[HN Gopher] I Can't See You but I'm Not Blind ___________________________________________________________________ I Can't See You but I'm Not Blind Author : rognjen Score : 128 points Date : 2021-12-14 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (steveblank.com) (TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com) | petercooper wrote: | Is there a more practical test for this than trusting what the | person answering says? Like the aphantasia equivalent of one of | those colorblind pictures where different people see different | numbers. | | I struggle to determine if I _can_ visualize imagery or not. I | don 't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that | is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a | (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or | something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route | based on the shortest map distance? Because I _can_ do that.. | pseudalopex wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research | petercooper wrote: | Thanks. A couple of ideas mentioned there for anyone else: | "measuring cortical excitability in the primary visual | cortex" and measuring skin perspiration/fear response in a | situation where a story that triggers mental imagery is | followed by imagery that might "amplify" the former. These | both seem rather limited to measurements in study groups and | both require equipment, but interesting nonetheless! | heynow0 wrote: | I attribute my inability to draw on this. | | If I try to imagine what a mouse looks like, I have no idea. And | thus trying to draw it results in a disaster. | | My mom and brother can draw very well. I should ask them about | aphantasia. But im pretty sure my aphantasia is cause of my | inability to sketch anything even remotely well. | vanderZwan wrote: | I remember reading about aphantasia while I was in art school. It | made me wonder if the opposite also might exist: being _really | good_ at visualizing images in your head, and whether or not some | of the people in my school might have it. The few classmates I | asked thought I was being ridiculous, so I dropped the subject. I | still wonder how one might test this though. | pseudalopex wrote: | VVIQ covers low and high ability.[1] | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu... | egypturnash wrote: | There is a story that one of the animators in the 1940s Warners | studio got into a car accident, and suffered a mild concussion. | When he recovered, he found that his visualization was much | improved - suddenly he could visualize the simple construction | of the characters, and "trace" it directly onto the paper. This | resulted in him being able to draw a lot faster, so that's a | pretty obvious test. | | (IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you | want citations.) | | My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of | marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost | into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to | improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a _lot_ of | steps that younger me couldn 't. I generally like to describe | the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer | and a library of models on your brain". | woopwoop wrote: | I remain very confused about what aphantasia is. Let me give a | concrete example. If you ask me to describe my mother's | appearance to you, in as much detail as I can, the output is | pretty meager. She's a woman in her early 70s. Tall, about 5'9". | Slightly overweight. She has brown hair with streaks of grey. And | that's it. I'm embarrassed to note that I cannot recall her eye | color from memory. | | Does this mean I have aphantasia? From what I have read, I would | say the opposite. Though their are many, many people fitting the | above description, I'm confident I could pick her out in a lineup | of hundreds of them. There is visual data in my head that I | cannot articulate about, e.g., bone structure, skin texture, | gait, etc. On the other hand, I cannot summon a picture of her in | my head with high enough fidelity to be able to recall her eye | color. If you are aphantasic, what is your experience recalling | someone's face? Is it like this, or is everything you remember | verbal, or verbalizable? | scotu wrote: | I would start with the fact that not much in the world is | either one thing or another, so also with aphantasia I don't | think you either "have it" or you don't. One might have varying | degrees of it. I feel I can almost visualize a simple shape | like a square, but a face is something I'm sure I cannot | visualize. | | Then I'd say, in my self-diagnosed experience, I can describe | things I remember, maybe not in painstaking detail but I can. | I'm not able to see an image of the same thing if I close my | eyes and try to imagine it. | | I feel like the difference is, I can recognize your face if I | see it again, but if I need to recall what you look like I get | a list of features written in words out of my brain, not an | image. | woopwoop wrote: | Is your typical verbal description of a face you remember as | sparse as the one I gave? Are their other things about the | face you remember that you cannot put into words, or is | everything you remember verbal? | scotu wrote: | yeah, I'd say my description could be pretty similar. But | when it comes down to sparse descriptions, I think memory | also has a role. My memory is not fantastic, so I might | have just dropped the memory of eye colors, unless that | came up a few times for some reason for me to fix that | memory. | | But thinking about coming up with an unknown, generic face | (GAN style, if you will): I cannot see it. Or something | simpler, an apple: very foggy visual+takes a lot of effort | to keep seeing the vague blurry image I might be able to | come up with. | rietta wrote: | Wow, this is interesting. And I am now wondering if describes how | I process visual information mentally. Outside of dreaming I do | not specifically see anything visually if I close my eyes and | think about something. I can describe. I can attempt to draw | badly (more of a comment on my low artistic ability). | Lealen wrote: | On the other hand it seems that I have hyperphantasia (I can | visualize anything, animate it, rotate, check any of the details) | and at the same time I work as an software engineer, but in | contrary to what people might think it helps me a lot as I can | visualize and remember all the parts of the code that I work on. | | I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks | (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to | write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised | with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I | think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding | aspect. | riskable wrote: | Have you tried OpenSCAD (https://openscad.org/) yet? If you | have hyperphantasia _and can code_ getting a 3D printer and | fooling around in OpenSCAD could become your new favorite hobby | /addiction! | | Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD: | | https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill (Low-poly Rose Twist | Vase) | | https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise (just a neat | keycap) | | https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium (an entire | keyboard: Switches, stabs, case, keycaps, etc were all made | with OpenSCAD) | | Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they | designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how | it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to | use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I _hate_ the | ternary operator! It 's so obtuse. | codazoda wrote: | My boss has this and I believe it's a real thing. | | That said, how do you know? If I "close my eyes an imagine the | apple in the picture" I can both see "black" like the author | mentioned and I can imagine what an apple looks like. I would | describe what I see as a photo of that apple but I can't actually | see the apple. But I don't see a list of facts about it either. | | So, is this a language barrier? Are there tests we can run to | prove that I can see things in my minds eye that others cannot? | Can I prove that I have the ability and that I don't fall into | the 2%? | | Edit: Apparently, yes, if I would just follow the links. The test | says I have visual hyperphantasia but I still wonder, is this | just the way I think about the things I conjure up in my mind? :P | kkjjkgjjgg wrote: | What is meant by "seeing in ones mind"? And how can he have that | disability, but still see images in dreams? How do they test for | this? | riskable wrote: | I believe they test this with the "paper folding test". | Something like this: https://www.123test.com/spatial-reasoning- | test/ | | If you can answer at least one of those questions you probably | don't have aphantasia. | caymanjim wrote: | Is this really testing aphantasia? I would think that to do | that you'd have to show someone the first image, give them | time to remember it or whatever, and then ask them which of | the shapes are possible without reference to the original | image. I think anyone can look back and forth between these | things and reason about how they come together ("this is not | adjacent to that so this folded version is not possible"). | durovo wrote: | Yeah, I have the same concern as well. However, I felt that | being able to visualize things in my head allowed me to | solve some of these problems very quickly (in around 4-5 | seconds). I can make the 2-d image collapse into the 3-d | object in my head. I guess not having aphantasia would make | you quicker on these tests? I must admit though, I had to | look back and forth for some problems as well. | sethhovestol wrote: | I am mind-blind in every sense, yet I got a 9/10 on that. | It's still only checked by qualitative things, how a person | self reports about it. I know it's not just a language thing | though. My go to example is that if you knew morgan freedman | wrote this you could read it in his voice in your head. I | can't, I'd recognize his voice, but I can't use it in my | head. | fieryskiff11 wrote: | confirmed npc | jodrellblank wrote: | I can, and for context I've known about the distinction of people | who can and cannot for years; even then I didn't notice until | last year that I can't smell or taste in my imagination and other | people can. "Lemon" to me is pictures of lemons, to my mum it's a | lip-curlingly intense sour taste. | | You'd think it would be a simple hop years ago from sight to the | other senses and which ones work in my head and which don't. But | no, smell and taste are "out of sight, out of mind" for me in a | way that sight isn't. When they aren't present I don't have a | good way of thinking about them and don't really think about them | much at all. | | What about the other senses, can people imagine kinaesthetic body | positions of poses they aren't currently doing? Can people | imagine balancing on a high-wire or being off-balance on a moving | boat, while sitting on steady ground? | yupper32 wrote: | What's the opposite? | | I can vividly picture people. I can recognize and describe most | people I've ever met in my adult life. I can remember and picture | our conversation we had the one and only time we met at a bar 3 | years ago. Where we were in the bar, the people around us, the | drinks we had (at least the type of glass, I can't taste in my | head). | | But your name? No where to be found. Disappears almost instantly. | | It's incredibly frustrating. | rexreed wrote: | A lot of us are better with faces than names, and can remember | when and where and what we were doing with someone and forget | their name at the same time. | cescobedo wrote: | hyperphantasia | obventio56 wrote: | I'm not sure why I'm the first to point this out on HN (which is | usually a pretty skeptical group) but "aphantasia" is very poorly | studied (1). I've met plenty of people who claim to have it but | it seems more like a failure of language to compare experience. | That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people | are wired differently. | | (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia | stevebmark wrote: | I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems | very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things | "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5 | pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual | experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the | visualization of seeing. | | I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think | being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl | their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, | they're both trainable. | | When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm | shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are | seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels | like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or | recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm | able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over | focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make | something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of | training? | | I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to | visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind | works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" | outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We | all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a | limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly | variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the | same. | pseudalopex wrote: | Some aphantasics weren't born with it. Many have vivid dreams. | So they can compare their own experiences. | | How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical | excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in | that article? | phaedrus wrote: | I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my | mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or | structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of | the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my | mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for | generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I | write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I | thought it would. | | I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be | difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being | just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I | share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the | "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let | me explain: | | I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental | process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around | and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures | and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but | it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete | with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated | in some special way with my train of thought. | | So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once | thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I | did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) | But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious | experience is _actually_ totally nonverbal, or if I am just | discounting things that are actually there or describe it | differently. | godshatter wrote: | I can understand the skepticism. I have aphantasia and am | equally skeptical that most people can actually "see" anything. | When I'm supposed to visualize a beach, for example, for me | it's merely a list of things I would tell the setup crew to | make if this were a movie. Chair, umbrella, lifeguard stand, | ship on the horizon, trail of footsteps along the water's edge, | film it at sunset. | | I have found differences between myself and others, though. | When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a | restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, | but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only | thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have | to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition | happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very | often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope | to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only | remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the | edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when | I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only | coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking | visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can | almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently | throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note | about it. | | It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the | vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a | sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a | complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a | wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" | it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around | an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the | corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if | it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly | tell me they "see" something. | phaedrus wrote: | I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the | person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently, | is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc. | it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them | and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON" | signal. | | So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet | and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite | reason! | | The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of | worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have | the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something | changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I | can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and | I get an extreme _jamais vu_ telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So | I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my | brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT". | | When by elimination I realize no this really must be the | correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this | Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in | my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and | consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing | yourself up a ladder with vertigo. | axby wrote: | Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an | imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of | being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits | like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any | trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some | brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape. | | But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen | often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can | conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past | and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every | now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), | I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and | only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I | see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as | you mentioned. | | I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a | decent description of a criminal or something like that | (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might | struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for | an hour, at least days later. | godshatter wrote: | > I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give | a decent description of a criminal or something like that | (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might | struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for | an hour, at least days later. | | I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the | police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe | someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious. | Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair, | square face, just standing there watching things". It helps | me to remember in case it's important later. | | And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of | an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my | mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll | feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the | phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to | describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it | internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my | name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what | that is like. I don't have that kind of experience | otherwise. | | My mind is a dark, quiet place :) | axby wrote: | Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment: | | I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually | remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also | text based content is way easier for me to remember than | hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times | then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see | someone's picture and their name written down, usually it | sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't | know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what | they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of | numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, | I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to | process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, | usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy | and I'll remember it for a while. | | Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life | if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps | even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in | my career with software, but if my job required me to keep | track of a bunch of things without having the chance to | write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to | really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something | simple like that. Going through a large list of data is | difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself | making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real | time consequences. But luckily for software (and school | assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had | time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my | work/answer. | | Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely | relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a | restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia | at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it. | anyfoo wrote: | Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this | is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in | your head, you do not work with visual representations of | your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do | that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you | trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost | infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you | remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember | where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a | picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is | that impossible as well? | v64 wrote: | Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for | others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely | auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm | thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of | chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while | tuning out the rest. | | I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will | literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two | ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 | in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold | the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is | twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two." | | If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, | I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) | Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp | than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry | and topology. | | Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember | the content, although there are also cases too where I'll | remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the | cover or some detail like that, not because I visually | remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually | committed that book in my mind as "the book with the | bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the | bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in | my mental description. | godshatter wrote: | When I'm working with equations in my head, which I don't | do often, I think of them as a list of terms and what's | done with them. No visual representation, just a memorized | list. For electronic circuits, I would probably remember | what connects with what, but not how they are laid out | spatially. For textbooks, I do remember sometimes that the | specific text I'm think of is found on a left page near the | top, but I can't see it. That's just where my eyes will | scan when I look for it again. Most often I don't, though, | unless I poured over it a lot when learning it. | | I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found | that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than | others and I think it's because most people were trying to | visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it | was just another equation to work with. | whatshisface wrote: | I don't think about the visual representation of equations. | I think about the equations, not in any specific | representation, but as what they are. I think my mental | abilities are roughly average, including my ability to | picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that | people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a | mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only | for images of written expressions that represent equations. | | It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only | paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the | persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's | funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing | average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary | inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than | any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had | those genes. | anyfoo wrote: | And you are able to manipulate complex equations without | any visual tools, just by "thinking about what they are"? | For example mentally multiply a term into nominator and | denominator of a rational function? That's just | inconceivable to me. Where's your "scratch pad" | essentially. To me it works pretty much like it works on | paper, only that the "paper" is in my head, and the | visuality of it all (being able to "focus" on a | particular part of the equation etc.) helps in keeping | the problem tractable, otherwise even a relatively simple | equation quickly becomes overwhelming to manipulate. | | (To say nothing about the other meaning of the word | "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of | Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in | my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it" | without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because | that pun was also too good to pass up). | whatshisface wrote: | You are able to conceive of it, you're just doing it | without realizing what you're doing. Someone with a good | imagination but no math knowledge at all could picture | the same squiggly lines as you can, but without meaning. | In your head there exists both the squiggly lines, and | what they mean. All you have to do is fill in the last | quadrant, which would be holding the meaning without | picturing the lines. I would suggest that you might be | using the meaning scratch space without using the | imagination scratch space every time you think about | something that can't be pictured. | | You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was | picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it | by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is | going, people with bad imaginations would be people with | an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking. | zepto wrote: | Why? There are seemingly plenty of different ways that people | are wired. Assuming everyone is wired the same seems like a | preposterous null hypothesis given how varied we are in every | observable way. | Accacin wrote: | Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it | makes us that little bit more unique. | | I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's | sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like | literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that | happening before I slept. | | Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very | vivid too. | nicoburns wrote: | > That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few | people are wired differently. | | Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem | to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react | wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how | varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if | we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. | Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly | dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just | like the rest of our bodies. | ratmice wrote: | I always wondered to what extent aphantasia affects mundane | tasks, like setting something down, turning out the lights and | picking it back up in the dark. I always seem to use a mental | image of the thing in the space where I left it. | necovek wrote: | That's more a spatial awareness and memory, I think. | | I think I might have "aphantasia" (or I am not trying hard | enough :)), but I can perfectly well find things I left | somewhere in the dark. I could also easily find that place I | got to once through a maze of one-way streets following | instructions by someone else weeks ago by kinda-recognizing | buildings and houses where I need to make turns. I couldn't | describe what those houses looked like for the life of me, but | I could perfectly recognize them once I saw them. | | All of these are things I've noticed in the past, but never put | a name to it (not that I looked). | sneak wrote: | I've read a lot of stuff about aphantasia but I don't know if I | can see things in my minds eye or not. I'm not sure if the | visualizations I can summon are what people are talking about | when they use the term "mind's eye". I would not describe them as | "seeing", more like "memory". | | This is operating with the assumption that people with aphantasia | can still remember what things look like (something I can do). I | guess I can't tell the difference between remembering what | something looks like and what people mean when they say "seeing | something in their head". | | I can remember what things look like that I haven't seen, such as | "a life-size elephant made of gold" because I remember what gold | looks like and what an elephant looks like. I can imagine this | even with my eyes open and looking at other things, but it's | nothing like "seeing" with a "mind's eye". | | Is this aphantasia? | torstenvl wrote: | I'm sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe | that the author cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, | _and_ that he didn 't realize this was odd until adulthood. | | For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also | have to be true: | | - He never heard anyone talk about dreams | | - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads | | - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in | front of the object of their art | | - He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used | and people describe what they see in their memory of an event | | - He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something | was demonstrated visually | | - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or | other code by following their mental image | | - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory | | - Etc. | | It just strikes me as entirely implausible. | _dain_ wrote: | There are similar experiences reported by many, many people. | Check out /r/aphantasia, it's full of people saying variations | on "omg my whole life I didn't realize 'mental images' weren't | metaphorical!!!" Example: | | https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp... | | >Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember | those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) | because they can 'see' the person's face in their memory. | | Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and | contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is | so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have | thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in | complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy- | and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb | activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures | of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We | take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask | whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside | someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, | all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet | another colourful metaphor. | | And then you have people like this | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out | deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or | deluded. | Taniwha wrote: | I'm 63, literally up until 5 minutes ago I didn't realise that | most people (or any people) actually see images when they | imagine things, I'm quite flabbergasted, in retrospect it | explains lots of things | riskable wrote: | Some people see words or numbers in their heads as shapes (that | have no resemblance to how they're drawn). Would it be that | surprising that the opposite could also be true? That they | literally just have a storage location for words/letters and | that's all they "see". They don't have a shape per se but they, | "know them when they see (or write) them." | | You probably use this same cognitive feature when | writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. | Here's a simple example: When you read some text with | parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What | about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly | don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely | different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or | period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a | breath). | | Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there | who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism | that the rest of us use for punctuation? | silicon2401 wrote: | > cannot see in his mind, cannot speak in his mind, and that he | didn't realize this was odd until adulthood | | There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across | the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their | experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's | eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they | may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can | find examples in this very thread. | yboris wrote: | Many color-blind people do not discover they are color blind | until teenage years (or even later). You can live without | realizing you're different even when people use different words | that to them seem to be describing the same thing. | | I recommend reading the classic _The Man Who Mistook His Wife | for a Hat_ by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways | brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For | example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for | example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and | putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is | incomplete). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f... | necovek wrote: | It seems dreams are not affected by aphantasia. | | Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" | while you do that. | | I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things | I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of | features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image | in my head. | | All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that | everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term | "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I | rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, | just on the other end of the curve). | | I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were | never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like | them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly | differently. | | So in short, I could notice that there are some special things | about my brain, but I did not know that this might be | "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at | math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed | other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's | only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have | a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at | the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it). | | I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to | believe that you find it implausible that adults would only | learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop | them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but | I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are | extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a | miniscule part of them. | zepto wrote: | If you find it implausible, you need to simply read the | literature on perceptual changes caused by brain lesions. | | Try reading "the man who mistook his wife for a hat", by Oliver | Sacks. | | Most of your examples don't have any obvious connection to what | was posted. | | E.g. most people don't have a photographic memory and we all | know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head | doesn't require you to visualize anything. It just requires you | not to say what you read out loud. | GistNoesis wrote: | The author didn't say he couldn't speak in his mind but that he | couldn't hear the sound of their voice in their head. | | You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of | thought way of what you are saying but not hear them. | | This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or | play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the | feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling | associated with your eardrums. | | Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons | of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you | can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear | absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin | with some earplugs. | caymanjim wrote: | > - He never heard anyone talk about dreams | | I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but | occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets. | | > - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads | | I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery | involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it | to myself. | | > - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly | in front of the object of their art | | I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I | don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to | draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, | even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific | cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't | recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of | Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to | tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the | real thing. | | > - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN | or other code by following their mental image | | When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about | how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first | 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few | hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 | now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a | good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it | involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks | to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to | remember the underlying information. | | > - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory | | You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all | the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only | person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen | Wiltshire[1]. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire | jfhufl wrote: | Interesting - I may have hyperphantasia? Most of my thoughts are | accompanied by images, and I can rotate and unfold things. It's | so vivid I seem to have two types of synesthesia: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form | https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-rare-humans-who-see- | time-and-have-amazing-memories | sarasasa28 wrote: | I can only imagine very vaguely and for just 1/2 seconds, is this | it? | Borrible wrote: | Everything you 'see' is just in your mind. | | Aphantasia is, some people just can't make their optical qualia | up willingly or their optical qualia lack the image quality of | their visual capacity. | | A lot more people are convinced, what they 'see' through their | eyes is outside their mind, because they can't make it up | willingly. | | But, there is no color outside your mind. | vinceguidry wrote: | Not quite. Color is created in your eyes, by the rods and | cones. What the mind sees comes from the eyes, and color | blindness is usually caused by genetic defects causing the rods | and cones to be differently sensitive than normal. | | Those with color blindness have had luck wearing special | polarized shades turning some color frequencies into others | that the rods and cones can better sense. | Borrible wrote: | So, tell me, what is 'red'? Not the wavelength thingie, I | mean your subjective experience of this qualia. | vinceguidry wrote: | Are you asking me about 'a' qualia, or a 'type' of qualia? | Spinnaker_ wrote: | I always thought "picture in your head" was a figure of speech. I | was also really confused how police sketch artists worked. I have | zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people could | somehow describe features of strangers? A lot of things made more | sense once I learned about aphantasia. | | I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind. | I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing | visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element. | SamBam wrote: | > I have zero mental imagery of even my wife's face, yet people | could somehow describe features of strangers? | | But could you describe your wife's features? | | And if so, do you think it's because you're reciting a list of | memorized facts ("she has brown hair" etc) or because you're | drawing on your memory, even if not visually? | | Could you describe (at all) any major pieces of art, such as | the pose of the Mona Lisa? | Spinnaker_ wrote: | I guess I'm drawing on memory, but not visually. Try closing | your eyes. You probably still have a sense of the shape of | the room you are in, without actually picturing it right? | Like you know how far away the walls are and where the | bookshelf is. It's similar with faces. I have some sort of | "model" of her face in my head, there's just no visual | component. | | And as I read that over, I realize it's a terrible | explanation. I have no clue how to respond usefully. | pxc wrote: | It's like this for me, too. I have collections of visual | facts but they don't cohere into a single visual | experience, really | mercutio2 wrote: | I, too, always thought this was just a figure of speech! I can | visualize the geometric outline of things (size, approximate | shape), but nothing else. | | When I realized many people actually can recall a snapshot of | things, I realized (part of) how they manage to be so much | better at drawing than I am. | | Truly hard to walk a mile in anyone else's shoes. | tartoran wrote: | You seem to have some degree of aphantasia. I do too and have | similar experiences with audio and olfactory recall as you do. | I had once been robbed and when police showed me a few mugshots | I completely forgot what the mugger looked like and my theory | is that since I could not entertain the image in my mind's eye | it was very weak and quickly got disturbed by seeing all the | other faces in photos. Id be a terrible eye witness I think | forty wrote: | Interesting that it's different for sound, taste and smell! Do | you have an internal narrative? | | I think I can kind of imagine what it's like not to be able to | picture images in my head but I always have a very hard time | imagining what people without internal narrative feel like (as | I assume it must be to imagine what it's like to have one when | you don't) | watwut wrote: | > I was also really confused how police sketch artists worked. | | There are standard "algorithms" how to draw people. You kind of | draw standard shapes and then make differences against | "standard". Proportions of peoples heads, eyes, noses and other | features are surprisingly similar among people. | | Sketch artists basically learned very well how to draw peoples | faces specifically and what are important features people | notice. | pseudalopex wrote: | Forensic artists learn how to help people describe more. They | can try different shapes until the witness says it looks right. | And the successes get more attention than the failures. | riskable wrote: | Like many mental traits there's a spectrum: Some people (like | me) have extreme levels of visualization in our heads. I can | picture things I'm imagining in intimate detail which is | (probably) why I'm pretty good at turning code into precisely | what I'm imagining (e.g. | https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise it's a keycap). | However, I have such bad long-term memory that I qualified for | special needs (mental impairment edition) education (which I | did not get enrolled in, for reference). | | I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in _true_ 3D. | I _thought_ it was because of this--and my long term memory | issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces | (or names). I am _not_ the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw | the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have | prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot | of people look the same _enough_ to me that I have difficulty | telling them apart without hearing their voices (I 'm fantastic | with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble | with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind | in one eye that are absolutely _fantastic_ at remembering | people 's faces (and names, obviously). | | So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have | prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a | spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists | don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's | pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason | haha). | | Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is a | question like this? | https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg | jve wrote: | Not parent commenter, but took me maybe 20-30 seconds to come | up with the answer with validating by comparing how each | character stands to each other. | | I can't see images in my head. But at least I can try to fold | it within my imagination. I can at least rotate it like in 3D | computer program. But void is all I "see" in my imagination. | alecst wrote: | Not that it makes me a genius or something, but it's not that | hard for me to picture that cube folding. Or to imagine it | folded and rotated. I did have to slow down a little to make | sure I wasn't making a mistake about the orientation of the | characters. | | What about you? | riskable wrote: | I'm great at paper folding visualization. I know this | because I was given tests like that (by professionals) | twice in my life (99th percentile =). | | For reference, that particular cube folding question is | easier than others because you can take the "shortcut" and | just pay attention to the orientation of the numbers. The | ones that I have to stop and think about the most are the | ones with nothing but colors or (minor) shading. For | whatever reason I find sides with shapes the easiest to | visualize... Even if the shape is the same no matter the | orientation (e.g. a circle). | | Interesting tidbit: I love 3D puzzles and I always try to | visualize what it looks like inside (if it's the type where | you can't see the inner workings) while I'm figuring it | out. I'm almost always _way_ off with what I thought the | inside would look like. Different kind of visualization I | think. Probably has something to do with the ability to | turn physical sensations (i.e. "what you feel") into a | mental image. | pxc wrote: | > a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me | that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing | their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes | naturally when you have trouble with faces haha). | | I am the same way. I'm also highly myopic (I got glasses at | age 4). There are times I've failed to recognize old friends | until they started speaking to me (they did look a little | different from the last time I'd seen them). | | I always assumed that not seeing very well as a little kid is | part of why I sometimes have visual recognition problems, | too. | philsnow wrote: | Very interesting, I got glasses at age 5 and I'm exactly | the same, including not being able to clearly visualize | even my wife's face. | | My last job was 100% remote, and I started a week before | one of the twice-yearly retreats where everybody gets | together in person. Knowing that I'm poor at recognizing | faces and poor at remembering names, I threw together | https://github.com/philsnow/slanki and was able to put a | name to about 50% of the 250 faces I met at that retreat, | which felt absolutely like a superpower to me at the time. | boole1854 wrote: | > Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is | a question like this? | https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg | | Interesting. This question is not hard to solve for me, but I | can't solve it by visualizing the cube rotating despite | having no trouble visualizing the cube in its initial | position. More specifically, when I try to rotate the cube in | my mind's eye, to get it "started" rotating, I have to anchor | my focus on one particular side of the cube, which I can then | rotate correctly. However, this causes me to lose focus on | the other sides of the cube, and I can no longer simply look | back at them to see how their numbers are oriented after the | rotation completes. | | When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times? | Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then | look back at the others and see that they are still correct? | Spinnaker_ wrote: | Very difficult. I can't fold the cube up in my mind. I tried | for a few minutes and just felt frustrated. Instead I needed | to look at angles of the numbers relative to each other and | eliminate wrong answers. | perennialmind wrote: | Same here: it reduces to a logic problem. I can imagine the | transformation, the space, the cube, the rotation | individually as concepts, but all of it is more memory than | visualization and carrying through the shape and | orientation of the numbers seems like magic. | myself248 wrote: | This is an interesting point, because while I find it trivial | to work with geometric objects in my head (see my other post in | this thread), I find it very hard to recall a face as anything | other than "a face". | | I recognize people just fine, but if you sat me down with a | sketch artist (or indeed the sketch-artist sub game in Police | Quest II), I'm at a loss to say whether someone's eyes are | wider or narrower-spaced, whether their mouth is higher or | lower, etc. Sometimes I do notice people's noses in the | abstract and I may have a describable memory of that, and I | think I remember most people's hair shape if not the color. But | "A face with a small nose and long hair" is not really much to | go on. | | Smells, too. I smell just fine, and sometimes smells evoke | instant memories, but I can't name a smell that I'm smelling. | I'm absolutely at a loss to figure out what herbs are missing | from food I'm making, or what I've added too much of. I can't | describe tastes or smells beyond a very basic level. | olalonde wrote: | It's weird, I always considered myself as having a photographic | memory and now I'm wondering if I have aphantasia. I believe I | could draw a scene from memory with quite high resolution and | accuracy. But it's not anything like the experience of seeing | with my eyes. In fact, closing my eyes barely helps me visualise. | I just assumed it was like that for everyone. | giarc wrote: | I tried the linked test mostly with my eyes closed. I don't | 'see' anything, just black. It improved very slightly if I kept | my eyes opened and stared at nothing (blank wall, desk surface | etc). Not to the point where I could suddenly 'see' things, but | I was able to come off the 1 scale of "knowing" I was thinking | of an object. | kraemahz wrote: | Hypophantasia is what limited visualization is called. As with | all things biological it is a spectrum of experiences. | thayne wrote: | I wonder if there is a continuum here. I think that I can | visualize things in my head, but doing so is difficult for me, | and definitely doesn't look exactly the same as if I saw it. And | certainly if you tell me to think about an elephant my first | instinct would be to think of words that describe an elephant, | not summon up images of an elephant. But if pressed I could | visualize a shadowy silhouette of an elephant. And I definitely | think I can visualize movement and actions, although it is | different than normal sight, and there generally isn't a lot of | detail in what the things moving look like. I definitely relate | to not being able to describe what people look like, because | unless I specifically take note of details like what they are | wearing, what color their hair is, whether they are wearing | glasses etc. or I don't remember those details. | causality0 wrote: | _The way I'm wired has given me (and likely other founders and | those in other fields) an edge._ | | This seems like wild speculation. The single cited study is also | riddled with problems, including comparing 2,000 people with | self-reported aphantasia to a set of 200 control individuals from | an entirely different study. | Waterluvian wrote: | I assume that when people close their eyes and see an apple, | there's an entire spectrum of how richly present that Apple is. | Some, like me, vaguely see a colourless "idea" of an apple while | others might even see colour and detail or more. | | If this is accurate, it makes me wonder two things: | | 1. Is there even a unique condition of not seeing the apple or | are you just very far off to one end of the spectrum ? (Perhaps | this isn't an important distinction) | | 2. Are the people who can very richly see an apple more likely to | be artistically inclined? | pjungwir wrote: | > This latest recognition of aphantasia as a neurological | difference is only a decade or so old (although references in the | literature go back to the 1890's.) | | The first time I heard about aphantasia I recalled reading | someone, one of the semioticians I think, perhaps Saussure, | criticizing Locke for talking about ideas as visual images in | your head. "Of course we don't actually see the images," he | wrote. At the time I agreed with him, but maybe he and I both | have this condition. :-) | jstanley wrote: | > If you want to see what aphantasia is like look at the picture | of the Apple. Now close your eyes and try to imagine the apple, | seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you don't see anything, | you might have aphantasia. | | I can imagine the apple, but I can't literally _see_ it. Nothing | I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory | of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features | that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that | everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering | having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia | actually the inability to even imagine the apple? | jcranmer wrote: | The way I would describe things (being a programmer) is that my | actual eye and my "mind's eye" are using different display | devices. The actual eye comes out as a PNG in its full | vividness, but the "mind's eye" only "sees"... something like | an SVG? It definitely comes across that the "mind's eye" is | encoding visual information differently, and words like | "wireframe" or "storyboard" (for entire scenes) seem to be a | better way of describing it than anything else, although I | wouldn't call them great descriptions [1]. | | The most notable difference is that there's no "visual" | encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this | thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"-- | and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can | tell you if that shade is "color | 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd | struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color. | It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in | encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green | square, but something like a color gradient just makes my | "mind's eye" go -\\_(tsu)_/-. | | [1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be | very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on | their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of | their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this | through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye | without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a | minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient | detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail. | Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some | piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed | image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually | doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail | unless prompted. | causality0 wrote: | _Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people | confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing | it?_ | | No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't | consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate | predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the | article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant turning | and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how | significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the | size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare | their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've | never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case. | perennialmind wrote: | Oh that's fun. I imagined a distressed elephant walking | through the office and pulling down ceiling tiles, the wood | floor splintering under the weight. Didn't think about ears. | Attitude, mass, height, and building materials: yes. Ears: | no. | DarylZero wrote: | Take this test: https://aphantasia.com/vviq/ | illwrks wrote: | "You have hyper-aphantasia". Makes sense as I'm a designer | and can very easily visualise things, objects etc in my head. | ud_0 wrote: | The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it | to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because | it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of | mental images are. | | If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what | it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted | version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the | way to the left, or to the center, or what? | | I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels | like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never | as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that | count? | | When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never | a danger of me _not realizing_ that my eyes are currently | closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed | to literally hallucinate scenes all the time? | drcongo wrote: | Same here. I didn't think I had aphantasia at all until I | tried this test and then realised that me "visualising" | something doesn't really bear any relation to being able to | see a visual representation of that thing. Mostly it just | felt like pulling up memories, and in fact when it asked me | to visualise a rainbow I simply couldn't, though I could | "see" one when I thought about a photo of a rainbow I took | not so long ago. But again, that feels more like simply | remembering. | kayodelycaon wrote: | Hallucinations and visualizing are completely different | things. Even in my worst psychotic episode, I knew the | difference between real and not-real. | | The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the | real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source | didn't matter to the rest of my brain. | | People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing | on. | tartoran wrote: | Similar problem here. I actually notice that the imagery is | a fleeting caricature trying to capture what Im attempting | to observe, some kind of CGA resolution image of a lake, | trees and so on. It's also very confusing that I can | actually transpose myself within my imagination where I | barely notice Im blind because I can feel it all around. | Jtsummers wrote: | > When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is | never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are | currently closed. | | Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People | without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their | mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in | front of them, that would be a hallucination. | ud_0 wrote: | I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the | way visualization is described. | | From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one | could assume that the difference is just how much control | people have over the content of the image, as opposed to | the degree of realism. | | A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels | indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control | what the experience entails. From this test, I gather | that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic | image in front of them, but they are completely in | command of what is shown. | SamBam wrote: | I do think there's a difference between visualizing | something clearly and not clearly, though, and this is | what the test is asking. | | The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend | or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's | face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or | different facial expressions she makes. | | If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who | served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up | with something vague. I remember he was wearing large | earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a | blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at | his face, there are parts that simply won't come into | focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the | same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind | spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but | in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way). | | So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction | between visualizing things clearly and not. | Jtsummers wrote: | That's also just memory. I couldn't describe most servers | I've had after a few hours if it was the only time I saw | them. Try to imagine _a_ barista. Imagine a scene in a | coffee shop, it will get filled in with your actual | memories of places you 've been and people you've seen. | Can you produce a detailed (but not accurate to reality) | mental image of such a place or a barista working there | that is comparable to your recall of your wife's face? | (maybe not as detailed, but not as fuzzy as trying to | recall a specific barista) | fsflover wrote: | Or try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367989. | necovek wrote: | Not the GP, but it was hard for me to take that test: I can | describe features of a thing I am trying to imagine, but it | does not show as a visual image at all. So it's all "nothing | at all" all the way in the test. My first thought is "am I | trying hard enough?" | | It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's | really hard for someone with it to understand what's being | asked of them. :) | | I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly | not sure, just like the GP. | jstanley wrote: | Huh, maybe I have aphantasia too, thanks. The lowest level | above "no image at all" is "Dim and vague; flat", which are | not words that I would ever use to describe thoughts. | | But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else _would_ use | these words to describe thoughts. | timvdalen wrote: | That was my experience as well. The things in that test are | not how I relate to thoughts. | torstenvl wrote: | Most people can see things in their mind that they don't | consciously remember as discrete facts. For example, many | people have a visual and motor memory of things like passcodes, | but do not consciously and discretely remember the digits. A | fun example from my own life: when I was a child, during a | spelling test, I couldn't remember where to put the "h" in | "ghost" until I called to mind the cover of this book: | | https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776 | fsflover wrote: | > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people | confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing | it? | | No. See this recent discussion: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277. | jstanley wrote: | That thread seems to indeed suggest that people are confusing | seeing something with imagining seeing something. The point | about the common inability to draw an accurate bicycle seems | to prove it. | codetrotter wrote: | I see why you'd think that but it's not how it works for a | lot of people. As others have tried to explained to those | that think no one can visualize in their head, for most of | us that can visualize it's not a photograph in your head. | And besides, drawing from imagination takes practice. Heck, | even drawing something that is literally right in front of | you takes practice. | Jtsummers wrote: | That point actually proved nothing. It demonstrated that | there's a distinction between: | | 1. Ability to visualize | | 2. Accuracy of memory | | 3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings | | Those aren't _one_ thing, it 's a combination of things. | The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which | people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster | their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends | who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could | produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some | friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save | their lives. It says nothing about their ability to | visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and | ability to draw. | jstanley wrote: | The people who had trouble drawing a bicycle from memory | would presumably have no problem connecting the right | parts if they had a bicycle in front of them, which | suggests they are not accurately visualising a bicycle. | Liquid_Fire wrote: | If I read a paragraph of text and then try to write it | down from memory, I would probably produce something | vaguely similar but not quite exact. Maybe I would change | some words or phrases with similar ones, or miss a part | entirely. The better I understand the underlying idea, | the closer it is likely to be to the original, but unless | I reread the paragraph many times with the specific goal | of memorising it, I'm unlikely to reproduce it exactly. | | Same with visualising a bicycle. I've seen many bicycles | and I know what parts a bicycle has and roughly how they | fit together, but unless I've paid attention to the exact | shape and position of each part, I could at best | visualise a rough approximation of a bicycle. | | I'm not aware exactly what is wrong, just as I would not | be aware of what part of the paragraph I changed. But in | many ways it doesn't matter, because the high-level idea | is there mostly unchanged, just as with the text. The | difference is that if you don't fit the parts in exactly | the right way, the bicycle will not work, but I'm | unlikely to completely change the paragraph by | substituting a few synonyms. | | This is not even getting into the jump from visualising | to drawing, which would depend on my ability to draw. | Jtsummers wrote: | Right, but accuracy _with respect to reality_ is not the | distinction between aphantasia and non-aphantasia, that | 's more about memory or technical knowledge than about | the ability to visualize itself. Someone without | aphantasia can also visualize fantastical scenes with no | connection to reality, either because it is fully | fantastical (dragons and dwarves) or not a real memory | (imagining meeting with someone, but it hasn't happened | yet for you to be able to recall). They could visualize | cartoonish scenes or cel shaded scenes or animated XKCD | stick figures. None of those are realistic, but they | could still be visualized in detail. | fsflover wrote: | I don't see why one can't imagine a wrong bicycle. | housecarpenter wrote: | I'd slightly trollishly say nobody has aphantasia, it's just | that some people make a false distinction between remembering | what something looks like and seeing it. Same as what you're | saying really, but makes people feel better about themselves, | rather than worse. | | It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions | always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the | distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about | a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest | because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it | is. | jhedwards wrote: | > Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people | confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing | it? | | Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and | watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really | any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a | video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the | scene and draw up the details. | | I think it's interesting that the author of the article | suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking | about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well | with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a | system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me | do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II | book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the | equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my | visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me | to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are | definitely advantages for both types of thinking. | kayodelycaon wrote: | > I've found that I can work well with software because I can | visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and | machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. | | I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing | an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math | notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It | requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without | externalizing everything. | alecbz wrote: | > it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people | confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing | it? | | So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind | is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if | that means I have aphantasia or not. | | Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how | vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or | at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question. | I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to | describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more | like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing | this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or | weak. | | But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen | IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g. | But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers | is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now | remembering it. | nicoburns wrote: | > So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my | mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not | sure if that means I have aphantasia or not. | | I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to | remember images at all. | DoktorDelta wrote: | That sounds like antaphasia based on what I've read. You might | be interested in the materials available at | https://aphantasia.com/ | | They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of | Visual Imagery Questionnaire | necovek wrote: | Ok, I didn't need to learn that I might have aphantasia too :) | | Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and | mathematics. | | But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write- | only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I | also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well. | | Now, my dreams are usually pretty vivid, but I see that's | "normal" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia | arkj wrote: | If the condition of Aphantasia intrigues you then you should | check out Blidnsight[1] and Visual Agnosia[2]. Oliver Sacks | book[3] had a humbling effect on the science-knows-it-all | teenager in me. I really thing some of the next paradigms in | computing will come from a deeper understanding of how human | brain handles sensory information. [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight [2] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_agnosia [3] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f... | lkbm wrote: | SSC has an interesting post about this and similar things: | https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e... | | If you lacked some common internal mental experience, would you | know? This guy didn't. In the SSC piece, there's someone who | didn't realize he lacked a sense of smell until high school. | | I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have | some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre" | and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to | me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a | real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of | right and wrong. Make me wonder about how sometimes media will | portray an angel and devil on your shoulders urging you to do | right or wrong. (No one hallucinates _those_ , do they? I've | always just assumed it's a metaphor, but so did the "no sense of | smell" guy!) | pxc wrote: | > I also came across recent tweets about "hey, some people have | some not-under-their-control voice in their head, how bizarre" | and others were like "that's a conscious". It never occurred to | me that the idea of a third-party voice as your conscious was a | real thing in "normal" minds, not a metaphor for their sense of | right and wrong. | | Can you find that tweet? | lkbm wrote: | Original tweet/thread: | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1467359243431215106 | | It was QT'd by someone where I then saw a few replies | suggesting this is a conscience (not "conscious", as I wrote | earlier, oops): | https://twitter.com/Scruffff/status/1467979777038438402 | nonameiguess wrote: | I didn't realize I was lactose intolerant until adulthood. I | honestly never knew having to violently crap within minutes of | eating most meals was abnormal since I'd been doing it my | entire life and not really paying attention to whether anyone | else was. | marstall wrote: | I have vibrant dreams with very detailed renderings of | landscapes, particularly non-existent cities that sprawl out | block after block and mile after detailed mile as I move through | them. In these places, I also experience intense interpersonal | drama, highly detailed other characters, emotions, physical | sensations, thoughts in my head about everything that's | happening, empathy for others, anxieties, desires etc. And the | rules of the reality change, inception-style, every few seconds, | with themes and obsessions that recur. | | but this ability is completely lacking for me in reality. If I | try to picture some of the obvious things mentioned in this | thread - my wife's face, an apple, an elephant - I can, but it's | a fairly muddy 2d image and I couldn't tell you what direction | the elephant's trunk is pointing for example ... | errcorrectcode wrote: | I had this ability vividly when I was <16. It diminished with | age, physiological anxiety condition, sleep disturbances, and | failing antidepressants. I basically lack it completely now. | eloeffler wrote: | A friend of mine spent much time on MUD[1] servers playing and | interacting with strangers. The game theme was fantasy-ish. | | As he moved through the large world of the server he would | repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer | (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some | trait or role that you can have in the game. | | Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work | as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common | on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision | played there, using screen readers. | | Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to | talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I | do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual | image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a | wall of ASCII. | | Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume | that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD A MUD (/m^d/; originally | multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and | multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual | world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing | games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, | and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, | objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions | performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with | each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a | natural language. | simonebrunozzi wrote: | What a great story to read. I would be really curious to know | more about that particular MUD. | | I have normal vision, and have played on MUDs only for a few | years, in my late teens / early twenties. | Taniwha wrote: | oh see-er | ghostly_s wrote: | I have aphantasia...but I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the | first time this year, and since then have had a few moments--I | believe they are hypnagogic states, where I have actually for the | first time in my life been able to _see_ in my imagination. Truly | wild experience. | k__ wrote: | Interesting, I thought there were some discussions lately that | this much more common than people think (i.e. >2%). | toss1 wrote: | This is fascinating to me and it never occurred to me before | reading about it a long time ago. | | My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing. | In those sports it is critical to have a deep visualization of | the course. For ski racing, you will see racers waiting around | the starting gate for their start time with eyes closed lightly | swaying their head and moving their hand in visualizing their | ideal path down the course (we even sometimes crash in those | simulation runs and shake our head and restart...) | | In sportscar racing, an important drill is to drive the course in | your head, making every shift, turn-in point, apex, and track out | point, visualizing and feeling your attitude, balance, the | forces, at every point on the track ---- and do it under a | stopwatch so you know you have a realistic timing of the track | with your car. I could typically come within a second of the real | times, and it was quite vivid, and for 'fuzzy' sections, I could | go back and sharpen the visualization. | | These seemed to me and my coaches as essential skills for the | sport, and I never heard of anyone in either sport without that | ability. | | I want to know if people without that innate capability just get | filtered out early, or if it is trainable. Does anyone have any | data on that? | 0_____0 wrote: | Aphantasia has non-visual forms as well. | | Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a | pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority | of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a | year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since. | | On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about | the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I | can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling | a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is | missing for me. | gamerDude wrote: | And I have audio aphantasia. I can't remember the sound of | anyone's voice and can't recall music. Never had a song stuck | in my head. But I can remember the words and content just no | tones/sounds/etc. | Rastonbury wrote: | Do you like listening to music? | gamerDude wrote: | I listen to music, but only as background. It has caused | some odd dating issues in the past because I don't care | about concerts nor can I recall "our song". But I am also | comfortable in silence and I generally won't notice if the | background music stops. | 0_____0 wrote: | do you have high-fidelity recall of other senses? i've | wondered since i have no olfactory, but high audio and | spatial recall | gamerDude wrote: | I do seem to have a high quality memory in general for | other things. So, maybe that counts? But I haven't really | done a comparison with others for higher ability to recall | different senses. I think its hard to judge due to language | barriers in describing our own personal experiences | compared to others. | totetsu wrote: | Me neither. I realised very young, well before I even knew | visual aphantasia existed. I get where the people lacking | visual are coming from. It's hard to even imagine imagining a | smell.. where in one's head does the minds nose feel like it | is? What's to stop people just imagining nice smells all day.. | Kinrany wrote: | Tried smelling coffee and tea just now. I can recognize them | perfectly, but I can't remember what coffee smells like after | smelling tea. Repeating the process doesn't seem to help | either. | drcongo wrote: | People can imagine smells?! I had no idea! | cryptica wrote: | I think maybe people with this condition over-idealize what it | means to visualize something. | | I think I'm very good at visualization. I can visualize things | and recall visual scenes from my past but it doesn't look | anywhere near as vivid or detailed as the real experience... | Except when it comes to emotions; my emotions are heightened when | visualizing things (especially memories from my past) - I'm | pretty sure that I didn't feel as strongly back then as I feel | recalling the memory (I suspect so because I rarely feel very | strongly about anything in the present). Emotions help make the | visualizations seem real in spite of the lack of detail. For me, | even the appearance of an inanimate object or a movement has a | distinct feeling associated with it. | | My mind doesn't separate emotions and logic. When I react to | things strongly (which is very rare), there is a logical reason | behind it and I always know why I'm doing things and why I'm | feeling a certain way. I'm immune to depression because I can | always enumerate everything that makes me sad and when I resolve | these issues, I always feel happy... Until new issues arise. | | I never got into situations whereby I thought something would | make me happy but it didn't or I started to take it for granted. | If I think something will make me happy, it will make me happy | 100%. | | I usually run scenarios through in my head before I make any | decision; I guess that's also a form of visualization. When I'm | looking at the menu at a restaurant, I visualize myself eating | each dish on the menu (and imagine the smell and flavor) in order | to make a decision. Actually one of my siblings joked that they | always try to choose the same dishes as me when we go to a | restaurant together because it almost always turns out good. | mhb wrote: | The Secret Sense - Asimov | https://archive.org/details/TheSecretSense/mode/2up | harel wrote: | I am exactly how he describes. I cannot visualise anything and I | don't have an internal voiceover. I do however recall abstracts | and concepts. So if I saw an elephant before I'd be able to bring | up the concept of the elephant. Nothing visual, but conceptual. | I've discovered this is a thing (that people actually visualise) | past my 40s. For a while I thought I missed out on some special | fx, but it had no detrimental effect on my life. Maybe even it | does help me see complex software as abstracts easier. Who knows. | It is what it is. | erganemic wrote: | Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly- | impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially | through a text medium!). | | I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are | artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely | despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on | this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 | people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects | 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after | describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife | corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with | shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!". | | I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people | - for starters, people _vastly_ overestimate their ability to | picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a | bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would | if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. | Even if they didn 't have the artistic skill to make a "good" | drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain | to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by | aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're | looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the | affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has | the handlebars in front of the front wheel). | | My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance | artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is | significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed | her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was | watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I | picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my | brain is recalling apples it's seen before and _telling itself to | process that information as if it were coming from my eyes._ Even | though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that | this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I | visualize it in my head, it _feels_ like I 'm seeing it. She | chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying | questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing | too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability | than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience | with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of | structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really | remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm | always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but | she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff | with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, | after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more | trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently | "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self- | fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing | things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same | vividness anymore (she's since "recovered"). | | I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did | have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring | each other that we weren't _really_ mind-blind - but that would | either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting | questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that | make them more likely to be friends :) | riskable wrote: | As I read your 6/7 dinner party example I couldn't help but | wonder if it's just a "birds of a feather" bias: People who | have trouble visualizing things tend to get along well/have | similar interests/beliefs/realities and just naturally often | end up hanging out together. | | You could say that about any sort of human trait: People who | <share trait X> tend to enjoy each other's company. Some traits | having more influence than others (obviously). | vgel wrote: | This is a great point. | | Agreed with your comparison to your wife as being better at | visualization: I think in general "aphantasia" is on a | spectrum, with some people being completely unable to visualize | things, and others hearing about people who can visualize | incredibly well and thinking "If I don't have that, then I must | have aphantasia!" | | It's also a skill: I used to think I had aphantasia. Over the | last ~3 years I've been practicing visualization -- nothing | fancy, just trying to close my eyes and visualize things every | so often for a few minutes. With that low-level practice, my | ability to visualize things has improved a lot: before I had | nothing, now I can get black-and-white shaky images, and | manipulate them, rotate them, etc. | | Still can't do faces though, I can imagine the rest of a person | but their face is just missing. Still working on that :) | kayodelycaon wrote: | I have an extreme ability to visualize, which includes all of | my senses, to the ability to imagine being an animal. Smell, | taste, hearing, limited visual senses, instincts, the feeling | of fur on my skin, and more are all within my ability. For lack | of a better term, I call it my "mental holodeck", which seems | to get the point across. It's more of a virtual machine because | I'm running someone else's brain on my hardware. | | This ability evolved from lucid dreaming I learned in high | school. After eighteen years of deliberate practice (several | times per week), I can drop into this state at will. My real | senses are dimmed, but not gone. If my phone beeps, I will hear | it and likely lose what I'm imagining. | | Despite all of this, I couldn't draw any of it. I can't draw | and I lack the ability to keep a single image in for a | prolonged period. But I can write it. Finding ways of | describing smells or sensations in a way other people can | understand is fun. (My virtual machine can also run | approximations of other people.) | caymanjim wrote: | I don't have any concept of seeing something in my head. I always | assumed it was a way to say "think about this thing" and never | thought people could "see" it in any meaningful way. If someone | asks me to picture an elephant, I don't have any visual | experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me. I can | describe what an elephant looks like. I can draw something-- | poorly--that other people would immediately identify as an | elephant. I can talk about the shape of an elephant, the parts of | an elephant, colors, textures, and other physical properties. But | I can't "see" or "picture" an elephant. | | I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly- | pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" | something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by | seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; | I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like | that. | | Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm | experiencing things differently or just describing them in | different terms. | watwut wrote: | It is not either or. I went from not never imagining things in | visual way to having images popping up in my head by | themselves. The brain started to visualize things, after I | started to learn to draw. I knew absolutely nothing about | drawing and used draw-a-box and youtube tutorials to learn. | | I never felt like missing something and those images dont add | much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much | to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly | big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. | | I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in | your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But | from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know | whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to | specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I | noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of | things and much better at noticing properties of objects around | me. | pseudalopex wrote: | Some artists have aphantasia. So it isn't just a function of | drawing. | burnished wrote: | >> Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about | "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often. | | Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people | authentically go about the process of thinking in a different | way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people | that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was | a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why | people would find that stimulating. | watwut wrote: | It draws that much attention only on hacker news and only | this one specific difference in how people think. | | I don't see general interest in psychology or other | people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then | HN that would care about aphantasia this way either. | pseudalopex wrote: | Search Reddit for aphantasia. Or hn.algolia.com for lots | of psychology topics. Try autism. | SilasX wrote: | _If_ there were a concrete phenomenon that 's consistently | observable, I absolutely agree with that reasoning. But I | don't see that dynamic in discussions of aphantasia. We | can't directly compare subjective experience, so any | comparison is going to be filtered through the language of | how we describe said experience, and so it's that much | harder to conclude whether aphantasia is a natural category | and the extent to which people have it. | | Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and- | fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic. | | Even when people do try to have a productive discussion | about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish | whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking | metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) | casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes | into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is. | | (Before you start guessing, I don't think I have | aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine | pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily | the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on | "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although | I _think_ I 'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do | it.) | | Now, if we want to talk about _observables_ believed to be | associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be | interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or | casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the | condition. | | Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way | to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I | usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste. | jaggederest wrote: | I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in | nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my | mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract | thoughts in visual form. | | My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a | V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, | see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a | complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan | complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to | people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they | left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where | they want it to go. | whatshisface wrote: | Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know | where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that | people ask you to explain how you know where things are. | aaronblohowiak wrote: | Fwiw I absolutely can "look" at an elephant in my imagination, | and sometimes I am even surprised by what it does (like when it | blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) the subconscious mind | can be wild! I can imagine the big gray elephants from the | savanna or the smaller brown ones from the jungles. I have | memories of documentaries that "replay" in my head. When I am | imagining like this, my awareness of the real world fades and I | can't really see what is in front of me. | | In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and | visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors | before they happen in the real world. | codazoda wrote: | Yup, mine tilted it's head flapping it's ears. It was a real | elephant and not a cartoon like Dumbo (I can "see" both). I'm | not sure if that's an action I've seen before or what but I | didn't seem to "request" that image from myself, it almost | acted on it's own. Clearly it's in my mind, so I did it, but | I didn't consciously try to do so. The mind is wild. | burke wrote: | What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from | aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient | or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities. | | If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination: | | * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of | oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and | significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery. | | * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a | photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, | it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force | it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an | elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part. | | * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague | sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some | vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob | over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way | and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue | savanna kind of scene with literally no detail. | | * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think | I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' | at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive | things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5-1fps | discontinuous scene update. | | It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes | from the same circuits that are able to recognize external | images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I | imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at | fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be | surprised by the details of that elephant's visual | presentation. | | It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model | into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like | there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish | those models than I have. | pxc wrote: | > Fwiw I absolutely can "look" at an elephant in my | imagination, and sometimes I am even surprised by what it | does (like when it blinks or squirts water from its trunk..) | the subconscious mind can be wild! | | ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever | happened to me. Wow. | | How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of | research on that? | | These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize | things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions | of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental | images is extreme | drdeca wrote: | Yeah, that's definitely more vivid than what I see, and I'm | fairly sure that it is unusually vivid. I can visualize a | bit, but unless the thing is a simple shape I usually have | trouble "seeing the entire thing at once". | | That's not to say that I don't ever have visual images come | to mind unbidden. | ThrustVectoring wrote: | People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what | they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can | count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can _also_ count | the stripes. | 1ris wrote: | Ok, this is mindblowing for me. When I think of a tiger I | have some kind of visual sensation, but it's extremely low on | information. Like maybe 12x12 or 16x16 pixels. But not sharp | pixels, but fuzzy, colored shapes, or very, very simple | details, like whiskers. Like in a impressionist picture. But | way simpler. | | Never though that this was different of anyone else. | | Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things | i realised that apparently i can have this image only for | about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of | other people aswell. | | Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class, | despite trying. | pxc wrote: | > When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes. | | Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I 'visualize' a tiger, | it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read | your comment I said 'oh, wtf!' out loud | Jtsummers wrote: | Consider sitting outside and looking at a flowering bush or | tree. At first it's just a tree. Then you realize that | there are flowers on it (they were always there, but you | weren't attending to them before). After a little while | you'll again suddenly realize that there are bees buzzing | around the flowers, and a nest halfway up and a few feet | from the center on the right. You, most likely, did not | have all that in your head on your first glance at the | tree. It was just a tree. This is how many mental images | are formed. | | If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always | starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for | (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up | Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. | For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the | face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, | or am asked a question about it, more details will come to | mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a | scene, like from a commercial. | saberdancer wrote: | The way it works for me (I can't visualize like that), | it's like I am writing a story. I can say I see a tiger, | then think about it and write down more details but I am | always consciously adding stuff to the tiger. If I want | details about number of stripes, I need to think about it | and then "write" it. Never do I see something I am not | consciously forming. | | Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights | ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to | a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator | game I played, but it was quite vivid for me. | boole1854 wrote: | For me, and I think for most people, "picturing an elephant" is | very literal. For example, you could ask me to "picture an | elephant" then follow up by asking "what is the elephant which | you pictured doing with its trunk?" To answer the question, I | focus my attention on trunk in the picture in my head in order | to "take in" what it is doing (e.g., perhaps "it is curled | upward but otherwise not doing anything" or it might turn out | that "it is grasping a branch"). | | > Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm | experiencing things differently or just describing them in | different terms. | | Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or | focusing attention on an image in your head in order to | describe it, the way I explained above? | nicoburns wrote: | Do you have visual experiences while dreaming? For me "seeing | in my head" is most similar to those: certainly a visual | experience but with less detail than when I'm actually looking | at something. I believe some people's are much more detailed | than mine, as some people can reproduce scenes in exquisite | detail from memory. | | Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I | don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to | spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will | visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite | like reading from paper, but very similar. | Accacin wrote: | Yeah it's confusing me too. When I asked a friend if he could | picture a red apple he said he could 'see' it visually. If I do | the same thing, I can't see an apple, but I do think about an | apple, and I know what it looks like. | | I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way | :) | tshaddox wrote: | I'm honestly not even sure if someone could describe their own | experience of thinking about visual things with enough detail | that I could tell whether my own experience of thinking about | visual things is significantly different. When you started | talking about having _no concept of seeing something in your | head_ I thought "whoa, that's very different from my | experience." But then what you went on to describe sounds | precisely like my experience. I can make poor but recognizable | drawings of commonly-known objects like animals. I can also | imagine large human spaces I've spent a lot of time in, like my | apartment building or old Counter-Strike levels, with a fair | amount of detail (certainly enough to describe how to | navigate). But now I'm wondering what distinction you're making | between being able to use your imagination to accomplish these | tasks and "seeing" or "picturing" these objects in your mind. | Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual | hallucination of these objects? Surely that ability is | extremely rare, and isn't what people mean when they say | they're picturing something in their head, right? | myself248 wrote: | > Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual | hallucination of these objects? | | That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate | it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might | draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured | from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything | geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it | appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA. | | When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching | equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where | for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a | first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers | admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l | overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions | had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to | other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to | sketching and ordering. | | (environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp- | content/uploads/2016/08/image-... ) | | Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those | onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and | what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of | piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, | who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who | would arrange for a delivery the next day. | | I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a | straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like | having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put | them together. After running it through the fax machine to | get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any | other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, | even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go | do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body | strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; | if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was | probably the best place for me.) | | The majority of installers in the field could do this, though | some were certainly better at it than others. Most would | start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on | the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to | depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one | who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and | pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas | most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from | any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight | out. | | I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing | into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head | was the anomaly. | gipp wrote: | > That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, | rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I | might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant | pictured from, etc. | | I can do this too, but it is not _literally_ a visual | experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual | perception, not visual _sensation_ in the way that a | hallucination does. | | Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my | eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of | something in my literal vision. Which is what some people | are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing | to talk about. | johnmaguire wrote: | I don't know of anyone who can summon an image such that | it blocks their literal eyesight. But in my head, I can | still "see" the image, with definition, color, etc. I can | vividly recall photographs and "see" the colors, lines, | and details of those photographs in my head. I am still | also seeing what is in front of me, though in a more "out | of focus" fashion - my visual concentration is elsewhere. | silisili wrote: | Now I'm curious which is more common. | | > That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, | rotate it around in 3-space | | I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my | class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and | quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were | constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but | rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like | this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely | flustered my brain to the point of switching majors. | tshaddox wrote: | I'm also curious if there is any difference between these | two experiences other than the words each person uses to | describe their own experience. | caymanjim wrote: | > Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual | hallucination of these objects? | | It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's | why I think it may have more to do with the language people | are using to describe the experience than the experience | itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty | accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level. | cj wrote: | If it helps, when I close my eyes I see black/darkness. | | If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks | like, I still only see black/darkness... but I can still | describe the features of the room in very much detail. I | definitely can't conjure up a vivid image in my head, I | would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly | visual experience. Same with recalling what someone's voice | sounds like... I can imagine what someone's voice sounds | like, but definitely can't hear their voice in any | meaningful level of detail, yet I'm still able to describe | the voice - it's more of a feeling than a literal | audio/visual experience. | | I definitely wouldn't describe my own experience as | anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see | black/darkness... (I think) it's uncommon to literally see | things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. | Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is | abnormal? | philsnow wrote: | I have no idea if I'm in the minority of humans in this, | but when I picture something in my head, it has colors, | shapes, and I guess I'm using the same brain hardware as | when I use my eyes to process the "phantasm" of it. My | mental model is that this facility is another "source", | in addition to my eyes, that can be used to pipe sense | data into the visual processing "sink". | | When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The | exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text | file got me thinking about what it would look like if my | eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit | at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I | would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would | look like (given what information I had about things like | whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not, | whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind | of thing). | | Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my | refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I | keep track of whether I'm running out of various things | (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so, | it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I | have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images | are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent | reality, with more familiar things being represented more | accurately. | | It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or | not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're | open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing | it (my parents called it "staring off into space"). | Nzen wrote: | I'll second the first paragraph here. The demonstration | I've come up with involves holding a hand closely in | front of only my left eye. My brain lets me see both | things, but my hand also has a 'transparent' | characteristic when I'm focusing on my right vision. Back | to visualizing, the 'other source' isn't anywhere near as | crisp as the demonstration, and often is a mix of memory | / imagination / caricature / labeling it with the | concept. | tshaddox wrote: | It's still not clear to me if there's a difference | between _imagining I 'm seeing something_ and _actually | seeing something in my head_. When I imagine what it 's | like to see something, of course it has colors, shapes, | etc. I can also imagine what a room would look like from | a particular vantage point (although I may not be as | skillful as it as someone who has practiced doing it and | experimented with computer graphics). I guess I'm still | curious if there's truly any difference in our | experiences. I wonder if optical illusions work when | we're picturing things in our head. | posix86 wrote: | That's so interesting! I did the test linked to in the | article, and I noticed that I am able to "visualize" | object, but have decidedly a hard time to think about how | I would perceive them if I looked at them - so I guess | just opposite from you. | | I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the | perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once. | And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a | tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many | things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual | anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different | sense. | martyvis wrote: | I feel I am the same as this. I often build things from | wood and steel. In order to plan parts to be made, where | to do cuts and make joins I need to think and "see" how | best to do that. I believe I do this quite well, and my | thoughts work out well once I put my hand to my tools and | make what I foresaw. But I don't believe I ever had a | vivid hallucination of what I was making, more a hazy | wireframe that gets the job done | lisper wrote: | Just by way of providing another data point: I was going | down this exact same rabbit hole and my experience | matches your description exactly. | MobiusHorizons wrote: | It's certainly hard to describe the inner workings of one's | mind with adequate detail to compare them to others. However | I believe this anecdote may provide some insight. | | One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide | I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this | several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and | remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of | someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has | partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but | most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems | to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the | elephant or apple in the article. | | I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own | experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's | descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference. | cryptonector wrote: | I can close my eyes and see a picture or even video of any | scene, from any angle, that I have seen before or that I | could arrange the details of in my head, as if it were real. | I don't even have to close my eyes, but it's more vivid if I | do. | | However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or | even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to | recall it, the more blurry it becomes. | | Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real. | I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental | image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind, | but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird. | | The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would | be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with | concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one | might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear | that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind | people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and | even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on | conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament | to the neuroplasticity of our brains. | ksec wrote: | Same here. I could "think" about it, but I couldn't see it. I | just tested this out in a completely dark room. Both with or | without my eyes open. I just cant see it. I cant visualise an | Elephant in my head. Not even the slightest. I never thought | when someone visualise it they really meant "visualise" it. | This is shocking! | | I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within | 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, | thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least | dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a | child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in | my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be | "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only | person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend. | | When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something | similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D | Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. | May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ? | | And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either. | | For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing. | nsxwolf wrote: | Do you just not hear your voice when you think? Are there | words? How do you formulate ideas without words? What happens | when you speak - do ideas just cross some event horizon and | come out as vocalizations? Do you know what the words are | going to be before you say them? | ksec wrote: | Just like I know I am thinking of an elephant, but I cant | "see" an elephant. I know I am thinking about a topic and | precise words I am using like what I am typing out now, but | I cant "hear" the voice in my head of what I am typing / | about to type. | | My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me | mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my | head without me realising I was actually saying it out. | philsnow wrote: | > And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it | either. | | > For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing. | | FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental | narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for | me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it | did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a | mental narrative voice. | ksec wrote: | I have "thoughts" or argument flows through my mind. But | they are definitely silent and messy. So instead of arguing | about it inside my head, I talked to myself, this makes | things much clearer. | | Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice. | tetraca wrote: | I would describe it this way: my mind kind of has a scratchpad | of sorts that's separate from what I see or hear. It's a dream- | like space that you can conjure a vague image onto that's | visual in nature but distinctly different from literally seeing | out of your eye and not in real space. If you are able to | recall and play a song you heard in your head - it's | reminiscent of that, but visual. I often do both. When I was | younger I often visualized words in my head as I said or | thought them. | anyfoo wrote: | I can't imagine doing math or electronics in my head without | _some_ concept of internal visualization. Assuming you do those | things (if not there is likely something else that applies): | When you rearrange equations in your head, are you not having | some visual representation of them (actual equations in an | otherwise empty space for me) that you manipulate? When you | think about a circuit, don 't you mentally think about where | the current goes in an actual visual representation of the | circuit? | | What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember | roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or | whatever was? | | I think the answers to these questions might help me at least | to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a | different description. | irrational wrote: | I have a sort of similar thing. I do not dream. That is, I am | nearly 50 years old and I have never woken up having any | recollection of anything happening from the time I fall asleep | until I wake up. I understand that other people remember seeing | or hearing things while they sleep (from what people describe, | things like falling is a common dream theme). I've never | experienced this. People say, "Oh, you do dream, you just don't | remember it." After reading this article, would they also try to | tell this person that he can see things in his mind's eye but | can't remember them? | | I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure | from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had | an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my | inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my | inability to derive pleasure from music. | | Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music | could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any | way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in | any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music. | I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming. | [deleted] | jccalhoun wrote: | This seems to be a popular topic on HN but I wonder how much of | this is due to semantics. Before I read a story about this I | didn't stop to think that people couldn't picture things in their | mind. But now that I've read a few and seen numerous comments on | it, I've started to second guess myself. I can imagine a couple | gears turning and I would normally have said, "yes I can see it | in my mind" but it isn't really like seeing but it seems visual | in some way. | | So maybe what I consider "seeing" in my mind doesn't really count | as "seeing" for some because that isn't 100% what it is like? | | Maybe I'm just so locked into "seeing" things in my mind that I | can't imagine how it would work if I didn't. | trompetenaccoun wrote: | It's not just semantics, but it seems like a hard concept to | grasp for those who are not affected. And even those who have | it, when they first learn about it. | pseudalopex wrote: | I don't think semantics explains cortical excitability and skin | conductance differences.[1] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research | dhon_ wrote: | I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the author. | Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if I try to | recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can "fill in" | detail by recalling facts about that person (hair/eye colour, | wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and details fade quickly. | | I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have | a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots | of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal | imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a | different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and | makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice. | | One test for aphantasia goes something like this: | | > Imagine a ball sitting on a table. You reach forward and push | the ball and it rolls off the table. Now without changing the | scene, what colour was the ball? What about the table? | | For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin | to stainless steel. My wife will describe a colourful beach | ball on a wooden table with lighting and shadow and describe | the room it's in in detail. My scene was in a void as no room | was mentioned. | saghm wrote: | > I have aphantasia, although to a lesser degree to the | author. Like you I can visualise 3d models in my head, but if | I try to recall an image of someone it lacks detail. I can | "fill in" detail by recalling facts about that person | (hair/eye colour, wrinkles etc) but the image is blurry and | details fade quickly. | | > I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will | have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head | with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my | normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like | it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically | use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with | practice. | | Interesting! I relate quite heavily to first part; I also can | visualize abstract things but have a lot of trouble with | faces. I'm sometimes not able to recognize whether two photos | are of the same person or different people, and I always seem | to think that other people don't look similar when others do | think they do, and think people look similar that no one else | seems to. However, I dream _very_ vividly almost every night, | and I find it so engrossing that it interferes with my | ability to get up in the morning sometimes because in my | half-awake state I'm convinced that the "story" in my dream | is interesting enough that I need to see where it goes. By | the time I'm fully awake, it generally turns out that the | dream didn't make much sense, but often it contained enough | absurdity that telling my friends or family about it is | entertaining for them. | magnusmundus wrote: | This comment is very interesting to me, thank you for | sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you said, and I feel | the phrasing "normal imagination lacking detail" is perfect. | And, (why I decided to respond ->) | | > For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something | akin to stainless steel. | | my scene was similar but opposite: Steel/metallic ball on | smooth white table, ball falls into a colorless void. The | table doesn't even have dimensions really, just has an edge | the ball can fall off. | | I must read more on aphantasia. If you don't mind me asking: | did you decide that this is your condition through learning | about it, or were you "diagnosed" somehow? | dougmwne wrote: | I am on the side that this isn't semantics and is a real | phenomenon. For me, I can hear in my mind very well. I can hear | so well that I can occasionally confuse things I've hear in my | mind's ear for a real sound (did you just say something?). It | very slightly crosses the line into an auditory hallucination. | I can hear music so well that I don't need a radio to listen, | just think of the first few seconds of a song and off it goes | on the jukebox. | | My mental images are nowhere near this clear, but they are a | kind of "darksight" a seeing and a not seeing, ephemeral but | also real and useful for visualization and problem solving. | basq wrote: | I can relate. I'll also get songs viscerally stuck in my head | that will play nonstop for several days straight. And not | only music, I'll occasionally get stuck images as well, | pictures that will sit in my peripheral thoughts for days. | dougmwne wrote: | That's the first I've heard of eyeworms. Interesting! | Mezzie wrote: | Fun fact: I have no mind's eye UNTIL I take Tizanidine. That was | a really weird discovery. | | I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind | until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had | to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense | didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug | fixes that. | | It's VERY distracting. | alfonsodev wrote: | I was practically blind my first years of life too, and have | aphantasia, how come did you started taking the drug, by chance | unrelated ? Did it fix it for once or it reverts when not | taking the drug? I've been only able to "see" in colors and | details, in a state of half sleep half awake, never awake, and | very low res when dreaming. | Mezzie wrote: | I got diagnosed with MS and I take it for my muscle | spasticity at night to help me sleep, so it's completely | unrelated. I have -20 vision with severe astigmatism and was | completely uncorrected until I had eye surgery at 4 to fix | some eye muscle issues. | | It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a | little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind | at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can | vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not | more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I | started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing' | it. | | I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the | side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also | experience. | exikyut wrote: | Oooh. Do you have any particular references you'd link to for | more info about this? | | https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html says that | | > _Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased | muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in | which the nerves do not function properly and patients may | experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and | problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or | brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications | called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in | the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax._ | | > _..._ | | > _This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask | your doctor or pharmacist for more information._ | | I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the | point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to | follow/copy bits of it :) | | I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've | been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which | naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of | subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations | between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming | language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to | unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious | level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar | pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I | can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable | intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg _recreational_ options) to | shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost | to helping me reset stuff. | Mezzie wrote: | I don't, sadly. It was a complete accident. I have MS and | take Tizanidine for my muscle spasticity; being able to | imagine things is just an odd side effect. I also can't | imagine there's enough formerly-blind people with MS to test | this on with science. (I'm a statistical oddity!) | | One side effect of tizanidine at higher doses is | hallucinations, so it would seem to do SOMETHING with your | visualization center, but idk what. | | For your autistic difficulties, I'm curious if finding | resources for people that have gone blind/deaf might help. I | know it sounds weird, but as a visually impaired person, we | thought I had Asperger's for a while because I literally | couldn't see body language well enough to read social cues, | and I found it really helpful to look up information on how | to 'read' that information elsewhere. Likewise, if somebody | goes deaf, I'm sure there are lessons on how to do things | like read more into body language. It just might help explain | a lot of things that neurotypical people take for granted. | | Also biology: I find it really helps me to remember that | humans are sacks of hormones and that sometimes when they're | silly it's not me being wrong. They might just have gotten a | surge of adrenaline and had a knee jerk reaction, or they | might be overstimulated. I know I tend to forget humans are | embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies | will allow. | zafka wrote: | I really love your understanding of the biological effects | on human interaction: | | "I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic | out of them than their bodies will allow." | | Thanks for today's smile. | [deleted] | lavasalesman wrote: | I don't have aphantasia but if I never learned about the mind's | eye from other people I think I would have used it almost never, | just sometimes as a memory aid. Everything I think about is done | abstractly; ie words in books and conversations take on no image | in my mind, only the ideas transfer. After learning about how | imagery springs to other people's minds when they're reading, | conversing, etc. I've tried to do it myself and it is possible | but always a conscious effort and usually tiring. The benefit for | me is that images are more memorable than ideas alone so my | recall of the things I try to visualize improves if I do it well, | and has led me to try things like diagramming the things people | say, also improving recall and understanding. | jp57 wrote: | I used to wonder if this was just a difference in semantic | understanding of the word "to see", just as two people might | argue whether a color is blue or green or on what side of some | arbitrary line some liminal experience falls. | | The thing that changed my mind was that the aphantasic people | I've spoken with say their dreams have no visual component. They | don't have a visual experience when they dream. My dreams are | intensely visual; I am absolutely seeing things when I dream. | pxc wrote: | > the aphantasic people I've spoken with say their dreams have | no visual component. They don't have a visual experience when | they dream. My dreams are intensely visual; I am absolutely | seeing things when I dream. | | I don't think my dreams have no visual component, but it's | often the case that certain visual properties are just not | filled in. Like someone's shirt might just not have a color in | my dreams. Not grey, not transparent, and not like everything | is black and white. Just that it didn't any color in | particular, just didn't have that feature ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-14 23:00 UTC)