I still have a hard time believing this is actually real. I also don't see how you actually could do many jobs with this condition.
At least I couldn't imagine doing any job I ever head without the ability to manipulate visual information in my head.
I have aphantasia, and I don't feel handicapped at all. The only thing where I really notice differences is when trying to describe people. Since I can't visualize them in my head, I can only describe "known facts", like "they have brown hair". I would make a lousy crime witness...
When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame.
It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.
Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.
If I think of basically anything technical I get an image in my head. Any algorithm I write first exists in my head as a visualization of what I want to do. If I can't visualize what is going on I can't understand it and am in a state of confusion.
I might not have complete aphantasia, when trying to imagine an apple I struggle to imagine it beyond a circular form with a rod pertruding from an indent at the top. No color, no texture. As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
But I don't feel like I am impacted in imagining simple algorithms. I also construct them of very simple forms and rearrange them in my mind. I also feel like it is a lot easier for me to imagine things „automatically“ due to it being memories or being a byproduct of thinking about something. But my mind struggles constructing these images at will.
Also taking a pen and drawing these things up can replace some of the missing imaginary power :)
> As soon as I try to add more detail the previously imagined details dissapear and I have to circle back and reimagine them. Like having a very limited amount of draw calls every frame.
This matches my experience - I think of it a bit like a really slow CRT, the phosphorescence fading before the image can be composed.
It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
Interesting. My wife swears she has no visual mind, but she has remarkable spatial awareness when it comes to “this object will fit in that space, and must go through this sequence of manoeuvres to reach it” - she’d have Dirk Gently’s sofa up the stairs in a whistle.
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
There is a lot of evidence that aphants score higher on spatial reasoning tests than those with vivid visual recall and are over represented in fields like math and science.
These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.
Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.
Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.
> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.
You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?
(not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen before"). I don't see how any of these wouldn't still be considered visual mental imagery and I'm starting to think that the people saying there's a semantics issue here might have a point.
When I 'visualize' it's not an image at all. It's the concept of what the image would be showing, which the above posters have called a graph or schematic. But that's an analogy, and not to be taken too literally. I don't visualize a schematic. I instead feel the connections and relationships between concepts. It's entirely non-visual.
I see, it sounded like you were saying you were visualizing a schema[1] (not schematic) of a house but thought it didn't qualify as visualization for some reason.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
I think this is where I go by default, and I've described it before as a low-resolution wireframe. Only the particular part I'm paying attention to is there but I know what's around it and can shift focus as needed.
Almost like rendering a 3D image, but stopping early. I can also go full color with effort but it's generally unnecessary.
This is spatial reasoning, no visualization required. I have always had exceptional spatial reasoning, and while I can visualize it quite well, it is entirely unnecessary for function. My brain contains a detailed model of the topology of space that is quite separate from what the space actually looks like and can reason about it intuitively without visualizing it. This makes things like navigation easy even in places I have never seen before and therefore can’t visualize — I don’t need to know where I am to not be lost.
You're still describing it as an image. I think it would be more accurate to say that you feel the connections between the represented concepts as might be illustrated on a blueprint. But it's a non-visual experience.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker.
When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
Wait, do people see images of a clock in their mind? Like you, I know spatially where the hands should point so I assume this is what “seeing” is. Do people see a clock… like a legit visual when they close their eyes?
There’s nothing visual. There’s word association: painting, woman, brown hair, Louvre, Da Vinci and so on. Also potentially emotional response too, I’ve never seen it so I don’t have anything like that.
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts. Their response to thinking about the Mona Lisa is the same as yours. You know which way she faces, don't you?
Both my wife and one of my co-workers experience hi-res images superimposed over their actual vision when prompted (and occasionally involuntarily). This opposite end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia[0]. There are accounts in this thread of people having trouble reading books because they're too caught up in the visuals the story creates in their head (something that same co-worker has also mentioned happening).
I just responded to you elsewhere assuming that you're operating from a baseline experience of depending on visualization, but this comment has made me think you might actually also lack it, and that your assertion that aphantasia must be debilitating is from an assumption that the lack we're describing is something beyond your experience. Since it's all a matter of your internal experience, though, it's impossible for me to know.
Indeed, I just wrote a sibling comment before I saw yours about the same phenomenon, hyperphantasia. I don't think that the parent is right that it's just "memories and concepts," it actually is vivid imagery for most people who don't have aphantasia. It does seem like the parent has some sort of aphantasia, just not as severe as seeing nothing, it seems to be more of a spectrum rather than a binary.
> I think you believe that "normal" people have some magic hi-res virtual movie projector that superimposes crystal clear visions inside their heads. No, it's all just memories and concepts.
Some people do, hyperphantasia. I can do this, perfectly visualize the details of the Mona Lisa and examine it from any angle in my mind's eye. If I am in a semi-lucid state while nearing sleep, I can do it even more intensely, as the other day I was visualizing waves bouncing around in a maze and I could see every single bounce.
However, you're right that most people cannot do it so vividly, but it is not the case to say that it's simply memories and concepts, it actually is images and video inside their heads.
> How can you be sure that you actually see the details, and that you are not merely experiencing the feeling of seeing those details?
Can you describe the difference to me based on your experience? I don't quite understand what it would be, because in my mind's eye, I can literally see the entirety of the Mona Lisa. It does not feel like a "feeling," like happiness or angriness, those are what I'd classify as feelings.
> Have you tried drawing the Mona Lisa from various angles? To what level of detail can you comfortably reproduce it?
I don't draw so it would be limited by my drawing ability, but I can reproduce it pretty well if I tried hard enough, as I can visualize it completely in my mind.
It's probably impossible to tell the difference (which would explain the lack of understanding of opposing groups in this thread), unless one tests their ability to actually see the details instead of merely believing that one sees the details.
If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
Note that I'm not interested in memory aspects here. If one can't differentiate minute details, yet still see them highly realistically, then what exactly is it one sees? Probably not the same as the real thing or a photographic image.
A follow-up question would be whether the envisioned details are stable enough to draw or reason from, or whether the image keeps changing in one's head. In the latter case, the process of phantasising may be more akin to what diffusion models do.
> If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.
I see what you mean, yes, it's not eidetic or photographic memory when I see it in my mind, I can't see all the small details like that, but I can see it as if I took a picture, not an extremely high resolution one that shows every brush stroke, but more akin to something like this photo's level of detail (I can visualize the people in the crowd as well) [0]. I might even say that I cannot see the details because I actually have no knowledge of them (exactly how many folds or creases there are), than being unable to visualize them entirely. For example, I can see the Mona Lisa with 4, 5, 6, folds in her sleeves, all different images in my mind. Some people however can see every crease exactly as it is but that's much rarer, it's photographic memory, and it's not really what I'd call a normal person's (without aphantasia) experience. It is likely even trainable with more exposure to the actual underlying artifact such as observing the painting in-depth and remembering via visual snapshots what it looks like.
There are others with aphantasia, perhaps milder forms of it, who cannot "see" the Mona Lisa as a photograph, they just see a blur or something more akin to curves and lines that they must focus on, sometimes without color. These people would have less stable images in my mind, but generally my images are pretty stable. I'm curious to hear about what you can see in your mind's eye. Based on what you were saying, it seems to me like you're more on the belief or feeling side, or is it that you can completely see an image in your mind that's stable?
Most certainly. In the first case one can actually use data to base decisions on. In the latter, one is merely hallucinating something which has less information value.
Allow me to try again: in the first case you actually see the details in your mind, and you can reason with them, by separating out single details, focus on them, and reproduce them in a meaningful way. This would allow an artist to form a highly detailed image in their head, and then reproduce it on paper. I think this is very rare, if possible at all. (Of course this is possible with simple imagery, but we are discussing photorealistic copies of the Mona Lisa here.)
In the latter case, one assumes to see details, but in fact one does not, and one cannot focus on details, nor reason with them.
I'm painting a black-and-white distinction here, but I suppose that in reality it is even more complex.
Does this make sense, or do you still insist that there is no meaningful difference between these two interpretations? In that case, could you point out where you think my reasoning goes wrong?
All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise. The brain is never a lossless memory replay device, even if it feels like it to some people.
But my original point was more that the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise. There isn’t a homunculus in your head with a little film projector.
> All real people (not machines with lossless recall) are actually the second case, even if they think otherwise.
I tend to agree, but I suppose that the level of lossiness varies from person to person, and depends on training and concentration.
> the feeling of seeing something is all there is, whether you interpret those feelings as visual or otherwise
Interesting! Would you say that the same mechanism applies to the feeling of hearing or tasting things? Or are those fundamentally different from visual experiences?
And what about observing the real world, is that the same experience as replaying something in one's head, but using a different input source?
Nope I didn’t realize she was facing a particular direction. I’d consider that a lack of knowledge. But if I did again it would just be words.
I don’t believe that people have a high res magical image. I believe there’s something that feels like visual stimulation which is used as a reference for information. I don’t have anything that seems remotely visual.
Forget the Mona Lisa, maybe you've never seen it even in a book. Do you know what the shape of your country (like from a map) looks like? Of course you do, and it's not because you went around and did your own border survey, it's because you've seen the shape on maps thousands of times, and you can picture it in your head.
I've seen the Mono Lisa in Paris, twice. And no I have absolutely no idea which way she faces as I never bothered to commit that factual bit of knowledge to memory.
It's definitely real - I just need to draw/map out things on tos like drawio all the time when things get too complex to hold in my head as just memorised words and relationships
It cracks me up —- every time this topic comes up, a few people chime in to say that people who claim they can visualize things are just lying.
No dudes, we can see the Mona Lisa just by thinking about it. Quite literally. I can see Luke and Obi Wan sitting in the hut discussing the Force, and that blue hologram of Carrie Fisher, in detail. And of course there’s audio, now the Cerveza Cristal theme is rattling around my head.
The “screen” even has a location, it’s behind my eyes, maybe an inch above and ahead of my ears. Someone else in this thread said something about “closing your eyes, if you just see light…” no, that’s wrong, the picture is in a different place entirely.
(I’m probably a two or one on that “red star” test.)
My "screen" isn't anywhere in space. It's in my internal world. If I want to see only it, I take a step out of reality, into my head, and there it is. Doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or closed, there's just another reality I can enter.
I can superimpose things from it on normal reality too though, wherever I want them. They're in all three dimensions, like I can walk around them, or just copy the entire scene wholesale to my inside mind and move it about while I stay still.
It wasn't until I learned about aphantasia that I discovered I'm on an extreme end even of the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, but it made sense of the fact that as a child, I had a lot of trouble recognizing when I was awake vs. dreaming. I was pulling things into "reality" from my imaginary space as easily awake as most people do while dreaming.
When I was 5 years old, a child psychologist gave me a standard-face watch and told me to practice looking at it whenever I wasn't sure whether I was awake. When I was awake, I would be able to read it. When I was dreaming, I wouldn't be able to. It worked!
I still remember the night in my late 20s when I was absolutely sure I was dreaming (I'm usually a lucid dreamer). By this time I had long since stopped relying on the watch to tell when I was dreaming, because years of life experience had made it much easier to tell, but I still wore a standard-face watch due to years of habit. That night I dreamt I was standing in a pool, pouring water back and forth between my hands. I looked down at my watch and it was 11:37.
When I woke up, I kid you not, the watch on my bedside table's battery had died and it was stopped at 11:37. I've been able to read books and clocks while sleeping ever since.
Sounds like you actually have the opposite, hyperphantasia, perhaps even of an extreme kind. I also lucid dream, very vividly, but I cannot superimpose things from my mind onto my visual plane, it is more like the above parent for me, it's in a separate area from the visual plane altogether, and I suspect that's most people except for those with hyperphantasia.
Yes, from what I've heard from other people, I have pretty extreme hyperphantasia.
The only other people I've talked to/heard of who experience something similar also have one or more kinds of synesthesia, which I don't have. I can pull anything from my inner world into the outer one and vice versa, but the things are only themselves. Numbers and letters don't have colors, smells, or personalities. Music notes aren't tactile. Nothing like that.
That's interesting, how detailed are your models you pull out to observe? Are the models static? It's like you have your very own mind-linked AR setup.
They're as detailed as my attention to them. If my eyes stay open, I can add details to the model. It's not like taking a photograph I can look at later, so for example, if there were a playing card on a desk, and all I had consciously noticed was that it was a playing card, not that it was the queen of hearts, I wouldn't be able to close my eyes and then determine what the card was from the model.
But it's not static either. I can manipulate it at will. I can move around the space, or move the space around me. There will be more details if it's a space I know well, because more things will have entered my awareness over time, but I can also make educated guesses, like assuming the legs on the back of a table probably match the ones on the front even if I haven't seen the back.
I was actually an adult before I realized not everyone has this. Even then, at first I thought only people who had aphantasia didn't have it. I thought it was totally normal to have an inner world as detailed as the outer one. Now I kinda just think everybody else is missing out!
That makes sense, for me I can do everything you talked about, including having them as detailed as my attention to them and doing spacial manipulations, but I simply cannot bring them into the real world so to speak, to superimpose them on my vision. They still exist only in my mind's eye, the plane behind and above my visual plane, as the commenter said above.
Yeah, I don't have a division between the planes unless I choose to. I can separate them, but it's just as easy to keep them together. I think of them as the "inside" and "outside" planes, the only major distinction between them being that other people can only see things in the outside plane. They're not separated in position unless I want them to be.
For what it's worth, I can also hear them. I carry on conversations with people who aren't physically in the room all the time. For example. (My doc assures me that this is fine as long as I know they're not in the room and I don't trust what they say without verifying!) It's extremely useful for bouncing ideas around, even if it's really only an elaborate way of thinking about something by myself in several ways. I find it intuitively easier to discuss something with another person than just to sit and think about it.
I will say it's not much of a tactile sense, though. I can use my hands to manipulate things if I want, but I don't feel them nearly as clearly as I can see and hear them. I guess I also just don't do this as often, because how something physically feels isn't usually terribly important to me. Same reason I look at and listen to a lot more things for information in the outside plane than I touch.
I draw pictures. Had some difficulty dreaming up a part to create in engineering school but 3D cad programs made my own shortcomings irrelevant.
We had a 'intro engineering' class that taught orthographic drawing (by hand, about a decade ago, so thankful for it) which included puzzles on what the various 2D views should be given a 3d object, and the opposite direction. Holy crap those were so hard for me, but picked it up with practice.
I have visio open constantly at work. Lots of mind maps, flow diagrams. Take lots of pictures on vacation because the visual memories are basically gone as soon as my body is.
The 'language is a tool for communication' thread from today has some discussion on different types of thinking. For example it was inconceivable to me that someone would visualize words in their head, but I guess that's a thing for some people.
I do have to ask people to draw me a picture occasionally when they're trying to describe something. Don't need a lot of detail, just a rough sketch and I can figure out the idea.
I can confirm that this is real. It also isn’t much of a problem job-wise.
I can’t do creative work like drawing a picture, but I can (and do) think up algorithms and write code. I would describe it as: I can’t do creative visual work, everything else is fine.
Imagine thinking in concepts instead of images. I can't visualize a hammer or a face, but I don't have trouble with a multidimensional array or a graph.
I can't visualize anything. If I close my eyes, I just see some vague light coming through my eyelids. I can "imagine" for a lack of a better word, the graph and all the nodes and edges "existing", and can reason about its properties based on that.
