I am in the group that didn't realize people were being literal when talking about imagining things until I learned about the term aphantashia as an adult. I don't think I have issues with facial...
I am in the group that didn't realize people were being literal when talking about imagining things until I learned about the term aphantashia as an adult. I don't think I have issues with facial recognition, but I cannot recall faces aside from recognition. As an example, if I was asked to describe my own mother's face I would draw a blank.
I've always attributed this to why I don't find reading particularly interesting and why I've given up all attempts I've ever made at art (the not being able to visualize my goal). I also don't remember dreams, so not really sure what's going on there. I'd find it interesting though if I were to learn that my dreams are visual and I never recall them specifically because I can't visualize them consciously.
Oh god when a book starts describing the landscape. Just kill me now. On the plus side, I will never worry about how the protagonist in the movie adaptation doesn't look like their description in...
Oh god when a book starts describing the landscape. Just kill me now.
On the plus side, I will never worry about how the protagonist in the movie adaptation doesn't look like their description in the book, or how people imagined it. I didn't know what they were supposed to look like anyway. If anything, reading a book after a movie is better.
It really did seem like people used the terms seeing or minds eye as if it was just a metaphor.
Fun trick I learnt was to ask someone to think of a table with a red apple on it. Then ask them what color or material the table was. Most respond instantly, aphantasiacs will look at you puzzled.
As an example, if I was asked to describe my own mother's face I would draw a blank.
Yeah uhh my mom has dark colored hair. That's as far as I get.
I can’t even see the apple (or its color (or the table)). Like, I know what an apple looks like, and I know what colors an apple can be, but in my mind it only appears as a sort of formless,...
I can’t even see the apple (or its color (or the table)).
Like, I know what an apple looks like, and I know what colors an apple can be, but in my mind it only appears as a sort of formless, nondescript round object. It exists as a somewhat vacant spatial placeholder that my brain “knows” is supposed to be an apple.
Somewhere else in my brain is a non-visual entry in my memory that exists as color = red or color = green depending on what I’m asked to summon.
If the color of the apple isn’t specified for me? Then I have no idea what the color is. It literally doesn’t have one, and I cannot manifest one except to basically think “hmm, apples are usually red, right?”
Additionally, those memory flags really only work for common things with obvious values.
An author will describe something unique with lots of visual detail, hoping to embed in my memory with entries like color = greens and blues,texture = weathered, lighting = dim. The moment those pass by in the text, they are GONE from my brain. Turn the page and ask me about a character’s hair color or the way the landscape looks, and I’ve got nothing.
From article: I would love to see our brain scans side by side with others, trying to picture things Does aphantastia contribute to how we select romantic partners: do we place less value on...
From article:
Although Jim’s brain responded normally to tests of recognition (being shown images of famous faces), when he was asked to generate a mental image the scanner showed only faint brain activity, compared with the brain activity in the control group. Instead, there was activation in areas of the frontal lobe that were typically activated in situations of cognitive effort or dissonance. Jim was trying, but failing.
I would love to see our brain scans side by side with others, trying to picture things
Does aphantastia contribute to how we select romantic partners: do we place less value on physical attractiveness since we can't spend hours mentally pouring over the hotness of a visual imagery / memory?
For me, the image that sprung to mind was an old small, square wooden table that'd been painted with white enamel several times over the course of its life, sitting next to the window of a...
For me, the image that sprung to mind was an old small, square wooden table that'd been painted with white enamel several times over the course of its life, sitting next to the window of a farmhouse with gentle, indirect mid-day light spilling in through the curtains.
That's a lot of imagery that wasn't described at all in the text, and I think it was mostly inspired by the addition of the apple. Had it been some other object the surrounding imagery would probably be different.
I have a slightly milder case of aphantasia, I like reading books and I also do art as a hobby, but the problem with visualizing stuff definitely exists for me. It's probably one of the reasons...
I've always attributed this to why I don't find reading particularly interesting and why I've given up all attempts I've ever made at art (the not being able to visualize my goal).
I have a slightly milder case of aphantasia, I like reading books and I also do art as a hobby, but the problem with visualizing stuff definitely exists for me. It's probably one of the reasons why, when working in the analog world, I mostly did abstract art, but what I want to say is that these days there are ways around that. Like doing 3d graphics, which allows you to shift and change stuff and see what it looks like, what's better or worse, you don't need to have a complete idea and commit right away.
But you can also use digital 2D or 3D graphics as a visual aid for physical art. I make ceramics, which is a craft more than art, but it also applies: it's hard for me to visualize how a certain glaze would look on a specific ceramic body, so sometimes I just make 3D models with approximations of the glaze and the clay. Todays physically based rendering built on path tracing is photorealistic enough that it truly gives me an idea of how it's going to look. And when you already have decent taste and an eye for art, you can often see what's wrong and build from there.
Plus of course using references is an obvious one. I made some 3D scenes where I started with a reference, like a panel from a semi-obscure manga, and gradually (using both my ideas and more references) recreated it into my own thing. But this is nothing novel, I just wanted to say that various digital tools greatly helped me with approaching art without being able to visualize things.
Curiously I have no problem with recalling music. On the contrary, I get songs playing in my head almost constantly, which can be quite annoying.
I've managed to get into visual art, but I have the exact opposite problem: I can picture what I want it to look like in my head, but my hands can't match the standard my mind has made for the...
I've managed to get into visual art, but I have the exact opposite problem: I can picture what I want it to look like in my head, but my hands can't match the standard my mind has made for the image. I will always be making an imitation of the thing i can already see. This also goes for any other artistic ventures like music or movies. If I make something, it is always a worse version than the 'original'.
While I'm clearly thankful for the ability to hyperactively picture things like I do, it is also incredibly maddening. Art for me is plike describing a cool concert you went to... there is no way to give justice to the awesome thing you've experience with your own abilities unless you fully recreated the concert yourself. But then it's just a recreation! Ugh.
Speaking of internal monologues, there's also a condition called anendophasia where you don't have one. This one is a REALLY new discovery, from what I can find it was just formally identified...
Yeah, it honestly sounds exhausting. My fiancée sometimes refers to me as having "a void brain" but I would find her constant stream of monologue and imagery utterly exhausting. One thing my brain...
Yeah, it honestly sounds exhausting. My fiancée sometimes refers to me as having "a void brain" but I would find her constant stream of monologue and imagery utterly exhausting.
One thing my brain does constantly have is music. Melodies I've heard, ones I'm writing, whole songs, snippets of lyrics. Sometimes one at a time, and sometimes all at once. I've no doubt that sounds exhausting to some, but I love always having a little bit of my own mental soundtrack going on.
As someone whose internal monologue is too busy and too loud, it can be exhausting. But when moderated slightly, like using meditation, it can also bring forward great ideas and useful insights on...
I would find her constant stream of monologue and imagery utterly exhausting.
As someone whose internal monologue is too busy and too loud, it can be exhausting. But when moderated slightly, like using meditation, it can also bring forward great ideas and useful insights on many things. It tends to get louder and busier when I'm anxious or unhappy with life, that is the only thing that truly sucks.
I can internally monologue and I can get songs stuck in my head, but music is simplified down to something closer to rhythmic poetry. There will be words and a beat, but instruments are gone. It's...
I can internally monologue and I can get songs stuck in my head, but music is simplified down to something closer to rhythmic poetry. There will be words and a beat, but instruments are gone. It's kind of like I've reduced it down to just what it takes to sing along.
I've described it to my wife as like I think in details. To use the apple example that keeps getting brought up: to me an apple is that white flash card with black sans-serif text that depicts a side view of a red delicious apple with exactly 2 knobs at the bottom and a short brown stem. I don't see this flash card in my mind though. It's just that when I think about an apple with no explicit descriptors I don't visualize some apple and then describe it, I just fetch the details about what a stereotypical apple is. These descriptors are still words though, which is where the internal monologue comes in.
I can't say if I experience the internal monologue the same as others though without knowing more about how they're normally experienced. I can say that it doesn't feel like I "hear" the words as much as they're "just there". They don't have a voice.
I'd say that sounds close enough to my own internal monologue, which I believe is considered "normal". I have the words, and sometimes there's a recognizable voice to it, but only when I'm being...
I'd say that sounds close enough to my own internal monologue, which I believe is considered "normal". I have the words, and sometimes there's a recognizable voice to it, but only when I'm being conscious of it. It's kind of weird to think about how the "voice" is very genderless and toneless, best word I have to describe it is "invisible" despite that usually being used for visual. It's not silent, because it's there, but it's also... not.
Also, now you have me wondering about how I think of music and songs. I think my mind also puts more emphasis on vocals, but the instrumentals are there, particularly when they're a focal point of the song. The songs are definitely "simplified" though. I'm guessing anauralia (inner ear) has a whole scale like aphantasia where some people "hear" nothing, and those who hear stuff in exact detail.
For the record, as far as I know I have none of these conditions. But I just learned the name of the lack of inner monologue today (anendophasia), and that anauralia exists and is a totally separate thing from that and aphantasia. So, I have no clue what actually defines a "baseline" mind anymore because we take that stuff for granted. And now I'm wondering what if someone has all three...
For me, my internal monologue is "silent" but somehow masculine in some indistinct way? (I'm cis-male.) It's not my voice, precisely, but it has some abstract quality to it that is male. When I'm...
For me, my internal monologue is "silent" but somehow masculine in some indistinct way? (I'm cis-male.) It's not my voice, precisely, but it has some abstract quality to it that is male. When I'm reading something written by a woman, the voice doesn't change exactly, but it has an abstract feminine quality to it instead.
Similarly, when I have a song stuck in my head (which is almost always—currently it's "Tainted Love"), my mental representation of the song isn't fully formed. The instrumentation is simplified in some way. I think the vocals are probably the closest. If I really concentrate, I think I can "fill the song out," so to speak, but it's hard to say what exactly is changing.
In imagining the apple on the table, I don't know that the table had a color, even though the apple was definitely red. Similarly, I couldn't say what the background was. It wasn't dark and it wasn't light, it was just... undefined.
The recurring theme is abstractness and indefiniteness. Dreams are the same way. They're more shallow than real life perception. I don't know if that's true for everyone.
Finding the difference in everyone's experience fascinating! Thanks for sharing everyone. Not sure if my experience is in any way representative of normal, but will share it all the same. [Sorry...
Finding the difference in everyone's experience fascinating! Thanks for sharing everyone.
Not sure if my experience is in any way representative of normal, but will share it all the same.
[Sorry in advance for the text wall]
When you mentioned 'Tainted Love', while not familiar enough with it to know much beyond the chorus, I mentally tried to "listen" to it and could "hear" the beat, him singing the lyrics word for word, with the right timing, etc.
I'm sure there's a slight difference somehow vs reality or I'm missing something (human recollection is very rarely perfect), but listening to the same part IRL afterwards I can't readily notice any difference from what I "mentally" heard.
Not sure if there's a trick to it, but I've found the best success when I'm actively trying to "hear" the music as if I was listening to it, but with the passive effort you'd have if you were genuinely doing so - if that makes sense. Kind of like tuning your hearing in to listen to background music you weren't paying attention before in a coffee shop.
Maybe that primes the same pathways as when you listen a bit more, and triggers a more complete recollection - like a re-experience vs actively trying to re-create how it sounds in your mind? No idea, complete armchair theory and probably wrong lol.
Additionally, I have an inner monologue of my thoughts that I mentally "hear" as if you were hearing it out loud, and same when I read text. Like literally as I'm typing this I hear it.
The voice is masculine and close to my own, but if I'm honest there's a slight difference to where it's slightly closer to a middle ground than my IRL voice.
If I try to imagine someone I know saying something, I actually "hear" their voice saying it - often with their personality traits as well.
Ex: the way they would respond and chuckle to a light joke they "said" in my mind in their specific mannerisms and way - even if I didn't prompt it with any specific wording or specific intent on what they'd "say".
I'll also somehow imagine and assign voices to characters based on descriptions given, but on some level my brain clearly fills in the gaps with its own interpretation.
Using the example given in another comment in this thread, I can also imagine an apple in a space, in a scene, and even rotating it 360 degrees or changing the color (red apple, green apple, etc.) or changing it from realistic, to cartoonish, to abstract.
Much like the character voice I mentioned, my brain will fill in any details somehow if not described.
Ex: Initially the red apple was rotating toward the right and had a few natural imperfections on the starting side (like small holes you'd see in actual apples IRL) but as it rotated my brain added a quarter-size bruise to the side it rotated to in the upper middle of the apple - even though that was never part of the "imagine an apple" prompt.
Interesting. Your imagination definitely seems more robust than mine. I surveyed my household on the apple/table question, and both my wife and my daughter reported having color to the apple, the...
Interesting. Your imagination definitely seems more robust than mine.
I surveyed my household on the apple/table question, and both my wife and my daughter reported having color to the apple, the table, and the background. So my daughter seems to have inherited my wife's imagination.
I asked my wife and daughter about dreams and they reported that there seems to be a lot more details filled in there then I've got, too. For example, my wife mentioned the idea of walking through a crowd in a dream. For me, I would be walking through the nebulous concept of "a crowd." Unless I'm interacting with any individual person, all of the people in the dream crowd would be undefined. The room itself might well be undefined as well. But for her, there would be a lot of random details about those people (e.g., gender, hair color, clothes).
Similarly, I asked both of them to imagine a sheep jumping over a fence. For me, that fence and the sheep are white and the fence is nebulously in some kind of grass. The density of the grass, the length of the sheep's coat, the color of its head, the sky, the time of day, what's on the horizon... None of that is defined for me but all of it was defined for both of them. If my mental attention isn't directed to it, it's like my brain doesn't "render" any of those details. It's like my visual and auditory imagination are "compressed."
Your description is very close to my own experience. My mind has to cut and zoom to different aspects and focus to attempt something close to visual fidelity. I remember a good portion of my...
Your description is very close to my own experience. My mind has to cut and zoom to different aspects and focus to attempt something close to visual fidelity.
I remember a good portion of my dreams though, and most are highly visual and convincing. However, the people's faces usually don't match reality. And one experience of lucid dreaming happened when I realized someone's face was completely wrong.
In contrast to my own imagination, reading the previous commenter's last paragraph seemed to give me a boost in the perceived visuals. It did nothing to solidify other details like the table or background. But the apple shifted from a prototypical, cartoonish red delicious to something more real, green-tinged oranges blending into the dimpled reds. Without consciously choosing the color or exact details to "render."
This effect was most noticeable to me while reading Name of the Wind. At some point while reading, I was no longer consciously comprehending the words on the page. It was a fully visual experience happening in my mind that I only recognized when I started turning the page.
Then, I re-read the page because I couldn't believe what I "saw" was an accurate depiction (it was). Kinda like lucid dreaming, in the right environment I could shift into a flow and visually experience the scene. But like dreams, there was a fragile balance. Thinking too directly about the visualization or actual words on the page would break the effect and shift my conscious experience back to comprehending the words' meanings.
For what it's worth, there's a near certainty you do dream normally and you just don't remember because it's a bit of a weird skill to develop. If you're interested, you could start a dream diary...
For what it's worth, there's a near certainty you do dream normally and you just don't remember because it's a bit of a weird skill to develop.
If you're interested, you could start a dream diary and start to improve your dream recall. Most people can easily go from 0-1 dreams a night remembered to like 5 in a few weeks.
I haven't woken up with any recollection of a dream in years. Based on what I understand dream journaling to be I have low confidence I could even start one due to lacking any useful days to build...
I haven't woken up with any recollection of a dream in years. Based on what I understand dream journaling to be I have low confidence I could even start one due to lacking any useful days to build on. I don't even mean that I can't remember any specific dreams right now, I mean I don't even wake up with a vague "that was a weird dream" feeling.
I've always assumed that I do dream and just never remember it, but I also find it fascinating that the only reason I have to believe that is that that's what people say. I was told that not dreaming is basically impossible, so I must be. The reason I find this fascinating is that even if I truly didn't the assumption would still be that I must be and just lack the recall of them. I'm not arguing the science, I just find it interesting.
On evidence that I do dream, on rare occasion I'll wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night. I never have any recollection of the cause, but my best guess is that I was having a nightmare. That kind of physical response is the closest I've had to any conscious recollection of anything related to dreaming I've had in many years.
My guess is that it isn't related to aphantasia though because others have said they get vivid dreams, although I can't personally conceptualize how that works. Like even if I do get vivid dreams I'm unsure how the recall on them would work since I wouldn't be able to re-vizualize the memory consciously.
That's pretty fascinating, how dreams work differently for folks. I wonder if you experience rapid eye movement and different phases differently on a brian waves and frequency scale. For me,...
That's pretty fascinating, how dreams work differently for folks. I wonder if you experience rapid eye movement and different phases differently on a brian waves and frequency scale.
For me, dreams work like this.
Imagine that ocassioanlly, after going to bed, you begin to see and experience life from the camera perspective of an alternate world you. You are approximately the same dimension and height, probably because your brain doesn't have enough data to simulate a vastly different 1st person perspective. You're mostly not "driving" (lucid dreaming), you're behind the eyeballs of someone else observing how they go about life. There are normal ambient sounds and speech and languages you actually speak, but yourself and others might slide in and out of those languages mid sentence. You have access to the inner thoughts of dream you, such as how they feel about the texture / taste / smell of things, their sense of balance / vertigo: but you don't feel these, just what alternative you think about them. But you feel all of their emotions, if they are scared of delighted or disgusted or enraged.
You know different people: some of whom exist in our world and behave the same, some of whom only look like the version here, and some are complete strangers to you. The alternative you could have different morals, different memories, preferences and abilities. (So for example, I used to consistently dream that I could fly or leap great distances or at least effortlessly glide above 6 inches off the ground.) In fact, the physics of that world could be completely different: objects can physically warp, impossible room interior dimensions, think Inception elevator hallway scene but this will feel normal and not alarming.
Text is consistently not readable, but alternate world you can understand their text just fine and infer meaning that you have access to.
While in dream world, then, you might have a different job, different past, different martial status, be different ages; you could be very mean or calloused, could be addicted or drawn to other things, or very motivated by things you don't care about here. But mostly you're similarly moral and share same delights and dislikes.
While you're dreaming, because these are perfectly normal aspects of your alternative self's universe, you don't raise any questions, it's just how it is there. If real life you were close to waking up you might start to question inconsistencies, find physical impossibilities bewildering, and object to other differences, which could contribute to you waking up as that world collapses, and your awareness gets pulled back to this world, you being back on your bed eyes open in the dark/morning.
And finally you wake up still having accessible memories of your most recent travel to an alternative world. You might wake up with the same lingering emotions, such as the happiness you felt, or their nostalgia, or their frustrations. Sadly, you may now also feel the moral repercussions of dream world actions / events.
:) visual recollection of dream world fade extremely fast and you can't visualize details anymore because you're aphantastic.
Would super love to hear how dreams work for others. I just assumed we all dream the same
My dreams work pretty much like yours, except that I'm embodied somehow, occasionally non-human. I might be 100 feet tall, or looking at the world through compound eyes, or knowing what it's like...
My dreams work pretty much like yours, except that I'm embodied somehow, occasionally non-human. I might be 100 feet tall, or looking at the world through compound eyes, or knowing what it's like to be a chair, or having the inner life of an amoeba engulfing a bacterium. It can be seriously cool or being a horrified passenger (usually causes a quick, sweating wakeup).
Waking up in a sweat, especially if it's associated with palpitations and general over-excited feeling, can be an autonomic nervous system weirdness thing. At least, I attribute my experiences...
Waking up in a sweat, especially if it's associated with palpitations and general over-excited feeling, can be an autonomic nervous system weirdness thing. At least, I attribute my experiences like that to my dysautonomia. They are never associated with dreams for me, and I am a person who commonly remembers dreams.
If you wanted to try to remember a dream, and live with someone, you could ask them to wake you up while you are dreaming. The eye movement in REM sleep is really obvious. REM is most common towards the end of your normal sleep period, so like half an hour to an hour before you normally wake up would be a good time for your helper to come check if your eyeballs are moving around rapidly, and wake you up if they are.
That's difficult to answer. If people really have an experience like it is depicted on TV, then no I don't have that. Depictions are highly visual. What I do experience is my mind wandering while...
That's difficult to answer. If people really have an experience like it is depicted on TV, then no I don't have that. Depictions are highly visual.
What I do experience is my mind wandering while I simultaneously have a lowered response to external stimulus. Externally I think that is functionally the same, but I feel it would be more correct to label it an internal distraction than a day dream.
An article about Zeman’s second paper appeared in the New York Times, and, after that, e-mails poured in. Around seventeen thousand people contacted him. Most were congenital aphantasics, and most not only lacked visual imagery; they could not mentally call up sounds, either, or touch, or the sensation of movement. Many had difficulty recognizing faces. Many said that they had a family member who was aphantasic, too. Most said that they saw images in dreams. Zeman recruited colleagues to work with him, and together they tried to reply to every correspondent.
Some people who wrote had once had imagery but lost it. About half of these had lost it as a consequence of physical injury—stroke, meningitis, head trauma, suffocation. The other half attributed their loss to a psychiatric cause—depersonalization syndrome, depression. A few told him that they thought they’d suppressed their capacity to visualize because traumatic memories had made imagery intolerable. [...]
...
Zeman also received messages from people who appeared to have the opposite of aphantasia: they told him that their mental pictures were graphic and inescapable. There was evidently a spectrum of mental imagery, with aphantasia on one end and extraordinarily vivid imagery on the other and most people’s experience somewhere in between. Zeman figured that the vivid extreme needed a name as well; he dubbed it hyperphantasia. It seemed that two or three per cent of people were aphantasic and somewhat more were hyperphantasic.
Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.
Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.
...
Isabel, like Parfit, remembered very little about her life. She kept boxes of souvenirs—ticket stubs, programs—but unless she looked at these things, or a friend reminded her, she didn’t recall most of the places she’d visited or things she’d done. She imagined that this could be a problem in a relationship, if you didn’t remember what you’d done together and the other person got upset and accused you of not caring, though fortunately she’d never been with someone like that. When she went out with friends who were full of stories, she’d worry that she wasn’t entertaining enough [...]
...
In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.
At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
She tried not to expose herself to ugly or violent images because she knew they would stick in her mind for years. But even without a picture, if she even heard about violence her mind would produce one. Once, reading about someone undergoing surgery without anesthetic, she imagined it so graphically that she fainted. [...]
Thanks for sharing! I gotta try to find a copy of this article somewhere, or grab a sale subscription at some point, because this is very interesting to me. When I first heard about aphantasia a...
Thanks for sharing! I gotta try to find a copy of this article somewhere, or grab a sale subscription at some point, because this is very interesting to me. When I first heard about aphantasia a couple years back, I seriously questioned if I have it, and I’m pretty sure I do.
Like quite a few people in the comments here, when I try to picture something I don’t really picture it, I just can hold the concept of it in my mind, but without any associated imagery.
I barely remember dreams, if I dream at all, and my memory is absolutely terrible. It made my parents sad when I’ve brought up my bad memory of trips we’ve been on…but I can usually play it off, or truthfully say that the trips have shaped who I am even if I don’t explicitly remember all the things we did.
One part of your synopsis of the article that sticks out to me is the:
The other half attributed their loss to a psychiatric cause—depersonalization syndrome, depression.
I did have pretty bad undiagnosed “depression” throughout high-school and maybe earlier, and I wonder if that played a role.
I know growing up I would devour books, and I still do, but I do find myself skimming long and wordy descriptions of things, so I tend to prefer books that are “witty” than overly descriptive if that makes sense. I can also really only describe plots, but not what characters or scenes look like, outside of like a very general idea. I can definitely do a better job with movies or tv show characters, but I also don’t think I could describe more than outfit and hair color, if even that.
But I’ve always struggled with trying to do anything artistic or decorative without a reference of basically exactly what I want in front of me. It drives my wife nuts to no end when we’re trying to pick out outfits or decor…no I have no idea if this rug will look good in our house unless we physically place it in the house.
I wish I knew if I’d always had aphantasia, or if it was something that I somehow developed (or if there was some way to “regain” visualization abilities).
https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1rc0/some_people_cant_see_mental_images_the_consequences_are_profound#comment-gtn3 Has the mirror version. Search for word mirror on this page
I only discovered I have aphantasia 2 years ago, aged 38. It was quite the bizarre realisation that most people actually can mentally visualise things, it stunned me to be honest and definitely...
I only discovered I have aphantasia 2 years ago, aged 38. It was quite the bizarre realisation that most people actually can mentally visualise things, it stunned me to be honest and definitely felt weird for a while. I’ve read of some people becoming super depressed after finding out, I was bummed for a bit, mostly about how I imagine most people can dwell on fond memories aided by visual memory. On reflection I think explains a few things about me as a person and my preferences. The main two being that I have always loved music and film but struggled to get into fiction writing. I also seem to deal with grief quite quickly and always have done. The crazy thing to me is that it is such a recent discovery scientifically, you’d have thought this would have been known about for 100’s of years and well studied. I can definitely relate to a lot in the article, thanks for sharing.
Right, I’m off to sleep… where I do actually see things in my dreams!
Not that surprising to me. We only know our own minds, so it's hard to realize that our "normal" might be different from everyone else's unless we explicitly discuss it. And aphantasia is directly...
The crazy thing to me is that it is such a recent discovery scientifically, you’d have thought this would have been known about for 100’s of years and well studied.
Not that surprising to me. We only know our own minds, so it's hard to realize that our "normal" might be different from everyone else's unless we explicitly discuss it. And aphantasia is directly tied to how we think, which is such a basic thing and would barely ever come up in casual conversations. As the article notes, even the current research started when a man lost the ability to visualize things in his mind after a surgery. Same goes for the historic cases mentioned. If someone's born with it, it most likely won't ever come up because you'd assume everyone is the same way.
The mind is a crazy thing, and psychology and neuroscience are still fairly young fields compared to other sciences. I can't guess how many other potential conditions relating to "basic" cognition or perception have yet to be discovered because people just don't think to ask or mention it.
And in the category of unreliable narration, it's only in the last few decades that we've had the technical capability to quantitatively measure what's going on when people think and experience....
And in the category of unreliable narration, it's only in the last few decades that we've had the technical capability to quantitatively measure what's going on when people think and experience. Going through a couple of Zeman's papers (here and here), they're able to localize differences in brain structure, connectome, and metabolism related to visual processing for aphantastics vs. median visualizers and hyperphantastics.
I'm curious whether there is a connection/correlation with poor eyesight. I struggle to remember faces and I don't visualize much when thinking or remembering. I also had a eureka moment, seeing...
I'm curious whether there is a connection/correlation with poor eyesight. I struggle to remember faces and I don't visualize much when thinking or remembering. I also had a eureka moment, seeing leaves on trees for the first time when I got glasses. I've always been more aware of auditory, (books included) smell, taste than visual input although when I focus on something visual like a beautiful view, I get a sense of wonder and pleasure.
I suspect that bad eyesight is why I don't have much early childhood memory of events other than sounds, sensations, tastes, and smells. I remember the first book I read in detail, the pain of a...
I suspect that bad eyesight is why I don't have much early childhood memory of events other than sounds, sensations, tastes, and smells. I remember the first book I read in detail, the pain of a cut on my foot bad enough to need stitches when I was three, and the stitches. I don't recall what my parents and baby brother looked like from that time. I got glasses when I was six, and the world bloomed.
When I close my eyes there’s only blackness. When my eyes are open I have perfect vision. I tried really, really hard when I was a kid to actually imagine things and see them because I knew people...
When I close my eyes there’s only blackness. When my eyes are open I have perfect vision.
I tried really, really hard when I was a kid to actually imagine things and see them because I knew people could do that sort of thing. Specifically I tried to imagine a pink elephant playing with a ball. But black is all I ever got.
ND and multiple concussions in my youth, but no concussions before I knew I couldn’t imagine visuals.
I've known for a little while now that I belong in this group, with overlapping prosopagnosia (face blindness). For my side, I do okay with fiction writing. But yes ditto on grief. Probably easier...
I've known for a little while now that I belong in this group, with overlapping prosopagnosia (face blindness).
For my side, I do okay with fiction writing. But yes ditto on grief. Probably easier because I can't "re-live" memories. No audio / scent / visual / touch flash backs.
I also see dreams: they're pretty indistinguishable from experiencing reality (while I'm dreaming the inconsistencies are not apparent).
The knowledge seemed to him more personal than an ordinary fact, but he could not feel or picture what it had been like to be that boy in the kitchen.
Basically this is spot on. Memories are composits reconstructed from known facts every single time. Might also contribute to how much I am open to being wrong about my past assumptions: there was maybe a fact missing or misfiled, cool, I'll fix it, and no need for memory video editing. ( I choose to do this, though, I don't just believe everyone of course)
I suppose this is a weird question, but how do you know you visualize when dreaming? The only way I can imagine saying I can visualize while dreaming would require being able to recall visuals...
I suppose this is a weird question, but how do you know you visualize when dreaming? The only way I can imagine saying I can visualize while dreaming would require being able to recall visuals from my dreams, but recalling visuals is a problem in itself.
Dreams are different than imagination and activates elsewhere in the brain too. Dreaming can be actively experienced by the brain and thus you can see dreams while they happen even if you can't...
Dreams are different than imagination and activates elsewhere in the brain too. Dreaming can be actively experienced by the brain and thus you can see dreams while they happen even if you can't imagine things while awake.
I rarely dream, nor do I mentally see things, but I do know when I'm dreaming. Sometimes.
Wow. Just wow. I have difficulty comprehending the inner life of aphantastics (or anendophasics, or anauralics) because I'm on the other end of the spectrum for sensory imagination. I don't read a...
Wow. Just wow. I have difficulty comprehending the inner life of aphantastics (or anendophasics, or anauralics) because I'm on the other end of the spectrum for sensory imagination.
I don't read a book, I have an immersive experience complete with imagined visuals, sound, touch, smell, taste. I did well in biochemistry - visualize the ball and stick model of a molecule, rotate it, imagine chiral mirror images, no problem. Higher mathematics - picture a manifold, invert it, transform it...
The "apple on a table" exercise results for me in a very specific Platonic image of a perfect russet apple (pink and golden brown, a slightly flattened spheroid with a green stem) that I saw at an heirloom apple farm, sitting on a piano-polished mahogany table I once admired in a museum. Not exactly acts of pure imagination, but a combination of comforting recalled images.
These days, my work head is busy with visualized network diagrams; flowcharts; where all the controls are located spatially in various GUI layers; how many cells over to the right a specific value is located in a table; the relative indents and colors for lines of code depending on what the nested blocks are doing; the auditory signals for successful/unsuccessful actions... I'm an experiential learner, because once I've done something, I can play it back in my head in all its details and create variations as needed. The caveat is that I loathe working at a computer all day - it's a kind of sensory deprivation, and my mind does wander to provide the missing stimulation if I'm at it too long.
I'm not an artist or musician because my motor skills aren't good enough to reproduce what's in my mind's eye/ear, not because I can't imagine in detail what I want to commit to the medium. I worked as a pastry cook successfully because there are a lot of professional hacks to improve reproducibility. For hobby stuff, I tend to work at jewelry scale because it's easier to minimize visible distortions of relative proportion.
In a forum discussion, someone said, "You can't remember pain (physical)", and my internal reaction was "the hell you say". My inner sensory library brought up a litany of broken bones, arthritic aches, head pounding, cramps, burns, cuts, bruises...
The epicure and wine tasting skills come with the package - I make up recipes by "taste-ualizing". I didn't know that the ability to recall and recombine tastes and smells in detail was unusual until I went to a tasting with a bunch of trained sommeliers and got the full on "One of us, one of us..." vibe.
I avoid visual news presentations or violent movies and TV because reading about it is bad enough. One f*cking picture of the Gaza devastations will last for years of nightmares, thanks. I don't have so much trouble with intrusive imagery or other sensory process data as the article describes, mainly due to decades of SSRI use and meditation.
Neuro-weirdisms: I recall faces well, but people's names don't stick at all, even if I visualize the person wearing a name tag. I don't have photographic memory for what I see on a page - I can recall the gist of the content and striking details of font or paragraph layout, but not the fine text. Gross anatomy was a PITA in med school because I could picture everything and move through layers easily in my head, but not associate the names for each structure.
I don't have great recall for emotional content of memories. Just being able to visualize or recall sensory detail isn't everything; I feel like I'm synthesizing what I should have felt from what I recall.
I just realized that hyperphantasia is probably why I'm not a great teacher. As others mentioned here it's as difficult to imagine the lack of a vast sensory library as I imagine it would be to contemplate the presence of one. If I'm constantly expressing myself in terms that not all the students are equipped to imagine (there's that word again), of course the lessons won't connect.
I'm also like you, albeit a slightly more "extreme" version. To avoid repeating huge parts of your message, I'd describe it as, "I experience everything you said you can experience, either the...
I'm also like you, albeit a slightly more "extreme" version. To avoid repeating huge parts of your message, I'd describe it as, "I experience everything you said you can experience, either the same or more "strongly", but I also experience almost all things you said you explicitly either said you can't, or said you don't have a problem with." Further, I also experience synaesthesia, which is a whole other can of worms.
Now, it may seem fun to some. And to some extent, yeah, I would agree. I can not only imagine but also "almost experience" all senses just from imagining them. If I imagine a chair or an apple, I can not only "see it" but also, say, strongly feel its texture, the sound it makes when touched in any particular way, smell its scent, visualise all its tiny details and so on. But it also simultaneously sucks. For one, I strongly re-live trauma and other negative things on the regular. You'd think it'd make me numb eventually, but no. Big reason why I almost completely avoid horror content, the news, etc. Also I can recall my dreams scarily well & they feel extremely lifelike. Including nightmares, of which I have plenty. Also, synaesthesia makes things even more complicated as it regularly confuses me somewhat, especially when I try to physically tell others (i.e. speak, not write) about some things related to particular senses.
I've got the synesthesia (who knew tastes had melody and rhythm, and numbers have colors?) and excessively strong traumatic memory issues as well. I can vividly visualize (and all the other...
I've got the synesthesia (who knew tastes had melody and rhythm, and numbers have colors?) and excessively strong traumatic memory issues as well. I can vividly visualize (and all the other senses) future events that make me extremely anxious and depressed. Suicidal ideation was a terrifying experience, and the start of a long journey through psychopharmacology.
But I'm old and have many years of practice dealing with this.
I don't have a great sense where exactly on the spectrum I sit, but I do know I'm more hyper- than an- on these things. Visually, not as strongly as you, but maybe I can give some insight on this...
I have difficulty comprehending the inner life of aphantasics (or
anendophasics, or anauralics) [...]
I don't have a great sense where exactly on the spectrum I sit, but I do know I'm more hyper- than an- on these things. Visually, not as strongly as you, but maybe I can give some insight on this from someone a step or two down the scale to possibly give a sense on that general direction?? I'll also respond to some of @TaylorSwiftsPickles's comment inline here, and to some excerpt from the article.
The "apple on a table" exercise
I can visualize small things very clearly, but I do have a definitive limit. As such I have a very strong sense of attention in my visualizations, rendering in very high detail the thing of interest, and very low detail the others, and out into a void at the bounds of the visualization. If I picture the apple on the table, the apple is a prototypical Red Delicious (although that's not my favorite) with no blemishes. The color is a neatly polished deep red, with specular highlights from an overhead lamp. The surface of the table is some lightly stained wood (the dining table at my childhood home), with a harsh shadow from the overhead light and softer shadow from ambient occlusion.
However, at first, that's the whole picture. It's not that I can't visualize the rest of the table, and the table and its legs do have some presence to them, but there's no form unless I "look", and in visualizing that form I must sacrifice some of the detail on the apple and its illumination. I can focus on the joinery of the table and its surroundings, the floor, the chairs, the ceiling; but at that point, the apple itself fades to formless presence.
Until I "look" at some subject, there is no form or presence at all; only void, but wherever I direct my attention I can render out consistent detail for the subject in exchange for the same elsewhere. This seems similar to what @hobblyhoy described, but perhaps my 'default' state is a bit more visual than theirs.
One technique is to fold details away into 'texture'; it's almost like the color/texture and the geometry occupy different segments of my attention, so if I can fold geometry information like the texture of a tablecloth or the apholstery of the chair away into a general pattern or roughness, it's easier bring more details into focus. But in some sense, that's just another way to sacrifice one form for another.
Higher mathematics - picture a manifold, invert it, transform it...
Here's an exercise that might get you into this "attention" mindset, or else reveal something about how you see things. Picture your favorite surface embedded in space (say a torus or bell). Hold that to the side. Now, separately, consider the highest point on that surface. Do not visualize the point as lying on the surface itself: the surface is merely a guide to sample the points in their own space.
Now sample a few points from the surface. Say the lowest point also, or simply pick points at random.
Eventually, there is some number of points that's just too many for me to keep track of. For me, maybe 8? 10? It's difficult to do counting operations like that. Alternatively, I can imagine a distribution of uncountable number of points, but only by visualizing the texture of their distribution painted on the surface itself.
I don't have so much trouble with intrusive imagery or other sensory process data as the article describes, mainly due to decades of SSRI use and meditation.
I don't have troubles either (with one exception, below), but neither medication nor meditation were necessary for this. Like I say, I must explicitly direct attention to visualize a thing. If my attention is elsewhere, there is no capacity for intrusion.
The exception is in auditory senses. My auralia (??) is much stronger than phantasia (??). From the article:
While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
I cannot do this with film, perhaps except for short scenes that I know very well. However for sounds - music, dialogue, or my own inner speech - I can. When I'm bored I'll play an album for myself. Moreover, I can't "turn it off". There is always something playing, so I have learned to try my best to direct it.
For example, I can focus much much easier on things if there's some ambient instrumental music playing to occupy that auditory processing and leave my inner speech and visualization free to reason about a problem. Silence is too distracting, as it leaves that part of my mind to wander. Music with vocals are too distracting, as the words distract my inner speech.
When recalling speech, it seems to occupy the same part of my mind responsible for my inner speech; I cannot imagine two voices simultaneously as language, but I can imagine discordant voices in a chorus as noise. I cannot understand others speaking to me if I'm simultaneously using my inner speech or recalling speech. There are no limits on character of the voice as others here have described: my inner voice is typically my own, but I can perfectly recall others' voices or invent new ones.
I avoid visual news presentations or violent movies and TV because reading about it is bad enough.
So, same, but not for this reason. I don't have these issues with commentary over silent images, but audio recordings of people in distress really get to me.
I cannot recall taste or smell at all, in any capacity. I do know as a matter of fact which tastes and smells I like or dislike, and I instantly recognize them when they occur, but I cannot conjure them.
I have strong memory for pain, faces, and emotions; although faces have similar caveats regarding level of detail. I can imagine the person's face or the person's body and clothing and surroundings. Not both. A crowd of many people are all faceless, unless I focus on an individual.
I can recall some touch, but it is difficult and fleeting. I get the sense that the level of detail here is similar to how some of the near-aphantasics here describe visualization: fleeting wireframes and general forms but no persistence. Like, I can perfectly recall the shape and illumination of a large granite boulder at a nearby park; I can visualize the rough texture of its surface. I can imagine touching my hand to it, and I know I would feel the grittiness of the dust and dirt, the sharpness of the fractures in the surface, but I just.... can't. I can very clearly recall the cold of it. I wonder if that's related to my strong memory of pain since cold relates to heat? But I don't feel the sharpness, so maybe not.
(From @TaylorSwiftsPickles) Further, I also experience synaesthesia, which is a whole other can of worms.
As a child through my teens I used to experience synaesthesia (auditory to visual? to spatial?) but I no longer do. I know as a matter of fact which sounds produce which visualizations, but they don't come in real time any more. It also wasn't strictly visual; more like a spatial presence and distortion according to each sound. I wouldn't have described it this way at the time, but, knowing what I know now: try to think of a stress tensor field overlaid on your surroundings. Hearing a sound caused a distortion in that tensor field around the place from which the sound originated. Different pitches and tones and speech producing different twistings and periodic patterns in that field about the point. The way I described it when I was younger was as motion, that sounds caused twisting or stretching around the speaker, but that's not quite right because there was never really anything moving, just a sort of impression of force, which is why I liken it to a stress tensor now.
I don't have photographic memory for what I see on a page - I can recall the gist of the content and striking details of font or paragraph layout, but not the fine text.
If I had read the text, I can exactly recall the words through my inner speech. If I saw the text but did not read it, I cannot. Too much detail in the form. I can recall the form of a particular letter or short word, but long words and sentences and paragraphs get folded into texture on the surface with limited detail.
I just realized that hyperphantasia is probably why I'm not a great teacher.
This will definitely change how I teach! Currently I work in differential geometry, and I think now I rely too heavily on visualization of the various operators on the surfaces. In the future I will try to bring more pictures and animations with me so the audience need not conjure anything in their own mind, and try to bring more symbolic representation for those who think better with notation.
For this exercise I got up to 30 until I hit a small wall, but keeping count of those separately in my working memory and counting again and again I got up to 120, now that I'm done counting and...
Now sample a few points from the surface. Say the lowest point also, or simply pick points at random
For this exercise I got up to 30 until I hit a small wall, but keeping count of those separately in my working memory and counting again and again I got up to 120, now that I'm done counting and adding them, I can imagine the full shape with all the points at a moment's thought, more than 120 and I'd miss-imagine their placements and count. (And also did a few more cheats than just going 30 by 30, I got nice evenly spaced dots, did one side and copied it to the other, this was on a round infinity-like shape rotating on its long side)
I tried going above 30 in one go and I could but it took more work and my speed was sluggish, went to 70ish workout chunking out the visualizations or counting before I lost it
Tracking that many points with consistent placement is seriously impressive to me!! To be clear, you're imagining the points off in their own space away from the surface, not placing them directly...
Tracking that many points with consistent placement is seriously impressive to me!! To be clear, you're imagining the points off in their own space away from the surface, not placing them directly on the surface? It's much easier for me to imagine dots scattered on the surface as opposed to the dots free-floating in space according to the general shape of the surface.
It is also a bit easier for me to imagine the points in regular patterns, or points on a curve as opposed to points on a surface. Past about a dozen or so I don't trust that I'm placing the points consistently and they aren't wandering around. If I just place a bunch of points and attempt to count them, I lose track quickly.
Placing points in separate batches and merging them is an interesting idea.... I put my surface to the left and the place for my point cloud to the right. I scatter three points on the surface, then move them over to the point cloud. I can hold the triplet in my mind as vertices of a single triangle - again, I'm limited to only a few elements at a time, but with each element being the vertices of a triangle that brings the count to about 20!! I'm so proud of myself! However I cannot do the same with quadruples of points or more - the limit for me seems to be about half a dozen batches of three.
Incidentally, the best way I can remember long numbers is in rhythmic batches of three digits spatially arranged left-to-right in reading order. I wonder if there's some relation there as positioning things spatially is the best technique I have for helping working memory.
Edit: Reflecting on that last point more, I think that's backwards. I think the trick is relying on my audio memory, with the triplets of numbers coming in rhythm. So, with that in mind:
I place the surface off to the left, and the space for my point cloud to the right. I imagine a single triplet of points as the base element, and deform it so the vertices land on arbitrary points of the surface to be the first batch. Then to rhythm I deform the triangle so the vertices land on new sets of points. I go in sequence, adding two triplets each time, my inner speech counting 3 - 6, 3 - 6 - 9 - 12, 3 - 6 - 9 - 12 - 15 - 18, and so on, moving the triplet in the same pattern each time. With this strategy I can get past 30 points in total, albeit not all at once, but the rhythm and sound convinces me I am placing them consistently.
First off, counting in threes always had been easier for me, so there's gotta be something interesting thing going on there. Second I tried having the dots distanced from the objects but still...
First off, counting in threes always had been easier for me, so there's gotta be something interesting thing going on there.
Second I tried having the dots distanced from the objects but still floating around it, got to 110 before hitting problems, mainly that I started running out of even space around since for reasons unknown to myself I place then further apart than when they're on the surface.
Third doing this as having the object on the left and placing dots that trace the shape of the object on the right was slower, I could no longer use the copy paste cheat, I got to 70 (with chunking in 30's again) before I noticed I'm losing track of near-exact positionings on the dots (oh hey 70 again, i couldn't chunk them!). Also had run out of even spacing at 60 this time so the dots were even further apart from each other this time. My spacing is related to the amount difficulty of imagining them I think :D
When I start planning and counting I'm kinda zoomed in on the dots, but at 10 I have a pause and take a step back looking at the full shape and work on that. Kinda like putting two windows next to each other instead of alt-tabbing between them.
I'm proud of you for getting to 20! Try different shapes, it's a different difficulty on a Mobius strip than on a cube.
on cube I pause to find new even spaced positions on one side.
Actually lemme draw it on a square, i'm gonna do dots on the shape. Here's a Paint drawing of my imagination on dots on or above a square.
Between each color i had a pause to find new even positionings for the dots, and on the right i put the order i added them (did the black dots, then found space for blue, then found space for orange...)
On one side i can keep track of these 41 points.
I gave it a try and i can keep my imagination of 3 faces with different dot patterns on a cube, started on the 4th one and i forgot the second one :P
Here's a picture of what I'm trying to visualize (but with a single point cloud that I add to over time; the three point clouds in the image are just to show that progression.)...
Here's a picture of what I'm trying to visualize (but with a single point cloud that I add to over time; the three point clouds in the image are just to show that progression.)
I feel this about silence. My mind is always speaking, I have an inner dialogue and am diagnosed ADHD. The entirety of my thoughts are my own voice in my head. I can perhaps "tune out" that voice...
For example, I can focus much much easier on things if there's some ambient instrumental music playing to occupy that auditory processing and leave my inner speech and visualization free to reason about a problem. Silence is too distracting, as it leaves that part of my mind to wander. Music with vocals are too distracting, as the words distract my inner speech.
I feel this about silence. My mind is always speaking, I have an inner dialogue and am diagnosed ADHD. The entirety of my thoughts are my own voice in my head. I can perhaps "tune out" that voice in favor of experiencing "raw input" (if my eyes are opened), but being left to my own devices I am essentially just thinking in a never-ending train of thought.
When recalling speech, it seems to occupy the same part of my mind responsible for my inner speech; I cannot imagine two voices simultaneously as language, but I can imagine discordant voices in a chorus as noise. I cannot understand others speaking to me if I'm simultaneously using my inner speech or recalling speech. There are no limits on character of the voice as others here have described: my inner voice is typically my own, but I can perfectly recall others' voices or invent new ones.
This is interesting. My voice is also my own, but in my head. However, if I try to "recall" other peoples voices, or invent another one (which I just tried), it becomes just my voice but "mimicking" that voice. I tried my wife's voice, and it was simply my voice but higher pitched and more-feminine (and I knew it was hers). I tried Darth Vader for kicks, and it was simply my voice but poorly (and funnily) modulated through a breathing apparatus.
This is a segue, but I've been recently listening to Barm Stoker's Dracula (I know, I know. Corny). Throughout the book, there is tons of description of Dracula. He has cold, gaunt and white hands. His flesh is pale like a corpse. I do not "see" a head when thinking about this, but upon further reflection my mind is "taken" out of the scene entirely to focus on that singular detail in that singular moment.
Take for example, if I were to be able to visualize Dracula's "Cold, gaunt and pale white hands", the image in my mind (if it were to appear) would, as I "feel" it, consume the entirety of my field of view. I would not have imagined (I feel) the entirety of Dracula, but it would be as if I was zoomed in on a disembodied hand. This leads me to believe that I have some "sense" of spatial dimension, and I hone in on that. However, there is no visual.
This put "You don't know the power of the dark side" in my mind, but you also put this idea in my head, so it sort of involuntarily came out "You don't know ThE PoWeR Of tHe dArK SiDe" as a weird...
I tried Darth Vader for kicks, and it was simply my voice but poorly (and funnily) modulated through a breathing apparatus.
This put "You don't know the power of the dark side" in my mind, but you also put this idea in my head, so it sort of involuntarily came out "You don't know ThE PoWeR Of tHe dArK SiDe" as a weird hybrid mix of my own voice and James Earl Jones. Funny.
Sometimes distinctive voices will get 'stuck in my head' like a catchy tune. Gilbert Gottfried haunts me.
if I were to be able to visualize Dracula's "Cold, gaunt and pale white hands", the image in my mind (if it were to appear) would, as I "feel" it, consume the entirety of my field of view. I would not have imagined (I feel) the entirety of Dracula, but it would be as if I was zoomed in on a disembodied hand.
This is fairly accurate to how I see it, but not exactly as a "field of view". This is what I was trying to get at with the phrasing about "attention" and "form" and "presence".
Rephrasing my comment a bit to put into context:
As such I have a very strong sense of attention in my visualizations, rendering in very high detail the thing of interest, and very low detail the others, and out into a void at the bounds of the visualization. If I picture the apple on the table, the apple is [highly detailed.] The surface of the table [less detailed.]
However, at first, that's the whole picture. [I do still "feel" that the table and its legs are where they would be] but there's no form unless I "look", and in visualizing that form I must sacrifice some of the detail [of the apple]. [If I do focus on the table and its surroundings, then I can see those in more detail;] but at that point, the apple itself fades to formless presence.
I really want to hone in on this: That. That is how I feel about everything, all the time. I see nothing, but a knowing of what it is I am supposed to see. It's as if my entire focus is putting...
I really want to hone in on this:
However, at first, that's the whole picture. [I do still "feel" that the table and its legs are where they would be] but there's no form unless I "look"
That. That is how I feel about everything, all the time. I see nothing, but a knowing of what it is I am supposed to see. It's as if my entire focus is putting forth a visual "tip-of-the-tongue" artifact that is just ever-so-slightly out of reach.
This immediately made me wonder if we'll ever manage to get a helmet that can pick detailed images out of someone's mind with some training. I'll skip on the direct brain implants, but I'd dip in...
I just realized that hyperphantasia is probably why I'm not a great teacher. As others mentioned here it's as difficult to imagine the lack of a vast sensory library as I imagine it would be to contemplate the presence of one. If I'm constantly expressing myself in terms that not all the students are equipped to imagine (there's that word again), of course the lessons won't connect.
This immediately made me wonder if we'll ever manage to get a helmet that can pick detailed images out of someone's mind with some training. I'll skip on the direct brain implants, but I'd dip in with a helmet or circlet for a brain computer interface - like the ones that were shown in the Three Body Problem. We're a lot closer to this than most people realize.
For someone like you, one day in the not so distant future you might be able to broadcast your mental images directly out of your own head through that sort of interface and have a clever AI throw it up on the screen for everyone else to see. Perhaps even download something like architecture blueprints through the interface into an AI that can instantly make the plans real engineering diagrams. That might catapult your teaching skills into a category that no one has ever seen before. ;)
This is the sort of AI application that outclasses either human or AI output by synthesizing the two into a real time feedback loop. I see it as a category of careers that don't exist yet, but will still be keeping people employed in the future to replace some of the jobs it's automating away.
Fabulous idea, but the privacy implications are ghastly. I'd never want to use something like that in real time without the ability to edit my thoughtstream, for instance. Maybe with practice and...
Fabulous idea, but the privacy implications are ghastly. I'd never want to use something like that in real time without the ability to edit my thoughtstream, for instance. Maybe with practice and technical guardrails, it would be possible to project an image without the risk of other thoughts bleeding in (tell me you've never had a passing thought of what someone attractive would look like naked).
Fun fact, I literally haven't. For the record, I'm sitting somewhere between the "lesbian" and "asexual" part of the attraction spectrum. I'm personally indifferent to naked bodies, and I don't...
without the risk of other thoughts bleeding in (tell me you've never had a passing thought of what someone attractive would look like naked).
Fun fact, I literally haven't. For the record, I'm sitting somewhere between the "lesbian" and "asexual" part of the attraction spectrum.
I'm personally indifferent to naked bodies, and I don't find them attractive in the slightest, unless that body is my partner's. If I had that passing thought for someone (which I don't), I'd find the thought repulsive, if anything. When I see a woman I find subjectively beautiful, I don't imagine wonder what she looks like naked. I may just think she looks great; I might think her style is cool; I might think "I want to BE her"; I might think "I want to grab a coffee with her and get to know her" and "brainstorm" what she's like as a person, or what it'd be like if I dated her, but that's all, really.
Then again, I only experience attraction when I'm single - which hasn't been the case for like 7 years almost. Now that I'm not single, it more or less just recognising that someone looks good and/or getting gender envy from them, but that's all. I've not been attracted to anyone else all those years - just my wonderful partner.
If anything, I'm always surprised to hear that other people commonly imagine what people would look like naked...
In my case (and at my age) it's sheer aesthetic curiosity about the variations of human shape, as much as anything sexual. I see someone very narrow-bodied, apparently muscular, or otherwise an...
In my case (and at my age) it's sheer aesthetic curiosity about the variations of human shape, as much as anything sexual. I see someone very narrow-bodied, apparently muscular, or otherwise an outlier, and wonder exactly how they're built.
That's interesting too. To me it's a pretty alien concept to "mentally undress" someone - even more so when, in fact, clothes themselves play a big role for aesthetic attraction in my case. What...
That's interesting too. To me it's a pretty alien concept to "mentally undress" someone - even more so when, in fact, clothes themselves play a big role for aesthetic attraction in my case. What someone wears, and how they express their "sense of self" through their presentation overall, are what I'll notice and/or think about. And the concept of "mentally undressing" feels like a total 180° from that :P
Oh, the implications are a lot worse than that. Here's a taste of the bad side from one of my favorite totally unknown science fiction shows. To quote one of the best movies ever filmed,...
My one example was an "off the top of my head". It's serious enough that even the New York Times had a pretty decent summary article on the state of neurodata risks and protections. Even with...
My one example was an "off the top of my head".
It's serious enough that even the New York Times had a pretty decent summary article on the state of neurodata risks and protections.
Even with current technology, you could have advertisers making precise neural maps of your personal "bliss points" to sell you addictive processed junk food
Your unpleasant YouTube clip from Incorporated is closer than anyone might wish for. [And now I've got a show to watch...]
I highly recommend it - just the one season, but it ends up parked at a great spot that could be picked up again kinda like Stargate Universe did. It's the closest thing I've seen to perfect...
I highly recommend it - just the one season, but it ends up parked at a great spot that could be picked up again kinda like Stargate Universe did. It's the closest thing I've seen to perfect cyberpunk on the silver screen. Great story, top tier acting, brutally dark humor that had me rolling, and it hits too close to home for comfort if you've worked in corporate America before. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had a guaranteed hit on their hands here, but as is their wont Syfy's people bungled the marketing. It was cancelled before anyone even knew it existed.
Hah with technology like that concerts and music videos would be insane, time and skill required to recreate what we imagine is stopping aphantasiacs from experiencing a lot of things that we can...
Hah with technology like that concerts and music videos would be insane, time and skill required to recreate what we imagine is stopping aphantasiacs from experiencing a lot of things that we can only describe in words.
Gotta learn how and where we think and imagine before we get to that point tho :[
Yeah it's extremely interesting seeing tilderinos describe aphantasia here, and surprising on how many there are! I think I may be slightly on the hyper end of it but I can stop imagining them if...
Yeah it's extremely interesting seeing tilderinos describe aphantasia here, and surprising on how many there are!
I think I may be slightly on the hyper end of it but I can stop imagining them if needed.
Books are indeed a full life like experience and I love them, I sometimes feel if I learn music theory and practice a little bit I may even start to hear an orchestra when I read books.
Music aswell! Songs aren't just a feeling and something to hear and pass, if I let go of the reigns my brain WILL be imagining sceneries effects and all kinds of shenanigans with them.
To the point I can burn myself out imagining them and feel fatigued after 15-30 minutes depending on the amount of details I imagine (I can stop doing this, I just have to actively stop the imaginations so I can experience songs as just sounds and feelings)
When teaching people I always automatically draw things out in the air or on a screen or whiteboard or anything, haven't had trouble explaining things to anyone... Yet.
Also happy to know I'm not the only one who has trouble remembering people's names, I gotta ask many many times and sometimes make internal associations with something I can imagine to remember them.
I joke with people that I'll remember their IP addresses and phone numbers before I recall their names, but it's actually painfully true and very embarrassing. I've tried all the mnemonic tricks,...
I joke with people that I'll remember their IP addresses and phone numbers before I recall their names, but it's actually painfully true and very embarrassing. I've tried all the mnemonic tricks, but some combination of social anxiety, lack of discrete patterns in cognomens (if only all blonde 30-something Southeastern U.S. women were named "Caitlyn", life would be so much easier)...
For social events, I usually have my prosthetic spouse along gently reminding me of people's names. Just imagine having to keep labeled photos of your co-workers so you don't misname someone you've worked with for years (I literally did this with my boss on a phone call this morning, mixing his name up with another coworker whose name starts with the same letter).
I've told some of my closest friends and they sometimes remember to tell me who people are :D Family is the same. Sometimes they help, sometimes they forget.
I've told some of my closest friends and they sometimes remember to tell me who people are :D Family is the same. Sometimes they help, sometimes they forget.
I am also one of these folks. My wife and I are self described "aphantasia"-havers (aphantasic)? There are things that blew my mind when I realized people could literally conjure up images in...
I am also one of these folks. My wife and I are self described "aphantasia"-havers (aphantasic)?
There are things that blew my mind when I realized people could literally conjure up images in their mind.
For me, a lot of it is just a "knowledge" of something. I don't literally "see" a mental image of a thing. I understand the concept of a tree, the rough scale, the color and texture, but I don't see it.
My wife and I are both software engineers, and I come from a background in mathematics. I think I view "objects" in my mind sort of the way I would a data model. I know the property, the shape, and the structural interactions of an object. As you would a data class defined in some programming language, but I cannot conjure an image.
This extends to my dreams. I don't really "see" things, but I can remember scenery and settings. It's very hard to explain.
One thing that is of note, I believe. Before this whole "aphantasia" popularity in recent years, there was no word for any of this. I remember trying out things like Sensory Deprivation tanks (which most people hallucinate in), and all I could see were the "pressure waves" caused by the blood flow in my eyes. No imagery whatsoever. My close friends, however, described seeing fantastic images.
Initially when I discovered that this was "not" the normal experience I was honestly pretty bummed about it. I remember feeling like I was missing out on something integral to the human experience. It's been years since, and more thoughts on the matter have lead me to the conclusion that my inability here has helped shaped me in ways I really have come to be proud of. It has helped me be talented (I think) in areas of logical thinking, mathematics, and abstract concepts.
Hah! I also am aphantasic. The one time I did Salvia, which normally involves hallucinations, those waves were all I got. That, and my mind trying to figure out why I'd been struck blind (because...
Hah! I also am aphantasic. The one time I did Salvia, which normally involves hallucinations, those waves were all I got. That, and my mind trying to figure out why I'd been struck blind (because my eyes were closed.) It wasn't something I wanted a second shot at. Maybe this is why?
It's funny - I thought aphantastics would be strictly concrete thinkers without imagination, but reading your description, it's clear imagination is taking place. You're working with more abstract...
It's funny - I thought aphantastics would be strictly concrete thinkers without imagination, but reading your description, it's clear imagination is taking place. You're working with more abstract cognitive models of tangible objects rather than sensory models, that's all.
I wonder if we'd also have atypical responses to psychedelics and mind altering substances. +1 on the object oriented mental processes. It's cool, we get to instantiate abstract classes with no...
I wonder if we'd also have atypical responses to psychedelics and mind altering substances.
+1 on the object oriented mental processes. It's cool, we get to instantiate abstract classes with no properties filled in.
I love when these posts about aphantsia pop up. It's nice to know I'm not alone. My favorite way to demonstrate/explain to people is by asking them a question. "Think of an apple. What color is...
I love when these posts about aphantsia pop up. It's nice to know I'm not alone.
My favorite way to demonstrate/explain to people is by asking them a question. "Think of an apple. What color is it?"
People with mental imagery will respond almost immediately and say "red." The few aphantasiacs I've asked, look at me and it seems like they don't understand the question. They/we have a concept of an apple in our mind, but unless it's specified, it's just an apple. Not red, or green, or yellow, it just IS an apple.
Right. We're thinking about the quintessential Apple, the Omni Apple which can be any and every apple. And then some people with autism will also look at the question funny because they'd be...
Right. We're thinking about the quintessential Apple, the Omni Apple which can be any and every apple.
And then some people with autism will also look at the question funny because they'd be thinking of a very specific apple that at one point existed and they've interacted with, not a generic red.
Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too. Best I can manage is a dim wire frame that pops into my mind for about the duration of a camera flash in a pitch black room, and I...
Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too.
Best I can manage is a dim wire frame that pops into my mind for about the duration of a camera flash in a pitch black room, and I can't flash that camera more than once every couple of minutes for any given scene. No colors or textures, just vectors, shapes, edges. I can't remember dreams at all, not even a tiny fraction of them.
I've got the omnipresent visual snow and tinnitus to go with it, though the migraines stopped once I was out of my 20s. Even magic mushrooms and LSD hit my mind like a brick wall - I don't think it's possible for me to have hallucinations, I've tried on several occasions. The closest I get is some washed out almost transparent pastel rainbow stripes if I stare at a bright white wall while under a heavy dose. I do get enhanced color perception and the 'breathing' visual effect while tripping, but no trails.
Never seemed to bother me when reading books, doing calculus or physics, or various engineering tasks. Never bothered me on the art either, but then I don't imagine an image and try to draw it, I just start plopping things down onto the paper and working with them once I can look at them. I'd say the only thing about it that bothers me is the reflexive irritated eye-roll I do every time I hear someone say the word "visualize" when trying to explain something. That technique is utterly useless to me.
My audio memory is probably better than normal, though. If I listen to your voice for about five minutes and we don't talk again until twenty years later on the phone, I'll recognize you from just your 'hello' even if your voice has changed. Using this to freak people out is kinda fun. I can play back complete songs I've heard in my head like there's an embedded mp3 player in there if I've heard it enough times, though it's not instantly memorized and I do forget them over time.
I was doing some digging on this out of curiosity some time ago and found some anecdotal evidence that Ayahuasca and DMT can 'cure' it for some people - and not just while high, I mean permanently after one dose. Doesn't work for everyone, but apparently the heavy psychedelics do work for some people. Haven't tried either of those yet myself. In fact being able to remember everything I'd seen before seems like hell - all that visual crud in the brain would clog up and slow down my thinking like a Tildes front page full of cat pictures.
I also found some meditation techniques that presented a method for training that visualization process. I tried it out of curiosity and after some practice it did seem to work - I could lift a small image off a page and keep it around like the tiny spot you'd see from staring at the sun, and lasting about that long. Didn't bother keeping up with it though, as I said it doesn't seem useful to me.
The researcher estimated 2-3% of people are aphantic. If tildes had 2,000 active users, then just with the average human distribution that would mean 40-60 aphantic tilderinos. Doesn't require any...
The researcher estimated 2-3% of people are aphantic. If tildes had 2,000 active users, then just with the average human distribution that would mean 40-60 aphantic tilderinos. Doesn't require any selection bias.
Interesting multiple people have commented on lack of hallucinations, both in sensory deprivation chambers and from drug stimulus. It might mean aphasics have an advantage in endurance athletic events, where sleep deprivation hallucinations are a common challenge for participants.
That's interesting. I've stayed awake for a little over five days at a time before (non-stop Babylon 5 marathon with friends) and towards the end of it, my color vision was washed out almost to...
That's interesting. I've stayed awake for a little over five days at a time before (non-stop Babylon 5 marathon with friends) and towards the end of it, my color vision was washed out almost to black and white. Never knew sleep deprivation lead to hallucinations before you mentioned it.
So there's models now to place people on a spectrum. Very few people have full aphantasia, most have some "level" of it. For the classic "apple" example, a 0 would be no visualization at all. As...
The researcher estimated 2-3% of people are aphantic
So there's models now to place people on a spectrum. Very few people have full aphantasia, most have some "level" of it. For the classic "apple" example, a 0 would be no visualization at all. As we work our way from 0 towards 5 we gain clarity - a fuzzy round nondistinct shape might be a 1, a 2 increasing the dynamics of shape, by 3 we might add color, 4 would be almost perfect and a 5 hyper-realistic adding details like bruises, dirt, the stem, becoming a near perfect representation of an apple in space (as the article stated perhaps even entering the person's reality in some fashion).
We don't have good numbers on how the normal curve is divided and I believe the 2-3% estimations came before there was a good quantization of this (or a truly well-designed questionnaire to determine or grade aphantasia) so take it with a grain of salt.
There are probably a lot of people that don't know they are aphantasics. Internet people are more aware of it since it's kind of a recurrent subject? There is also certainly a whole spectrum...
Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too.
There are probably a lot of people that don't know they are aphantasics. Internet people are more aware of it since it's kind of a recurrent subject?
There is also certainly a whole spectrum between aphantasic and hyperphantasic, but it's hard to position yourself because you'll never see another point of reference than yourself. I don't consider myself aphantasic, I can imagine things, but they're abstract, fleeting images. If I imagine an apple I see it red, because the "default" apple is red, but if I imagine a person, it's just the concept of a person, a sort of mannequin without any defining trait. I can recall things I've seen, but the scenes are also fleeting. And I certainly cannot play a whole movie in my head.
I’m honestly surprised by the same thing. Also aphantasic. “Some” indeed. Would’ve loved if it cured it for me, since I am highly interested in visual arts, on both the creation & consumption side.
Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too.
I’m honestly surprised by the same thing. Also aphantasic.
some anecdotal evidence that Ayahuasca and DMT can 'cure' it for some people
“Some” indeed. Would’ve loved if it cured it for me, since I am highly interested in visual arts, on both the creation & consumption side.
Not totally surprising that the bunch of us self selected to be on a heavily text only site, reading a long form article. I would imagine (not visually lol) the distribution at say, a graphical...
Not totally surprising that the bunch of us self selected to be on a heavily text only site, reading a long form article. I would imagine (not visually lol) the distribution at say, a graphical arts site or the police academy to be skewed heavily the other way: I can't mentally recall colour or look at an object and visualize it in different colours and shape; there are more super-recognizers among the kinds of professions that benefit from being able to "scan" memories like a movie / photo for previously not remembered details.
Not so surprising that some hyperfantasics self selected it either - fewer visual distractions here than on places like reddit or X because nothing is embedded, no ads or images to leak unbidden...
Not so surprising that some hyperfantasics self selected it either - fewer visual distractions here than on places like reddit or X because nothing is embedded, no ads or images to leak unbidden into your visual canvas. Perhaps we should add 'most differently neuro-divergent community' to our accolades. Somehow we've managed to exclude the middle and focus on the extreme ends of the bell curve. :P
Spot on - you have no idea how much I hate it when ads occupy my brain space permanently, or I get some abominable image or autoplay audio shoved into my face. Add in a generous helping of...
Spot on - you have no idea how much I hate it when ads occupy my brain space permanently, or I get some abominable image or autoplay audio shoved into my face. Add in a generous helping of misophonia, and I need the blessed quiet of a social place like this.
That's so interesting we're both drawn to text only, for opposite reasons. Reading the responses of all the hyper-s here and from the article , it sounds fascinating, and I wondered a bit if I'm...
That's so interesting we're both drawn to text only, for opposite reasons. Reading the responses of all the hyper-s here and from the article , it sounds fascinating, and I wondered a bit if I'm jealous. Sounds like a learning and professional cheat code for success. Maybe that's why I failed first year calculus twice before finally passing Calc for Programmers. I also struggled with physics until I can use computer assistance to visualize.
But if you can imagine it, my default mindscape is a cozy reading corner. I can turn on music or play a piece of media, but I can fully turn it off as well; close a book, pull out a craft, one thing at a time nothing jumping at me like pop up ads. I don't (can't) recall details of atrocities or gross shock images; they are inside folders, whose folder names sometimes catches my mind's eye, and I'll keep them closed no thanks. I have to be careful not to bring up sad or upsetting news before going to bed because others can be greatly upset by things like that and can't fall asleep.
The article mentioned a hyper- who walked into imagined doors, and someone who can't stop seeing a beloved pet who has died, ...that kind of inability to step away and stop everything for peace sounds not worth the highlights.
I don't want the ability to recall pain. Facts of the pain can be valuable, but the sensation seems....not advantageous?
Anyway, I think society needs more quiet spaces like this for everyone.
It's my experience that the hyperphantastic traits might be a cheat code for some kinds of learning, but not necessarily for success. Too well remembered past traumas feed into anxiety and...
It's my experience that the hyperphantastic traits might be a cheat code for some kinds of learning, but not necessarily for success. Too well remembered past traumas feed into anxiety and depression about realistically imagined futures, and the whole doom loop can spiral out of control. I've spent a great deal of time on meditation techniques to focus on being present, attuned to immediate sensory information and what I can control, letting intrusive thoughts and recollections pass. Nonetheless, a big chunk of my life has been spent floundering among personal and professional dead ends, too terrified or overwhelmed to make good choices.
It sounds like aphantasia doesn't divorce people from immediate unpleasantnesses in any way, either - you're still feeling what you feel, even if less historical baggage or anticipatory fear comes with it. It makes perfect sense that we'd both seek out quiet retreats into the safe, cozy, and controllable.
What I find amazing in all this research is how even when they describe their best case scenario of people with internal monologuos or people who visualize things it doesn't even scratch the...
What I find amazing in all this research is how even when they describe their best case scenario of people with internal monologuos or people who visualize things it doesn't even scratch the surface of what I personally experience in my head.
Like not only do I have an internal monologue, I have several, at once. I'm constantly turning over ideas and perspectives, picking apart things I see and experience. I'm having full conversations about things trying to understand my experiences from different perspectives.
And not only can I visualize people, places, things, and objects, but I can run simulations in my head and see those objects from different angles and can feel the textures, smells, tastes, sound it would make, and guess accurately the weight, mass, and force needed to push it around or throw it.
Like take the example of an apple. Not only can I visualize an apple, but I can describe the sound it'd make when hitting the floor, how it can bruise, the feel of cutting it, how much give it would give to a sharp knife, the texture of the seeds, etc. I can turn the apple around in my head, cut it in half, detail the inner texture, etc. Ask me the color and I can list the color texture of the surface, inner color, color of the seeds, and the chalky grey/green of the stem and the bruising/unripe areas, etc. Even as I'm thinking of that I can describe the give the stem has, what it feels like to pull the stem out, describe the little star shaped butthole on the bottom of the apple, the 4 "legs" on the bottom of the apple, how the apple will feel after being left out for a while when the outer surface has dried a bit and the cut edges start to curl, the slipperiness of the seeds, the sharp harder edge of the little places in the apple the seeds are, the feeling of it crunching in my mouth as I take a bite, the slight slurping I need to do as I bite, how the peel of the apple breaks down slower as I chew than the flesh of the apple does and how that feels in my mouth as I swallow. All this is in my head simultaneously and I can visualize it all instantly.
And with memories I can literally walk through my memories, rewind, replay, and like relive the memories. I can see everything, remember the sounds, smells, and how I felt in the moment physically and mentally. And I can run different simulations of how things could have gone differently and possible outcomes.
I can do math in my head by visualizing writing it down and solving it too.
I also have synesthesia where in addition to all of the above I can also visualize sounds and audio, I associate colors with certain words and numbers, and can describe the texture of smells and tastes. Like Vanilla is an overwhelming round smell, cinnamon is kind of a fine scratchy smell, alcohol has kind of a sinking or deep sensation with it. The number 6 is purple, 3 is green, 9 is a red/orange, 7 red, 8 grey, 1 white, 4 yellow, 5 dark brown, etc.
So it's incredible reading that people don't experience even a fraction of what I do. Like I feel like I've got everything unlocked in my head with the only limitations literally being the laws of physics, and I have trouble comprehending what it would be like to live without any of that.
I'm surprised I didn't see my own situation represented here so I'll add another to the pile- I don't have aphantasia but it is the default state for how I imagine things. For example when asked...
I'm surprised I didn't see my own situation represented here so I'll add another to the pile- I don't have aphantasia but it is the default state for how I imagine things. For example when asked to imagine an apple- it's formless, shapeless, it's a symbol or concept of an apple. It's only when I'm asked "what color is it?" that that it actually jumps into a visualization and takes on a shape, color, all the other visible and tangible aspects of a real apple. Despite this I actually have a pretty active imagination, I spend a lot of time playing out stories in my head or playing with concepts like "seeing" beyond your typical range of vision.
Like many of you I also have prosopagnosia, though I'm not sure if that's connected with this in my case. I have no problem visualizing a person just am not able to form that shape into a good representation of anyone I actually know beyond facts like hair color, eye color, noted prominent features or scars, etc
I'm an aphantasiac that went through Calc 3 and differnetial equations in college. I graduated with a chemical engineering degree. The only time I ever "visualized" anything was an experience with...
I'm an aphantasiac that went through Calc 3 and differnetial equations in college. I graduated with a chemical engineering degree.
The only time I ever "visualized" anything was an experience with Magic Mushrooms. It also made calc 3, and all the spatial stuff click, a weird Ah HA moment.
Engineering as well. I’m not sure how you build something physical without being able to see it in your head first. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mechanical engineers that don’t have a...
Engineering as well. I’m not sure how you build something physical without being able to see it in your head first. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mechanical engineers that don’t have a mind’s eye. I’d love to hear from one.
Funny. I'm not a mechanical engineer by schooling, but Chemical. I suppose in my education the drawings were just rough sketches. You did the math to get the dimensions (of a reaction tank for...
Funny. I'm not a mechanical engineer by schooling, but Chemical. I suppose in my education the drawings were just rough sketches. You did the math to get the dimensions (of a reaction tank for example).
The way I describe my "mental images" is like a list of specifications. But I think that lines up quite well with engineering. What's an engineering drawing but a list of specifications?
I have a concept of an apple, but you need to define the color, whether it has a stem, how many feet it has, is it bruised, etc. while It doesn't sharpen a mental image, it gives me the context of what is intended.
I am a software engineer and mathematician and am aphantasic. I know this may sound pompous, but genuinely, is there any questions you'd like to ask? I'm happy to explain my thought process on how...
I am a software engineer and mathematician and am aphantasic.
I know this may sound pompous, but genuinely, is there any questions you'd like to ask? I'm happy to explain my thought process on how I tackle complex problems and build things without visualization.
When designing a system (my day job as a Software Engineer), I first "talk" through the problem in my head. Like literally perform an inner monologue describing to myself at a high level what I...
When designing a system (my day job as a Software Engineer), I first "talk" through the problem in my head. Like literally perform an inner monologue describing to myself at a high level what I would like to accomplish.
This sort of is uncannily like a the "thought process" you might see when you show the thinking on a large language model like o1. I will converse with myself and find myself saying in my own head "wait, if this system has this delay, then it can cause a bottleneck here".
Once that process has "wrapped up", I put things to diagram or tickets if they warrant it. So if something is going to be sufficiently difficult for me to convey to someone else via description, I will diagram the architecture (mermaid diagrams, excalidraw, good ol' pen and paper, etc).
I have used CAD tools, but I do not do them for my professional work. Only for personal 3D-Printing in the one-off. I am incapable of "imagining" addendums to objects in 3D models, even if I am literally looking right at them. I typically just have to try things until it "looks right".
How do you reason about program memory and/or data structures? For me (see my other comment for detail on my degree of mental imagery) program memory and data structures are very viscerally laid...
How do you reason about program memory and/or data structures? For me (see my other comment for detail on my degree of mental imagery) program memory and data structures are very viscerally laid out in a space. I get in principle that one might reason about these things strictly symbolically... after all, the computer does all its work with simple numbers. But I have no conception of how to diagnose problems or work through an algorithm without that spatial organization. What's your experience there?
I appreciate this question, and I genuinely spent a few days thinking about how I wanted to reply here. I feel it's best to just sort of, "do the exercise" in a sort of flow-of-consciousness style...
I appreciate this question, and I genuinely spent a few days thinking about how I wanted to reply here.
I feel it's best to just sort of, "do the exercise" in a sort of flow-of-consciousness style of writing. I will type out my thoughts to your question as they come here:
How do I conceptualize data structures and memory in a way that makes sense?
If I were to be asked about this in a gut-check way, I would normally say "I imagine a box that is subdivided, or a grid, or mxn matrix. Each slot representing a space within which values may be stored. This is physically represented (today at least) as transistors, who's voltage levels float up or down to absolute values of 0,1.
However, upon deeper thought I do not truly "think" of a box. There is no object that actually comes to mind, merely the ideas and associations that those things have. I understand, factually and intuitively that a box has spatial dimension, just as transistors do when laid out upon a grid. These dimensions add nuance to how data is laid out and direct literal affects to algorithms.
For instance, a LinkedList, or Doubly-Linked List, is a data structure which lays itself out by providing pointers from each component of the data structure to the next component. This allows for data to be "inserted" fast, because instead of having to find a position to insert the data, it can be laid out more "sporadically" in physical space.
Alternatively, a traditional array typically allocates a "block" of space within memory. This block is sequential by necessity, and data is almost certainly "physically adjacent" to eachother. This allows for faster search algorithms (sometimes) within the data set because the sequential reading is optimized. Another example is that a linked list may be sorted, but you cannot simply "jump" to the middle of a list like you could an array by computing an index. You would have to traverse the list sequentially to find the middle of a sorted LinkedList, and then store that reference if you wanted to keep it.
Boiling back to the earlier question, how do I "understand" this without visualizing it, as everything I have stated so far has been in metaphors of the physical. Part of me understands these things by visual representation in the real realm. It could be a whiteboard if a concept is particularly hard to grasp. However, ultimately, I think I have gained a nuance for understanding things by pattern recognition as well.
For example, the repetition of language and code has given me insights into how things work at a glance. I understand, intuitively, that the two pieces of code function practically identically in o(n) time:
for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
doThingOne();
doThingTwo();
}
vs
for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
doThingOne();
}
for (let j = 0; j < 10; j++) {
doThingTwo();
}
It's essentially saying "do thing one and thing two n times" vs "do thing one n times and two thing two n times". It follows by Distributive Property that these operations can be written either way. You can even go so far as to represent functions and logic abstractly through variables if it helps. The above can be represented as (x+y)n or xn+yn.
Going back to earlier, thinking about a box conceptually (but not visually) helps, because it is one of the things we interact with regularly in real life that contains structured slots laid out in space. This, ultimately, is a brute fact I understand and rely on. Just as I rely on the idea that the mathematical operations and values together can combined into expressions that produce results and solutions.
I hope this layout isn't too messy. I will revisit to hopefully clean things up.
One thing I do want to emphasize is, if there is a conceptual structure I am truly struggling with understanding. Such as something that spans both time and space (3-4 dimensions or more, such as high-vector space for RAG in an LLM), I will try to physically lay out models or visuals for me and simply "toy" with the data until I gain an intuition. Often times I will do data dumps or model data sets just to see how the thing behaves through various probing.
I don't want to come off as some sort of "Rain Man" superhuman, I have my limitations and I struggle a lot. There are just some things that are not natural even for me to intuit. If we did not have modern computers and tools at our disposal, I'm sure I'd be doing something entirely different with my life.
In mathematics, I tend to reason about things geometrically, and simply use the algebra as a means to codify those representations or give more analytical rigor, or as extra 'memory' to keep track...
In mathematics, I tend to reason about things geometrically, and simply use the algebra as a means to codify those representations or give more analytical rigor, or as extra 'memory' to keep track of more entities than I can focus on at once. I get the sense from this that you do the opposite; internally, everything is algebra, and if necessary you might draw out some diagrams to get an intuitive feel for how to direct an approach to a problem.
For what it's worth, I can't do sophisticated algebra in my head very well. I usually need to write things out with pencil and paper. I can get by just fine, but I can think of several peers that deal with long formulae much better than I can.
On your example of a linked list: think of that pointer juggling you do to insert an element. In my mind, I have a very clear picture of nodes connected by arrows, and a highlighted 'cursor' arrow. A new node comes into existence, and I see how I need to move the cursor and arrows. Then the actual programming is just an exercise to figure out how to write down that manipulation so the computer can do it.
If, instead, you consider it as some recursive algebraic structure, then you can just sort of... intuit which 'algebraic' manipulations to get the program to do the operation? And maybe if you're having difficulty on that intuition, you draw out a diagram to guide the process?
It feels like the same sort of 'muscle' that says "oh, substitute this expression for that one to make this integral easier" or "oh, add and subtract this term to make things factor nicely." Sometimes those come from a place of intuition and pattern recognition, but sometimes you have to look at some geometry to see which pieces are missing.
Your final sentence resonates with me. I don't know how to really truly explain it further to people and I'm wracking my mind to come up with better examples. I hope to tackle this further and...
Your final sentence resonates with me. I don't know how to really truly explain it further to people and I'm wracking my mind to come up with better examples. I hope to tackle this further and revisit this thread honestly as I ponder longer.
One thing you said, the ability to "Intuit" things I feel warrant a reply.
The other day, I forgot my password to Bitwarden after setting up a new computer. The strangest thing happened, I could let my hands "move" in a pattern I subconsciously and intuitively knew. But if I tried to "think" about what I was doing it sort of broke down and got in the way. This is the muscle memory you are describing.
I've got a weird "vibe" gut check going on in my brain where I think when things become visual, I can sort of... Almost call upon some invisible hand that guides me through a problem by some rails. But those rails are not accessible directly.
To really manifest what I am trying to say here: it's as if the concepts, properties, and intuitions that are accompanying useful physical analogies (like a box holding things to represent computer memory), are still acting. They are acting in a way in me that are not directly accessible, but they are still there.
This further can be "sussed out" and verified, I think, by assuming the opposite. I'm not a particularly creative person. I struggle to come up with novel ideas or new things that are not based upon something I've come to "understand" before. It's not that I can't do it, it's just less natural to me.
This is totally reasonable to me. I have a keyless front door lock, with a little keypad where I type in a code to enter. I honestly do not know the number. I must have known it when I first...
The other day, I forgot my password to Bitwarden after setting up a new computer. The strangest thing happened, I could let my hands "move" in a pattern I subconsciously and intuitively knew. But if I tried to "think" about what I was doing it sort of broke down and got in the way. This is the muscle memory you are describing.
This is totally reasonable to me. I have a keyless front door lock, with a little keypad where I type in a code to enter. I honestly do not know the number. I must have known it when I first bought the thing, but several years on, typing the thing in every day without looking, I honestly do not know the number and just go through the motions on muscle memory. I do know the pattern of numbers on the keypad, so I could work it out if I needed to, but the number isn't sitting in my mind as a simple fact.
Really, thinking about it.... I should probably change that code! It's been the same for quite a while.
To really manifest what I am trying to say here: it's as if the concepts, properties, and intuitions that are accompanying useful physical analogies (like a box holding things to represent computer memory), are still acting. They are acting in a way in me that are not directly accessible, but they are still there.
A year and a half ago (wow!) I had a conversation with @RNG on here (here's the comment relevant to this conversation) where they brought up "integrated information theory" of consciousness, which I had never heard of before (and here's the overview of IIT which they linked and also the wikipedia article). That conversation has lingered on my mind ever since, and IIT in particular. The more I've learned and thought about it since, the more convinced I've become that, while that formulation is probably not correct, it's almost certainly on the right track.
The basic idea is that the experience of consciousness arises from "complexes" of information processing capability. Different regions of the brain process different things in different ways, and as such there may be "sub-complexes" of local information processing. The consciousness is then the local maximum of information processing capability, comprised of several subcomplexes.
A relevant quote to your point here:
5. In principle, the major complex can vary (expand, shrink, split, and move), as long as it is a local maximum of information integration. For example, experiences of “pure thought”, which can occur in wakefulness and especially in some dreams, may be specified by a neuronal complex that is smaller and substantially different than the complex specifying purely perceptual experiences.
6. It is well established that, after the complete section of the corpus callosum—the roughly 200 million fibers that connect the cortices of the two hemispheres—consciousness is split in two: there are two separate “flows” of experience, one associated with the left hemisphere and one with the right one. An intriguing prediction of IIT is that, if the efficacy of the callosal fibers were reduced progressively, there would be a moment at which, for a minor change in the traffic of neural impulses across the callosum, experience would go from being a single one to suddenly splitting into two separate experiencing minds. The splitting of consciousness should be associated with the splitting of a single conceptual structure into two similar ones (when two maxima of integrated information supplant a single maximum). Under certain pathological conditions (for example, dissociative disorders such as hysterical blindness), and perhaps even under certain physiological conditions (say “autopilot” driving while having a phone conversation), such splits may also occur among cortical areas within the same hemisphere in the absence of an anatomical lesion. Again, IIT predicts that in such conditions there should be two local maxima of information integration, one corresponding to a “major” complex and one or more to “minor” complexes (Mudrik, Faivre et al. 2014).
So the idea in the "autopilot" scenario is that the single global maximum of information integration splits into two (or more) local maxima, and so produce two consciousnesses. One having the phone call, the other driving the vehicle. If only one of the minor complexes is connected to memory-forming capability in the brain, then only memories from that minor complex will remain for later recall.
Anecdotally, I've experienced (something like) this in both ways: I can have a full conversation with someone while I'm distracted by something else, and leave with no memory of the conversation. Or, I'll be distracted in my own thoughts while driving and suddenly appear at my house with no memory of operating the car.
It also seems to line up with this excerpt from the OP:
Reeder had tested children’s imagery and believed that most children were hyperphantasic. They had not yet undergone the synaptic pruning that took place in adolescence, so there were incalculably more neuronal connections linking different parts of their brain, giving rise to fertile imagery. Then, as they grew older, the weaker connections were pruned away. Because the synapses that were pruned tended to be the ones that were used less, Reeder thought it was possible that the children who grew up to be hyperphantasic adults were those who kept on wanting to conjure up visual fantasy worlds, even as they grew older. Conversely, perhaps children who grew up to become typical imagers daydreamed less and less, becoming more interested in the real people and things around them. Maybe some children who loved to daydream were scolded, in school or at home, to pay attention, and maybe these children disciplined themselves to focus on the here and now and lost the ability to travel to the imaginary worlds they’d known when they were young.
Where that 'synaptic pruning' might make it difficult for a single major complex to span both visualization and reasoning, and instead splits into separate visualizing and reasoning minor complexes.
I wonder if the thing you describe (or even "intuition" or "gut feel" in general) comes from something similar, where perhaps there is some minor complex which does perform such visualizations, and can be that "invisible hand" to give you the answer, but it is somehow disconnected from memory-forming capability and the rest of the major complex that you consider to be you.
We had this conversation in the office about a year ago, and figured out that everybody in our office covers the spectrum of internal imagery pretty well. Some people could get vague shapes/ideas...
We had this conversation in the office about a year ago, and figured out that everybody in our office covers the spectrum of internal imagery pretty well. Some people could get vague shapes/ideas to form, some had none, and I myself covered the tail end of it with full on detail (see my other comment on this thread for more on that). I also liked that some of those that have trouble picturing things had no problem hearing an entire ensemble, specifically those that had musical training. Others would only be able to imagine things like that when they dream, but were unable to when they woke (I asked them about their dreams since I had read a convo like this on reddit a while back, and the dream-difference I always found interesting).
I also read from someone with aphantasia that they were able to do some exercises to work up a bit of that imaginary sight muscle. They would close their eyes and focus on the ambient static/floating fog that occurs with the absence of light. As those shapes danced around, they would do the equivalent of the cloud-rorschach test and pick out some shapes and identify what they looked like. They would then 'hold onto that shape' in their mind, so even as the static continued to dance around, they would try to picture the mouse/kite/tree/etc. shape where and how they saw it in their mind. They wrote that after a while they were able to (with some difficulty) conjure up an image from nothing, but pointed out it was harder to do without a reference.
That is exactly how it worked for me when I was trying to visualize things. I'd have a blank piece of paper with something small on it (like a thumbnail-sized bird) and stare at it, then try to...
That is exactly how it worked for me when I was trying to visualize things. I'd have a blank piece of paper with something small on it (like a thumbnail-sized bird) and stare at it, then try to retain it after I closed my eyes. I could pick it up and hold it for a bit, I'd lose it after a minute or so unless I dipped back out onto the page to refresh it. I figure if I practiced at this a lot every day I could perhaps open up a wallet-at-arms-length size area where I could place a visual image that would persist, perhaps even with some control.
The 'cloud-rorschach' trick is much, much harder to pin down and control. My visual snow looks an awful lot like this but mine is calm - all the images people make to show how it looks are running at 60Hz compared to my 2Hz speed. My snow drifts around, changes colors, and shifts more lazily than falling snow on a still day. Mine's also more transparent than that, it's hard to even notice it if my eyes are open unless I'm looking at a bright solid color background.
If I close my eyes, I get what's more like HPPD static but again, vastly more calm than that image implies. If I try to focus on a scene, sometimes the snow will swirl over and around what I'm trying to imagine in waves that flow from the edge of my vision to the center. It's as if you took the pixels on a video you were watching and set them free to flow around all over the screen, but they have to follow the slopes and shapes of things even though they've now lost texture and all turned into shifting rainbow colored sand. Then they rebel and abandon the forms they were briefly following and I lose the image. It's really quite pretty but not useful. :P
I can't pin down a size for the individual snowflakes/pixels either, which I've always thought was peculiar. It's as if they shrink when I try or are somehow infinitely small to begin with, like I'm looking at plank-length flecks of light. Pixels on a monitor are gargantuan compared to the ones making up my static.
This is the case for me. I can't visualize actual images almost all the time, however I know for a fact (because I have very good memory for facts) that on multiple occasions as I was lucid...
the hypnagogic state just before sleep
This is the case for me. I can't visualize actual images almost all the time, however I know for a fact (because I have very good memory for facts) that on multiple occasions as I was lucid dreaming or on the threshold of falling asleep I have seen vivid visual memories with a great deal of detail. It's always mind-blowing, because I normally can't do that at all, and it's also interesting that it reveals that there's a lot of crap in my brain that I just can't access.
Huh, I didn't really think I could be surprised by my aphantasia, but I definetely was. Both by the article and all the comments here. From the article, I realized that when talk about memory then...
Huh, I didn't really think I could be surprised by my aphantasia, but I definetely was. Both by the article and all the comments here.
From the article, I realized that when talk about memory then mean a literal re-experience of some event. Seems obvious know, but wow is that not me. Saying that my memory is purely factual sounds kinda pompous logic bro, but thats the best description I have. I just know the one of my childhood cats was grey and white.
I have no problems recognizing people's faces, but I also can't describe them at all.
On a heavier side, I've always had a weak sense of self; honestly, all the elements of the final section are thoughts I've had. The idea that "The Self" is memories feels real weird to me, not that I can really define what My Self is. I'm also not a "thing" that's existed throughout my life. I'm the liquid in a leaky bucket that sometimes gets refilled and eventually I'm simply different.
I don't know how long threads usually stay lively in Tildes but I'm very much enjoying this one. I wanted to ask those still here if they'll humor me. If you are a "aphantasic" person, can you...
I don't know how long threads usually stay lively in Tildes but I'm very much enjoying this one.
I wanted to ask those still here if they'll humor me.
If you are a "aphantasic" person, can you answer a few questions:
Have you had a history of vision problems or impairments?
Do you wear glasses, contacts, or have otherwise repaired your vision?
If yes to #2 at what age?
This is not very scientific or rigorous, but I had a lot of eye problems growing up and my family did not help me to receive glasses (for various reasons) until I was much older (into my teenage years).
This lead me to grow up with poor vision throughout my life. It blew my mind people could read a sign a few yards away and I never really thought about it. I know this may sound made up but I grew up in a very isolated rural area.
I'd be interested to see if there is any correlation to physical image processing impairments and development of aphantasia.
I'm nearsighted - anything past arm's length is blurred to the point of not being able to read letters unless they are huge on a billboard. I probably did that to myself reading books. I was in a...
I'm nearsighted - anything past arm's length is blurred to the point of not being able to read letters unless they are huge on a billboard. I probably did that to myself reading books. I was in a local library reading program and reading before I ever set foot in a school. It's also what I spent most of my time in school doing to escape the boredom. That meant I spent most of my time focusing my vision at arm's length and that seems to be where I permanently parked it. Then screens came along at the same distance and I work in tech so I'm always in front of one. :P Can't read lettering on typical street signs at all at any distance. I can't even read the numbers on a wall clock that's in the room with me without squinting.
Got my first eyeglasses at 14, cleared it up perfectly. Just got a new prescription last month, vision is still great even at distance though I now need bifocals to read very close. I do have some floaters but nothing unusual for someone of my age.
I am in the group that didn't realize people were being literal when talking about imagining things until I learned about the term aphantashia as an adult. I don't think I have issues with facial recognition, but I cannot recall faces aside from recognition. As an example, if I was asked to describe my own mother's face I would draw a blank.
I've always attributed this to why I don't find reading particularly interesting and why I've given up all attempts I've ever made at art (the not being able to visualize my goal). I also don't remember dreams, so not really sure what's going on there. I'd find it interesting though if I were to learn that my dreams are visual and I never recall them specifically because I can't visualize them consciously.
Oh god when a book starts describing the landscape. Just kill me now.
On the plus side, I will never worry about how the protagonist in the movie adaptation doesn't look like their description in the book, or how people imagined it. I didn't know what they were supposed to look like anyway. If anything, reading a book after a movie is better.
It really did seem like people used the terms seeing or minds eye as if it was just a metaphor.
Fun trick I learnt was to ask someone to think of a table with a red apple on it. Then ask them what color or material the table was. Most respond instantly, aphantasiacs will look at you puzzled.
Yeah uhh my mom has dark colored hair. That's as far as I get.
For whatever reason my table was dark wood with a large frilly white cloth draped over it.
It’s funny how a lot of these tests involve apples.
I can’t even see the apple (or its color (or the table)).
Like, I know what an apple looks like, and I know what colors an apple can be, but in my mind it only appears as a sort of formless, nondescript round object. It exists as a somewhat vacant spatial placeholder that my brain “knows” is supposed to be an apple.
Somewhere else in my brain is a non-visual entry in my memory that exists as
color = redorcolor = greendepending on what I’m asked to summon.If the color of the apple isn’t specified for me? Then I have no idea what the color is. It literally doesn’t have one, and I cannot manifest one except to basically think “hmm, apples are usually red, right?”
Additionally, those memory flags really only work for common things with obvious values.
An author will describe something unique with lots of visual detail, hoping to embed in my memory with entries like
color = greens and blues,texture = weathered,lighting = dim. The moment those pass by in the text, they are GONE from my brain. Turn the page and ask me about a character’s hair color or the way the landscape looks, and I’ve got nothing.From article:
I would love to see our brain scans side by side with others, trying to picture things
Does aphantastia contribute to how we select romantic partners: do we place less value on physical attractiveness since we can't spend hours mentally pouring over the hotness of a visual imagery / memory?
For me, the image that sprung to mind was an old small, square wooden table that'd been painted with white enamel several times over the course of its life, sitting next to the window of a farmhouse with gentle, indirect mid-day light spilling in through the curtains.
That's a lot of imagery that wasn't described at all in the text, and I think it was mostly inspired by the addition of the apple. Had it been some other object the surrounding imagery would probably be different.
I have a slightly milder case of aphantasia, I like reading books and I also do art as a hobby, but the problem with visualizing stuff definitely exists for me. It's probably one of the reasons why, when working in the analog world, I mostly did abstract art, but what I want to say is that these days there are ways around that. Like doing 3d graphics, which allows you to shift and change stuff and see what it looks like, what's better or worse, you don't need to have a complete idea and commit right away.
But you can also use digital 2D or 3D graphics as a visual aid for physical art. I make ceramics, which is a craft more than art, but it also applies: it's hard for me to visualize how a certain glaze would look on a specific ceramic body, so sometimes I just make 3D models with approximations of the glaze and the clay. Todays physically based rendering built on path tracing is photorealistic enough that it truly gives me an idea of how it's going to look. And when you already have decent taste and an eye for art, you can often see what's wrong and build from there.
Plus of course using references is an obvious one. I made some 3D scenes where I started with a reference, like a panel from a semi-obscure manga, and gradually (using both my ideas and more references) recreated it into my own thing. But this is nothing novel, I just wanted to say that various digital tools greatly helped me with approaching art without being able to visualize things.
Curiously I have no problem with recalling music. On the contrary, I get songs playing in my head almost constantly, which can be quite annoying.
I've managed to get into visual art, but I have the exact opposite problem: I can picture what I want it to look like in my head, but my hands can't match the standard my mind has made for the image. I will always be making an imitation of the thing i can already see. This also goes for any other artistic ventures like music or movies. If I make something, it is always a worse version than the 'original'.
While I'm clearly thankful for the ability to hyperactively picture things like I do, it is also incredibly maddening. Art for me is plike describing a cool concert you went to... there is no way to give justice to the awesome thing you've experience with your own abilities unless you fully recreated the concert yourself. But then it's just a recreation! Ugh.
This is so intriguing to me. Can you hear things in your mind? As in, either music/sounds you've previously heard, or an internal monologue?
Speaking of internal monologues, there's also a condition called anendophasia where you don't have one. This one is a REALLY new discovery, from what I can find it was just formally identified last year.
And looking that up just now introduced me to anauralia, a lack of internal auditory imagery.
The human mind is seriously crazy.
I think having an internal monologue should be described as the condition!
Yeah, it honestly sounds exhausting. My fiancée sometimes refers to me as having "a void brain" but I would find her constant stream of monologue and imagery utterly exhausting.
One thing my brain does constantly have is music. Melodies I've heard, ones I'm writing, whole songs, snippets of lyrics. Sometimes one at a time, and sometimes all at once. I've no doubt that sounds exhausting to some, but I love always having a little bit of my own mental soundtrack going on.
As someone whose internal monologue is too busy and too loud, it can be exhausting. But when moderated slightly, like using meditation, it can also bring forward great ideas and useful insights on many things. It tends to get louder and busier when I'm anxious or unhappy with life, that is the only thing that truly sucks.
I can internally monologue and I can get songs stuck in my head, but music is simplified down to something closer to rhythmic poetry. There will be words and a beat, but instruments are gone. It's kind of like I've reduced it down to just what it takes to sing along.
I've described it to my wife as like I think in details. To use the apple example that keeps getting brought up: to me an apple is that white flash card with black sans-serif text that depicts a side view of a red delicious apple with exactly 2 knobs at the bottom and a short brown stem. I don't see this flash card in my mind though. It's just that when I think about an apple with no explicit descriptors I don't visualize some apple and then describe it, I just fetch the details about what a stereotypical apple is. These descriptors are still words though, which is where the internal monologue comes in.
I can't say if I experience the internal monologue the same as others though without knowing more about how they're normally experienced. I can say that it doesn't feel like I "hear" the words as much as they're "just there". They don't have a voice.
I'd say that sounds close enough to my own internal monologue, which I believe is considered "normal". I have the words, and sometimes there's a recognizable voice to it, but only when I'm being conscious of it. It's kind of weird to think about how the "voice" is very genderless and toneless, best word I have to describe it is "invisible" despite that usually being used for visual. It's not silent, because it's there, but it's also... not.
Also, now you have me wondering about how I think of music and songs. I think my mind also puts more emphasis on vocals, but the instrumentals are there, particularly when they're a focal point of the song. The songs are definitely "simplified" though. I'm guessing anauralia (inner ear) has a whole scale like aphantasia where some people "hear" nothing, and those who hear stuff in exact detail.
For the record, as far as I know I have none of these conditions. But I just learned the name of the lack of inner monologue today (anendophasia), and that anauralia exists and is a totally separate thing from that and aphantasia. So, I have no clue what actually defines a "baseline" mind anymore because we take that stuff for granted. And now I'm wondering what if someone has all three...
For me, my internal monologue is "silent" but somehow masculine in some indistinct way? (I'm cis-male.) It's not my voice, precisely, but it has some abstract quality to it that is male. When I'm reading something written by a woman, the voice doesn't change exactly, but it has an abstract feminine quality to it instead.
Similarly, when I have a song stuck in my head (which is almost always—currently it's "Tainted Love"), my mental representation of the song isn't fully formed. The instrumentation is simplified in some way. I think the vocals are probably the closest. If I really concentrate, I think I can "fill the song out," so to speak, but it's hard to say what exactly is changing.
In imagining the apple on the table, I don't know that the table had a color, even though the apple was definitely red. Similarly, I couldn't say what the background was. It wasn't dark and it wasn't light, it was just... undefined.
The recurring theme is abstractness and indefiniteness. Dreams are the same way. They're more shallow than real life perception. I don't know if that's true for everyone.
Finding the difference in everyone's experience fascinating! Thanks for sharing everyone.
Not sure if my experience is in any way representative of normal, but will share it all the same.
[Sorry in advance for the text wall]
When you mentioned 'Tainted Love', while not familiar enough with it to know much beyond the chorus, I mentally tried to "listen" to it and could "hear" the beat, him singing the lyrics word for word, with the right timing, etc.
I'm sure there's a slight difference somehow vs reality or I'm missing something (human recollection is very rarely perfect), but listening to the same part IRL afterwards I can't readily notice any difference from what I "mentally" heard.
Not sure if there's a trick to it, but I've found the best success when I'm actively trying to "hear" the music as if I was listening to it, but with the passive effort you'd have if you were genuinely doing so - if that makes sense. Kind of like tuning your hearing in to listen to background music you weren't paying attention before in a coffee shop.
Maybe that primes the same pathways as when you listen a bit more, and triggers a more complete recollection - like a re-experience vs actively trying to re-create how it sounds in your mind? No idea, complete armchair theory and probably wrong lol.
Additionally, I have an inner monologue of my thoughts that I mentally "hear" as if you were hearing it out loud, and same when I read text. Like literally as I'm typing this I hear it.
The voice is masculine and close to my own, but if I'm honest there's a slight difference to where it's slightly closer to a middle ground than my IRL voice.
If I try to imagine someone I know saying something, I actually "hear" their voice saying it - often with their personality traits as well.
Ex: the way they would respond and chuckle to a light joke they "said" in my mind in their specific mannerisms and way - even if I didn't prompt it with any specific wording or specific intent on what they'd "say".
I'll also somehow imagine and assign voices to characters based on descriptions given, but on some level my brain clearly fills in the gaps with its own interpretation.
Using the example given in another comment in this thread, I can also imagine an apple in a space, in a scene, and even rotating it 360 degrees or changing the color (red apple, green apple, etc.) or changing it from realistic, to cartoonish, to abstract.
Much like the character voice I mentioned, my brain will fill in any details somehow if not described.
Ex: Initially the red apple was rotating toward the right and had a few natural imperfections on the starting side (like small holes you'd see in actual apples IRL) but as it rotated my brain added a quarter-size bruise to the side it rotated to in the upper middle of the apple - even though that was never part of the "imagine an apple" prompt.
Interesting. Your imagination definitely seems more robust than mine.
I surveyed my household on the apple/table question, and both my wife and my daughter reported having color to the apple, the table, and the background. So my daughter seems to have inherited my wife's imagination.
I asked my wife and daughter about dreams and they reported that there seems to be a lot more details filled in there then I've got, too. For example, my wife mentioned the idea of walking through a crowd in a dream. For me, I would be walking through the nebulous concept of "a crowd." Unless I'm interacting with any individual person, all of the people in the dream crowd would be undefined. The room itself might well be undefined as well. But for her, there would be a lot of random details about those people (e.g., gender, hair color, clothes).
Similarly, I asked both of them to imagine a sheep jumping over a fence. For me, that fence and the sheep are white and the fence is nebulously in some kind of grass. The density of the grass, the length of the sheep's coat, the color of its head, the sky, the time of day, what's on the horizon... None of that is defined for me but all of it was defined for both of them. If my mental attention isn't directed to it, it's like my brain doesn't "render" any of those details. It's like my visual and auditory imagination are "compressed."
Your description is very close to my own experience. My mind has to cut and zoom to different aspects and focus to attempt something close to visual fidelity.
I remember a good portion of my dreams though, and most are highly visual and convincing. However, the people's faces usually don't match reality. And one experience of lucid dreaming happened when I realized someone's face was completely wrong.
In contrast to my own imagination, reading the previous commenter's last paragraph seemed to give me a boost in the perceived visuals. It did nothing to solidify other details like the table or background. But the apple shifted from a prototypical, cartoonish red delicious to something more real, green-tinged oranges blending into the dimpled reds. Without consciously choosing the color or exact details to "render."
This effect was most noticeable to me while reading Name of the Wind. At some point while reading, I was no longer consciously comprehending the words on the page. It was a fully visual experience happening in my mind that I only recognized when I started turning the page.
Then, I re-read the page because I couldn't believe what I "saw" was an accurate depiction (it was). Kinda like lucid dreaming, in the right environment I could shift into a flow and visually experience the scene. But like dreams, there was a fragile balance. Thinking too directly about the visualization or actual words on the page would break the effect and shift my conscious experience back to comprehending the words' meanings.
For what it's worth, there's a near certainty you do dream normally and you just don't remember because it's a bit of a weird skill to develop.
If you're interested, you could start a dream diary and start to improve your dream recall. Most people can easily go from 0-1 dreams a night remembered to like 5 in a few weeks.
I haven't woken up with any recollection of a dream in years. Based on what I understand dream journaling to be I have low confidence I could even start one due to lacking any useful days to build on. I don't even mean that I can't remember any specific dreams right now, I mean I don't even wake up with a vague "that was a weird dream" feeling.
I've always assumed that I do dream and just never remember it, but I also find it fascinating that the only reason I have to believe that is that that's what people say. I was told that not dreaming is basically impossible, so I must be. The reason I find this fascinating is that even if I truly didn't the assumption would still be that I must be and just lack the recall of them. I'm not arguing the science, I just find it interesting.
On evidence that I do dream, on rare occasion I'll wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night. I never have any recollection of the cause, but my best guess is that I was having a nightmare. That kind of physical response is the closest I've had to any conscious recollection of anything related to dreaming I've had in many years.
My guess is that it isn't related to aphantasia though because others have said they get vivid dreams, although I can't personally conceptualize how that works. Like even if I do get vivid dreams I'm unsure how the recall on them would work since I wouldn't be able to re-vizualize the memory consciously.
That's pretty fascinating, how dreams work differently for folks. I wonder if you experience rapid eye movement and different phases differently on a brian waves and frequency scale.
For me, dreams work like this.
Imagine that ocassioanlly, after going to bed, you begin to see and experience life from the camera perspective of an alternate world you. You are approximately the same dimension and height, probably because your brain doesn't have enough data to simulate a vastly different 1st person perspective. You're mostly not "driving" (lucid dreaming), you're behind the eyeballs of someone else observing how they go about life. There are normal ambient sounds and speech and languages you actually speak, but yourself and others might slide in and out of those languages mid sentence. You have access to the inner thoughts of dream you, such as how they feel about the texture / taste / smell of things, their sense of balance / vertigo: but you don't feel these, just what alternative you think about them. But you feel all of their emotions, if they are scared of delighted or disgusted or enraged.
You know different people: some of whom exist in our world and behave the same, some of whom only look like the version here, and some are complete strangers to you. The alternative you could have different morals, different memories, preferences and abilities. (So for example, I used to consistently dream that I could fly or leap great distances or at least effortlessly glide above 6 inches off the ground.) In fact, the physics of that world could be completely different: objects can physically warp, impossible room interior dimensions, think Inception elevator hallway scene but this will feel normal and not alarming.
Text is consistently not readable, but alternate world you can understand their text just fine and infer meaning that you have access to.
While in dream world, then, you might have a different job, different past, different martial status, be different ages; you could be very mean or calloused, could be addicted or drawn to other things, or very motivated by things you don't care about here. But mostly you're similarly moral and share same delights and dislikes.
While you're dreaming, because these are perfectly normal aspects of your alternative self's universe, you don't raise any questions, it's just how it is there. If real life you were close to waking up you might start to question inconsistencies, find physical impossibilities bewildering, and object to other differences, which could contribute to you waking up as that world collapses, and your awareness gets pulled back to this world, you being back on your bed eyes open in the dark/morning.
And finally you wake up still having accessible memories of your most recent travel to an alternative world. You might wake up with the same lingering emotions, such as the happiness you felt, or their nostalgia, or their frustrations. Sadly, you may now also feel the moral repercussions of dream world actions / events.
:) visual recollection of dream world fade extremely fast and you can't visualize details anymore because you're aphantastic.
Would super love to hear how dreams work for others. I just assumed we all dream the same
My dreams work pretty much like yours, except that I'm embodied somehow, occasionally non-human. I might be 100 feet tall, or looking at the world through compound eyes, or knowing what it's like to be a chair, or having the inner life of an amoeba engulfing a bacterium. It can be seriously cool or being a horrified passenger (usually causes a quick, sweating wakeup).
Waking up in a sweat, especially if it's associated with palpitations and general over-excited feeling, can be an autonomic nervous system weirdness thing. At least, I attribute my experiences like that to my dysautonomia. They are never associated with dreams for me, and I am a person who commonly remembers dreams.
If you wanted to try to remember a dream, and live with someone, you could ask them to wake you up while you are dreaming. The eye movement in REM sleep is really obvious. REM is most common towards the end of your normal sleep period, so like half an hour to an hour before you normally wake up would be a good time for your helper to come check if your eyeballs are moving around rapidly, and wake you up if they are.
Do you daydream?
That's difficult to answer. If people really have an experience like it is depicted on TV, then no I don't have that. Depictions are highly visual.
What I do experience is my mind wandering while I simultaneously have a lowered response to external stimulus. Externally I think that is functionally the same, but I feel it would be more correct to label it an internal distraction than a day dream.
From the article:
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Thanks for sharing! I gotta try to find a copy of this article somewhere, or grab a sale subscription at some point, because this is very interesting to me. When I first heard about aphantasia a couple years back, I seriously questioned if I have it, and I’m pretty sure I do.
Like quite a few people in the comments here, when I try to picture something I don’t really picture it, I just can hold the concept of it in my mind, but without any associated imagery.
I barely remember dreams, if I dream at all, and my memory is absolutely terrible. It made my parents sad when I’ve brought up my bad memory of trips we’ve been on…but I can usually play it off, or truthfully say that the trips have shaped who I am even if I don’t explicitly remember all the things we did.
One part of your synopsis of the article that sticks out to me is the:
I did have pretty bad undiagnosed “depression” throughout high-school and maybe earlier, and I wonder if that played a role.
I know growing up I would devour books, and I still do, but I do find myself skimming long and wordy descriptions of things, so I tend to prefer books that are “witty” than overly descriptive if that makes sense. I can also really only describe plots, but not what characters or scenes look like, outside of like a very general idea. I can definitely do a better job with movies or tv show characters, but I also don’t think I could describe more than outfit and hair color, if even that.
But I’ve always struggled with trying to do anything artistic or decorative without a reference of basically exactly what I want in front of me. It drives my wife nuts to no end when we’re trying to pick out outfits or decor…no I have no idea if this rug will look good in our house unless we physically place it in the house.
I wish I knew if I’d always had aphantasia, or if it was something that I somehow developed (or if there was some way to “regain” visualization abilities).
https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1rc0/some_people_cant_see_mental_images_the_consequences_are_profound#comment-gtn3
Has the mirror version. Search for word mirror on this page
I only discovered I have aphantasia 2 years ago, aged 38. It was quite the bizarre realisation that most people actually can mentally visualise things, it stunned me to be honest and definitely felt weird for a while. I’ve read of some people becoming super depressed after finding out, I was bummed for a bit, mostly about how I imagine most people can dwell on fond memories aided by visual memory. On reflection I think explains a few things about me as a person and my preferences. The main two being that I have always loved music and film but struggled to get into fiction writing. I also seem to deal with grief quite quickly and always have done. The crazy thing to me is that it is such a recent discovery scientifically, you’d have thought this would have been known about for 100’s of years and well studied. I can definitely relate to a lot in the article, thanks for sharing.
Right, I’m off to sleep… where I do actually see things in my dreams!
Not that surprising to me. We only know our own minds, so it's hard to realize that our "normal" might be different from everyone else's unless we explicitly discuss it. And aphantasia is directly tied to how we think, which is such a basic thing and would barely ever come up in casual conversations. As the article notes, even the current research started when a man lost the ability to visualize things in his mind after a surgery. Same goes for the historic cases mentioned. If someone's born with it, it most likely won't ever come up because you'd assume everyone is the same way.
The mind is a crazy thing, and psychology and neuroscience are still fairly young fields compared to other sciences. I can't guess how many other potential conditions relating to "basic" cognition or perception have yet to be discovered because people just don't think to ask or mention it.
And in the category of unreliable narration, it's only in the last few decades that we've had the technical capability to quantitatively measure what's going on when people think and experience. Going through a couple of Zeman's papers (here and here), they're able to localize differences in brain structure, connectome, and metabolism related to visual processing for aphantastics vs. median visualizers and hyperphantastics.
I'm curious whether there is a connection/correlation with poor eyesight. I struggle to remember faces and I don't visualize much when thinking or remembering. I also had a eureka moment, seeing leaves on trees for the first time when I got glasses. I've always been more aware of auditory, (books included) smell, taste than visual input although when I focus on something visual like a beautiful view, I get a sense of wonder and pleasure.
I suspect that bad eyesight is why I don't have much early childhood memory of events other than sounds, sensations, tastes, and smells. I remember the first book I read in detail, the pain of a cut on my foot bad enough to need stitches when I was three, and the stitches. I don't recall what my parents and baby brother looked like from that time. I got glasses when I was six, and the world bloomed.
When I close my eyes there’s only blackness. When my eyes are open I have perfect vision.
I tried really, really hard when I was a kid to actually imagine things and see them because I knew people could do that sort of thing. Specifically I tried to imagine a pink elephant playing with a ball. But black is all I ever got.
ND and multiple concussions in my youth, but no concussions before I knew I couldn’t imagine visuals.
I've known for a little while now that I belong in this group, with overlapping prosopagnosia (face blindness).
For my side, I do okay with fiction writing. But yes ditto on grief. Probably easier because I can't "re-live" memories. No audio / scent / visual / touch flash backs.
I also see dreams: they're pretty indistinguishable from experiencing reality (while I'm dreaming the inconsistencies are not apparent).
Basically this is spot on. Memories are composits reconstructed from known facts every single time. Might also contribute to how much I am open to being wrong about my past assumptions: there was maybe a fact missing or misfiled, cool, I'll fix it, and no need for memory video editing. ( I choose to do this, though, I don't just believe everyone of course)
I suppose this is a weird question, but how do you know you visualize when dreaming? The only way I can imagine saying I can visualize while dreaming would require being able to recall visuals from my dreams, but recalling visuals is a problem in itself.
Dreams are different than imagination and activates elsewhere in the brain too. Dreaming can be actively experienced by the brain and thus you can see dreams while they happen even if you can't imagine things while awake.
I rarely dream, nor do I mentally see things, but I do know when I'm dreaming. Sometimes.
Wow. Just wow. I have difficulty comprehending the inner life of aphantastics (or anendophasics, or anauralics) because I'm on the other end of the spectrum for sensory imagination.
I don't read a book, I have an immersive experience complete with imagined visuals, sound, touch, smell, taste. I did well in biochemistry - visualize the ball and stick model of a molecule, rotate it, imagine chiral mirror images, no problem. Higher mathematics - picture a manifold, invert it, transform it...
The "apple on a table" exercise results for me in a very specific Platonic image of a perfect russet apple (pink and golden brown, a slightly flattened spheroid with a green stem) that I saw at an heirloom apple farm, sitting on a piano-polished mahogany table I once admired in a museum. Not exactly acts of pure imagination, but a combination of comforting recalled images.
These days, my work head is busy with visualized network diagrams; flowcharts; where all the controls are located spatially in various GUI layers; how many cells over to the right a specific value is located in a table; the relative indents and colors for lines of code depending on what the nested blocks are doing; the auditory signals for successful/unsuccessful actions... I'm an experiential learner, because once I've done something, I can play it back in my head in all its details and create variations as needed. The caveat is that I loathe working at a computer all day - it's a kind of sensory deprivation, and my mind does wander to provide the missing stimulation if I'm at it too long.
I'm not an artist or musician because my motor skills aren't good enough to reproduce what's in my mind's eye/ear, not because I can't imagine in detail what I want to commit to the medium. I worked as a pastry cook successfully because there are a lot of professional hacks to improve reproducibility. For hobby stuff, I tend to work at jewelry scale because it's easier to minimize visible distortions of relative proportion.
In a forum discussion, someone said, "You can't remember pain (physical)", and my internal reaction was "the hell you say". My inner sensory library brought up a litany of broken bones, arthritic aches, head pounding, cramps, burns, cuts, bruises...
The epicure and wine tasting skills come with the package - I make up recipes by "taste-ualizing". I didn't know that the ability to recall and recombine tastes and smells in detail was unusual until I went to a tasting with a bunch of trained sommeliers and got the full on "One of us, one of us..." vibe.
I avoid visual news presentations or violent movies and TV because reading about it is bad enough. One f*cking picture of the Gaza devastations will last for years of nightmares, thanks. I don't have so much trouble with intrusive imagery or other sensory process data as the article describes, mainly due to decades of SSRI use and meditation.
Neuro-weirdisms: I recall faces well, but people's names don't stick at all, even if I visualize the person wearing a name tag. I don't have photographic memory for what I see on a page - I can recall the gist of the content and striking details of font or paragraph layout, but not the fine text. Gross anatomy was a PITA in med school because I could picture everything and move through layers easily in my head, but not associate the names for each structure.
I don't have great recall for emotional content of memories. Just being able to visualize or recall sensory detail isn't everything; I feel like I'm synthesizing what I should have felt from what I recall.
I just realized that hyperphantasia is probably why I'm not a great teacher. As others mentioned here it's as difficult to imagine the lack of a vast sensory library as I imagine it would be to contemplate the presence of one. If I'm constantly expressing myself in terms that not all the students are equipped to imagine (there's that word again), of course the lessons won't connect.
I'm also like you, albeit a slightly more "extreme" version. To avoid repeating huge parts of your message, I'd describe it as, "I experience everything you said you can experience, either the same or more "strongly", but I also experience almost all things you said you explicitly either said you can't, or said you don't have a problem with." Further, I also experience synaesthesia, which is a whole other can of worms.
Now, it may seem fun to some. And to some extent, yeah, I would agree. I can not only imagine but also "almost experience" all senses just from imagining them. If I imagine a chair or an apple, I can not only "see it" but also, say, strongly feel its texture, the sound it makes when touched in any particular way, smell its scent, visualise all its tiny details and so on. But it also simultaneously sucks. For one, I strongly re-live trauma and other negative things on the regular. You'd think it'd make me numb eventually, but no. Big reason why I almost completely avoid horror content, the news, etc. Also I can recall my dreams scarily well & they feel extremely lifelike. Including nightmares, of which I have plenty. Also, synaesthesia makes things even more complicated as it regularly confuses me somewhat, especially when I try to physically tell others (i.e. speak, not write) about some things related to particular senses.
I've got the synesthesia (who knew tastes had melody and rhythm, and numbers have colors?) and excessively strong traumatic memory issues as well. I can vividly visualize (and all the other senses) future events that make me extremely anxious and depressed. Suicidal ideation was a terrifying experience, and the start of a long journey through psychopharmacology.
But I'm old and have many years of practice dealing with this.
I don't have a great sense where exactly on the spectrum I sit, but I do know I'm more hyper- than an- on these things. Visually, not as strongly as you, but maybe I can give some insight on this from someone a step or two down the scale to possibly give a sense on that general direction?? I'll also respond to some of @TaylorSwiftsPickles's comment inline here, and to some excerpt from the article.
I can visualize small things very clearly, but I do have a definitive limit. As such I have a very strong sense of attention in my visualizations, rendering in very high detail the thing of interest, and very low detail the others, and out into a void at the bounds of the visualization. If I picture the apple on the table, the apple is a prototypical Red Delicious (although that's not my favorite) with no blemishes. The color is a neatly polished deep red, with specular highlights from an overhead lamp. The surface of the table is some lightly stained wood (the dining table at my childhood home), with a harsh shadow from the overhead light and softer shadow from ambient occlusion.
However, at first, that's the whole picture. It's not that I can't visualize the rest of the table, and the table and its legs do have some presence to them, but there's no form unless I "look", and in visualizing that form I must sacrifice some of the detail on the apple and its illumination. I can focus on the joinery of the table and its surroundings, the floor, the chairs, the ceiling; but at that point, the apple itself fades to formless presence.
Until I "look" at some subject, there is no form or presence at all; only void, but wherever I direct my attention I can render out consistent detail for the subject in exchange for the same elsewhere. This seems similar to what @hobblyhoy described, but perhaps my 'default' state is a bit more visual than theirs.
One technique is to fold details away into 'texture'; it's almost like the color/texture and the geometry occupy different segments of my attention, so if I can fold geometry information like the texture of a tablecloth or the apholstery of the chair away into a general pattern or roughness, it's easier bring more details into focus. But in some sense, that's just another way to sacrifice one form for another.
Here's an exercise that might get you into this "attention" mindset, or else reveal something about how you see things. Picture your favorite surface embedded in space (say a torus or bell). Hold that to the side. Now, separately, consider the highest point on that surface. Do not visualize the point as lying on the surface itself: the surface is merely a guide to sample the points in their own space.
Now sample a few points from the surface. Say the lowest point also, or simply pick points at random.
Eventually, there is some number of points that's just too many for me to keep track of. For me, maybe 8? 10? It's difficult to do counting operations like that. Alternatively, I can imagine a distribution of uncountable number of points, but only by visualizing the texture of their distribution painted on the surface itself.
I don't have troubles either (with one exception, below), but neither medication nor meditation were necessary for this. Like I say, I must explicitly direct attention to visualize a thing. If my attention is elsewhere, there is no capacity for intrusion.
The exception is in auditory senses. My auralia (??) is much stronger than phantasia (??). From the article:
I cannot do this with film, perhaps except for short scenes that I know very well. However for sounds - music, dialogue, or my own inner speech - I can. When I'm bored I'll play an album for myself. Moreover, I can't "turn it off". There is always something playing, so I have learned to try my best to direct it.
For example, I can focus much much easier on things if there's some ambient instrumental music playing to occupy that auditory processing and leave my inner speech and visualization free to reason about a problem. Silence is too distracting, as it leaves that part of my mind to wander. Music with vocals are too distracting, as the words distract my inner speech.
When recalling speech, it seems to occupy the same part of my mind responsible for my inner speech; I cannot imagine two voices simultaneously as language, but I can imagine discordant voices in a chorus as noise. I cannot understand others speaking to me if I'm simultaneously using my inner speech or recalling speech. There are no limits on character of the voice as others here have described: my inner voice is typically my own, but I can perfectly recall others' voices or invent new ones.
So, same, but not for this reason. I don't have these issues with commentary over silent images, but audio recordings of people in distress really get to me.
I cannot recall taste or smell at all, in any capacity. I do know as a matter of fact which tastes and smells I like or dislike, and I instantly recognize them when they occur, but I cannot conjure them.
I have strong memory for pain, faces, and emotions; although faces have similar caveats regarding level of detail. I can imagine the person's face or the person's body and clothing and surroundings. Not both. A crowd of many people are all faceless, unless I focus on an individual.
I can recall some touch, but it is difficult and fleeting. I get the sense that the level of detail here is similar to how some of the near-aphantasics here describe visualization: fleeting wireframes and general forms but no persistence. Like, I can perfectly recall the shape and illumination of a large granite boulder at a nearby park; I can visualize the rough texture of its surface. I can imagine touching my hand to it, and I know I would feel the grittiness of the dust and dirt, the sharpness of the fractures in the surface, but I just.... can't. I can very clearly recall the cold of it. I wonder if that's related to my strong memory of pain since cold relates to heat? But I don't feel the sharpness, so maybe not.
As a child through my teens I used to experience synaesthesia (auditory to visual? to spatial?) but I no longer do. I know as a matter of fact which sounds produce which visualizations, but they don't come in real time any more. It also wasn't strictly visual; more like a spatial presence and distortion according to each sound. I wouldn't have described it this way at the time, but, knowing what I know now: try to think of a stress tensor field overlaid on your surroundings. Hearing a sound caused a distortion in that tensor field around the place from which the sound originated. Different pitches and tones and speech producing different twistings and periodic patterns in that field about the point. The way I described it when I was younger was as motion, that sounds caused twisting or stretching around the speaker, but that's not quite right because there was never really anything moving, just a sort of impression of force, which is why I liken it to a stress tensor now.
If I had read the text, I can exactly recall the words through my inner speech. If I saw the text but did not read it, I cannot. Too much detail in the form. I can recall the form of a particular letter or short word, but long words and sentences and paragraphs get folded into texture on the surface with limited detail.
This will definitely change how I teach! Currently I work in differential geometry, and I think now I rely too heavily on visualization of the various operators on the surfaces. In the future I will try to bring more pictures and animations with me so the audience need not conjure anything in their own mind, and try to bring more symbolic representation for those who think better with notation.
For this exercise I got up to 30 until I hit a small wall, but keeping count of those separately in my working memory and counting again and again I got up to 120, now that I'm done counting and adding them, I can imagine the full shape with all the points at a moment's thought, more than 120 and I'd miss-imagine their placements and count. (And also did a few more cheats than just going 30 by 30, I got nice evenly spaced dots, did one side and copied it to the other, this was on a round infinity-like shape rotating on its long side)
I tried going above 30 in one go and I could but it took more work and my speed was sluggish, went to 70ish workout chunking out the visualizations or counting before I lost it
Tracking that many points with consistent placement is seriously impressive to me!! To be clear, you're imagining the points off in their own space away from the surface, not placing them directly on the surface? It's much easier for me to imagine dots scattered on the surface as opposed to the dots free-floating in space according to the general shape of the surface.
It is also a bit easier for me to imagine the points in regular patterns, or points on a curve as opposed to points on a surface. Past about a dozen or so I don't trust that I'm placing the points consistently and they aren't wandering around. If I just place a bunch of points and attempt to count them, I lose track quickly.
Placing points in separate batches and merging them is an interesting idea.... I put my surface to the left and the place for my point cloud to the right. I scatter three points on the surface, then move them over to the point cloud. I can hold the triplet in my mind as vertices of a single triangle - again, I'm limited to only a few elements at a time, but with each element being the vertices of a triangle that brings the count to about 20!! I'm so proud of myself! However I cannot do the same with quadruples of points or more - the limit for me seems to be about half a dozen batches of three.
Incidentally, the best way I can remember long numbers is in rhythmic batches of three digits spatially arranged left-to-right in reading order. I wonder if there's some relation there as positioning things spatially is the best technique I have for helping working memory.Edit: Reflecting on that last point more, I think that's backwards. I think the trick is relying on my audio memory, with the triplets of numbers coming in rhythm. So, with that in mind:
I place the surface off to the left, and the space for my point cloud to the right. I imagine a single triplet of points as the base element, and deform it so the vertices land on arbitrary points of the surface to be the first batch. Then to rhythm I deform the triangle so the vertices land on new sets of points. I go in sequence, adding two triplets each time, my inner speech counting
3 - 6,3 - 6 - 9 - 12,3 - 6 - 9 - 12 - 15 - 18, and so on, moving the triplet in the same pattern each time. With this strategy I can get past 30 points in total, albeit not all at once, but the rhythm and sound convinces me I am placing them consistently.Hahahah what the fuck are you guys talking about ...
This is legitimately black magic to someone that can "picture" a concept of an apple at best.
First off, counting in threes always had been easier for me, so there's gotta be something interesting thing going on there.
Second I tried having the dots distanced from the objects but still floating around it, got to 110 before hitting problems, mainly that I started running out of even space around since for reasons unknown to myself I place then further apart than when they're on the surface.
Third doing this as having the object on the left and placing dots that trace the shape of the object on the right was slower, I could no longer use the copy paste cheat, I got to 70 (with chunking in 30's again) before I noticed I'm losing track of near-exact positionings on the dots (oh hey 70 again, i couldn't chunk them!). Also had run out of even spacing at 60 this time so the dots were even further apart from each other this time. My spacing is related to the amount difficulty of imagining them I think :D
When I start planning and counting I'm kinda zoomed in on the dots, but at 10 I have a pause and take a step back looking at the full shape and work on that. Kinda like putting two windows next to each other instead of alt-tabbing between them.
I'm proud of you for getting to 20! Try different shapes, it's a different difficulty on a Mobius strip than on a cube.
on cube I pause to find new even spaced positions on one side.
Actually lemme draw it on a square, i'm gonna do dots on the shape.
Here's a Paint drawing of my imagination on dots on or above a square.
Between each color i had a pause to find new even positionings for the dots, and on the right i put the order i added them (did the black dots, then found space for blue, then found space for orange...)
On one side i can keep track of these 41 points.
I gave it a try and i can keep my imagination of 3 faces with different dot patterns on a cube, started on the 4th one and i forgot the second one :P
Here's a picture of what I'm trying to visualize (but with a single point cloud that I add to over time; the three point clouds in the image are just to show that progression.)
https://i.imgur.com/Y8XDhoD.png
Also, the way you subdivide the grid of dots on the face reminds me of this fractal dithering technique. (Showcase video.)
I feel this about silence. My mind is always speaking, I have an inner dialogue and am diagnosed ADHD. The entirety of my thoughts are my own voice in my head. I can perhaps "tune out" that voice in favor of experiencing "raw input" (if my eyes are opened), but being left to my own devices I am essentially just thinking in a never-ending train of thought.
This is interesting. My voice is also my own, but in my head. However, if I try to "recall" other peoples voices, or invent another one (which I just tried), it becomes just my voice but "mimicking" that voice. I tried my wife's voice, and it was simply my voice but higher pitched and more-feminine (and I knew it was hers). I tried Darth Vader for kicks, and it was simply my voice but poorly (and funnily) modulated through a breathing apparatus.
This is a segue, but I've been recently listening to Barm Stoker's Dracula (I know, I know. Corny). Throughout the book, there is tons of description of Dracula. He has cold, gaunt and white hands. His flesh is pale like a corpse. I do not "see" a head when thinking about this, but upon further reflection my mind is "taken" out of the scene entirely to focus on that singular detail in that singular moment.
Take for example, if I were to be able to visualize Dracula's "Cold, gaunt and pale white hands", the image in my mind (if it were to appear) would, as I "feel" it, consume the entirety of my field of view. I would not have imagined (I feel) the entirety of Dracula, but it would be as if I was zoomed in on a disembodied hand. This leads me to believe that I have some "sense" of spatial dimension, and I hone in on that. However, there is no visual.
This put "You don't know the power of the dark side" in my mind, but you also put this idea in my head, so it sort of involuntarily came out "You don't know ThE PoWeR Of tHe dArK SiDe" as a weird hybrid mix of my own voice and James Earl Jones. Funny.
Sometimes distinctive voices will get 'stuck in my head' like a catchy tune. Gilbert Gottfried haunts me.
This is fairly accurate to how I see it, but not exactly as a "field of view". This is what I was trying to get at with the phrasing about "attention" and "form" and "presence".
Rephrasing my comment a bit to put into context:
I really want to hone in on this:
That. That is how I feel about everything, all the time. I see nothing, but a knowing of what it is I am supposed to see. It's as if my entire focus is putting forth a visual "tip-of-the-tongue" artifact that is just ever-so-slightly out of reach.
This immediately made me wonder if we'll ever manage to get a helmet that can pick detailed images out of someone's mind with some training. I'll skip on the direct brain implants, but I'd dip in with a helmet or circlet for a brain computer interface - like the ones that were shown in the Three Body Problem. We're a lot closer to this than most people realize.
For someone like you, one day in the not so distant future you might be able to broadcast your mental images directly out of your own head through that sort of interface and have a clever AI throw it up on the screen for everyone else to see. Perhaps even download something like architecture blueprints through the interface into an AI that can instantly make the plans real engineering diagrams. That might catapult your teaching skills into a category that no one has ever seen before. ;)
This is the sort of AI application that outclasses either human or AI output by synthesizing the two into a real time feedback loop. I see it as a category of careers that don't exist yet, but will still be keeping people employed in the future to replace some of the jobs it's automating away.
We're closer to this than perhaps even you realize!
Yeah, I'd qualify those results as ready for prime time, good enough to be a version one product!
Fabulous idea, but the privacy implications are ghastly. I'd never want to use something like that in real time without the ability to edit my thoughtstream, for instance. Maybe with practice and technical guardrails, it would be possible to project an image without the risk of other thoughts bleeding in (tell me you've never had a passing thought of what someone attractive would look like naked).
Fun fact, I literally haven't. For the record, I'm sitting somewhere between the "lesbian" and "asexual" part of the attraction spectrum.
I'm personally indifferent to naked bodies, and I don't find them attractive in the slightest, unless that body is my partner's. If I had that passing thought for someone (which I don't), I'd find the thought repulsive, if anything. When I see a woman I find subjectively beautiful, I don't imagine wonder what she looks like naked. I may just think she looks great; I might think her style is cool; I might think "I want to BE her"; I might think "I want to grab a coffee with her and get to know her" and "brainstorm" what she's like as a person, or what it'd be like if I dated her, but that's all, really.
Then again, I only experience attraction when I'm single - which hasn't been the case for like 7 years almost. Now that I'm not single, it more or less just recognising that someone looks good and/or getting gender envy from them, but that's all. I've not been attracted to anyone else all those years - just my wonderful partner.
If anything, I'm always surprised to hear that other people commonly imagine what people would look like naked...
In my case (and at my age) it's sheer aesthetic curiosity about the variations of human shape, as much as anything sexual. I see someone very narrow-bodied, apparently muscular, or otherwise an outlier, and wonder exactly how they're built.
That's interesting too. To me it's a pretty alien concept to "mentally undress" someone - even more so when, in fact, clothes themselves play a big role for aesthetic attraction in my case. What someone wears, and how they express their "sense of self" through their presentation overall, are what I'll notice and/or think about. And the concept of "mentally undressing" feels like a total 180° from that :P
I'm sorry you found my offhand comments disturbing, and I'll remove them if you prefer.
Nah, you're good, I recognise this a more common thing among people whose attraction type differs to mine. Just thought I'd share as well.
Oh, the implications are a lot worse than that. Here's a taste of the bad side from one of my favorite totally unknown science fiction shows. To quote one of the best movies ever filmed, "Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain - you have to pay for it."
My one example was an "off the top of my head".
It's serious enough that even the New York Times had a pretty decent summary article on the state of neurodata risks and protections.
Even with current technology, you could have advertisers making precise neural maps of your personal "bliss points" to sell you addictive processed junk food
Your unpleasant YouTube clip from Incorporated is closer than anyone might wish for. [And now I've got a show to watch...]
I highly recommend it - just the one season, but it ends up parked at a great spot that could be picked up again kinda like Stargate Universe did. It's the closest thing I've seen to perfect cyberpunk on the silver screen. Great story, top tier acting, brutally dark humor that had me rolling, and it hits too close to home for comfort if you've worked in corporate America before. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had a guaranteed hit on their hands here, but as is their wont Syfy's people bungled the marketing. It was cancelled before anyone even knew it existed.
Hah with technology like that concerts and music videos would be insane, time and skill required to recreate what we imagine is stopping aphantasiacs from experiencing a lot of things that we can only describe in words.
Gotta learn how and where we think and imagine before we get to that point tho :[
Yeah it's extremely interesting seeing tilderinos describe aphantasia here, and surprising on how many there are!
I think I may be slightly on the hyper end of it but I can stop imagining them if needed.
Books are indeed a full life like experience and I love them, I sometimes feel if I learn music theory and practice a little bit I may even start to hear an orchestra when I read books.
Music aswell! Songs aren't just a feeling and something to hear and pass, if I let go of the reigns my brain WILL be imagining sceneries effects and all kinds of shenanigans with them.
To the point I can burn myself out imagining them and feel fatigued after 15-30 minutes depending on the amount of details I imagine (I can stop doing this, I just have to actively stop the imaginations so I can experience songs as just sounds and feelings)
When teaching people I always automatically draw things out in the air or on a screen or whiteboard or anything, haven't had trouble explaining things to anyone... Yet.
Also happy to know I'm not the only one who has trouble remembering people's names, I gotta ask many many times and sometimes make internal associations with something I can imagine to remember them.
I joke with people that I'll remember their IP addresses and phone numbers before I recall their names, but it's actually painfully true and very embarrassing. I've tried all the mnemonic tricks, but some combination of social anxiety, lack of discrete patterns in cognomens (if only all blonde 30-something Southeastern U.S. women were named "Caitlyn", life would be so much easier)...
For social events, I usually have my prosthetic spouse along gently reminding me of people's names. Just imagine having to keep labeled photos of your co-workers so you don't misname someone you've worked with for years (I literally did this with my boss on a phone call this morning, mixing his name up with another coworker whose name starts with the same letter).
I've told some of my closest friends and they sometimes remember to tell me who people are :D Family is the same. Sometimes they help, sometimes they forget.
I am also one of these folks. My wife and I are self described "aphantasia"-havers (aphantasic)?
There are things that blew my mind when I realized people could literally conjure up images in their mind.
For me, a lot of it is just a "knowledge" of something. I don't literally "see" a mental image of a thing. I understand the concept of a tree, the rough scale, the color and texture, but I don't see it.
My wife and I are both software engineers, and I come from a background in mathematics. I think I view "objects" in my mind sort of the way I would a data model. I know the property, the shape, and the structural interactions of an object. As you would a data class defined in some programming language, but I cannot conjure an image.
This extends to my dreams. I don't really "see" things, but I can remember scenery and settings. It's very hard to explain.
One thing that is of note, I believe. Before this whole "aphantasia" popularity in recent years, there was no word for any of this. I remember trying out things like Sensory Deprivation tanks (which most people hallucinate in), and all I could see were the "pressure waves" caused by the blood flow in my eyes. No imagery whatsoever. My close friends, however, described seeing fantastic images.
Initially when I discovered that this was "not" the normal experience I was honestly pretty bummed about it. I remember feeling like I was missing out on something integral to the human experience. It's been years since, and more thoughts on the matter have lead me to the conclusion that my inability here has helped shaped me in ways I really have come to be proud of. It has helped me be talented (I think) in areas of logical thinking, mathematics, and abstract concepts.
Hah! I also am aphantasic. The one time I did Salvia, which normally involves hallucinations, those waves were all I got. That, and my mind trying to figure out why I'd been struck blind (because my eyes were closed.) It wasn't something I wanted a second shot at. Maybe this is why?
It's funny - I thought aphantastics would be strictly concrete thinkers without imagination, but reading your description, it's clear imagination is taking place. You're working with more abstract cognitive models of tangible objects rather than sensory models, that's all.
I wonder if we'd also have atypical responses to psychedelics and mind altering substances.
+1 on the object oriented mental processes. It's cool, we get to instantiate abstract classes with no properties filled in.
I love when these posts about aphantsia pop up. It's nice to know I'm not alone.
My favorite way to demonstrate/explain to people is by asking them a question. "Think of an apple. What color is it?"
People with mental imagery will respond almost immediately and say "red." The few aphantasiacs I've asked, look at me and it seems like they don't understand the question. They/we have a concept of an apple in our mind, but unless it's specified, it's just an apple. Not red, or green, or yellow, it just IS an apple.
Right. We're thinking about the quintessential Apple, the Omni Apple which can be any and every apple.
And then some people with autism will also look at the question funny because they'd be thinking of a very specific apple that at one point existed and they've interacted with, not a generic red.
I didn't even consider how my aphantsia interracts with my AuDHD... Oh boy what a new can of worms this is...
Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too.
Best I can manage is a dim wire frame that pops into my mind for about the duration of a camera flash in a pitch black room, and I can't flash that camera more than once every couple of minutes for any given scene. No colors or textures, just vectors, shapes, edges. I can't remember dreams at all, not even a tiny fraction of them.
I've got the omnipresent visual snow and tinnitus to go with it, though the migraines stopped once I was out of my 20s. Even magic mushrooms and LSD hit my mind like a brick wall - I don't think it's possible for me to have hallucinations, I've tried on several occasions. The closest I get is some washed out almost transparent pastel rainbow stripes if I stare at a bright white wall while under a heavy dose. I do get enhanced color perception and the 'breathing' visual effect while tripping, but no trails.
Never seemed to bother me when reading books, doing calculus or physics, or various engineering tasks. Never bothered me on the art either, but then I don't imagine an image and try to draw it, I just start plopping things down onto the paper and working with them once I can look at them. I'd say the only thing about it that bothers me is the reflexive irritated eye-roll I do every time I hear someone say the word "visualize" when trying to explain something. That technique is utterly useless to me.
My audio memory is probably better than normal, though. If I listen to your voice for about five minutes and we don't talk again until twenty years later on the phone, I'll recognize you from just your 'hello' even if your voice has changed. Using this to freak people out is kinda fun. I can play back complete songs I've heard in my head like there's an embedded mp3 player in there if I've heard it enough times, though it's not instantly memorized and I do forget them over time.
I was doing some digging on this out of curiosity some time ago and found some anecdotal evidence that Ayahuasca and DMT can 'cure' it for some people - and not just while high, I mean permanently after one dose. Doesn't work for everyone, but apparently the heavy psychedelics do work for some people. Haven't tried either of those yet myself. In fact being able to remember everything I'd seen before seems like hell - all that visual crud in the brain would clog up and slow down my thinking like a Tildes front page full of cat pictures.
I also found some meditation techniques that presented a method for training that visualization process. I tried it out of curiosity and after some practice it did seem to work - I could lift a small image off a page and keep it around like the tiny spot you'd see from staring at the sun, and lasting about that long. Didn't bother keeping up with it though, as I said it doesn't seem useful to me.
The researcher estimated 2-3% of people are aphantic. If tildes had 2,000 active users, then just with the average human distribution that would mean 40-60 aphantic tilderinos. Doesn't require any selection bias.
Interesting multiple people have commented on lack of hallucinations, both in sensory deprivation chambers and from drug stimulus. It might mean aphasics have an advantage in endurance athletic events, where sleep deprivation hallucinations are a common challenge for participants.
That's interesting. I've stayed awake for a little over five days at a time before (non-stop Babylon 5 marathon with friends) and towards the end of it, my color vision was washed out almost to black and white. Never knew sleep deprivation lead to hallucinations before you mentioned it.
So there's models now to place people on a spectrum. Very few people have full aphantasia, most have some "level" of it. For the classic "apple" example, a 0 would be no visualization at all. As we work our way from 0 towards 5 we gain clarity - a fuzzy round nondistinct shape might be a 1, a 2 increasing the dynamics of shape, by 3 we might add color, 4 would be almost perfect and a 5 hyper-realistic adding details like bruises, dirt, the stem, becoming a near perfect representation of an apple in space (as the article stated perhaps even entering the person's reality in some fashion).
We don't have good numbers on how the normal curve is divided and I believe the 2-3% estimations came before there was a good quantization of this (or a truly well-designed questionnaire to determine or grade aphantasia) so take it with a grain of salt.
There are probably a lot of people that don't know they are aphantasics. Internet people are more aware of it since it's kind of a recurrent subject?
There is also certainly a whole spectrum between aphantasic and hyperphantasic, but it's hard to position yourself because you'll never see another point of reference than yourself. I don't consider myself aphantasic, I can imagine things, but they're abstract, fleeting images. If I imagine an apple I see it red, because the "default" apple is red, but if I imagine a person, it's just the concept of a person, a sort of mannequin without any defining trait. I can recall things I've seen, but the scenes are also fleeting. And I certainly cannot play a whole movie in my head.
I’m honestly surprised by the same thing. Also aphantasic.
“Some” indeed. Would’ve loved if it cured it for me, since I am highly interested in visual arts, on both the creation & consumption side.
Not totally surprising that the bunch of us self selected to be on a heavily text only site, reading a long form article. I would imagine (not visually lol) the distribution at say, a graphical arts site or the police academy to be skewed heavily the other way: I can't mentally recall colour or look at an object and visualize it in different colours and shape; there are more super-recognizers among the kinds of professions that benefit from being able to "scan" memories like a movie / photo for previously not remembered details.
Not so surprising that some hyperfantasics self selected it either - fewer visual distractions here than on places like reddit or X because nothing is embedded, no ads or images to leak unbidden into your visual canvas. Perhaps we should add 'most differently neuro-divergent community' to our accolades. Somehow we've managed to exclude the middle and focus on the extreme ends of the bell curve. :P
Spot on - you have no idea how much I hate it when ads occupy my brain space permanently, or I get some abominable image or autoplay audio shoved into my face. Add in a generous helping of misophonia, and I need the blessed quiet of a social place like this.
That's so interesting we're both drawn to text only, for opposite reasons. Reading the responses of all the hyper-s here and from the article , it sounds fascinating, and I wondered a bit if I'm jealous. Sounds like a learning and professional cheat code for success. Maybe that's why I failed first year calculus twice before finally passing Calc for Programmers. I also struggled with physics until I can use computer assistance to visualize.
But if you can imagine it, my default mindscape is a cozy reading corner. I can turn on music or play a piece of media, but I can fully turn it off as well; close a book, pull out a craft, one thing at a time nothing jumping at me like pop up ads. I don't (can't) recall details of atrocities or gross shock images; they are inside folders, whose folder names sometimes catches my mind's eye, and I'll keep them closed no thanks. I have to be careful not to bring up sad or upsetting news before going to bed because others can be greatly upset by things like that and can't fall asleep.
The article mentioned a hyper- who walked into imagined doors, and someone who can't stop seeing a beloved pet who has died, ...that kind of inability to step away and stop everything for peace sounds not worth the highlights.
I don't want the ability to recall pain. Facts of the pain can be valuable, but the sensation seems....not advantageous?
Anyway, I think society needs more quiet spaces like this for everyone.
It's my experience that the hyperphantastic traits might be a cheat code for some kinds of learning, but not necessarily for success. Too well remembered past traumas feed into anxiety and depression about realistically imagined futures, and the whole doom loop can spiral out of control. I've spent a great deal of time on meditation techniques to focus on being present, attuned to immediate sensory information and what I can control, letting intrusive thoughts and recollections pass. Nonetheless, a big chunk of my life has been spent floundering among personal and professional dead ends, too terrified or overwhelmed to make good choices.
It sounds like aphantasia doesn't divorce people from immediate unpleasantnesses in any way, either - you're still feeling what you feel, even if less historical baggage or anticipatory fear comes with it. It makes perfect sense that we'd both seek out quiet retreats into the safe, cozy, and controllable.
Mirror: https://archive.is/P4RgL
What I find amazing in all this research is how even when they describe their best case scenario of people with internal monologuos or people who visualize things it doesn't even scratch the surface of what I personally experience in my head.
Like not only do I have an internal monologue, I have several, at once. I'm constantly turning over ideas and perspectives, picking apart things I see and experience. I'm having full conversations about things trying to understand my experiences from different perspectives.
And not only can I visualize people, places, things, and objects, but I can run simulations in my head and see those objects from different angles and can feel the textures, smells, tastes, sound it would make, and guess accurately the weight, mass, and force needed to push it around or throw it.
Like take the example of an apple. Not only can I visualize an apple, but I can describe the sound it'd make when hitting the floor, how it can bruise, the feel of cutting it, how much give it would give to a sharp knife, the texture of the seeds, etc. I can turn the apple around in my head, cut it in half, detail the inner texture, etc. Ask me the color and I can list the color texture of the surface, inner color, color of the seeds, and the chalky grey/green of the stem and the bruising/unripe areas, etc. Even as I'm thinking of that I can describe the give the stem has, what it feels like to pull the stem out, describe the little star shaped butthole on the bottom of the apple, the 4 "legs" on the bottom of the apple, how the apple will feel after being left out for a while when the outer surface has dried a bit and the cut edges start to curl, the slipperiness of the seeds, the sharp harder edge of the little places in the apple the seeds are, the feeling of it crunching in my mouth as I take a bite, the slight slurping I need to do as I bite, how the peel of the apple breaks down slower as I chew than the flesh of the apple does and how that feels in my mouth as I swallow. All this is in my head simultaneously and I can visualize it all instantly.
And with memories I can literally walk through my memories, rewind, replay, and like relive the memories. I can see everything, remember the sounds, smells, and how I felt in the moment physically and mentally. And I can run different simulations of how things could have gone differently and possible outcomes.
I can do math in my head by visualizing writing it down and solving it too.
I also have synesthesia where in addition to all of the above I can also visualize sounds and audio, I associate colors with certain words and numbers, and can describe the texture of smells and tastes. Like Vanilla is an overwhelming round smell, cinnamon is kind of a fine scratchy smell, alcohol has kind of a sinking or deep sensation with it. The number 6 is purple, 3 is green, 9 is a red/orange, 7 red, 8 grey, 1 white, 4 yellow, 5 dark brown, etc.
So it's incredible reading that people don't experience even a fraction of what I do. Like I feel like I've got everything unlocked in my head with the only limitations literally being the laws of physics, and I have trouble comprehending what it would be like to live without any of that.
It sounds like it works out well for you, but are there any downsides?
I'm surprised I didn't see my own situation represented here so I'll add another to the pile- I don't have aphantasia but it is the default state for how I imagine things. For example when asked to imagine an apple- it's formless, shapeless, it's a symbol or concept of an apple. It's only when I'm asked "what color is it?" that that it actually jumps into a visualization and takes on a shape, color, all the other visible and tangible aspects of a real apple. Despite this I actually have a pretty active imagination, I spend a lot of time playing out stories in my head or playing with concepts like "seeing" beyond your typical range of vision.
Like many of you I also have prosopagnosia, though I'm not sure if that's connected with this in my case. I have no problem visualizing a person just am not able to form that shape into a good representation of anyone I actually know beyond facts like hair color, eye color, noted prominent features or scars, etc
This sounds like it could be a learning difference as well, visualization is so important when learning in depth math and physics.
I'm an aphantasiac that went through Calc 3 and differnetial equations in college. I graduated with a chemical engineering degree.
The only time I ever "visualized" anything was an experience with Magic Mushrooms. It also made calc 3, and all the spatial stuff click, a weird Ah HA moment.
Engineering as well. I’m not sure how you build something physical without being able to see it in your head first. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mechanical engineers that don’t have a mind’s eye. I’d love to hear from one.
Funny. I'm not a mechanical engineer by schooling, but Chemical. I suppose in my education the drawings were just rough sketches. You did the math to get the dimensions (of a reaction tank for example).
The way I describe my "mental images" is like a list of specifications. But I think that lines up quite well with engineering. What's an engineering drawing but a list of specifications?
I have a concept of an apple, but you need to define the color, whether it has a stem, how many feet it has, is it bruised, etc. while It doesn't sharpen a mental image, it gives me the context of what is intended.
I am a software engineer and mathematician and am aphantasic.
I know this may sound pompous, but genuinely, is there any questions you'd like to ask? I'm happy to explain my thought process on how I tackle complex problems and build things without visualization.
Do you draw diagrams when doing geometric problems? Have you used CAD tools?
When designing a system (my day job as a Software Engineer), I first "talk" through the problem in my head. Like literally perform an inner monologue describing to myself at a high level what I would like to accomplish.
This sort of is uncannily like a the "thought process" you might see when you show the thinking on a large language model like o1. I will converse with myself and find myself saying in my own head "wait, if this system has this delay, then it can cause a bottleneck here".
Once that process has "wrapped up", I put things to diagram or tickets if they warrant it. So if something is going to be sufficiently difficult for me to convey to someone else via description, I will diagram the architecture (mermaid diagrams, excalidraw, good ol' pen and paper, etc).
I have used CAD tools, but I do not do them for my professional work. Only for personal 3D-Printing in the one-off. I am incapable of "imagining" addendums to objects in 3D models, even if I am literally looking right at them. I typically just have to try things until it "looks right".
How do you reason about program memory and/or data structures? For me (see my other comment for detail on my degree of mental imagery) program memory and data structures are very viscerally laid out in a space. I get in principle that one might reason about these things strictly symbolically... after all, the computer does all its work with simple numbers. But I have no conception of how to diagnose problems or work through an algorithm without that spatial organization. What's your experience there?
I appreciate this question, and I genuinely spent a few days thinking about how I wanted to reply here.
I feel it's best to just sort of, "do the exercise" in a sort of flow-of-consciousness style of writing. I will type out my thoughts to your question as they come here:
If I were to be asked about this in a gut-check way, I would normally say "I imagine a box that is subdivided, or a grid, or
mxnmatrix. Each slot representing a space within which values may be stored. This is physically represented (today at least) as transistors, who's voltage levels float up or down to absolute values of 0,1.However, upon deeper thought I do not truly "think" of a box. There is no object that actually comes to mind, merely the ideas and associations that those things have. I understand, factually and intuitively that a box has spatial dimension, just as transistors do when laid out upon a grid. These dimensions add nuance to how data is laid out and direct literal affects to algorithms.
For instance, a LinkedList, or Doubly-Linked List, is a data structure which lays itself out by providing pointers from each component of the data structure to the next component. This allows for data to be "inserted" fast, because instead of having to find a position to insert the data, it can be laid out more "sporadically" in physical space.
Alternatively, a traditional array typically allocates a "block" of space within memory. This block is sequential by necessity, and data is almost certainly "physically adjacent" to eachother. This allows for faster search algorithms (sometimes) within the data set because the sequential reading is optimized. Another example is that a linked list may be sorted, but you cannot simply "jump" to the middle of a list like you could an array by computing an index. You would have to traverse the list sequentially to find the middle of a sorted LinkedList, and then store that reference if you wanted to keep it.
Boiling back to the earlier question, how do I "understand" this without visualizing it, as everything I have stated so far has been in metaphors of the physical. Part of me understands these things by visual representation in the real realm. It could be a whiteboard if a concept is particularly hard to grasp. However, ultimately, I think I have gained a nuance for understanding things by pattern recognition as well.
For example, the repetition of language and code has given me insights into how things work at a glance. I understand, intuitively, that the two pieces of code function practically identically in
o(n)time:vs
It's essentially saying "do thing one and thing two
ntimes" vs "do thing onentimes and two thing twontimes". It follows by Distributive Property that these operations can be written either way. You can even go so far as to represent functions and logic abstractly through variables if it helps. The above can be represented as(x+y)norxn+yn.Going back to earlier, thinking about a box conceptually (but not visually) helps, because it is one of the things we interact with regularly in real life that contains structured slots laid out in space. This, ultimately, is a brute fact I understand and rely on. Just as I rely on the idea that the mathematical operations and values together can combined into expressions that produce results and solutions.
I hope this layout isn't too messy. I will revisit to hopefully clean things up.
One thing I do want to emphasize is, if there is a conceptual structure I am truly struggling with understanding. Such as something that spans both time and space (3-4 dimensions or more, such as high-vector space for RAG in an LLM), I will try to physically lay out models or visuals for me and simply "toy" with the data until I gain an intuition. Often times I will do data dumps or model data sets just to see how the thing behaves through various probing.
I don't want to come off as some sort of "Rain Man" superhuman, I have my limitations and I struggle a lot. There are just some things that are not natural even for me to intuit. If we did not have modern computers and tools at our disposal, I'm sure I'd be doing something entirely different with my life.
#offtopic
The codeblock format you used creates a box that does not auto-wrap, so I have to scroll sideways to read each paragraph.
Shoot. I'll fix it next I am at my computer.
Thank you for the heads up.
Should be fixed now.
In mathematics, I tend to reason about things geometrically, and simply use the algebra as a means to codify those representations or give more analytical rigor, or as extra 'memory' to keep track of more entities than I can focus on at once. I get the sense from this that you do the opposite; internally, everything is algebra, and if necessary you might draw out some diagrams to get an intuitive feel for how to direct an approach to a problem.
For what it's worth, I can't do sophisticated algebra in my head very well. I usually need to write things out with pencil and paper. I can get by just fine, but I can think of several peers that deal with long formulae much better than I can.
On your example of a linked list: think of that pointer juggling you do to insert an element. In my mind, I have a very clear picture of nodes connected by arrows, and a highlighted 'cursor' arrow. A new node comes into existence, and I see how I need to move the cursor and arrows. Then the actual programming is just an exercise to figure out how to write down that manipulation so the computer can do it.
If, instead, you consider it as some recursive algebraic structure, then you can just sort of... intuit which 'algebraic' manipulations to get the program to do the operation? And maybe if you're having difficulty on that intuition, you draw out a diagram to guide the process?
It feels like the same sort of 'muscle' that says "oh, substitute this expression for that one to make this integral easier" or "oh, add and subtract this term to make things factor nicely." Sometimes those come from a place of intuition and pattern recognition, but sometimes you have to look at some geometry to see which pieces are missing.
Your final sentence resonates with me. I don't know how to really truly explain it further to people and I'm wracking my mind to come up with better examples. I hope to tackle this further and revisit this thread honestly as I ponder longer.
One thing you said, the ability to "Intuit" things I feel warrant a reply.
The other day, I forgot my password to Bitwarden after setting up a new computer. The strangest thing happened, I could let my hands "move" in a pattern I subconsciously and intuitively knew. But if I tried to "think" about what I was doing it sort of broke down and got in the way. This is the muscle memory you are describing.
I've got a weird "vibe" gut check going on in my brain where I think when things become visual, I can sort of... Almost call upon some invisible hand that guides me through a problem by some rails. But those rails are not accessible directly.
To really manifest what I am trying to say here: it's as if the concepts, properties, and intuitions that are accompanying useful physical analogies (like a box holding things to represent computer memory), are still acting. They are acting in a way in me that are not directly accessible, but they are still there.
This further can be "sussed out" and verified, I think, by assuming the opposite. I'm not a particularly creative person. I struggle to come up with novel ideas or new things that are not based upon something I've come to "understand" before. It's not that I can't do it, it's just less natural to me.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit now...
This is totally reasonable to me. I have a keyless front door lock, with a little keypad where I type in a code to enter. I honestly do not know the number. I must have known it when I first bought the thing, but several years on, typing the thing in every day without looking, I honestly do not know the number and just go through the motions on muscle memory. I do know the pattern of numbers on the keypad, so I could work it out if I needed to, but the number isn't sitting in my mind as a simple fact.
Really, thinking about it.... I should probably change that code! It's been the same for quite a while.
A year and a half ago (wow!) I had a conversation with @RNG on here (here's the comment relevant to this conversation) where they brought up "integrated information theory" of consciousness, which I had never heard of before (and here's the overview of IIT which they linked and also the wikipedia article). That conversation has lingered on my mind ever since, and IIT in particular. The more I've learned and thought about it since, the more convinced I've become that, while that formulation is probably not correct, it's almost certainly on the right track.
The basic idea is that the experience of consciousness arises from "complexes" of information processing capability. Different regions of the brain process different things in different ways, and as such there may be "sub-complexes" of local information processing. The consciousness is then the local maximum of information processing capability, comprised of several subcomplexes.
A relevant quote to your point here:
So the idea in the "autopilot" scenario is that the single global maximum of information integration splits into two (or more) local maxima, and so produce two consciousnesses. One having the phone call, the other driving the vehicle. If only one of the minor complexes is connected to memory-forming capability in the brain, then only memories from that minor complex will remain for later recall.
Anecdotally, I've experienced (something like) this in both ways: I can have a full conversation with someone while I'm distracted by something else, and leave with no memory of the conversation. Or, I'll be distracted in my own thoughts while driving and suddenly appear at my house with no memory of operating the car.
It also seems to line up with this excerpt from the OP:
Where that 'synaptic pruning' might make it difficult for a single major complex to span both visualization and reasoning, and instead splits into separate visualizing and reasoning minor complexes.
I wonder if the thing you describe (or even "intuition" or "gut feel" in general) comes from something similar, where perhaps there is some minor complex which does perform such visualizations, and can be that "invisible hand" to give you the answer, but it is somehow disconnected from memory-forming capability and the rest of the major complex that you consider to be you.
We had this conversation in the office about a year ago, and figured out that everybody in our office covers the spectrum of internal imagery pretty well. Some people could get vague shapes/ideas to form, some had none, and I myself covered the tail end of it with full on detail (see my other comment on this thread for more on that). I also liked that some of those that have trouble picturing things had no problem hearing an entire ensemble, specifically those that had musical training. Others would only be able to imagine things like that when they dream, but were unable to when they woke (I asked them about their dreams since I had read a convo like this on reddit a while back, and the dream-difference I always found interesting).
I also read from someone with aphantasia that they were able to do some exercises to work up a bit of that imaginary sight muscle. They would close their eyes and focus on the ambient static/floating fog that occurs with the absence of light. As those shapes danced around, they would do the equivalent of the cloud-rorschach test and pick out some shapes and identify what they looked like. They would then 'hold onto that shape' in their mind, so even as the static continued to dance around, they would try to picture the mouse/kite/tree/etc. shape where and how they saw it in their mind. They wrote that after a while they were able to (with some difficulty) conjure up an image from nothing, but pointed out it was harder to do without a reference.
That is exactly how it worked for me when I was trying to visualize things. I'd have a blank piece of paper with something small on it (like a thumbnail-sized bird) and stare at it, then try to retain it after I closed my eyes. I could pick it up and hold it for a bit, I'd lose it after a minute or so unless I dipped back out onto the page to refresh it. I figure if I practiced at this a lot every day I could perhaps open up a wallet-at-arms-length size area where I could place a visual image that would persist, perhaps even with some control.
The 'cloud-rorschach' trick is much, much harder to pin down and control. My visual snow looks an awful lot like this but mine is calm - all the images people make to show how it looks are running at 60Hz compared to my 2Hz speed. My snow drifts around, changes colors, and shifts more lazily than falling snow on a still day. Mine's also more transparent than that, it's hard to even notice it if my eyes are open unless I'm looking at a bright solid color background.
If I close my eyes, I get what's more like HPPD static but again, vastly more calm than that image implies. If I try to focus on a scene, sometimes the snow will swirl over and around what I'm trying to imagine in waves that flow from the edge of my vision to the center. It's as if you took the pixels on a video you were watching and set them free to flow around all over the screen, but they have to follow the slopes and shapes of things even though they've now lost texture and all turned into shifting rainbow colored sand. Then they rebel and abandon the forms they were briefly following and I lose the image. It's really quite pretty but not useful. :P
I can't pin down a size for the individual snowflakes/pixels either, which I've always thought was peculiar. It's as if they shrink when I try or are somehow infinitely small to begin with, like I'm looking at plank-length flecks of light. Pixels on a monitor are gargantuan compared to the ones making up my static.
This is the case for me. I can't visualize actual images almost all the time, however I know for a fact (because I have very good memory for facts) that on multiple occasions as I was lucid dreaming or on the threshold of falling asleep I have seen vivid visual memories with a great deal of detail. It's always mind-blowing, because I normally can't do that at all, and it's also interesting that it reveals that there's a lot of crap in my brain that I just can't access.
Huh, I didn't really think I could be surprised by my aphantasia, but I definetely was. Both by the article and all the comments here.
From the article, I realized that when talk about memory then mean a literal re-experience of some event. Seems obvious know, but wow is that not me. Saying that my memory is purely factual sounds kinda pompous logic bro, but thats the best description I have. I just know the one of my childhood cats was grey and white.
I have no problems recognizing people's faces, but I also can't describe them at all.
On a heavier side, I've always had a weak sense of self; honestly, all the elements of the final section are thoughts I've had. The idea that "The Self" is memories feels real weird to me, not that I can really define what My Self is. I'm also not a "thing" that's existed throughout my life. I'm the liquid in a leaky bucket that sometimes gets refilled and eventually I'm simply different.
I don't know how long threads usually stay lively in Tildes but I'm very much enjoying this one.
I wanted to ask those still here if they'll humor me.
If you are a "aphantasic" person, can you answer a few questions:
This is not very scientific or rigorous, but I had a lot of eye problems growing up and my family did not help me to receive glasses (for various reasons) until I was much older (into my teenage years).
This lead me to grow up with poor vision throughout my life. It blew my mind people could read a sign a few yards away and I never really thought about it. I know this may sound made up but I grew up in a very isolated rural area.
I'd be interested to see if there is any correlation to physical image processing impairments and development of aphantasia.
I'm nearsighted - anything past arm's length is blurred to the point of not being able to read letters unless they are huge on a billboard. I probably did that to myself reading books. I was in a local library reading program and reading before I ever set foot in a school. It's also what I spent most of my time in school doing to escape the boredom. That meant I spent most of my time focusing my vision at arm's length and that seems to be where I permanently parked it. Then screens came along at the same distance and I work in tech so I'm always in front of one. :P Can't read lettering on typical street signs at all at any distance. I can't even read the numbers on a wall clock that's in the room with me without squinting.
Got my first eyeglasses at 14, cleared it up perfectly. Just got a new prescription last month, vision is still great even at distance though I now need bifocals to read very close. I do have some floaters but nothing unusual for someone of my age.