I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
replies(33):
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“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”
Yeah!
“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”
Yeah, you don’t have that?
“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“
Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.
——
…and around we go.
Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes. I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.
I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I have to write down in full every intermediate step because I can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two steps in the future.
Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.
For the most part, I can’t “think” about things except maybe mental math. I see things, and I talk to myself in my head.
Close your eyes and try to visualize an apple. Do this for 30 seconds or so. Try to visualize the skin, the reflection, the texture, the stem, the depth, etc. Try to hold a stable mental picture of that apple.
After the 30 seconds, rate your ability to picture the apple from 1 to 5, where 1 is complete inability and 5 is as if you were looking at a picture of an apple for those 30 seconds. 1 is aphantasia.
Another idea is to recall a vivid dream you had. I think most people would describe it as being part of a movie or reality. While awake, are you able to recreate scenes in vivid detail as if you were dreaming? 5 for complete parity and 1 for not at all. 1 is aphantasia.
Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg instead of a live feed.
An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
Seems like a good test?
If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?
I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can see the yellow light it casts.
Pull up the image on your phone and look at it. Now close your eyes and imagine the image as accurately as you can.
Is it as though you didn’t close your eyes at all? Do you see it the same way as when your eyes are open?
For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of self to be.
The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training, training to remain conscious through the process of falling asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image, quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the blank page without access to the reference image}).
there was a long running debate in the literature about how mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like format.
two very different philosophies about how the information was stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be accommodated in the other.
with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based) framework
It depends on what you mean by “see”.
It’s nothing like seeing with my eyes, and it’s nothing like dreaming.
When I “see” it is abstract. There are impressions and sensations. I can recall the qualities of something - even the visual qualities - but it doesn’t feel like sight.
Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own at night, not letting me fall asleep.
Imagination is weird.
I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.
Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30 seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye, an image of an apple as if you were looking at on your computer screen? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is complete parity as if you were looking at it from your computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what is your ability to do so?
It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.
I know it sounds crazy but I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.
Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.
Here are some other articles of note:
"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
"I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...
I was shocked to realize that when people said "imagine in your minds eye", they meant it literally. This seems to be a common experience for people with aphantasia [0].
Note that when I'm close to sleep or dreaming, then yes, my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity. While awake, its almost completely non-existent.
[0] "I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aph...
Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand, like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual information, it's far more topologically structural than bound to 3D physicality.
That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty much exactly like the sensation I have when I "see" stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close my eyes while awake — I can continue where I left off, and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.
But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the physical act of seeing with your eyes.
But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the same species had radically different methods of cognition, since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the broadest possible sense, is not radically different, and neither is our thinking hardware.
Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not with most other foods so I think it's more mouth preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov saliva before feeding reaction.
The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously, you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels" (not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very early embryonic development). The better I know the object the better this internal concept-image, but far from what looking at the real thing is like.
I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague without details unless I concentrate on them specifically, and it is very dark in there.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones. Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for fantastical landscapes and architecture.
The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even though I read the books long before those movies were made. People like me need graphically talented people around, or my mental images will be very much limited to drastically reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to all graphical artists).
I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.
It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdVBzuGWr4
You can easily understand where the difference is because the data is different between the eyes. The difference appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's eye is different from data from the physical eyes when those two 'streams of data' are blended.
But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.
What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.
So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.
Just now, what you wrote for example.
> my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.
What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of your head?
When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not "seeing".
Here's an article I found recently:
"Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7856239/
Sometimes when I'm close to sleep or when I'm lucid dreaming, I can visualize things with good fidelity. While I'm awake, I'm almost completely unable to.
I should just delete my comment, but let it stand as a monument to my goof.
Anyways, this is nothing like what I experience when I imagine something.
Does your photograph allow you to faithfully recall details you didn’t notice at the time or is it a simulation of an image?
but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc).
I'm fairly good at remembering faces, and if they're next to a name when I see them, I can even associate the name! The flip side, of course, is that if I don't see the name, I won't remember it.
The response to that suggestion was unexpectedly strong, People really didn't like the notion of doubt of their experience. Some said I was accusing them of lying.
It was quite odd, I thought it was an uncontroversial notion that what we feel we are experiencing can differ from reality.
I think, perhaps, it was received as me saying "This is the truth, you're the one who is wrong."
I have an active imagination and I read a lot of fiction and I don't think I have aphantasia, I just go to sleep, wake up and never remember a thing in between.
When I'm looking at it, the only thing I can see is whatever object is being imagined. However, yes - it's similar to the sensation of seeing with your own actual eyes. The reason it seems so foreign is because our real eyes can see more than one thing at a time. Our mind's eye can only see exactly one subject at a time (though I should mention that when I navigate cities, I do so by imagining a birds-eye view, so there are many objects IN the map, but I cannot see anything other than the map, and it becomes extremely blurry outside of the section I'm focusing on).
I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of charcoal, but I don’t consider this to be ‘acarbographism’ or something, I recognise that other people have put more effort into learning that skill than I have.
1. Actually seeing something like in a dream.
2. A mental scratch pad I can draw on and use spatial awareness to navigate. (I see the code of applications as flying over a landscape or walking through a forest.)
3. Imagination, which uses whatever data vision gets turned into.
I'm not sure how common 2 is. A lot of my brain has broken parts and this scratchpad is used in place of logic. This works fine until I need to work on linear list of similar tokens and keep them in order, like math and some functional programming languages.
If you could crop your real field of view somehow to just the photo in question, then would it be as though nothing changed?
(Like, I get that things outside the phone image would change, but does the image your imagining change? Does the sensation change?)
I think for many people, even people with aphantasia, dreaming is akin to watching a movie or actually experiencing the event (myself included). I know the experience is immersive because it's the same feeling as watching a movie, but I can't recall it visually the same way after the fact, while I'm awake.
For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.
That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".
In my case, I can distinctly remember my experiences from before the infection, and recall a clear difference in visualization capabilities before and after.
Like when in school I'd imagine graphs lines before drawn or best example is a cad test and from reading the directions I could get an idea of what I was about to draw in cad
Man made computers in our image, it use to be a job title.
In college, especially when I was studying Japanese and had to memorize a lot of shapes, I could look at a poster filled with characters and recall it hours later to translate those characters. Your mind is a muscle and it gets better with exercise, and grows weaker when lazy.
That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with me, because together we realized that people can relate to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments after I wake.
So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in your "minds eye".
If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's imagery but from a different place.
A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I never quite landed on an understanding of how much a person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is (assumed to be) innate or genetic.
Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not been trained for years in music.
Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.
(I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is something that some/most people do.)
Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just assuming is normal?!
your imagination is more like it's in the the back of the head, yeah?
What helped me 'move' where my imagination was (to the front and center), was to do the flame meditation. Which is to focus on a flame in a dark room for a few seconds, close your eyes, and try to retain the phosphene afterglow in the flame shape. and repeating that until you are able to retain image of the flame while your eyes are closed.
Similarly: 'drawing from memory' - particularly from recent short term memory - was another method that had a profound impact on my ability to visualize.
Both of these take time and commitment, but they have worked for me. They may work for you.
Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground. But then ask them" "What was the color of the ball? What was the size of the ball? What was the gender of the person pushing the ball, what clothes were they wearing?"
People with aphantasia are usually stunned by the follow up questions. People who don't have aphantasia really have seen the table, the material its made of, imagined a ball of certain size/type color (e.g. multicolor beach ball, or basketball or what ever), and they saw an actual person pushing the ball, they saw the ball rolling on the table an falling to the ground and can answer details about their vision.
It was just hours and hours of random junk every night.
I threw away the journal and realized forgetting dreams is good.
My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't any different than those hallucinations, with the exception of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting, shading, and so on are all like what you would see with your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.
Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.
It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else imagines they have X-Men superpowers.
I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).
In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications.
One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_ what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving them into place.
I can make an educated guess based on their length/width but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged without physically moving them.
It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!
The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench but certainly not the one in front of me.
"imagine a ball, can you see it?"
"yes"
"ok what color is it? "
I never heard anyone say anything other than a variation of "hm I don't know". It's just an anecdote but still
That's classic complete aphantasia. I have it too.
The "kind of different. I’m not really seeing it" would apply just as well to dream images. If you're interrogating people, you might try asking them whether it's similar to that.
It's not a list of abstract properties, it's an understanding of the shape of a candle. Why would you need to be able to see it to remember its shape?
I told my wife proudly that I could see something in my dream I wanted to. She told me she can imagine ANYTHING ANYWHERE ANYTIME (painter)
My question is: can you see the cat on the table? If not, sorry pal.
I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.
if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.
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then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.
For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.
For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.
I have a fuzzy mental stage for these things. It’s like my mind’s second monitor. It mostly goes ignored but I can focus on it if I want to. Shapes and colors are weak but are definitely there. But still a useful tool.
It's similar to replaying music in your head (if you can do that), you can hear the tune but your ears "know" no music is actually playing.
I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't have aphantasia.
It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access data/information about things that the brain is presumably constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not very strong": none.
Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.
No? Thanks for stopping by. :)
For example: without any internal monologue, think of the Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it resembles.
Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
(Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)
Yet I am very good at recognizing faces, have okay memory of past events (not outstanding, but acceptable) and can describe places and people with reasonable accuracy.
So, I'm not sure.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/12/05/865...
Some children don't see any differentiation between their imagination and reality, so it's a matter of paying attention to how others' behave to know what to do.
Because you can't trust that the reality that you're in is shared by the people around you.
It's like watching a movie; the people are not there, but you still see them.
The cinema is in my mind. People here describe it as "thinking of seeing", but to me that's nonsense. It's definitely a visual thing, I bet it's activating some of the same regions in the brain. Seeing is thinking anyway, in the sense the brain is interpreting signals from the optic nerve.
It's never an hallucination in the sense of being confused about what's real and what's not.
I can also anticipate the taste of something I like, feel it in my mouth, and start salivating. Is it tasting or "thinking of tasting"?
I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple" less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?
The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look up the references if you're interested.
When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a large study found. Probably there are critiques of his methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for trying to figure out how exactly you think.
It’s not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no internal voice so that wouldn’t make sense. It’s just like the concept of what I’m thinking of is right there in all its detail. Its extremely spatial - I’m thinking in 3D even if I’m not visualising it.
On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is very hard, especially faces.
Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a second and can’t be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of thinking isn’t visual.
That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.
Today, 30 years later, I have vivid representations of calligraphy or art, especially when I fall asleep. I fall asleep within at worst minutes so I cannot really take full pleasure of watching these ilages and during the day I am too surrounded by sources of sound, images etc. to meaningfully repeat the exercise.
I don't have any trouble following your path of increased detail, but if someone says "imagine an apple", I get a vaguely apple-shaped, generally redish object (I like cosmic crisp), which only becomes detailed if I "navigate my mental eye" closer.
I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch, smell, visuals.
And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it. Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and going to chat with women.
I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response viz".
I didn’t even try to imagine anything. Apples are just conceptually red by default. I can also tell you that it was tart, and crisp. I didn’t imagine those sensations either, they were just the first words that came to my mind when thinking about apples. The table is brown. I didn’t try to imagine anything table either, but the table in my kitchen, where there might be apples, is brown.
Can you see how this exercise is flawed?
“I’m picturing it as a bright red ball, glossy and catching a bit of light on one side.”
Great, huh? Except that’s what ChatGPT said when I asked it those two questions. It certainly isn’t picturing anything. If a robot which only ‘thinks’ in terms of chain-of-thought of abstract tokens can act as if it truly sees things, what makes you think this test has any validity at all?
Not really a description though, that seems… slow? The elements are all there just not in visual form.
It's like, if you want to make weather forecast, then you'll use as detailed models as possible, right?
But, I do have vivid, sometimes lucid, dreams. I would say they are exactly like seeing and being in terms of qualia. It feels like my eyes, and I can blink, cover my face, etc. It's like a nearly ideal, first-person VR experience.
They are unlike reality in that I can be aware it is a dream and have a kind of detachment about it. And the details can be unstable or break down as the dream progresses.
Common visual problems are that I cannot read or operate computers. I try, but the symbolic content shifts and blurs and will not remain coherent.
Motor problems include that I lose my balance or my legs stop working or gravity stops working and I start dragging myself along by my arms or swimming through the air, trying to continue the story.
If I've been playing video games recently, I can even have a weird second-order experience like I am fumbling to find the keyboard and mouse controls to pilot myself through the dream! That is a particularly weird feeling when I become aware of it.
I feel like I have recurring dreams in the same fictional places, but they can have unreal aspects that lead me to get lost. Not like MC Escher drawings, but doorways and junctions that seem to be unreliable or spaces that don't make sense like the Tardis.
Psychedelics and certain meditative practices can enhance this effect. There are also specific practices that allow imagined object to take a life of its own.
That's in the private imaginative mindspace. There are other mindspaces. There was one particular dream where I can tell, it was procedurally generated on-demand. When I deliberately took an unusual turn, the entire realm stuttered as whole new areas got procedurally generated. There were other spaces where it was not like that.
I actually feel like I'm closer than ever to getting towards visualisation. I've gone from a rock solid "zero" to "solid feeling, occasional split-second flash of something"
For most of the time with this exercise I was aiming for something simple. A red triangle in a blue square, but I'm not convinced that was an effective approach, I seem to be getting closer to the mark trying to picture something real.
A simple test I've seen mentioned is, ask someone this: “imagine a car, a fast car, zipping through a windy road… ok? (pause) now, what color was the car you saw?”
If you even need to think about it, you hadn't seen it.
He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately. But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.
But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.
And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.
I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it. I can have a high-resolution image of a candle, but it's not useful for understanding that there's a candle in the picture - for that, you need to have parsed the image and understood what it contains. The visualization is just the source material. Similarly, when you read a book, you're not remembering what entire pages look like with all the words on them.
The problem with these kinds of things is that so much happens unconsciously that we're not aware of. You think remembering the image is important because you're unaware of all the processing that allows you to understand the image.
The best I can do: do people with aphantasia only get aroused if the stimulus is present? Can't they not get horny just imagining things, like I imagine most people can?
Does steamy literature do anything for them? I imagine it doesn't, since if you cannot imagine things then words on a page just have no power.
In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".
The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.
The difference comes when I close my eyes vs. block my ears. When I close my eyes, I don't see images, I can't voluntarily make images appear. But with my eyes and ears blocked, I can still think words - my inner monologue - which I experience in much the same way as I do when I'm reading. I can't conjure other sounds though, which is why I don't really consider that equivalent to "hearing" - it's not sound, it's the concept of words. I don't have any analogue of that for images.
Ordinary aphantasia doesn't imply anything about lack of inner monologue. Some people apparently do lack an inner monologue, and if they're also aphantasic, that's been described by some authors as "deep aphantasia". But there's no evidence that the two conditions are related, except in a kind of conceptual sense.
It's hard to write about these things...
What works for me - is imagining sensations, they could enhance both real and vague pictures, and I feel them directly in the body which makes them very effective.
It is like seeing with peripheral vision, I know that is there and sometimes see it with quick glances, but details only appear if I focus on some part of it and disappear quickly when focus shifts.
Both brains and gpt appear to be doing lossy compression based on preexisting world knowledge.
I think most people couldn't imagine holding an apple specced like a washing machine in one hand. :-)
People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.
You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.
I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.
I am mostly aphantasaic, but have no trouble at all remembering emotions.
Is that because it’s hereditary or instead something that was missing in early childhood? Like as a toddler you were never given one of those games where you fit shapes into different sized holes for example?
Aphantasiacs often cannot imagine sensations either (at least, my friend doesn't. He cannot imagine the smell of coffee either).
The connection of aphantasia to strongly deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) is well-attested now. You can find numerous clinical studies on the matter.
I’ve been teaching math for almost 18 years at this point, and only a couple years ago learned that I lean towards aphantasia. Back in high school, geometry was HARD. Calc 3 was HARD. It was presented as visualize and imagine, and I tried my best. It just turns out other people could do that, and the fuzzy thing thing (or, more commonly, the ‘bulleted list of information’ that make up my imagination) was not “normal.”
If I’d known this (and my teachers were in a position to also know this), then maybe we’d spend more time with external visual models (what Geogebra now does for us, for example) to help me out.
Now that I teach future high school math teachers, it’s definitely something I talk about to normalize “not everyone can see in their mind.”
Famously, there's a psychology experiment where a person in a gorilla costume walks through the middle of a scene and beats their chest before walking off the other side of the screen, but people who've been given a challenge of tracking a ball being passed around will completely miss the gorilla. They'll laugh in shock on watching the same video a second time, amazed that they didn't "see" the gorilla on first viewing when their attention was on the ball.
In your simple test, focus is going to be drawn to other components - "fast", "zipping" and "windy" make me pay attention to the curves of the road, the wheels, the trees or cliffs causing the road to wind. The color of the car is irrelevant, so I don't pay attention to it.
I can't tell you what color the car was, but when I watched the gorilla video (without knowing in advance about it) I didn't know a gorilla had walked through the video either.
My last name just looks like a child drawing a wavy ocean!
As someone said below, I suggested figuring it out early is best because of a lot of things that just work differently, especially in learning. There seems to be a real selection bias that most people who learned they were aphantasic reading a New Yorker article, say, by definition figured out how to make it work somewhere along the line. Aphantasia isn’t at all a learning disability in a real sense, but you definitely have to approach things differently.
This is your thesis. In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed. I would furthermore claim that it calls this assumption into question. If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image. If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
Consider attempts in this very thread to compare conscious visualization to visualization in dreaming. Someone who isn't in a critical frame of mind or doesn't know about the limitations of vision in dreams and how our brains trick us about dream-sight (or the fairly different limitations of real vision and how our brains also trick us about that, as you mention) may follow a train of thought like, "well, I 'see' just fine in dreams, and my conscious 'mind's eye' is very similar to that, so sure, by the transitive property, I can 'see' about as well when I visualize as I actually see things with my real eyes"
Me, I go "well dream vision for approximately everyone is total shit but with a layer of trickery on top, and my 'inner eye' is similar to that except with the trickery dialed way down so I can tell where the seams are and if I try I can be aware of when I've just invented some detail that was 'always there' but actually wasn't a moment earlier and I can tell that I'm not actually seeing with my eyes (unlike a dream, where I think I'm 'seeing'), so yeah those two are pretty close for me, and the ways in which they differ are basically just how much my brain's lying to me so arguably aren't 'real' differences anyway, but both are entirely unlike actually seeing, so no, I don't 'see' when I visualize the same way as I 'see' with my eyes, though it is close to how I 'see' in a dream except I'm less-fooled about how bad it is"
... and I propose that these two responses could come from people with identical actual capacity for mental visualization.
When one of the former meet the latter, it might end in the latter thinking they have aphantasia or at least lean farther that direction, without any difference in their actual experience of or capacity for visualization.
....
I've seen a supposed set of autism test questions (I don't know if they're really used in autism diagnostics) that include something like "would you rather go to a party, or stay home and read a book?" and supposedly the "autistic" indicator is asking follow up questions or excessive hesitation. Meanwhile I'm very sure you could find people who instantly answered "go to a party" but actually choose that far less often when presented with the real choice involving those two things (necessarily with a lot more details and context filled in). I don't think they're lying or deceiving themselves! I think they're regarding the question very differently from how some others do. I think something similar is going on here, with two "tribes" with different perspectives on the question itself trying to communicate and talking right past one another, leading to much confusion.
(Meanwhile, I do think it's entirely possible aphantasia is real, I just also strongly suspect a lot of the people who've been led, by online discussion, to believe they're far from the median in this regard, actually aren't)
If I had the first clue how to record them, perhaps I'd have a career as a composer, LOL. The actual invention of them would be no work whatsoever, though the writing it down would be, and I'm sure there'd be a good deal of editing and arranging afterwards to fix them up (plus, who's to say if they'd be any good, or wouldn't all sound kinda the same, to a trained ear?)
I'm only barely familiar with the body of "classical" music, and even less familiar with big-band or brass band music, is the oddest part, but those couple narrow sorts of instrumental music are all I get without having to put effort into it (and I mean none, it just "plays" when I'm in the right head-space and surroundings, and no I don't mean "on drugs", and actually it can be really fucking annoying if I'm trying to sleep). I wouldn't be surprised if I actually lost that ability (such as it is) if I tried to train up enough to write the tunes down.
... maybe I should look into humming-to-MIDI software, hahaha.
My experience of seeing images in my mind is significantly different than when I am not seeing images, and also different from just remembering the details of an object like an apple vs visualizing it.
Regarding closing your eyes: I don't typically close my eyes when I create mental imagery, I'm turning it off and on right now as I type this, now there's an apple I can see in my mind, now there is nothing but the generic slightly darkish background that the apple was sitting in front of. Now the apple is there again but it's green not red, etc.
As I was reading your post and imagining, when I got to the color question it was a plastic spotted ball, white background with various colored spots. As I continued reading I switched to a red rubber ball.
Everything we are discussing in this comments section must be understood in an informal way. I obviously did not "prove" anything; I don't think anything can be proven about this anyway. Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".
It's a figure of speech: "this cannot be so!", "it must be like this other thing", etc. It's informal conversation.
> If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image.
Maybe straightforward, but as with anything related to the phenomenon of closure (as in Scott McCloud's closure), drawing an image closes doors. If you describe but don't draw an image, the reader is free to conjure their own image. Maybe they visualize a more attractive person than the artist would have drawn, or simply the kind of person they would be more attracted to.
Have you never seen a movie adaptation after reading the book and thought "wait, this wasn't how I imagined this character"?
> If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
That's such a mechanistic description! Words don't work like this. Sometimes describing less is better, because the human brain fills in the gaps. You don't simply list physical attributes in an analytical way, you instead conjure sensory stimulus for the reader.
(If talking about sex and adjacent activities makes anybody nervous, simply replace this with literature about food. In order to make somebody's mouth water you cannot simply list ingredients; you must evoke imagery and taste. Then again, some people -- aphantasiacs -- simply cannot "taste" the food in textual descriptions!).
For me the ball kept rolling off the table and rolling through air but not falling to the ground, even while realizing I should be causing it to fall to the ground, but rolling straight just "felt" natural at that moment because it's in make-believe land it can do whatever.
When awake, I have a "mind's eye," but it's more like what you're describing. As I fall asleep, I can actually begin to see things. I wonder if some people can do that when awake.
This is very much a real thing, but largely goes unnoticed because it doesn’t really affect anything, except for people going about their lives thinking that the word ‘visualise’ is a metaphor.
When I wide awake, parts of the image are "gone" when I'm not focusing them.
Also, the sensation of seeing in my mind does feel different. It's like there is some different place where that image is showing up.
Even if I imagine the mental image to overlay with my real vision, it feels like it's "added" somewhere between my conscious mind and the outside/real world.
