[erganemic]

Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly-impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially through a text medium!).

I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!".

I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people - for starters, people vastly overestimate their ability to picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. Even if they didn't have the artistic skill to make a "good" drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has the handlebars in front of the front wheel).

My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my brain is recalling apples it's seen before and telling itself to process that information as if it were coming from my eyes. Even though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I visualize it in my head, it feels like I'm seeing it. She chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same vividness anymore (she's since "recovered").

I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring each other that we weren't really mind-blind - but that would either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that make them more likely to be friends :)

[kayodelycaon]

I have an extreme ability to visualize, which includes all of my senses, to the ability to imagine being an animal. Smell, taste, hearing, limited visual senses, instincts, the feeling of fur on my skin, and more are all within my ability. For lack of a better term, I call it my "mental holodeck", which seems to get the point across. It's more of a virtual machine because I'm running someone else's brain on my hardware.

This ability evolved from lucid dreaming I learned in high school. After eighteen years of deliberate practice (several times per week), I can drop into this state at will. My real senses are dimmed, but not gone. If my phone beeps, I will hear it and likely lose what I'm imagining.

Despite all of this, I couldn't draw any of it. I can't draw and I lack the ability to keep a single image in for a prolonged period. But I can write it. Finding ways of describing smells or sensations in a way other people can understand is fun. (My virtual machine can also run approximations of other people.)

[riskable]

As I read your 6/7 dinner party example I couldn't help but wonder if it's just a "birds of a feather" bias: People who have trouble visualizing things tend to get along well/have similar interests/beliefs/realities and just naturally often end up hanging out together.

You could say that about any sort of human trait: People who <share trait X> tend to enjoy each other's company. Some traits having more influence than others (obviously).

[vgel]

This is a great point.

Agreed with your comparison to your wife as being better at visualization: I think in general "aphantasia" is on a spectrum, with some people being completely unable to visualize things, and others hearing about people who can visualize incredibly well and thinking "If I don't have that, then I must have aphantasia!"

It's also a skill: I used to think I had aphantasia. Over the last ~3 years I've been practicing visualization -- nothing fancy, just trying to close my eyes and visualize things every so often for a few minutes. With that low-level practice, my ability to visualize things has improved a lot: before I had nothing, now I can get black-and-white shaky images, and manipulate them, rotate them, etc.

Still can't do faces though, I can imagine the rest of a person but their face is just missing. Still working on that :)