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Some people can't see mental images

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183 points petalmind | 3 comments | 30 Oct 25 17:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.899s | source
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fellowniusmonk ◴[30 Oct 25 18:20 UTC] No.45763293[source]▶
I developed aphantasia around 13 after a series of heart procedures where I had to be under.

Evaluating qualia in others is extremely difficult/philosophically impossible, I have pre/post expierence with both states of being.

I can still somewhat conjure up imagery from prior to the procedure series, it almost feels like I can see them, my mother's face, my father face, kinda of, it did not effect my dreams or ability to have imagery in my edge of dreaming state, not immediately at least.

I went from being very imaginative to trying to surf that half awake state in the mornings because it was such a loss.

At this point it's all mostly gone. My memory is entirely text strings now.

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bena ◴[30 Oct 25 18:26 UTC] No.45763383[source]▶
Thank you for sharing your experience.

So, for you at least, there is/was a significant difference between "seeing things in your mind" and not being able to. Have you ever gone under any studies or tests to compare your brain activity to others?

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fellowniusmonk ◴[30 Oct 25 18:36 UTC] No.45763544[source]▶
No, if there was a study I would join it. I wish I had done an MRI in my "pre" state, the change was very rapid.

You'll see a bunch of people always pile into these aphantasia threads and basically show a bias towards their own qualia being the only type of existing experience and the whole thing being mere semantic differences to describe the same mental function.

It really boggles my mind, it's like in HS when I told people I was mildly color blind and they literally took it as being "like, blind?". I get that from a bunch of high schoolers, it's very odd to see in what are presumably adults on this site.

Those people are simply incorrect, I and many like me didn't have congenital aphantasia, it's well established in the literature.

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1. bena ◴[30 Oct 25 18:49 UTC] No.45763755[source]▶
I mean, the issue is that we cannot know what is actually going on in someone else's mind. All we can do is describe it to the best of our ability. So there is some likelihood that things like inner monologues and aphantasia are simply different ways of describing similar things.

However, you present an interesting point of view. As someone who remembers being able to visualize but is no longer able to.

And while I feel you on the MRI thing, I don't think you could have known you'd lose the ability to visualize. But I think there would be some value in comparing you against people who both claim to be able to visualize and those who claim to not be able to. You would serve as a sort of marker. Someone who we could be relatively comfortable categorizing as you have distinct memories of being able to visualize and now have a different experience.

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2. fellowniusmonk ◴[30 Oct 25 19:22 UTC] No.45764148[source]▶
This may be a bit nitpicky of me but:

I guess I just find qualia skeptism to be generally unhelpful and on a purely personal level I find it annoying and think of it as an almost brain dead take. Uncharitable though that may be, I guess I need an explanation for the behavior because I just don't get it.

I distinguish this from being skeptical about specific qualia explanations (the voices in my head are demons talking to me) which I think is fair, you don't have to accept the attempt to explain.

People who were skeptical of post covid health complications (also called long covid) who just straight up asserted it must be false and it's not worth looking into.

I don't understand the knee jerk denialism of qualia, a thing widely understood to be essentially irreducible and "unsharable".

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3. bena ◴[30 Oct 25 22:07 UTC] No.45765964[source]▶
It's completely ephemeral and ridiculously difficult to prove or demonstrate.

We only really know what goes on inside our own heads. And unlike other things, like long covid, there's no outward expression of not being able to visualize.

And even for those who claim to be able to visualize, they'll admit that they aren't "seeing" the object. But it's difficult to explain what I mean when I say "I can see it in my head". But it's not. So it's hard to say whether what we're doing is the same or not.

Like the old bit about whether or not the blue you see is the blue I see. In the end, it kind of doesn't matter. If something is "blue", we both agree that the thing is blue, it occupies a certain wavelength, etc. So even though we agree that the thing is blue, we cannot know if we actually see it the same. But since the results are the same, the particular qualia doesn't matter.

We can't make that comparison with inner monologue or visualization. Which is why I guess it fascinates people.