there any areas that are negatively or positively affected? Are there workarounds that these people do?
I read someone with Aphantasia say that they do math differently in that they don't picture the computations in their head, like it would be done in paper, but that they just use their verbal memory to keep track of intermediate values.
Someone who became aphantasic due to brain trauma would have to be asked. Until 3 years ago I truly believed that when people spoke about visualization or mind's eye it was meant figuratively. So it's not something that we work around or that knowingly impacts us. I assume there are some domains where I am more or less effective because of it, but that is true of everyone for all sorts of reasons.
I once read that those with aphantasia have a hard time becoming architects since they can't visualize the building they're designing.
This probably sounds dumb but after reading comments I've realized that I almost never visualize things onto the real world.
If I'm imagining a machine I'm not imagining it in front of me, instead I'm holding it abstractley in my mind. The one exception is if I'm looking at something being tweaked I'll apply chances onto top of that thing.
Someone mentioned their artist friend will imagine the drawing or subject they want is already on the paper then draw it. I've always tried to imagine the real thing in my mind and then translate it on the fly.
A vr game I played recently has you move and manipulate a 3d puzzle hovering in space in front of you.
I think approaching visualization as happening on top of the real world could be really helpful for me.
The opposite of Aphantasia is Hyperphantasia [0].
I believe myself to be hyperphantasic.
I believe that reading books is much more enjoyable for me. I can quickly visualize stuff that others cannot.
I actually _see_ stuff in vivid details on my head.
This has benifits in _many_ areas.
[0]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphantasia
For myself, I find I can create incredibly vivid images and scenes in my head up until the point where I consciously think about them being in my head, at which point they start to degrade and I can't really build them up again until I immerse myself in it again.
This makes it really hard to perform the test of how vividly can you imagine something in your head (an apple is the usual one), because if I try to imagine it, at best it comes off as very poorly formed and hard to get a good focus on. But I know and remember much more clear scenes from times where I've been focussing more so on the scene than trying to imagine the scene, if that makes any sense.
My kids and I just listened to an entire podcast episode about Aphantasia from Wow in the World - they really do a great (and fun) job explaining science concepts and recently related papers!
https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through...
Aphantasia is about the mindās eye but I wonder about other senses as well such as āthe mindās earsā or āthe mindās noseā - being able to synthesize or realistically recall other senses. I can somewhat weakly visualize, but I can make music in my head, imagine what something would feel like to some extent, but I donāt think I can do that for smell or taste. What are other peopleās experiences?
Iāve been wondering the same since learning about aphantasia.
I have once imagined music strongly enough it was the same subjective experience as if it was real (except for the conscious awareness it was internal, but that was literally the only difference).
I can alter my sense of which way down is on a whim.
I canāt imagine tastes or smells at all, merely recognise them when I experience them.
I imagine thermoception more strongly than pain, but nowhere near as strongly as sound or gravity.
I can imagine non-painful touch stimuli almost, but not quite, as strongly as gravity.
I can imagine false proprioception with middling strength, including the perception of having a differently configured body.
I can do that. I can create new music in my mind, and edit it at will, splicing it, mixing it with other instruments etc. In fact I use it to compose new music, then I just write it down as is on the page. I can also imagine smells and tastes, like if I ate popcorn I can vividly recall its sensory properties. I can also feel the tastes on my tongue and smells in my nose, it literally feels as if I experience them in real time.
Well, there's the mind's fear.
If you quiet it down and ask yourself "What am I afraid of happening?" you'll get an answer. It will usually be something you need to urgently attend to, or you'll regret it.
It's like an inverse conscience.
Speaking as a guy who meditates, where we study this kind of stuff, I would blame a shape of awareness. One part of your "reality" illuminated while another part, the part where mental images happen, resides in darkness (awarenessly speaking).
A solution would be to practice the formless/objectless/mindfulnessy/vipassany type meditation.
It's not a solution, but it does help. When you learn to understand, feel what your mind is doing you can more easily adjust it.
I would start with 3-4 minutes of boxed breathing back when I learned visualisation. Nothing would happen if my mind was doing the monkey thing, grasping at this, then at that, then at something else.
You can take an online test for aphantasia (the VVIQ, or Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) here:
That seems silly to me. Talk about random thing, ask "No image at all/Dim and vague; flat/Moderately clear and lively/Clear and lively/Perfectly clear and lively as real seeing", average results. I mean... you could ask this once with prompt "How vivid is your visual imagery" and you will probably get the same result.
Those are made up categories for a made up disorder.
That's like "depression". There is no one kind. How depressed are you? Very? Not so much?
How would you even know?
Past related threads:
_Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356
- Oct 2021 (10 comments)
_Picture This? Some Just Canāt (2015)_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320
- Oct 2021 (1 comment)
_Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016)_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905
- June 2021 (1 comment)
_Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946
- Sept 2020 (1 comment)
_Picture This? Some Just Canāt (2015)_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815
- April 2020 (103 comments)
_Aphantasia_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445
- June 2019 (72 comments)
_Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind'_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927
- April 2019 (422 comments)
_Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind'_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122
- April 2019 (2 comments)
_The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550
- Jan 2019 (100 comments)
_What itās like to be unable to visualize anything_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505
- May 2016 (11 comments)
_Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894
- April 2016 (202 comments)
_Aphantasia: A life without mental images_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792
- Aug 2015 (73 comments)
_Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678
- Aug 2015 (2 comments)
I wonder if this has to do with circumcision. Itās predominantly male, and Iāve read some current literature says that it stems from early childhood trauma
I kinda doubt that, given that I and my father have it. And to my knowledge neither of us are circumcised or had any appreciable childhood trauma.
The first time I heard/read about this was back in 2016 or so when I stumbled across a post on Facebook from Blake Ross [0]. Since then I have read more about aphantasia and in the process I have learned more about myself and in turn others as well. It has been an enlightening and helpful experience so far.
When it comes to visualization or a mind's eye I don't (and as far back as I can remember) have any form of that ability. When my eyes are open I see what is in my field of view, but I am unable to create new visual input, nor can I edit what I can see in any way. When my eyes are closed there isn't any colors, images, flashes of images, shapes, smoke, text, numbers or anything. It is just a darkened void.
Unlike some I am not face-blind. I recognize people I know when I see them, either in person or in physical/digital pictures. If I had to describe someone I know well and see every day, but they are not in front of me at the time, I couldn't do it adequately. Estimated height, weight, and size compared to me, doable. Same for hair color and whether or not they wear glasses. Anything else I couldn't say. I simply do not possess that information. If tried to describe someone I know well that I haven't seen in six months the best I could do would be their height and size compared to me.
At a certain point if I don't see them again it is like they just disappeared. The same applies to memorable conversations we had, places we went, and things we did. Over time it all just fades away. It really depends upon how strong of a connection there was. Even after 24 years I remember my high school sweetheart's name, how many years we were together, and where we went for both vacations we had. To this day I can recite her parent's telephone number and address from memory. I'm over 500 miles from there right now and I could hop in my vehicle and drive straight there without directions. I don't even need to remember their address to know how to get to their road and exact house from here and I haven't been there since 2003. Absolutely any other information about her and her family? That's all gone.
Like my lack of a mind's eye I seem to also have a lack of a mind's ear. Unlike what some others have posted I am unable to imagine music nor can I compose it in my head (or in person) either. If I want to listen to music I have to queue up YouTube or my local music player. I do one or the other daily as the music provides some respite from tinnitus.
As an aside: I played trumpet, trombone, and tuba throughout high school even though I can not read sheet music. I for some reason didn't or couldn't learn sheet music so my music teacher translated the notes into numbers for me. Those I understood. For the trumpet it would go something like: 13, 1, 12, 123, etc. Tuba was similar and trombone was based on distance the slider was from full back.
As to whether or not I have an inner voice. That too is a negative ghost-rider. If I'm thinking or reading I do not hear any voice, mine or otherwise. If I am making a grocery list something does happen because I remember it, but when I am thinking it I don't hear the words I think nor do I visualize them in my mind's eye. They are stored as data to be retrieved when I next go to the grocer.
Dreams are also absent from my life. When I wake up it is as if I had just laid down. I have no memory of anything happening between those two events.
Since learning of aphantasia I have made some changes in my life. Now when I go places I want to be able to experience again after I've left I take lots of pictures and video. I try and do the same with my friends. Pictures, videos, and audio so that if they pass before me I'll still be able to see and/or hear them again. Hopefully from now on I'll be able to say more than "I spent a month in Key West, Florida in 1997" or "I went to Mountain View, Arkansas for two weeks in 2005".
Overall I do not find aphantasia a negative. Up until I learned about it, it wasn't a thing so my experiences were just like everyone else. Now that I know about it and have learned more about myself I have made some small changes to my life to compensate. My current approach is to experience life as it happens and let the pictures, videos, and audio do the long-term backups.
[0]
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
I have this and it sucks.
I have aphantasia but somehow I am having a feeling it is self induced.
Let me explain. You know how in movies sometimes people who have hallucinations (basically uncontrolled prophantasia) start screening in terror because of the horror images they see.
So, good portion of my life my dreams were black and white and they look like room with under the strobe light. Only rarely I could see horizon in "outdoor dreams" or colors in my dreams. But, from time to time I have vivid color dreams, and even fewer of those, look like a reality.
So, when I started practicing meditation coupled with imagination and visualization of objects phantasia improved a bit, but dreams improved ten fold. But, soon as it improved a bit I stop practicing, I did not know why.
So, few weeks ago I started again, and few days I had a extremely sharp dream in which I saw viper snake attacking me, it was so vivid that I jumped out of bad. And while opening eyes, that image was still there, "snake" in the dark, on my bed.
So, my question is what if subconscious mind is doing it in order to protect us? Basically shutting down parts that feel unbearable for emotions to handle. Has anyone else had similar experience?
Additionally, when I have gimps during visual streaming (practice designed to improve visual imagination) objects are too complex and moving to fast, it is like video is streamed into my mind and I cannot control it. Last thing I remember is seeing some kind of very complex puzzle, element that was reshaping in breathing very rapid motion. Also those streams look more like AI generated visuals, they kind of looks as something but you cannot recognize anything.
Something like:
https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585
and "Name one thing on this image"
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Scr...
So, I guess if I would have those all the time, my sanity would be in question, so I suppose "slow conciseness" in order to sustain itself needs to "shut down" certain brain function, or optimize skills we used the most on expense of others, for instance I am good with imagining abstract things and logic.
I would like to know how to invoke those visualisations on demand, but it seem they just happen.
What I also find strange is that people who can vividly imagine, cannot recollect people faces.
On the other hand, I cannot describe any face, not even my closest love ones, but I can recognize them.
I could not describe anything to let say a police photo robot how crime suspect looks like, but I could pick it from the line among thousand of faces.
I am finding that very strange, it is like having one directional mind, in the sense you can understand foreign language (read/listen) but you cannot create your own sentences, write or speak.
Describing faces is like drawing. Drawing is like constructing.
If you don't notice the relationships of parts, don't break things down ā you can't do it.
Don't be afraid of your dreams. They are part of you. Part of your mind, consequently brain, which is a body part.
When dreaming you can do much more than visualize. Dreaming is a different skill.
You can learn dreaming too.
I am good at drawing, but only for things that are in front of me. Issue, is I can recognize face in split second, but I cannot recollect face. And, as I cannot recollect I cannot describe, if I say let say friend John, what I get is just abstraction of John, void blob. Someone already mentioned - imagine there is hash function, so once someone uses his password (face) I exactly know who is the person, but if you say persons name, nothing comes back, even remembering what he said, how he behaved or else, will not give me picture of person so I can use it from memory do describe and give distinctive features except he has two ears, nose, two eyes, maybe glasses, is bald... issue is you could explain same way most of the people.
Practice takes care of that.
Start with a subject that is simpler than faces, and progress incrementally.
Global aphantasic, dyslexic, problems with recall at times, hard to traverse memory and also in process of being diagnosed with ADHD. When Iām deeply interested in something I don't read forums and join community's as it spoils the fun of working things out, and helps in leaving out mistakes of others. Once I've rinsed the topic, created my construct and can find no new worthy vein to mine, then I will compare with the consensus. So what I have to contribute is only from my own half finished ideas, there may be errors, in fact and terminology, I'm still playing with my toy.
I'm annoyed I didn't work out I had aphantasia before reading about it, but I was close, from a young age. As many mention, counting sheep to sleep was a riddle, I discussed this with my sister about 8, I revisited that conversation after the revelation. She can not create visuals but can recall what she has seen. I can do neither. Many hints I was given, Henry Miller for one said I do not have much of a visual memory, Dracula and LOTR were too descriptive for me to appreciate fully.
There's so many nuances with this topic, I have no sensory memory, touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing but I can remember feelings. No sense of taste is the most common in the people Ive talked to. To recall experience everyone has, to create new experiences everyone has. I dislike the name aphantastic, without imagination, as I have an uncontrollable imagination and is separate, it throws more confusion onto an already confusing subject.
I have trouble recognising people, some aphants don't, I think this is due to my poor recall. I'm not sure if I believe in a subconscious as others do, that's another rabbit hole, but to be brief, my subconscious has access to that look up table that my consciousness dosnt.
You can have hyper Aphantastics who have beyond 4k abilities. You program yourself with I (not AI), but the memory bus might be differently wired restricting read write permissionās, a hardware limitation because it is not something you can learn.
A screen, a speaker are all only interfaces, we are all unique machines crafted by the universe, each one of a kind, and maybe, just maybe, for a specific purpose, that we have been blessed with I is astounding, I love playing with tech, my mate had a NES, I had a Master System, the enjoyable conversations we had describing our experiences would never have happened if we both had both.
Its funny that I is the one thing we cannot fathom, in philosophy, maths, physics. What troubles me is why has it been such a secret, why have Ya all so quite about your visual imagination, sounds like your all watching stuff you don't want to to tell anyone about :-) and if it is a gift are they going to be happy with what your doing on their hardware.
And finally, IMO, if you have a screen, you it you know, if your unsure you probably are.