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Experiences with aphantasia or what does visualizing look/feel like?
Aphantasia is a condition where a person is unable to visualize images in their minds eye. If I tell you to think of a red apple, several people will visualize this apple and 'see' it. But those (like me) with aphantasia simply can't. Some of us have access to other senses within our mind (hearing, touch, smell, etc), some don't.
Do you have aphantasia? There's a simple test here.
In a similar vein, is anybody able to explain what visualizing looks like? Is it just like the sight I get from my eyes? Different?
Visualizing (for me) feels like a second layer in Photoshop. I can see the world with my eyes as the main layer, and I can sort of sense the second layer. For example, if I imagined a large red ball in the middle of my room, I don't actually see a large ball, I experience a second 'layer' of vision that occurs only in my mind that isn't as vivid as the real world. It's essentially the same for my other senses as well. I'm curious if other people have the same experience as mine.
Edit: After thinking about it some more, describing things that I 'visualize' is sort of like describing things in the periphery of my vision, unless I concentrate I'll have trouble describing the details of visualized images.
The images I have the easiest time visualizing are as follows (in order of ease):
The images I have the most difficult time visualizing are typically faces, surprisingly. I can recognize faces pretty easily, but have a lot of trouble actually visualizing in detail what the face of someone I know looks like. I probably actually have an easier time with people I don't know very well, for example a coworker I see every so often.
This is a good way to describe it! same for me!
Edit: My wife says when she visualises stuff it's as clear as real life. The ball would be in the room if she wanted.
That's crazy. I can't even imagine being able to visualize like that.
Ironically, a large portion of my work is design, so don't let poor/no visualization skills stop you.
Yeah, me neither, I'm very jealous of her.
Edit: I've had some insanely realistic hallucinations on acid back in the day, some. where I literally couldn't distinguish them from reality, except for the fact Ba'al doesn't really exist, no matter how much he tries to convince you that he does.
Even when having so many hallucinogens I was convinced I might die, I never had a hallucination quite like that
That's really interesting, I imagine the quality of visualization is on a scale for most people, usually falling around an average of being 'ok' at visualization, where at the extreme ends you'll see experiences like aphantasia. I wonder if a higher quality visualization leads to an increase in artistic ability, or at least natural talent.
My wife has literally zero artistic ability :-D
She's good a baking, cooking and things like that, but stuff like drawing, music or other 'traditional' artistic stuff - forget about it, she's absolutely terrible, she has no interest whatsoever. On the other hand she does have a ridiculously good memory.
That's really interesting. If I try to imagine myself at home, I know where everything is, but it's like I'm walking through with my eyes closed. Or rather, blind. I have a 'sense' of where things are, but no visuals to back it up. It makes me wonder if a blind person can successfully walk around their own house if they know where everything is. I would think so.
If I concentrate really hard, I'm able to remember a space without visualizing it. I imagine that's due to the fact that visualizing is just so ingrained in my process of remembering locations. It's really an odd feeling, but in the end there's not much difference in the memory capacity, just in the method used to remember.
Same here! I've never been good at visualizing someone's face just from memory. It just sort of shifts and blurs around, and I have a hard time distinguishing people who look similar without a lot of practice or some kind of marker. I also struggle to associate names with faces too... But I have a pretty decent memory for non face related things.
It sounds like you have very high quality visualizations. If you would compare a real world object to an object that you visualize in the real world, would you say that the visualization seems faint, only in the minds eye (see my description above), or a similar level of vividness as the real world object.
So if you imagine a glass of water on a table, you can actually see it? Like, with your eyeballs? That's a crazy level of vividness compared to my visualizations. If you don't mind me asking, when you imagine a glass of water, do you see actual reflections and refraction, and can you see the small details on the glass, or does it seem blurry or indistinct.
That's super neat. One other question I have is, if you could, can you visualize a large red ball, right in front of your computer screen/phone screen. Does that ball occlude the text/screen (as in, prevent you from reading it), or can you see both the ball AND the text.
Ah, so it's more as if your 'second layer' is just very vivid, rather than your visualizations actually taking place within the 'main layer.'
Been this way as long as I can remember! I like mathematics and science, though I've come up with an interesting way to approach it. Instead of using my internal sight sense to visualize things, I use my spatial sense. I'll think of something, then 'grab' it and move it where it needs to go. I can only imagine how much more helpful being able to see what I'm doing would be.
I actually do have a big inner world! I'm just blind in it and navigate based on 'sensing' where everything is. Like mental echolocation.
I wouldn't be able to say if I'm better or worse, I've never really tested. I'll have to see if I can find a way to actually test that.
So something like a mind palace is impossible for you?
That still might be possible, since spatial memory isn't impaired by aphasiantasia (I believe), it would just require a different method of encoding information into the palace (not through images).
Funny story about that, I actually have a 'headspace' or 'wonderland' (depending on who you talk to). There is an area inside my head with persistent places that I can recall. I also still have a spacial memory, just no visualization of the palace.
Not OP, but not only are mental palaces impossible for me – I thought the idea of mental palaces was batshit crazy the first time I heard of it precisely because it sounded completely impractical.
Mental palaces really confuse me. I don't think I have Aphantasia, but I know some people who do, so I know some first-hand accounts but I still can't decide if I have it. I saw a post here on tildes about mind palaces a while back and the OP was taking about imagining words on a book and then storing that book away somewhere. I don't understand this. I have a very vague picture of a bookshelf and a book, but the moment I try and put text on the book I'm thrown back into real life. Even when I do have this mental picture, it's more of a phantom thing, a lot like a floater in your eye that you can only see when you're not really looking at it. I don't really know what that means but anyway that's my experience with this.
I can't hear anything either, sadly. It's also odd that your's wasn't since birth. Any head trauma that happened to you at any point?
I'm curious by what you mean by too much. Like years of alcohol abuse or you threw up a couple times?
I have a kind of face/person aphantasia.
But there's absolutely no chance I can visualize faces or whole persons. The test you linked focuses on that quite strongly - unless I've seen them in literally the last few hours, I can't see their faces, I can't imagine them walk, and I can't imagine their physique. Not even for close family members who I've seen basically every day for my entire life. I'm also horrible with names and remembering people in general, that's probably related.
I'd probably drive a sketch artist insane if I ever witnessed a crime. Face? Well, I suppose they had one, yes.
I hope I'm never in a position where I have to talk to a sketch artist. I would just tell them that I can't do it.
Do you ever have problems recognizing people out in public?
No, not really, funnily enough. It's not that I can't remember faces, or can't process them (face blindness), but just that I can't recall them. I can pretty much always tell that I've seen someone before, but anything more than that (name, story, where I met them, etc) is hard. I guess it's similar to Alzheimer's/dementia, where you just lose access to memories, not the memories themselves? With a few pointers normally it all comes back.
The only thing I'm quite good at recalling are spacial and "photographic" memory (if you can all it that, nothing crazy like pages of numbers, just imagery in general). I should probably look into mind palaces.
Look up face blindness. That's a thing.
Segment on 60 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxqsBk7Wn-Y
My wife accuses me of this but I think I'm largely just inattentive of those details because I view them as unimportant much of the time.
Haven't had time to watch it yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm not face blind. I don't have much trouble recognizing people, just with visualizing faces.
Ah yes, then that’s not face blindness
Hey, I have aphantasia too – I can't visualize anything. Ironically, I'm a visual designer lol. For the longest time when I heard people talk about visualizing things in their mind's eye, I thought they were speaking metaphorically. The only time I've truly been able to visualize things has been on psychedelic drugs.
Even on psyches, it's REALLY hard for me to visualize. Only on certain brands of research chems or on a specific trip of mushrooms have I been able to visualize. Though there are a few people on the r/Aphantasia sub that said LSA allowed them to visualize after the trip was done... I want to play around with that.
Hey this kind of happened to me. When I used to do DXM (I don't recommend it), one of the places I used to visit was a suite of simple, dark greyscale rooms that I could see whether my eyes were open or closed. I could look around the rooms, and move around in them. It's been 13+ years since the DXM phase of my life, but I've done other psychedelics since then and I could occasionally revisit those rooms on those trips, although it's been 6+ years since I last tripped. In the time that's elapsed since I last took any psychedelics, I've still had very rare moments where I can momentarily revisit those greyscale rooms for a few seconds, but it's not voluntary.
I've had a DXM trip once. I don't actually remember most of it. Dissociatives and I don't seem to mix well.
Conscious visualization is usually pretty hard for me if the thing I’m trying to imagine is real, like friends or the look of a specific garden. Turn it imaginary and we’re good to go hogwild into the hills with all sorts of fauna and creature attending.
For me it’s more like I see the outlines of real things rather than the thing itself. Even the imaginary things might seem realistic, but I don’t see them. It’s like trying to add to a drawing, picture, or painting with a pencil that doesn’t write. It feels like the impression is there, even if I can’t sense it. Even if I know exactly what the thing looks like, I can’t just add it to what is real. But I can experience it, in a way.