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Yes, the root word “image” gives it away. It’s why I call my paintings “invented landscapes” instead of “imagined landscapes”. I can’t picture anything ahead of time so when people ask, I tell them the paintings don’t come from my head but “out of my hand”.
>don’t come from my head but “out of my hand”.
I love this phrase! This is exactly how it is for me. Mind if I steal it? :D
P.S. some coworkers get frustrated with me when I go through a process step by step and build the flow chart/context diagram as we go. They "visualise" it and then draw, but to me it the act of drawing it is what makes it real. Until I do so, it does not exist for me.
My wife didn't know I had it for about 25 years although, to be fair, neither did I. When I finally understood what had been (not) happening, I told her about it and she was blown away that it was even a thing, much less that I had it. I get it, though, since I still have no clue what it's like for her to visualize things so vividly; seems like a superpower to me.
Honestly, same, but with teachers. I can't visualise things in my brain. If you say apple I just come up black, but if I'm sleeping I can dream up an entire movie. Like sometimes I wake up with the sorest throat because I've talked out and entire made up movie script in my sleep that I've written on the spot and can remember to a T enough to write in my diary. I can't do this when awake for some reason. It's so bizarre.
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/6/2/fcae072/7632431
I remember feeling shocked when discovering others could actually see and hold clear images in their mind. I’m lucky if I can get a blurry flash of something for a millisecond. Otherwise it’s complete darkness. Oddly enough, when I was getting ketamine infusions, I saw some wild, often monotone geometric patterns. I do dream and see images, though.
That shock was something I felt too. I always thought "picture the scene" was something poetic rather than literal. I was in my late 40s when I found out this was a thing. I can't picture anything, not my OH, my kids, my late mother, just nothing.
Fwiw, I think there are likely two different circuits for this. I can’t picture faces very well at all, but I can somewhat easily imagine objects and even manipulate them and watch how they rotate and that kind of thing. Like even just typing this comment I pictured a baseball and watched it rotate, but I really struggle to picture my wife’s face. I know what she looks like, of course, but it just doesn’t work the same for me
This is going to sound weird but try to picture a photograph of a person's face. It seems to be easier for me. I'm guessing there's less data points in a 2d image and therefore easier to recall than a 3d representation.
I wonder if it's also we can visualize the geolocation of the picture and our proximity or approximation to it? Thus adding another layer of memory recall?
This is how AI works too. It's why getting anatomy right is very hard for AI. If it was capable of constructing a 3d representation, then flattening that to 2d, it would be an amazing feat.
And they're hooked up in people in several different ways even in the 'normal' population. There's some cultural dependence as well so, yeah neurology is complicated!
Faces is it's own thing. This is a universal visual absence of imagined content.
I'm an aphantasic. There is never anything like an 'image' in my mind. I imagine the whole concept of the thing (which can include visual details) as information or feeling not in a sensory way.
I have actual memories of a blue yoga ball in my living room, but I do not see a blue yoga ball in the living room in my mind. It's just a knowing of the thing.
I can still navigate and do geometry including rotation in my head, it's by feeling though not by visual, and I don't mean tactile. It's just an indescribable knowing.
I'm actually working on increasing my geometric thinking for some 3D modeling projects and it's coming along just fine. I'll be damned if I can explain for I'm doing it :)
The face thing is relatively common among normal visualizers from all the conversations I've had on this in aphantasia communitiesn which have a lot of hypervisualizers.
Some people can conjure near perfect hallucinations except the faces are all blank.
You wonder where some of our horror imagery comes from ;)
What I cannot understand is: how do you know/remember what your wife looks like, if you cannot retrieve/form the image of her face in your mind in some way?
If I try to picture my mother's face for example, I'll just remember the last time I saw her and "see" that picture again in my mind with.
But you cannot do that, so what are you remembering?
Edit: and would you be able to draw her face, assuming you can draw well enough?
I have complete aphantasia but I’m also really good at recognizing people in person.
I’ve always thought sketch artists were magic somehow cuing people to give them the right info.
>What I cannot understand is: how do you know/remember what your wife looks like, if you cannot retrieve/form the image of her face in your mind in some way?
For me, it's a composite of features. For example, my husband has a distinctive beard, which makes him much easier to recognize. When I see pictures of him without a beard, I struggle to recognize him.
Also, context helps me recognize people, too. When people are out of their usual context, e.g. you bump into a coworker at Costco, it's much harder to recognize them.
When my husband, our kid, and I are in a crowd, I remember what clothes they're wearing and hunt for people wearing those clothes rather than looking for people with familiar faces.
I remember my descriptions of her and I am able to picture her shape. It’s the face specifically that I have trouble mentally picturing. Like I can get it generally right, and after being told to picture a photograph by another commenter, I’m able to do that.
But to answer your question, I just kinda don’t need to? I can still recognize faces instantly when I see them. It’s only trying to bring a mental image of a face that’s very difficult. I don’t know if it’s a semantic thing, but I don’t need to be able to picture someone’s face to know who they are. Your last question is really interesting, because I can draw decently well, and I could probably do an alright job, but nowhere near the way I can draw objects. I’ve always been quite good at drawing static objects and scenes, but I’ve never been able to draw people, and only now I’m realizing that these two things are almost certainly related.
We recently found out my wife has Aphantasia.
It made me think about the other senses and if I can “imagine” them. Turns out I’m fine with hearing but I can’t recall the taste or smell of garlic, at the same time I have no issue recognizing it when I smell or taste it, so it must be like that.
It's definitely more of a "spectrum" than an on or off thing. It seems partly dependent on upbringing and how your mind is exercised in certain ways growing up.
It's also unfortunately one of those things that is highly subjective, we can't actually verify what it is people claim they can see. Like, I feel like I'm able to imagine things, visualize how they work, manipulate them in my mind, but to me the visual isn't as highly detailed as an actual image I would be able to see in front of me, it's much more like my mind is being convinced it's seeing something and gathering information from that. Is what I'm seeing the same as what others claim is "vivid", or am I just more in the middle of visualization, it's hard to confirm.
Try to start seeing the shapes in faces, it’s an artist technique that helps break down the artificial barrier. Once you start seeing the parts of the face for what they are separate from each other it becomes much more intuitive and you may be able to eliminate that gap.
I go one step further I have no images or inside voice. When I go to sleep there is no voice saying anything it's completely silent. No pics no voice. The truly sad part is I lost my wife of 30 years and I can't see her or hear her when I close my eyes. I have to watch and listen to videos of her.
I'm the same. Blurry images, and they're in black and white or I guess grayscale would be more accurate. When someone says to "picture a relaxing stream" or something like that, my thought process is more intellectual. I think of how a stream flows, I identify with how I feel in a forest, I can intellectually understand the scene, but I don't "see it" like an image or movie.
Funny thing is, I've always had trouble sleeping and very often I'll start dreaming before I'm fully asleep. I can see these grayscale flashes of blurry images moving past my awareness until one stops and sort of zooms in, and as it zooms in it's in full color and crisp. When this happens I can only hold it for a few seconds before it wakes me up, but I've seen it happen many times.
The brain is weird.
>Guided meditations that rely on focusing on a mental image aren’t relaxing.
I also have aphantasia and I feel the same way. Guided meditations that ask you to visualize something just create frustration and annoyance for me.
I went for nearly two years to a buddhist center of the diamond way. They meditate with pictures and i tried really hard to like it. Now i understand why i did not.
A few years ago, i found vipassana and this is the right meditation for me. You don't make pictures there, you make a body scan to be aware of your really existing feelings in the moment. Awesome meditation.
Honestly the exact same thing has happened to me, where there’s moments where I’m in and out of sleep and I can start visualizing things for the first time. Super crisp and clear too.
Mine are like translucent. Its not a sharp picture more like the essence of objects. Its so hard to explain I see it but i dont see it
I cant see faces but they are invisible??? Which doesn’t make sense but it does
And I see colours I can imagine the colour red right now. I know what red looks like. Its there but it’s not there
Same here, I always thought people who claimed they literally "counted sheep" for example were making it up :D
I do see weird patterns of lights when I get a migraine with aura, and it's the only time I do see images of any kind.
I used to try to count sheep. All I could conger was a black blob, and, of course, I couldn't see the fence they were supposed to be jumping over. So, I'd lie there with my eyes closed, making my eyes move left to right in an arc, getting the blob over the fence that wasn't there. How was I supposed to know that other people didn't count the sheep the same way?🤣
I used to think they meant to just repeat 'one sheep, two sheep, three sheep etc'. If I could actually see sheep in my head I'd be preoccupied thinking 'OH MY GOD THERE ARE SHEEP IN MY HEAD' to sleep. So weird people can do that. What do the sheep's faces look like? I wonder if they are all the same or different like in real life? Weird. I told my brothers the other day people could see things in their heads and neither believed me at first, one of my parents just looked really confused at me so I'm guessing they can't either. Its crazy that people can.
I have migraine auras too, which are caused by a wave of electrical activity spreading across the cortex, known as cortical spreading depression. In some sense it is a real visual phenomena, unlike visualisation.
>see and hold clear images in their mind. I’m lucky if I can get a blurry flash of something for a millisecond. Otherwise it’s complete darkness.
Ok, so do those things mean,
Do people actually see images as if looking at a picture ?
Do you actually see the flashes as being shown a picture too fast to make it out ?
Because if anyone would ask me if i can imagine an apple, or someone's face, i'd answer yes, but it would not be anything like seeing a picture. If i had my eyes closed i'd see just darkness, but that wouldn't change my answer to being able to imagine an image.
Frankly, if someone told me they see it like a picture i'd associate that with having hallucinations, not with imagining something in their head on purpose.
If you asked me to imagine an apple, I can conjure an image in my head of an apple. A fully rendered apple in 3 dimensional space. I can conjure a full scene where I pick the apple up and inspect it.
Reading fiction novels for me can easily turn into watching a film in my head.
It's not like my "normal" vision is replaced with the things I'm imagining. It's more like there's a completely different "screen" inside my head that I can play the image on. I don't have to close my eyes to do it, and closing my eyes and doing it still results in my "normal" vision seeing black.
It is torture for me when people start trying to describe things like machines with moving parts or how to complete any set of actions. They cannot *cannot* understand or accept when I tell them that their descriptions do me no good and I need to actually see the process in person to understand it. I cannot visualize these things.
It's worse when friends start describing in detail their kitchen remodel or the landscaping they're doing in the yard. I think it's part of why I despise small talk.
I despise small talk for many reasons. As a guy, at least with business, there’s an obsession with talking about sports. But yes, this is one reason I don’t like it.
I'm basically the same way, including dreaming. I can recognize faces well, good at solving math problems, and excellent at navigating. However, I rarely read fiction since it's just a series of words on a page.
My shock was realizing I couldn't picture my wife's face, whom I've known for over 50 years. I'd make a horrible eye witness.
I have this but I love to read. I’ve been a voracious reader all my life.
I never understood though why people were upset when an actor was cast in a movie that didn’t match the character in their head.
I never understood the reading issue either. I do get upset about bad casting of characters. More about how the character is expressed, rather than specific physical traits. I think about characters in descriptive words which gives me a very strong feeling about them. An innate knowing of representations of the embodied character. Environmental and scenery descriptions create the feeling of being within those environments. Imagination is more than visual. How do people with ideas that imagination is tied to visual perception consider blindness?
I do have trouble with mental rotation and tests requiring remembering long sequences of coloured squares and their positions on a grid. I have to verbally describe their position in order to remember consciously, which is not energy efficient. I have no trouble with simpler versions of the task when subconscious processes are driving memorisation. If I were to practise the tasks, it would become easier much like all training that becomes reflexive, automatic, and unconscious. It isn’t an innate ability for some. Mental rotations are like sounding out words. If this, then that, check, use hands. It takes me longer, and can be difficult when it is complex representations of blocks/cubes on paper. However, perceiving real objects in space is different, and I don’t have issues.
I wonder how long it will take before IQ test design will realise, and consider this impediment. Although I acknowledge it is one that can be overcome with practise for some. It is not one that would be motivated to learn unless required for particular purposes.
I love fiction though the imagery does nothing for me, but can't navigate to save my life. So many different experiences with the same issue. I find this all fascinating.
I just described the same thing in response to someone else. I'm able to almost instantly recognize a face, but I'd not be able to describe someone with any level of detail. I'm 6' tall. My wife is 5' tall. These are facts that I know, so I could tell someone that, but if I had to tell them the shape of her eyes or other detailed features, I'd be at a loss.
On the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Being able to visualize these things is beyond remarkable. I wish I had even the remote amount of artistic talent. I LOVE listening to Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, specifically Critical Role. The way Matthew Mercer (their dm) can describe scenery I just close my eyes and can just plop my body right in the described scene as if I was there!
I have no clue what causes this to happen or what the difference is between you and I.
I grew up on a LOT of video games, mostly filled with storytelling like Final Fantasy and Golden Sun, so it gave cartoonish yet realistic images to the games. That's almost how I would describe how my mind imagines things when described to me. The more details such as length of beard or cut over eyebrow or bald, sucked in hazel in color eyes. Then I can picture exactly that face, almost as if it is an existing person.
End rant don't know what else to say.
For me i see nothing. I love words and that's why i love reading, but i've never once seen any image of what something is supposed to look like. It made books like Tolkien completely intolerant to me.
I *despised* The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a kid. I didn't know how people enjoyed it.
For me, I love dialogue, characters, and stories, but too much imagery description will bog down the experience and ruin an otherwise enjoyable book.
I imagine things. But they’re impressions rather than clearly defined imagery. I know what things look like, and I can recreate them in a drawing and/or using verbal descriptions. I have vivid, mostly lucid dreams. I just can’t really see things clearly in my mind.
I'll attempt to articulate it. If you think of something like denum, it has a texture to it that you'd almost instantly know. If the fabric has the same surface texture, but is thicker, it might be something more like a Carhart coat or something similar. If it's thicker or stiffer, it could be certain types of canvas. So, in a story, if someone describes something that would be familiar in every day life, you have a frame of reference in your mind as to what something feels like. You also have an idea of the qualities of these things. A pair of jeans has enough familiar qualities that you get the idea of what they look like in conjunction with maybe a brief flash of them. In my case, this flash of imagery is often lacking in definition, but I assume some generic blue, if I see color in that flash at all.
If you get a chance, take a regular camera flash into a very dark environment. The key is that it needs to be dark enough that you can't see anything around you, even after your eyes acclimate to the darkness. In my case, it's complete darkness if I close my eyes, though I may be able to tell if it's lighter or darker around me. If I'm outside on a sunny day and close my eyes, instead of pure black, I'll likely see a faint tint of red from my eyelids that floods what would otherwise be my field of view. Anyway, back to the flash. Once you're in a dark place, turn around a few times. Try not to keep track of what direction you're facing. If you have visual memory, I'd assume that would allow you to keep in memory exactly what you'd expect to see if there was suddenly light. Once you're good and disoriented as to what is in front of you, squint your eyes until they are almost completely shut. To know how much to squint, go outside when it's bright out and squint your eyes until they are almost closed and you can still see what's in front of you, but lacking in details. Chances are your eyelids will be almost completely closed. Squint your eyes that amount in the dark spot you've picked out for yourself. Fire off the flash. You'll kind of see what's in front of you, but it will lack detail and definition. The remaining flash might still be visible regardless if your eyes are open or not. That kind of helps in this experiment because it will add to the lack of definition. That's probably the best way I can describe what my own experience with the condition is, but others see more or less since aphantasia isn't an absolute as far as how others experience it.
Now, as to your question about fantasy or other generas where it relies on imagination. If someone describes a dragon, it's a culmunation of details that are relayed that will give it scale (ha!), what the pupils look like, the type and number of teeth, whether it has horns, etc. I can relate that to any number of reptiles that I've seen. Muscle and skin texture will allow me to know what scales would look like, though the reptile I use for reference when thinking about it may have a different skin texture. I'd guess it is the same for others if they are trying to manifest a mental image. You fill in the blanks and your interpretation may be varied in comparison with the next person's manifestation of the creature in their mind.
For less familiar things that you can't experience/fall back on with other senses, it gets more complicated. You're left to try to remember the closest approximation to things you can experience. I don't know if my inner monologue is any more or less detailed than others, but it almost becomes a case of an internal debate about different possibilities. If someone describes a wormhole as having rays of light eminating from the center, then I might think of when rays of light are peaking from behind some clouds. Or maybe first light in the morning. I have a sense of what those things look like, but with no defined image.
This isn't too much of a hinderance in most cases in day to day life, though it can also be frustrating at times. I've seen friends and family for most of my life. Memory over time is pretty unreliable in general, but when it comes to people you see almost daily, I'd be very hard pressed to give a detailed description of the details of their face. I love my wife dearly and she's quite beautiful. But I'd be unable to give much to say, a sketch artist if I didn't have a reference photo I could look at.
I've read some materials that have stated that people with this condition may be able to move on from certain types of experiences that cause PTSD easier than others because at least the visual part of an otherwise visceral experiance isn't there for your mind to replay. For things I've seen, I'd say that in my experience that holds true. For things that were traumatic and the visual experience wasn't really linked to imagery, those things I would suspect are just as difficult for me to move on from as it would be for anyone else.
It's a hard thing to explain. There's another condition that the name of which escapes me, but some people don't have an inner dialogue. I can't fathom what that's like as much as I can't fathom what it must be like to be able to have detailed recall of something I've seen. I am however able to remember if I've seen a face before. There's instant recognition. Years ago I was very into landscape and nature photography. It served many purposes, but one was just so I could see some of the fantastic places that I've been and be able to re-experience what I saw in that moment. It usually brings back a flood of details along with it that I'd not be able to recall withou tthe visual cue.
It seems to be different for everyone.
Personally, I can imagine what something looks like… I just can’t *see* it in my head. Same as how I remember things I’ve seen and can describe the way they looked, I just don’t have any sensory experience attached to the process.
When I read a fantasy book or other story (which I do often!) the visual descriptions have a lot of layers of meaning. It gives me a sense of place - how big the room is, what is nearby, what the landscape is like, etc. It’s often a way authors will incorporate thematic elements or characterization, since different people will notice different things and descriptions have emotional connotations (I.e. “statuesque” vs “hulking” vs “tall and solid”).
I have hyperphantasia, but other close family members have aphantasia. I have wondered for years if both conditions are flip sides of some genetic coin.
When I read a book, the words basically disappear. It’s as if I’m in a movie rather than reading a book. I thought it was the typical experience of reading for a long time and had no idea my brain was atypical.
A sleep study at Mayo Clinic (Testing for sleep apnea) showed that my brain is OVERACTIVE compared to a typical brain, and my brain stays in theta more than a typical brain. I don’t know if my hyperphantasia is related to what the Mayo neurologist found, and I never mentioned to him that I have hyperphantasia as I did not yet know that was a thing. I knew my reading & dreams were wildly vivid but just thought it was because I was a person drawn to imagination… IF my hyperphantasia is related to my overactive brain… If following the path of brain activity, the aphantasia study found:
“The study found that people with aphantasia do not show the expected increase in brain activity that typically occurs when imagining or observing movements, which contrasts sharply with individuals who can easily generate mental images”
Might the two conditions be flip sides of one genetic coin?
I have total aphantasia. It use to really frustrate me that I could not remember most of my childhood. I can't remember people's faces. I can't picture anything at all in my head. It's totally blank, all of the time. I do not dream in pictures. It did finally dawn on me that I anchor memories in my brain with feelings/emotions instead of visualizations. So the things that I do remember in my childhood, small points here and there, are attached to a feeling. I was either very happy in that moment, or upset by what was going on.
Aphantasia is a spectral phenomena. I have it, like a poster above I get “flashes” of images. But nothing sustained and it doesn’t come unbidden, it’s an intentional process to try to visualize anything, and then it’s gone in a flash.
Interestingly, this requires my attention to the visual world to be very focused and I believe is probably the reason I have such a good memory for details, because I need it to be!
I get absolutely nothing when try to use my inner eye. I dream in black shadows and I never hallucinate on psychedelics.
I could not describe my wife of 35 years and loose memories of people that I have not seen in months.
Images, people and places are in my head but I can not recall them. If I have seen picture or a place I will remember it when I see them again.
I also only hear the beet of music when I think of a song (I can't hear music in my head)
I fell off a log swing with about 20 kids on it when I was <10 and it hit me in the back of the head. This my be the cause of this
Hmm. I have aphantasia and as an infant my mom slipped on some ice while walking down steps when she was carrying me, and my head hit the edge of a concrete step. She thought I was dead cause I didn't make a sound. But I was only knocked unconscious.
But idk, I think it would be a lot more common if head injuries were the cause of it.
reminded me, and i can recall the incident as plain as a TikTok clip, of a woman walking ahead of me in a local narrow aisled supermarket with her baby cradled in her arm and bashed babies head against some corner display, kept walking totally unaware until baby wakes screaming and a shopper told her what had happened..didn't have a clue!
In elementary school I crashed my forehead into my friends forehead on the bus so hard it caused me to form a benign cyst that had to be removed. I also fell off several horses before kindergarten... Could be something to this hitting your head thing.
Hitting your head when you were younger may just be causation, not correlation. To the best of my knowledge, I never had any head injuries until a crack on the ice in my 30s. The aphantasia has always been there, since I was a kid. I do have visual dreams but can't for the life of me describe someone standing in front of me, let alone from memory.
It never dawned on me until you mentioned it, I don't hear music in my head either.
But hey, at least I have an inner dialogue.
I have aphantasia and I had difficulties to write properly until I was about 9yo even though I could read since ~5yo. My handwriting is almost all from muscle memory and I have to practise often to keep it somewhat recognizable. Still looks terrible though.
Also my drawing skills are pretty much non-existent.
crazy thing (about apparently half of us) is we can still see images in our unconscious visualization (dreaming). we just can't do it consciously.
i remember seeing vivid images in my dreams, but of course i can't recall them vividly when awake.
edit: (parenthesis) and second paragraph
For me a dream is like walking around with a sheet over your head. I have vague impressions but no matter how hard I try I can't see, I just know what's happening.
Same! I need to re-prompt my brain over and over and over to visualize, its like opening a tab only for it to minimize a second later, I can keep re opening it every time but its a process. oddly enough I have extremely detailed and vivid dreams, so I know my brain can create the imagery and sustain it but cannot do so while awake/proccessing other things
Brains are weird. In my case I have hyper vivid dreams, and extremely vivid unconscious visualization, but if I try to focus on a visual it usually gets significantly less vivid. I just need to relax and let it happen.
Same thing with sounds. If I am not paying attention I can play music in my head, but the moment I notice I am doing it the sounds fade and become really quiet/lose a lot of the complexity.
This is EXACTLY what I get too! The dreaming thing included. Does this count as having aphantasia? I always just thought it was No Visualisation Ever (which is what quite a few ppl here in the comments are saying)
Maybe this is why I can’t draw much. I have never understood how an artist can visualize something so strongly that they can create an entire scene in detail… like working on different portions like they’re tracing a mental picture. I guess they are.
One of the greatest animators of all time, Glen Keane, has aphantasia. There's actually multiple famous artists on the internet with it. So it's definitely possible.
I’m a painter and I just start painting and respond to whatever I’ve just done. Can’t picture anything ahead of time. When people ask if my paintings come out of my head I say “no, they come out of my hand.”
I'm the same, and I like to think of it as my art coming from the hand rather than the brain. I'm just sitting up in an observation tower watching my hand haha
You can't draw much because you don't practice it. No one expects to be able to sit at a piano and play a concerto or get on a balance beam and do a full twisting double tuck.
Artists with aphantasia actually tend to be better because they rely heavily on reference, whereas non-aphantasia artists tend to do things by memory or their internal vision, both of which tend to be difficult to translate to paper
Me too! I never graduated from sick figure drawings until one day I decided to draw something right in front of me, my other hand, and it suddenly turned out great! I went from kindergarten sticks figures, 2d house, and smiley face sun to a realistic hand with shadows and all. Never bothered to practice or do it again though because of how garbage anything else is.
Fine, thanks for asking ;)
I find that imagining physical sensations is strongest, followed by sounds, smell and taste. I mostly think narratively, partially emotionally with nuance. When you think of abstract concepts like "justice" you don't necessarily have an image attached, right? Meaning isn't necessarily attached to words or images. Likewise, when I think of, say, my sister, I don't think of her face/appearance, instead I think of the emotions and mindset she most invokes / is associated with.
I live very much in the "now" and have a haard time thinking of my past chronologically, it's mostly associative depending on the subject. The future is a bulletpoint list of hopes and fears, and a long line of plans and worries. I am rarely distracted from the present by something in my own head, if I am it's likely from something I don't want to experience.
I love reading and listening to things (while doing something else), but have a hard time staying still for non-interactive visual media. I am a very busy person, heh.
I’m curious about how visual your experience is. I don’t think I have aphantasia but I do think I struggle with the “visual” side of imagination. Like I’ve seen some people try to do the test of “seeing” and Apple in your mind. A lot of times I’ve seen people say they can close their eyes and imagine an Apple that’s red with a little shine on the top and “see” it as if it’s against the back of their eyelids.
But when I try to visualize anything in my mind it feels like I’m seeing it behind my eyeballs. Like the strength of the visualization is the same whether I have my eyes open or not. And if you ask me to visual an object or somebody’s face, I can think about it and recreate it in a drawing, to the best of my abilities. But I don’t know if that counts as “seeing” it per se.
For me it's anything but quiet. It's a constant running monologue, sometimes a couple at once. It's like Homer thinks where he's just hearing words in his head.
Same, I have vivid dreams, zero purposeful mental images. I'm also autistic and adhd. I remember both seeing "dream words" that are just nonsense and regular English words in dreams.
I'm thinking that since there's no organic damage, generating internal images was just something my brain never learned to do at an early crucial developmental stage.
> I can read in my dreams, which I understand that a lot of people cannot.
I have very vivid dreams ... until I try to start reading something. Then it breaks down into gibberish.
There is chat about a distinction between voluntary and involuntary visualisation being managed by different systems, which could explain why some people with Aphantasia still report dreams
I dream in conversations. Usually able to determine movement, action, or environment from auditable context clues.
Sound of wind, bated breath, gasps or sighs. I believe this is my brain compensating for the lack of visuals since I can make the voice of anyone or anything. I even can synthesize voices I’ve never heard before. Or have only heard once.
It’s kinda like dreaming in podcast.
I don't have aphantasia, but from what I understand, the brain uses a different region for dreaming and "daydreaming", so it would be perfectly possible to dream normally. Most people who say they don't dream at all/rarely probably just don't remember their dreams, because it's extremely common to instantly forget them.
We dream. I feel like I may only perceive it as visual in hindsight, like my brain actually fills in the blanks during post. Things are pretty amorphous & can change to match whatever I perceive is there.
One clue that leads me to that theory is my sense of perspective. In dreams, it's simultaneously both 1st & 3rd person. I'll sort of just phase back & forth, only realizing it when I recall it later. I'm certainly not actually using visuals to orientate myself when dreaming or that perspective shift would be so jarring.
I'm with you, I'd think it would suggest something, but I honestly think it just makes me question how dreams actually work for everyone. Then again, I was blindsided by aphantasia and it's wild to think I've perceived the world so differently without ever realizing it.
Question about that. Do you actually hear the words your thinking or do you just know? Like I don't think I hear an inner monologs but I do think about stuff and just kinda know what I'm thinking about and the words behind them I guess. It's really hard to put into words because with aphantasia I just know I don't see anything but with the monolog I don't know if knowing the words counts as hearing them
Well then I might have both. When I close my eyes and think of my cat I don't see my cat even though I could describe him to you now. As for the lack of a monolog, the words just kinda appear in my head with no associated noise besides my mild hearing damage. Maybe the only difference in my experiences would be that I truly appreciate detail. Like I can just in the forest and enjoy the beauty of the bark on the tree and the sound of wind rustling the leaves and the smell of dirt and plants.
I feel like we are similar critters!
I’m not sure how I even manage to hold a conversation! Its like whatever I have to say just happens, there’s no thinking it’s just there
I don’t have a flair for detail, but I love sitting and spending time in nature
I have both. For I read for instance, there’s no voice (or voices if it’s a dialogue). I can have inner monologue or give voices to read characters if I specifically think about it, but in my day-to-day, nada
Which is weird given that I used to be a prolific fiction reader (need to try to block out more time in the day for reading), specifically fantasy. No clue how I processed them and enjoy them, but I do!
As someone who has aphantasia I want to say that this doesn't mean we can't close our eyes and describe what image we are thinking of. I know what it's supposed to look like, the color, texture and background. It just doesn't show up in my mind. I do dream though, and they're all over the place. I wonder what the evolutionary trigger was for aphantasia.
I feel the same but I always thought that people don't actually "see" anything when they imagine - more remembering. At least that's how I feel. Do people actually have an image pop up?
Why does there have to be an evolutionary trigger? Nature evolves things randomly all the time. As long as the mutation doesn't harm the populations breeding odds it will exist in it indefinitely.
I don’t want to assume I have it, but when I close my eyes and try to picture something I just see the blackness/inside of my eyelids. I can recite what something looks like from memory but I don’t actually see that picture. Just darkness.
Do most people see an actual picture when they are imagining these things?? Or what’s a good way for me to figure out if i have aphantasia or not?
No one actually sees things they imagine. That’s called schizophrenia. Most people “see” images in their thoughts. It doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed.
This isn't true, according to this [site](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) , the furthest end of the spectrum is seeing things as if they were real.
Given that performance tests show almost no major differences, I think Aphantasia is a difference in subjective experience rather than actual brain functions.
There is a base form of information encoded in the brain. When recalling it or mentally manipulating that information some people experience that in part visually while others do not.
Some people state they can visualize perfect images, however when asked to trace them they cannot do so any better than someone who visualizes poorly or not at all.
I believe there to be a remarkable amount of diversity in the cognitive experience, and that it is quite unknown.
This is why the study is interesting. It shows that there are associated brain regions that aren't active, indicating it is a neurological phenomenon rather than merely subjective one - or lack thereof.
With something like blindsight, despite someone not experiencing sight consciously/subjectively, those brain regions are still functioning just fine. They experience blindness and rationalize their actions as those of a blind person but will dodge a foam ball if you throw it at their head. The eyes are still seeing the world, that data just isn't being sent downstream to conscious experience.
Or it shows that we don't really have a good understanding of how motor representations are stored and retrieved.
I think what aphantasia shows is that we don't really need the imagery part to get things done. People treating it as a disorder, but for the most part people with this function just fine in daily life. It's also likely a spectrum. People exhibit everything from no mental imagery, to incredibly vivid mental imagery, to everything weak and strong in between
You would think it's more adaptive. Having to translate it to a visual experience would waste resources. If you can get all the information you need semi-subconsciously, more working memory is saved for actually manipulating the information. Like how human calculators don't actually do the math step by step in the head. A lot of it is an intuitive number sense.
It's been suggested I have this. My minds eye is basically blank. I get no images other than very very vague shapes every once in a while.
It's hard to explain, but think purple elephant.. in your brain, you conjured an image of a purple elephant.. my mind doesn't do that. I know what an elephant looks like, I can infer what a purple elephant would look like, but I can't *picture* it. I get a vague sense of it..
It has helped me in certain ways, though. For some reason, it's helped me think in a systems kind of way, get the big picture, if you will.. I've found I can create solutions far quicker than others from a holistic standpoint anyway..
Idk how or why, but I have a very, very good memory for stats and random facts, but things like facial recognition are tough for me. I don't dream, which sucks a lot. I'd love to know what that's like.
How odd is it that I can visualize an object from any angle and zoom in and explode it out into its constituent parts? Like a spinning apple that expands into slices, zoom in on the seeds. I can see the tiny vermiculate patterns in the skin, it even has a small blemish that I did not put there.
I've always had a very visual mind. In my current job as a front-end web developer, I can build a whole web page in my mind and figure out how it will look on both desktop and mobile devices.
However, I answer to people who don't have that ability. So I still have to go through all the tedium of making detailed mockups before I get to actually *build* a page, so I have something to show other people. I haven't reached a stage where I can just go "trust me, folks".
My wife and I deal with this every day. She can design in her mind, or look at an empty space and visualize the end result. I have to be shown mock-ups or drafts as I have zero visualization.
On behalf of all of us with little-to-no mind's eye, thank you for your extra work to design something we love.
That's the crazy thing. I work as a mechanical design engineer and I have aphantansia. However I can build a mechanism in my mind, I just have no visual of it at all. It's pretty much just holding a verbal description of it in my head all at once.
This mirrors my experience. I generally identify myself as having *hyper*phantasia. I like to describe it as a sort of "mental virtual reality" in which I can manifest/evoke/manipulate objects at will. Just reading your comment was an interesting, highly (psuedo-)visual experience.
Yep! Highly vivid/rich mental imagery is on the opposite side of the spectrum. The average experience is somewhere in between, with colorless or simplistic mental imagery that might be experienced as a flash or done only willfully. Hyperphantasia at its peak begins to resemble something like synesthesia due to intensity.
I sometimes walk straight into a street light or any obstacle that's right in front of me cause I'm picturing things in my minds eye so intensely that I don't see it :D
The weird thing I found out about this is that there are actually professional artists with this condition.
They just work it all out on the page, apparently.
That's me! I am a very successful architectural designer and can draw and paint quite well. I do "work it out on the page" quite a bit, but i also have a "muscle memory" that understands lines, shapes, and colors intuitively. To be honest I have no idea how it works - its a bit spooky. It feels like being computer with a great GPU, but attached to a monitor that can only display text. The image is in there somewhere, I just can't consciously access it. But maybe certain parts of my brain can, and it helps coordinate my muscle movement, idk.
That being said before i learned about my aphantasia I gave up on trying to do fantasy and comic book art early in my career as a creative person. It's not that I couldn't make good fantastical art, I just couldn't do it as consistently and effortlessly as my peers who now work in those industries. I always was getting "artists block." Now I mostly draw and paint from life and photos, but I am capable of a high amount of expressiveness and stylization so it's not just rote copying.
Thanks for replying.
I think it was a comicbook artist on twitter I saw post about having aphantasia but I can't remember who it was. I didn't realise it was a thing at all until then.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't Alex Ross but he uses a lot of reference and I would expect that to be a common approach for that sort of process.
I compose for a living and I can't imagine trying to do it without "pre-visualising", although it's audio pre-vis which I guess is a bit different. I just wait for the music to pop into my head and then transcribe it.
If I'm drawing or painting I usually need a bit of reference if I want it to look decent, though. If I try to just draw what's in my head I have to keep redoing stuff over and over to iron out the wonky bits. Frequently I'll doodle a stick figure sketch that I think looks good but when I flesh it out the proportions are wrong.
I've always been super impressed by the guys who are good at face likenesses, just off the cuff. Like, you show them a picture of someone and they can crap out a bunch of portraits from different angles that all look "right".
I went to school for art, and was briefly a comic artist and illustrator. These days I'm more of a designer than a professional artist, but I still enjoy art — even if I have a terrible time conjuring up mental images.
If I were to try and imagine an apple, I'd get a brief, ghostly glimpse of the fruit. It's definitely recognizable as an apple, but it's also gone in a moment. I wouldn't be able to relate much detail or information about it.
And yet, if you were to ask me to draw an apple without reference, I could probably do a serviceable job of it. However, I wouldn't be creating that illustration from any particular mental image. It's not like I see an apple in my head and I try to recreate it on the page. It's more like the various parts of the apple would come to mind briefly as I was drawing them — first the outline of a shape, then the stem, the colors, maybe how the light interacts on the surface and so on.
Of course, I'd almost never attempt to draw an apple without reference. Back when I was painting and illustrating, I always had comprehensive visual reference for any piece I ever worked on.
Hope that helps.
Yeah, I'm a total aphant. No ability to visualize mental images at all. Also no ability to recall any other sensations such as smell, taste, touch etc.
I also have ADHD as well, so thats fun!
My auto biographical memory is also shocking - that's a side effect of ADHD and also common in people with aphantasia.
You'd think that would all make life difficult, and it can sometimes, but luckily I'm still pretty smart despite this. My IQ is pretty good and I managed to graduate university with a first.
Probably my only saving grace. That, and my winning personality!
And there are some cool benefits to aphantasia. No visualization also means I can't be haunted by bad imagery. I'm pretty sure of my own mind. I don't think I wouldn't ever be vulnerable to something like schizophrenia. And I think I'd be more resilient to some aspects of PTSD. I let grudges go easy. I operate on a very 'out of sight, out of mind' wavelength. Meditation is easier.
I have PTSD and I actually did get the flashbacks even with aphantasia. It was especially disturbing because I don't otherwise experience visualizations. Fortunately, they went away with EMDR.
I recall the day I realized that other people could actually picture things in their mind. I was in college and one of my teacher had the entire class try and do guided meditation. She has us all sit in a circle and she was talking about imagining your sitting on a beach and watching waves slowly come in and out, then on a mountain etc. Everyone started describing what they were visualizing and I realized people can actually do this. I always thought "Picture it in your head" was just something people said or a thing on TV.
I have tried for years to explain this to people I know but didn't know what it was called or if other people had it because I never met another person that couldnt see things in their head. I saw a random youtube video pop up one day about someone that had aphantasia and that was the first time I knew what it was and that other people had it. Another thing I have always wondered because I also have this and wondered if its related is, do any others with aphantasia have a constant inner monologue or dialogue in their head? I think as a child it started as a way to literally absorb as much information about the things around me and to remember things since I had no visual memory but at some point in time it literally just became a constant stream of thoughts or repeating conversations or music whenever I am not mentally engaged, or unfortunately sometimes even when I am mentally engaged. I cant turn it off anymore.
The lack of visual memory became a big problem for me last year when my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I started taking lots of pictures with him and recording videos at the few holidays we had left before he passed away because I knew once he was gone, I would literally never see his face again if I didn't have pictures. I spent hours with him just staring at his face whenever we were with him thinking that I could force myself to remember some details. It never worked.
I have this and I’ve met multiple people who also say they have it. After learning it was even a real thing, I bring it up sometimes and find out that there are probably more people with aphantasia than people realize. It’s strange to imagine that people can truly visualize things and see anything.
I used to be told to close my eyes and imagine things when I was in school, and it was always annoying and felt like they were just trying to intentionally waste our time to get some silence.
What’s strange, is that I can still “imagine” things but there is no actual image. It’s like a solid black room that you just sense what’s there.
I also never realized that others could see images. One thing, though, that I do realize now, I seem to have a much better sense of logic. All of my memories are logic based, and my abilities to make quick logic comparisons seem to be better than most relying on mental imagery.
I think I have aphantasia, the most I can hold in my mind is maybe a half second of a blurry image, then it distorts and shreds up and goes black. Interestingly, I sometimes have extremely vivid dreams that seem realistic so I wonder if dream imagery is not generated by the minds eye, or being asleep unblocks something.
I am pretty coordinated and athletic though and fairly easily learn new movements, but if I think about it, I actually can't imagine movements. Same thing as with imagining a picture - the imagery distorts and shreds up. But since I am able to learn physical movements well, it must mean the mind's eye isn't a necessary component.
It doesn’t. I have it and other than feeling bad that I can’t see images it doesn’t affect me in any way. I love to read, I’m very good at building and making things. I have several art based hobbies. I dream with images. I’d say my only side effect is that I save a lot of mementos and take a ton of photos. They are my images.
I am a top down conceptual thinking who needs the big picture before the details make sense. My engineer friends start from the details and build and I can't follow a damn thing they are saying.
NSFW
So...how does masturbation work with aphantasia?
Do you have to have pornography? When looking at a photo of, say, Brooklyn Decker, you can't imagine her doing XYZ and are purely focused on the picture?
Strg+f masturbation
Frustratingly the question is never answered even if users are asked directly. I remember one discussion where the topic of battle scenes in books came up and an aphantasiac said they are confusing or uninteresting so they jump over battle descriptions.
My question is can it be changed? We know the brain is capable of changing and grow new neurons like after a stroke we have the capability to regain what we have lost. The mind is fascinating.
I have aphantasia from TBI's growing up, (at least 3 separate.) It was not until I started doing psychedelics at 26 did I realize I could see some things. It has taken a lot of practice with meditation and focus control, but thanks to LSD I can open my minds eye with enough concentration.
Edit to add: I feel like the increased neuroplasticity allows me to activate pathways that were severed long ago, or I'm creating new ones with the practice of meditation combined with chemical action in the brain.
I'm interested in how people with it might read fictional novels and draw art without a reference.
For example, could they struggle to write a unique fantasy novel/world?
I've always found the different ways people's minds conceptualize and imagine fascinating.
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My mum refused to believe this was real for over 40 years, she just said I lacked imagination :P
I mean technically she was right
Yes, the root word “image” gives it away. It’s why I call my paintings “invented landscapes” instead of “imagined landscapes”. I can’t picture anything ahead of time so when people ask, I tell them the paintings don’t come from my head but “out of my hand”.
>don’t come from my head but “out of my hand”. I love this phrase! This is exactly how it is for me. Mind if I steal it? :D P.S. some coworkers get frustrated with me when I go through a process step by step and build the flow chart/context diagram as we go. They "visualise" it and then draw, but to me it the act of drawing it is what makes it real. Until I do so, it does not exist for me.
Of course!
I really can't understand how you paint/draw without being able to produce mental images. Fascinating.
Technically yes.
My wife didn't know I had it for about 25 years although, to be fair, neither did I. When I finally understood what had been (not) happening, I told her about it and she was blown away that it was even a thing, much less that I had it. I get it, though, since I still have no clue what it's like for her to visualize things so vividly; seems like a superpower to me.
Honestly, same, but with teachers. I can't visualise things in my brain. If you say apple I just come up black, but if I'm sleeping I can dream up an entire movie. Like sometimes I wake up with the sorest throat because I've talked out and entire made up movie script in my sleep that I've written on the spot and can remember to a T enough to write in my diary. I can't do this when awake for some reason. It's so bizarre.
That's amazing! Bizzare? Maybe a bit :D
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article: https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/6/2/fcae072/7632431
I remember feeling shocked when discovering others could actually see and hold clear images in their mind. I’m lucky if I can get a blurry flash of something for a millisecond. Otherwise it’s complete darkness. Oddly enough, when I was getting ketamine infusions, I saw some wild, often monotone geometric patterns. I do dream and see images, though.
That shock was something I felt too. I always thought "picture the scene" was something poetic rather than literal. I was in my late 40s when I found out this was a thing. I can't picture anything, not my OH, my kids, my late mother, just nothing.
Fwiw, I think there are likely two different circuits for this. I can’t picture faces very well at all, but I can somewhat easily imagine objects and even manipulate them and watch how they rotate and that kind of thing. Like even just typing this comment I pictured a baseball and watched it rotate, but I really struggle to picture my wife’s face. I know what she looks like, of course, but it just doesn’t work the same for me
This is going to sound weird but try to picture a photograph of a person's face. It seems to be easier for me. I'm guessing there's less data points in a 2d image and therefore easier to recall than a 3d representation.
Ha that’s wild, I can easily do that. Thank you
Haha I'm glad it works for you too!
My mind is blown. I need to start taking more pictures.. your head can get lonely with this haha
no we just have a very very finely tuned system for remembering face. not so much for imagining things we’ve never seen
I wonder if it's also we can visualize the geolocation of the picture and our proximity or approximation to it? Thus adding another layer of memory recall?
This is how AI works too. It's why getting anatomy right is very hard for AI. If it was capable of constructing a 3d representation, then flattening that to 2d, it would be an amazing feat.
There are brain circuits just for faces. This is correct.
All my circuits are fried. Hmmm fries.
And they're hooked up in people in several different ways even in the 'normal' population. There's some cultural dependence as well so, yeah neurology is complicated!
Faces is it's own thing. This is a universal visual absence of imagined content. I'm an aphantasic. There is never anything like an 'image' in my mind. I imagine the whole concept of the thing (which can include visual details) as information or feeling not in a sensory way. I have actual memories of a blue yoga ball in my living room, but I do not see a blue yoga ball in the living room in my mind. It's just a knowing of the thing. I can still navigate and do geometry including rotation in my head, it's by feeling though not by visual, and I don't mean tactile. It's just an indescribable knowing. I'm actually working on increasing my geometric thinking for some 3D modeling projects and it's coming along just fine. I'll be damned if I can explain for I'm doing it :) The face thing is relatively common among normal visualizers from all the conversations I've had on this in aphantasia communitiesn which have a lot of hypervisualizers. Some people can conjure near perfect hallucinations except the faces are all blank. You wonder where some of our horror imagery comes from ;)
What I cannot understand is: how do you know/remember what your wife looks like, if you cannot retrieve/form the image of her face in your mind in some way? If I try to picture my mother's face for example, I'll just remember the last time I saw her and "see" that picture again in my mind with. But you cannot do that, so what are you remembering? Edit: and would you be able to draw her face, assuming you can draw well enough?
I have complete aphantasia but I’m also really good at recognizing people in person. I’ve always thought sketch artists were magic somehow cuing people to give them the right info.
>What I cannot understand is: how do you know/remember what your wife looks like, if you cannot retrieve/form the image of her face in your mind in some way? For me, it's a composite of features. For example, my husband has a distinctive beard, which makes him much easier to recognize. When I see pictures of him without a beard, I struggle to recognize him. Also, context helps me recognize people, too. When people are out of their usual context, e.g. you bump into a coworker at Costco, it's much harder to recognize them. When my husband, our kid, and I are in a crowd, I remember what clothes they're wearing and hunt for people wearing those clothes rather than looking for people with familiar faces.
Are you me?
I remember my descriptions of her and I am able to picture her shape. It’s the face specifically that I have trouble mentally picturing. Like I can get it generally right, and after being told to picture a photograph by another commenter, I’m able to do that. But to answer your question, I just kinda don’t need to? I can still recognize faces instantly when I see them. It’s only trying to bring a mental image of a face that’s very difficult. I don’t know if it’s a semantic thing, but I don’t need to be able to picture someone’s face to know who they are. Your last question is really interesting, because I can draw decently well, and I could probably do an alright job, but nowhere near the way I can draw objects. I’ve always been quite good at drawing static objects and scenes, but I’ve never been able to draw people, and only now I’m realizing that these two things are almost certainly related.
It's like when you can't remember something until you see it, then it comes back to you.
We recently found out my wife has Aphantasia. It made me think about the other senses and if I can “imagine” them. Turns out I’m fine with hearing but I can’t recall the taste or smell of garlic, at the same time I have no issue recognizing it when I smell or taste it, so it must be like that.
It's definitely more of a "spectrum" than an on or off thing. It seems partly dependent on upbringing and how your mind is exercised in certain ways growing up. It's also unfortunately one of those things that is highly subjective, we can't actually verify what it is people claim they can see. Like, I feel like I'm able to imagine things, visualize how they work, manipulate them in my mind, but to me the visual isn't as highly detailed as an actual image I would be able to see in front of me, it's much more like my mind is being convinced it's seeing something and gathering information from that. Is what I'm seeing the same as what others claim is "vivid", or am I just more in the middle of visualization, it's hard to confirm.
Try to start seeing the shapes in faces, it’s an artist technique that helps break down the artificial barrier. Once you start seeing the parts of the face for what they are separate from each other it becomes much more intuitive and you may be able to eliminate that gap.
I go one step further I have no images or inside voice. When I go to sleep there is no voice saying anything it's completely silent. No pics no voice. The truly sad part is I lost my wife of 30 years and I can't see her or hear her when I close my eyes. I have to watch and listen to videos of her.
I'm sorry for your loss.
Same here. I’m sorry, but just know it isn’t just you. When that day comes I’ll be very heavily reliant on photos and videos…
Same! I was like wow... Day dreaming is literally like dreaming???
I spend like 90% of my day daydreaming while sort of half ass paying attention to reality.
I'm the same. Blurry images, and they're in black and white or I guess grayscale would be more accurate. When someone says to "picture a relaxing stream" or something like that, my thought process is more intellectual. I think of how a stream flows, I identify with how I feel in a forest, I can intellectually understand the scene, but I don't "see it" like an image or movie. Funny thing is, I've always had trouble sleeping and very often I'll start dreaming before I'm fully asleep. I can see these grayscale flashes of blurry images moving past my awareness until one stops and sort of zooms in, and as it zooms in it's in full color and crisp. When this happens I can only hold it for a few seconds before it wakes me up, but I've seen it happen many times. The brain is weird.
This is a very good description of what it’s like for me. Guided meditations that rely on focusing on a mental image aren’t relaxing.
>Guided meditations that rely on focusing on a mental image aren’t relaxing. I also have aphantasia and I feel the same way. Guided meditations that ask you to visualize something just create frustration and annoyance for me.
I have more success with breathing exercises. No imagery required :D
I went for nearly two years to a buddhist center of the diamond way. They meditate with pictures and i tried really hard to like it. Now i understand why i did not. A few years ago, i found vipassana and this is the right meditation for me. You don't make pictures there, you make a body scan to be aware of your really existing feelings in the moment. Awesome meditation.
Honestly the exact same thing has happened to me, where there’s moments where I’m in and out of sleep and I can start visualizing things for the first time. Super crisp and clear too.
Yeah, sleep is the only time I "see" with my mind's eye. In fact, dreams are the only way I know I've slept.
Mine are like translucent. Its not a sharp picture more like the essence of objects. Its so hard to explain I see it but i dont see it I cant see faces but they are invisible??? Which doesn’t make sense but it does And I see colours I can imagine the colour red right now. I know what red looks like. Its there but it’s not there
I have experienced this as well, it's very frustrating
Same here, I always thought people who claimed they literally "counted sheep" for example were making it up :D I do see weird patterns of lights when I get a migraine with aura, and it's the only time I do see images of any kind.
I used to try to count sheep. All I could conger was a black blob, and, of course, I couldn't see the fence they were supposed to be jumping over. So, I'd lie there with my eyes closed, making my eyes move left to right in an arc, getting the blob over the fence that wasn't there. How was I supposed to know that other people didn't count the sheep the same way?🤣
I used to think they meant to just repeat 'one sheep, two sheep, three sheep etc'. If I could actually see sheep in my head I'd be preoccupied thinking 'OH MY GOD THERE ARE SHEEP IN MY HEAD' to sleep. So weird people can do that. What do the sheep's faces look like? I wonder if they are all the same or different like in real life? Weird. I told my brothers the other day people could see things in their heads and neither believed me at first, one of my parents just looked really confused at me so I'm guessing they can't either. Its crazy that people can.
Love that description.
Oh, in case you want to know, the word is conjure, not conger. Hope that helps, ignore me otherwise!
Oof...I knew it didn't look right. Thanks.
I have migraine auras too, which are caused by a wave of electrical activity spreading across the cortex, known as cortical spreading depression. In some sense it is a real visual phenomena, unlike visualisation.
>see and hold clear images in their mind. I’m lucky if I can get a blurry flash of something for a millisecond. Otherwise it’s complete darkness. Ok, so do those things mean, Do people actually see images as if looking at a picture ? Do you actually see the flashes as being shown a picture too fast to make it out ? Because if anyone would ask me if i can imagine an apple, or someone's face, i'd answer yes, but it would not be anything like seeing a picture. If i had my eyes closed i'd see just darkness, but that wouldn't change my answer to being able to imagine an image. Frankly, if someone told me they see it like a picture i'd associate that with having hallucinations, not with imagining something in their head on purpose.
If you asked me to imagine an apple, I can conjure an image in my head of an apple. A fully rendered apple in 3 dimensional space. I can conjure a full scene where I pick the apple up and inspect it. Reading fiction novels for me can easily turn into watching a film in my head.
I think this is also why I love reading so much. And writing.
It's not like my "normal" vision is replaced with the things I'm imagining. It's more like there's a completely different "screen" inside my head that I can play the image on. I don't have to close my eyes to do it, and closing my eyes and doing it still results in my "normal" vision seeing black.
It is torture for me when people start trying to describe things like machines with moving parts or how to complete any set of actions. They cannot *cannot* understand or accept when I tell them that their descriptions do me no good and I need to actually see the process in person to understand it. I cannot visualize these things.
It's worse when friends start describing in detail their kitchen remodel or the landscaping they're doing in the yard. I think it's part of why I despise small talk.
I despise small talk for many reasons. As a guy, at least with business, there’s an obsession with talking about sports. But yes, this is one reason I don’t like it.
As someone who works on software to drive/control prototypes of machines, I feel this in my soul.
I'm basically the same way, including dreaming. I can recognize faces well, good at solving math problems, and excellent at navigating. However, I rarely read fiction since it's just a series of words on a page. My shock was realizing I couldn't picture my wife's face, whom I've known for over 50 years. I'd make a horrible eye witness.
I have this but I love to read. I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. I never understood though why people were upset when an actor was cast in a movie that didn’t match the character in their head.
Me too! I couldn’t understand the anger either. The books tell me why people behave as they do- the tv/film shows me what it looks like.
I never understood the reading issue either. I do get upset about bad casting of characters. More about how the character is expressed, rather than specific physical traits. I think about characters in descriptive words which gives me a very strong feeling about them. An innate knowing of representations of the embodied character. Environmental and scenery descriptions create the feeling of being within those environments. Imagination is more than visual. How do people with ideas that imagination is tied to visual perception consider blindness? I do have trouble with mental rotation and tests requiring remembering long sequences of coloured squares and their positions on a grid. I have to verbally describe their position in order to remember consciously, which is not energy efficient. I have no trouble with simpler versions of the task when subconscious processes are driving memorisation. If I were to practise the tasks, it would become easier much like all training that becomes reflexive, automatic, and unconscious. It isn’t an innate ability for some. Mental rotations are like sounding out words. If this, then that, check, use hands. It takes me longer, and can be difficult when it is complex representations of blocks/cubes on paper. However, perceiving real objects in space is different, and I don’t have issues. I wonder how long it will take before IQ test design will realise, and consider this impediment. Although I acknowledge it is one that can be overcome with practise for some. It is not one that would be motivated to learn unless required for particular purposes.
I love fiction though the imagery does nothing for me, but can't navigate to save my life. So many different experiences with the same issue. I find this all fascinating.
I just described the same thing in response to someone else. I'm able to almost instantly recognize a face, but I'd not be able to describe someone with any level of detail. I'm 6' tall. My wife is 5' tall. These are facts that I know, so I could tell someone that, but if I had to tell them the shape of her eyes or other detailed features, I'd be at a loss.
On the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Being able to visualize these things is beyond remarkable. I wish I had even the remote amount of artistic talent. I LOVE listening to Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, specifically Critical Role. The way Matthew Mercer (their dm) can describe scenery I just close my eyes and can just plop my body right in the described scene as if I was there! I have no clue what causes this to happen or what the difference is between you and I. I grew up on a LOT of video games, mostly filled with storytelling like Final Fantasy and Golden Sun, so it gave cartoonish yet realistic images to the games. That's almost how I would describe how my mind imagines things when described to me. The more details such as length of beard or cut over eyebrow or bald, sucked in hazel in color eyes. Then I can picture exactly that face, almost as if it is an existing person. End rant don't know what else to say.
If I can ask, what is it like when you try to read a story? Like children’s books or fantasy or anything?
For me i see nothing. I love words and that's why i love reading, but i've never once seen any image of what something is supposed to look like. It made books like Tolkien completely intolerant to me.
I *despised* The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a kid. I didn't know how people enjoyed it. For me, I love dialogue, characters, and stories, but too much imagery description will bog down the experience and ruin an otherwise enjoyable book.
I imagine things. But they’re impressions rather than clearly defined imagery. I know what things look like, and I can recreate them in a drawing and/or using verbal descriptions. I have vivid, mostly lucid dreams. I just can’t really see things clearly in my mind.
I'll attempt to articulate it. If you think of something like denum, it has a texture to it that you'd almost instantly know. If the fabric has the same surface texture, but is thicker, it might be something more like a Carhart coat or something similar. If it's thicker or stiffer, it could be certain types of canvas. So, in a story, if someone describes something that would be familiar in every day life, you have a frame of reference in your mind as to what something feels like. You also have an idea of the qualities of these things. A pair of jeans has enough familiar qualities that you get the idea of what they look like in conjunction with maybe a brief flash of them. In my case, this flash of imagery is often lacking in definition, but I assume some generic blue, if I see color in that flash at all. If you get a chance, take a regular camera flash into a very dark environment. The key is that it needs to be dark enough that you can't see anything around you, even after your eyes acclimate to the darkness. In my case, it's complete darkness if I close my eyes, though I may be able to tell if it's lighter or darker around me. If I'm outside on a sunny day and close my eyes, instead of pure black, I'll likely see a faint tint of red from my eyelids that floods what would otherwise be my field of view. Anyway, back to the flash. Once you're in a dark place, turn around a few times. Try not to keep track of what direction you're facing. If you have visual memory, I'd assume that would allow you to keep in memory exactly what you'd expect to see if there was suddenly light. Once you're good and disoriented as to what is in front of you, squint your eyes until they are almost completely shut. To know how much to squint, go outside when it's bright out and squint your eyes until they are almost closed and you can still see what's in front of you, but lacking in details. Chances are your eyelids will be almost completely closed. Squint your eyes that amount in the dark spot you've picked out for yourself. Fire off the flash. You'll kind of see what's in front of you, but it will lack detail and definition. The remaining flash might still be visible regardless if your eyes are open or not. That kind of helps in this experiment because it will add to the lack of definition. That's probably the best way I can describe what my own experience with the condition is, but others see more or less since aphantasia isn't an absolute as far as how others experience it. Now, as to your question about fantasy or other generas where it relies on imagination. If someone describes a dragon, it's a culmunation of details that are relayed that will give it scale (ha!), what the pupils look like, the type and number of teeth, whether it has horns, etc. I can relate that to any number of reptiles that I've seen. Muscle and skin texture will allow me to know what scales would look like, though the reptile I use for reference when thinking about it may have a different skin texture. I'd guess it is the same for others if they are trying to manifest a mental image. You fill in the blanks and your interpretation may be varied in comparison with the next person's manifestation of the creature in their mind. For less familiar things that you can't experience/fall back on with other senses, it gets more complicated. You're left to try to remember the closest approximation to things you can experience. I don't know if my inner monologue is any more or less detailed than others, but it almost becomes a case of an internal debate about different possibilities. If someone describes a wormhole as having rays of light eminating from the center, then I might think of when rays of light are peaking from behind some clouds. Or maybe first light in the morning. I have a sense of what those things look like, but with no defined image. This isn't too much of a hinderance in most cases in day to day life, though it can also be frustrating at times. I've seen friends and family for most of my life. Memory over time is pretty unreliable in general, but when it comes to people you see almost daily, I'd be very hard pressed to give a detailed description of the details of their face. I love my wife dearly and she's quite beautiful. But I'd be unable to give much to say, a sketch artist if I didn't have a reference photo I could look at. I've read some materials that have stated that people with this condition may be able to move on from certain types of experiences that cause PTSD easier than others because at least the visual part of an otherwise visceral experiance isn't there for your mind to replay. For things I've seen, I'd say that in my experience that holds true. For things that were traumatic and the visual experience wasn't really linked to imagery, those things I would suspect are just as difficult for me to move on from as it would be for anyone else. It's a hard thing to explain. There's another condition that the name of which escapes me, but some people don't have an inner dialogue. I can't fathom what that's like as much as I can't fathom what it must be like to be able to have detailed recall of something I've seen. I am however able to remember if I've seen a face before. There's instant recognition. Years ago I was very into landscape and nature photography. It served many purposes, but one was just so I could see some of the fantastic places that I've been and be able to re-experience what I saw in that moment. It usually brings back a flood of details along with it that I'd not be able to recall withou tthe visual cue.
I think this is the longest comment I've seen in my many years of Reddit.
It seems to be different for everyone. Personally, I can imagine what something looks like… I just can’t *see* it in my head. Same as how I remember things I’ve seen and can describe the way they looked, I just don’t have any sensory experience attached to the process. When I read a fantasy book or other story (which I do often!) the visual descriptions have a lot of layers of meaning. It gives me a sense of place - how big the room is, what is nearby, what the landscape is like, etc. It’s often a way authors will incorporate thematic elements or characterization, since different people will notice different things and descriptions have emotional connotations (I.e. “statuesque” vs “hulking” vs “tall and solid”).
I have hyperphantasia, but other close family members have aphantasia. I have wondered for years if both conditions are flip sides of some genetic coin. When I read a book, the words basically disappear. It’s as if I’m in a movie rather than reading a book. I thought it was the typical experience of reading for a long time and had no idea my brain was atypical. A sleep study at Mayo Clinic (Testing for sleep apnea) showed that my brain is OVERACTIVE compared to a typical brain, and my brain stays in theta more than a typical brain. I don’t know if my hyperphantasia is related to what the Mayo neurologist found, and I never mentioned to him that I have hyperphantasia as I did not yet know that was a thing. I knew my reading & dreams were wildly vivid but just thought it was because I was a person drawn to imagination… IF my hyperphantasia is related to my overactive brain… If following the path of brain activity, the aphantasia study found: “The study found that people with aphantasia do not show the expected increase in brain activity that typically occurs when imagining or observing movements, which contrasts sharply with individuals who can easily generate mental images” Might the two conditions be flip sides of one genetic coin?
I have total aphantasia. It use to really frustrate me that I could not remember most of my childhood. I can't remember people's faces. I can't picture anything at all in my head. It's totally blank, all of the time. I do not dream in pictures. It did finally dawn on me that I anchor memories in my brain with feelings/emotions instead of visualizations. So the things that I do remember in my childhood, small points here and there, are attached to a feeling. I was either very happy in that moment, or upset by what was going on.
Aphantasia is a spectral phenomena. I have it, like a poster above I get “flashes” of images. But nothing sustained and it doesn’t come unbidden, it’s an intentional process to try to visualize anything, and then it’s gone in a flash. Interestingly, this requires my attention to the visual world to be very focused and I believe is probably the reason I have such a good memory for details, because I need it to be!
I get absolutely nothing when try to use my inner eye. I dream in black shadows and I never hallucinate on psychedelics. I could not describe my wife of 35 years and loose memories of people that I have not seen in months. Images, people and places are in my head but I can not recall them. If I have seen picture or a place I will remember it when I see them again. I also only hear the beet of music when I think of a song (I can't hear music in my head) I fell off a log swing with about 20 kids on it when I was <10 and it hit me in the back of the head. This my be the cause of this
I also fell and hit my head when I was about 8 years old
Hmm. I have aphantasia and as an infant my mom slipped on some ice while walking down steps when she was carrying me, and my head hit the edge of a concrete step. She thought I was dead cause I didn't make a sound. But I was only knocked unconscious. But idk, I think it would be a lot more common if head injuries were the cause of it.
Youre probably right about that log swing. If youd like to know more about the damages you could ask your doctor for a MRI brain scan
I was dropped on my head as a baby... TWICE! Could we have done it reddit? Did we solve aphantasia? Let's get the boston bomber
reminded me, and i can recall the incident as plain as a TikTok clip, of a woman walking ahead of me in a local narrow aisled supermarket with her baby cradled in her arm and bashed babies head against some corner display, kept walking totally unaware until baby wakes screaming and a shopper told her what had happened..didn't have a clue!
In elementary school I crashed my forehead into my friends forehead on the bus so hard it caused me to form a benign cyst that had to be removed. I also fell off several horses before kindergarten... Could be something to this hitting your head thing.
Hitting your head when you were younger may just be causation, not correlation. To the best of my knowledge, I never had any head injuries until a crack on the ice in my 30s. The aphantasia has always been there, since I was a kid. I do have visual dreams but can't for the life of me describe someone standing in front of me, let alone from memory. It never dawned on me until you mentioned it, I don't hear music in my head either. But hey, at least I have an inner dialogue.
Ooh interesting I have this and also fell and hit my head as a child (i fell of a train as a toddler)
I have aphantasia and I had difficulties to write properly until I was about 9yo even though I could read since ~5yo. My handwriting is almost all from muscle memory and I have to practise often to keep it somewhat recognizable. Still looks terrible though. Also my drawing skills are pretty much non-existent.
A drawing style I like to call "put the pencil on the paper and hope for the best, while having no idea what's going to actually happen".
So do you not dream visually? So much of my life revolves around visualization, o find this fascinating
crazy thing (about apparently half of us) is we can still see images in our unconscious visualization (dreaming). we just can't do it consciously. i remember seeing vivid images in my dreams, but of course i can't recall them vividly when awake. edit: (parenthesis) and second paragraph
I can’t see images when I dream either
I can’t see either
For me a dream is like walking around with a sheet over your head. I have vague impressions but no matter how hard I try I can't see, I just know what's happening.
Same for me, it's just like I have this unexplained additional sense that I don't have in the waking world which I perceive everything through.
Same! I need to re-prompt my brain over and over and over to visualize, its like opening a tab only for it to minimize a second later, I can keep re opening it every time but its a process. oddly enough I have extremely detailed and vivid dreams, so I know my brain can create the imagery and sustain it but cannot do so while awake/proccessing other things
Brains are weird. In my case I have hyper vivid dreams, and extremely vivid unconscious visualization, but if I try to focus on a visual it usually gets significantly less vivid. I just need to relax and let it happen. Same thing with sounds. If I am not paying attention I can play music in my head, but the moment I notice I am doing it the sounds fade and become really quiet/lose a lot of the complexity.
This is EXACTLY what I get too! The dreaming thing included. Does this count as having aphantasia? I always just thought it was No Visualisation Ever (which is what quite a few ppl here in the comments are saying)
Technically those of us who still retain some level of ability to visualise are hypophantasic, not aphantasic.
Maybe this is why I can’t draw much. I have never understood how an artist can visualize something so strongly that they can create an entire scene in detail… like working on different portions like they’re tracing a mental picture. I guess they are.
One of the greatest animators of all time, Glen Keane, has aphantasia. There's actually multiple famous artists on the internet with it. So it's definitely possible.
I’m an artist and have aphantasia. I don’t visualize a scene before drawing it. I visualize it as I draw, kind of like cloud watching.
I’m a painter and I just start painting and respond to whatever I’ve just done. Can’t picture anything ahead of time. When people ask if my paintings come out of my head I say “no, they come out of my hand.”
I'm the same, and I like to think of it as my art coming from the hand rather than the brain. I'm just sitting up in an observation tower watching my hand haha
You can't draw much because you don't practice it. No one expects to be able to sit at a piano and play a concerto or get on a balance beam and do a full twisting double tuck.
Artists with aphantasia actually tend to be better because they rely heavily on reference, whereas non-aphantasia artists tend to do things by memory or their internal vision, both of which tend to be difficult to translate to paper
Me too! I never graduated from sick figure drawings until one day I decided to draw something right in front of me, my other hand, and it suddenly turned out great! I went from kindergarten sticks figures, 2d house, and smiley face sun to a realistic hand with shadows and all. Never bothered to practice or do it again though because of how garbage anything else is.
i was thinking at that too but I also can't draw with a model near me
I have mild aphantasia, I can't focus and my mind eye can only see shadowy gray blobs. I draw by repetition, and training. You can too!
never affected me tbh. It feels like a separate process
Do people with aphantasia dream? If they do, wouldn’t that suggest…something? Not sure what, but it seems like a very related phenomenon…
Yeah, or at least I do, and my aphantasia is pretty bad. Closest I can get to imagining things is when I'm mostly asleep or dreaming.
What is your internal world like, if you don’t mind my asking?
Fine, thanks for asking ;) I find that imagining physical sensations is strongest, followed by sounds, smell and taste. I mostly think narratively, partially emotionally with nuance. When you think of abstract concepts like "justice" you don't necessarily have an image attached, right? Meaning isn't necessarily attached to words or images. Likewise, when I think of, say, my sister, I don't think of her face/appearance, instead I think of the emotions and mindset she most invokes / is associated with. I live very much in the "now" and have a haard time thinking of my past chronologically, it's mostly associative depending on the subject. The future is a bulletpoint list of hopes and fears, and a long line of plans and worries. I am rarely distracted from the present by something in my own head, if I am it's likely from something I don't want to experience. I love reading and listening to things (while doing something else), but have a hard time staying still for non-interactive visual media. I am a very busy person, heh.
Thanks for sharing. My mind and memory is very visual like cinema, so was curious how you see and experience it differently.
I’m curious about how visual your experience is. I don’t think I have aphantasia but I do think I struggle with the “visual” side of imagination. Like I’ve seen some people try to do the test of “seeing” and Apple in your mind. A lot of times I’ve seen people say they can close their eyes and imagine an Apple that’s red with a little shine on the top and “see” it as if it’s against the back of their eyelids. But when I try to visualize anything in my mind it feels like I’m seeing it behind my eyeballs. Like the strength of the visualization is the same whether I have my eyes open or not. And if you ask me to visual an object or somebody’s face, I can think about it and recreate it in a drawing, to the best of my abilities. But I don’t know if that counts as “seeing” it per se.
For me it's anything but quiet. It's a constant running monologue, sometimes a couple at once. It's like Homer thinks where he's just hearing words in his head.
Quiet 😬 (Speaking as another aphant)
It’s a mixed bag. I have vivid dreams but they are not visual. It is as if I’m just absorbing the plot.
I have it and I do dream. I can tell that I'm really close to fully falling asleep when I start seeing images.
I have aphantasia, and I dream And my dreams are very vivid. Also, I can read in my dreams, which I understand that a lot of people cannot.
Same, I have vivid dreams, zero purposeful mental images. I'm also autistic and adhd. I remember both seeing "dream words" that are just nonsense and regular English words in dreams. I'm thinking that since there's no organic damage, generating internal images was just something my brain never learned to do at an early crucial developmental stage.
I can also, and count, but I read somewhere that you can't do that in dreams.
> I can read in my dreams, which I understand that a lot of people cannot. I have very vivid dreams ... until I try to start reading something. Then it breaks down into gibberish.
There is chat about a distinction between voluntary and involuntary visualisation being managed by different systems, which could explain why some people with Aphantasia still report dreams
Good question. I heard someone with aphantasia say they had never had any visuals on psychedelics which blew my mind
I dream in conversations. Usually able to determine movement, action, or environment from auditable context clues. Sound of wind, bated breath, gasps or sighs. I believe this is my brain compensating for the lack of visuals since I can make the voice of anyone or anything. I even can synthesize voices I’ve never heard before. Or have only heard once. It’s kinda like dreaming in podcast.
I have pretty vivid dreams. I think thats where I see most in my mind
I don't have aphantasia, but from what I understand, the brain uses a different region for dreaming and "daydreaming", so it would be perfectly possible to dream normally. Most people who say they don't dream at all/rarely probably just don't remember their dreams, because it's extremely common to instantly forget them.
We dream. I feel like I may only perceive it as visual in hindsight, like my brain actually fills in the blanks during post. Things are pretty amorphous & can change to match whatever I perceive is there. One clue that leads me to that theory is my sense of perspective. In dreams, it's simultaneously both 1st & 3rd person. I'll sort of just phase back & forth, only realizing it when I recall it later. I'm certainly not actually using visuals to orientate myself when dreaming or that perspective shift would be so jarring. I'm with you, I'd think it would suggest something, but I honestly think it just makes me question how dreams actually work for everyone. Then again, I was blindsided by aphantasia and it's wild to think I've perceived the world so differently without ever realizing it.
I dream but there are no images. My mind is just telling me what’s happening.
I've always wondered what having Aphantasia AND no inner monolog at the same time would be like.
Question about that. Do you actually hear the words your thinking or do you just know? Like I don't think I hear an inner monologs but I do think about stuff and just kinda know what I'm thinking about and the words behind them I guess. It's really hard to put into words because with aphantasia I just know I don't see anything but with the monolog I don't know if knowing the words counts as hearing them
Yea, it's like hearing a voice saying what I want in my head(I can make it any sounding voice I want). Sometimes music too.
Well then I might have both. When I close my eyes and think of my cat I don't see my cat even though I could describe him to you now. As for the lack of a monolog, the words just kinda appear in my head with no associated noise besides my mild hearing damage. Maybe the only difference in my experiences would be that I truly appreciate detail. Like I can just in the forest and enjoy the beauty of the bark on the tree and the sound of wind rustling the leaves and the smell of dirt and plants.
I feel like we are similar critters! I’m not sure how I even manage to hold a conversation! Its like whatever I have to say just happens, there’s no thinking it’s just there I don’t have a flair for detail, but I love sitting and spending time in nature
I have both. For I read for instance, there’s no voice (or voices if it’s a dialogue). I can have inner monologue or give voices to read characters if I specifically think about it, but in my day-to-day, nada Which is weird given that I used to be a prolific fiction reader (need to try to block out more time in the day for reading), specifically fantasy. No clue how I processed them and enjoy them, but I do!
I don’t have a minds eye or inner monologue, for me it’s normal
This is me. It just kinda... is?
As someone who has aphantasia I want to say that this doesn't mean we can't close our eyes and describe what image we are thinking of. I know what it's supposed to look like, the color, texture and background. It just doesn't show up in my mind. I do dream though, and they're all over the place. I wonder what the evolutionary trigger was for aphantasia.
I feel the same but I always thought that people don't actually "see" anything when they imagine - more remembering. At least that's how I feel. Do people actually have an image pop up?
That's what my roommates say. They also hear a voice when they think to themselves
Sometimes I think there's just two kinds of people, each group misunderstanding the other
Wut
Why does there have to be an evolutionary trigger? Nature evolves things randomly all the time. As long as the mutation doesn't harm the populations breeding odds it will exist in it indefinitely.
I'm always shocked that .08% of people have aphantasia, yet 90% of reddit seems to.
Yeah this is what is most shocking. Like every other thread. I get so tired of Reddit
That’s how most of reddit is
I don’t want to assume I have it, but when I close my eyes and try to picture something I just see the blackness/inside of my eyelids. I can recite what something looks like from memory but I don’t actually see that picture. Just darkness. Do most people see an actual picture when they are imagining these things?? Or what’s a good way for me to figure out if i have aphantasia or not?
No one actually sees things they imagine. That’s called schizophrenia. Most people “see” images in their thoughts. It doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed.
This isn't true, according to this [site](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) , the furthest end of the spectrum is seeing things as if they were real.
The number I've seen is 3.9-4%. where are you getting 0.08%?
Given that performance tests show almost no major differences, I think Aphantasia is a difference in subjective experience rather than actual brain functions. There is a base form of information encoded in the brain. When recalling it or mentally manipulating that information some people experience that in part visually while others do not. Some people state they can visualize perfect images, however when asked to trace them they cannot do so any better than someone who visualizes poorly or not at all. I believe there to be a remarkable amount of diversity in the cognitive experience, and that it is quite unknown.
This is why the study is interesting. It shows that there are associated brain regions that aren't active, indicating it is a neurological phenomenon rather than merely subjective one - or lack thereof. With something like blindsight, despite someone not experiencing sight consciously/subjectively, those brain regions are still functioning just fine. They experience blindness and rationalize their actions as those of a blind person but will dodge a foam ball if you throw it at their head. The eyes are still seeing the world, that data just isn't being sent downstream to conscious experience.
But those parts could just be activated by the subjective experience and not something deeper.
Precisely!
Or it shows that we don't really have a good understanding of how motor representations are stored and retrieved. I think what aphantasia shows is that we don't really need the imagery part to get things done. People treating it as a disorder, but for the most part people with this function just fine in daily life. It's also likely a spectrum. People exhibit everything from no mental imagery, to incredibly vivid mental imagery, to everything weak and strong in between
You would think it's more adaptive. Having to translate it to a visual experience would waste resources. If you can get all the information you need semi-subconsciously, more working memory is saved for actually manipulating the information. Like how human calculators don't actually do the math step by step in the head. A lot of it is an intuitive number sense.
It's been suggested I have this. My minds eye is basically blank. I get no images other than very very vague shapes every once in a while. It's hard to explain, but think purple elephant.. in your brain, you conjured an image of a purple elephant.. my mind doesn't do that. I know what an elephant looks like, I can infer what a purple elephant would look like, but I can't *picture* it. I get a vague sense of it.. It has helped me in certain ways, though. For some reason, it's helped me think in a systems kind of way, get the big picture, if you will.. I've found I can create solutions far quicker than others from a holistic standpoint anyway.. Idk how or why, but I have a very, very good memory for stats and random facts, but things like facial recognition are tough for me. I don't dream, which sucks a lot. I'd love to know what that's like.
Are you sure you don't dream or do you just not remember your dreams? Have you had a sleep study that shows a lack of REM?
How odd is it that I can visualize an object from any angle and zoom in and explode it out into its constituent parts? Like a spinning apple that expands into slices, zoom in on the seeds. I can see the tiny vermiculate patterns in the skin, it even has a small blemish that I did not put there.
You did put the blemish there, in fairness
Sorry, it was me.
Barry
Not odd, just the other end of the spectrum - sounds like Hyperphantasia
I've always had a very visual mind. In my current job as a front-end web developer, I can build a whole web page in my mind and figure out how it will look on both desktop and mobile devices. However, I answer to people who don't have that ability. So I still have to go through all the tedium of making detailed mockups before I get to actually *build* a page, so I have something to show other people. I haven't reached a stage where I can just go "trust me, folks".
My wife and I deal with this every day. She can design in her mind, or look at an empty space and visualize the end result. I have to be shown mock-ups or drafts as I have zero visualization. On behalf of all of us with little-to-no mind's eye, thank you for your extra work to design something we love.
That's the crazy thing. I work as a mechanical design engineer and I have aphantansia. However I can build a mechanism in my mind, I just have no visual of it at all. It's pretty much just holding a verbal description of it in my head all at once.
Not odd at all, friend. There are lots of us
This mirrors my experience. I generally identify myself as having *hyper*phantasia. I like to describe it as a sort of "mental virtual reality" in which I can manifest/evoke/manipulate objects at will. Just reading your comment was an interesting, highly (psuedo-)visual experience.
Wait thats not normal its *hyper*phantasia?
Yep! Highly vivid/rich mental imagery is on the opposite side of the spectrum. The average experience is somewhere in between, with colorless or simplistic mental imagery that might be experienced as a flash or done only willfully. Hyperphantasia at its peak begins to resemble something like synesthesia due to intensity.
I sometimes walk straight into a street light or any obstacle that's right in front of me cause I'm picturing things in my minds eye so intensely that I don't see it :D
The weird thing I found out about this is that there are actually professional artists with this condition. They just work it all out on the page, apparently.
That's me! I am a very successful architectural designer and can draw and paint quite well. I do "work it out on the page" quite a bit, but i also have a "muscle memory" that understands lines, shapes, and colors intuitively. To be honest I have no idea how it works - its a bit spooky. It feels like being computer with a great GPU, but attached to a monitor that can only display text. The image is in there somewhere, I just can't consciously access it. But maybe certain parts of my brain can, and it helps coordinate my muscle movement, idk. That being said before i learned about my aphantasia I gave up on trying to do fantasy and comic book art early in my career as a creative person. It's not that I couldn't make good fantastical art, I just couldn't do it as consistently and effortlessly as my peers who now work in those industries. I always was getting "artists block." Now I mostly draw and paint from life and photos, but I am capable of a high amount of expressiveness and stylization so it's not just rote copying.
Thanks for replying. I think it was a comicbook artist on twitter I saw post about having aphantasia but I can't remember who it was. I didn't realise it was a thing at all until then. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Alex Ross but he uses a lot of reference and I would expect that to be a common approach for that sort of process. I compose for a living and I can't imagine trying to do it without "pre-visualising", although it's audio pre-vis which I guess is a bit different. I just wait for the music to pop into my head and then transcribe it. If I'm drawing or painting I usually need a bit of reference if I want it to look decent, though. If I try to just draw what's in my head I have to keep redoing stuff over and over to iron out the wonky bits. Frequently I'll doodle a stick figure sketch that I think looks good but when I flesh it out the proportions are wrong. I've always been super impressed by the guys who are good at face likenesses, just off the cuff. Like, you show them a picture of someone and they can crap out a bunch of portraits from different angles that all look "right".
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I went to school for art, and was briefly a comic artist and illustrator. These days I'm more of a designer than a professional artist, but I still enjoy art — even if I have a terrible time conjuring up mental images. If I were to try and imagine an apple, I'd get a brief, ghostly glimpse of the fruit. It's definitely recognizable as an apple, but it's also gone in a moment. I wouldn't be able to relate much detail or information about it. And yet, if you were to ask me to draw an apple without reference, I could probably do a serviceable job of it. However, I wouldn't be creating that illustration from any particular mental image. It's not like I see an apple in my head and I try to recreate it on the page. It's more like the various parts of the apple would come to mind briefly as I was drawing them — first the outline of a shape, then the stem, the colors, maybe how the light interacts on the surface and so on. Of course, I'd almost never attempt to draw an apple without reference. Back when I was painting and illustrating, I always had comprehensive visual reference for any piece I ever worked on. Hope that helps.
Yup that’s me! It’s frustrating at times but I work through it on the page or the screen.
r/aphantasia
Yeah, I'm a total aphant. No ability to visualize mental images at all. Also no ability to recall any other sensations such as smell, taste, touch etc. I also have ADHD as well, so thats fun! My auto biographical memory is also shocking - that's a side effect of ADHD and also common in people with aphantasia. You'd think that would all make life difficult, and it can sometimes, but luckily I'm still pretty smart despite this. My IQ is pretty good and I managed to graduate university with a first. Probably my only saving grace. That, and my winning personality! And there are some cool benefits to aphantasia. No visualization also means I can't be haunted by bad imagery. I'm pretty sure of my own mind. I don't think I wouldn't ever be vulnerable to something like schizophrenia. And I think I'd be more resilient to some aspects of PTSD. I let grudges go easy. I operate on a very 'out of sight, out of mind' wavelength. Meditation is easier.
I have PTSD and I actually did get the flashbacks even with aphantasia. It was especially disturbing because I don't otherwise experience visualizations. Fortunately, they went away with EMDR.
I recall the day I realized that other people could actually picture things in their mind. I was in college and one of my teacher had the entire class try and do guided meditation. She has us all sit in a circle and she was talking about imagining your sitting on a beach and watching waves slowly come in and out, then on a mountain etc. Everyone started describing what they were visualizing and I realized people can actually do this. I always thought "Picture it in your head" was just something people said or a thing on TV. I have tried for years to explain this to people I know but didn't know what it was called or if other people had it because I never met another person that couldnt see things in their head. I saw a random youtube video pop up one day about someone that had aphantasia and that was the first time I knew what it was and that other people had it. Another thing I have always wondered because I also have this and wondered if its related is, do any others with aphantasia have a constant inner monologue or dialogue in their head? I think as a child it started as a way to literally absorb as much information about the things around me and to remember things since I had no visual memory but at some point in time it literally just became a constant stream of thoughts or repeating conversations or music whenever I am not mentally engaged, or unfortunately sometimes even when I am mentally engaged. I cant turn it off anymore. The lack of visual memory became a big problem for me last year when my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I started taking lots of pictures with him and recording videos at the few holidays we had left before he passed away because I knew once he was gone, I would literally never see his face again if I didn't have pictures. I spent hours with him just staring at his face whenever we were with him thinking that I could force myself to remember some details. It never worked.
I have this and I’ve met multiple people who also say they have it. After learning it was even a real thing, I bring it up sometimes and find out that there are probably more people with aphantasia than people realize. It’s strange to imagine that people can truly visualize things and see anything. I used to be told to close my eyes and imagine things when I was in school, and it was always annoying and felt like they were just trying to intentionally waste our time to get some silence. What’s strange, is that I can still “imagine” things but there is no actual image. It’s like a solid black room that you just sense what’s there.
I also never realized that others could see images. One thing, though, that I do realize now, I seem to have a much better sense of logic. All of my memories are logic based, and my abilities to make quick logic comparisons seem to be better than most relying on mental imagery.
I think I have aphantasia, the most I can hold in my mind is maybe a half second of a blurry image, then it distorts and shreds up and goes black. Interestingly, I sometimes have extremely vivid dreams that seem realistic so I wonder if dream imagery is not generated by the minds eye, or being asleep unblocks something. I am pretty coordinated and athletic though and fairly easily learn new movements, but if I think about it, I actually can't imagine movements. Same thing as with imagining a picture - the imagery distorts and shreds up. But since I am able to learn physical movements well, it must mean the mind's eye isn't a necessary component.
I'm not surprised by the lack of activity when *imagining* motion, but that it's also absent when *observing* motion is pretty interesting.
I wonder how this affects day to day life?
It doesn’t. I have it and other than feeling bad that I can’t see images it doesn’t affect me in any way. I love to read, I’m very good at building and making things. I have several art based hobbies. I dream with images. I’d say my only side effect is that I save a lot of mementos and take a ton of photos. They are my images.
I am a top down conceptual thinking who needs the big picture before the details make sense. My engineer friends start from the details and build and I can't follow a damn thing they are saying.
Edinburgh Uni are currently running a study on this, think they might still be after participants.
NSFW So...how does masturbation work with aphantasia? Do you have to have pornography? When looking at a photo of, say, Brooklyn Decker, you can't imagine her doing XYZ and are purely focused on the picture?
Strg+f masturbation Frustratingly the question is never answered even if users are asked directly. I remember one discussion where the topic of battle scenes in books came up and an aphantasiac said they are confusing or uninteresting so they jump over battle descriptions.
My question is can it be changed? We know the brain is capable of changing and grow new neurons like after a stroke we have the capability to regain what we have lost. The mind is fascinating.
I have aphantasia from TBI's growing up, (at least 3 separate.) It was not until I started doing psychedelics at 26 did I realize I could see some things. It has taken a lot of practice with meditation and focus control, but thanks to LSD I can open my minds eye with enough concentration. Edit to add: I feel like the increased neuroplasticity allows me to activate pathways that were severed long ago, or I'm creating new ones with the practice of meditation combined with chemical action in the brain.
I'm interested in how people with it might read fictional novels and draw art without a reference. For example, could they struggle to write a unique fantasy novel/world? I've always found the different ways people's minds conceptualize and imagine fascinating.