[obventio56]

I’m not sure why I’m the first to point this out on HN (which is usually a pretty skeptical group) but “aphantasia” is very poorly studied (1). I’ve met plenty of people who claim to have it but it seems more like a failure of language to compare experience. That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

[godshatter]

I can understand the skepticism. I have aphantasia and am equally skeptical that most people can actually "see" anything. When I'm supposed to visualize a beach, for example, for me it's merely a list of things I would tell the setup crew to make if this were a movie. Chair, umbrella, lifeguard stand, ship on the horizon, trail of footsteps along the water's edge, film it at sunset.

I have found differences between myself and others, though. When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note about it.

It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly tell me they "see" something.

[phaedrus]

I have hyperphantasia but also difficulty with faces. If the person changed their hair, applied their make-up differently, is standing at an angle I haven't seen them from before, etc. it won't match the hyper-specific image my memory has of them and my brain will give me a very strong "NOT THE SAME PERSON" signal.

So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason!

The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT".

When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.

[axby]

Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape.

But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned.

I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.

[godshatter]

> I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.

I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious. Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair, square face, just standing there watching things". It helps me to remember in case it's important later.

And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what that is like. I don't have that kind of experience otherwise.

My mind is a dark, quiet place :)

[axby]

Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment:

I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while.

Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer.

Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.

[anyfoo]

Sorry for asking the same questions as I did above, but this is very interesting to me. When you work with equations in your head, you do not work with visual representations of your equations? What about electronic circuits (if you do that) and, say, the current flowing through them, do you trace that in an actual representation (one out of almost infinitely many possible), or something more abstract? If you remember things from a textbook, do you sometimes remember where on a page you've seen it (e.g. a table, a graph, a picture, or just text) and the general shape of it, or is that impossible as well?

[v64]

Not OP, but also have visual aphantasia. Not speaking for others, but for me personally, my mind is entirely auditory. I hear my thoughts as spoken words, and if I'm thinking about something complex, it resembles a crowd of chatter where I can focus in on certain conversations while tuning out the rest.

I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two."

If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology.

Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.

[godshatter]

When I'm working with equations in my head, which I don't do often, I think of them as a list of terms and what's done with them. No visual representation, just a memorized list. For electronic circuits, I would probably remember what connects with what, but not how they are laid out spatially. For textbooks, I do remember sometimes that the specific text I'm think of is found on a left page near the top, but I can't see it. That's just where my eyes will scan when I look for it again. Most often I don't, though, unless I poured over it a lot when learning it.

I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than others and I think it's because most people were trying to visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it was just another equation to work with.

[whatshisface]

I don't think about the visual representation of equations. I think about the equations, not in any specific representation, but as what they are. I think my mental abilities are roughly average, including my ability to picture things when reading books, but I have noticed that people with extremely good imaginations don't often have a mental slot for "equations," as they actually are, but only for images of written expressions that represent equations.

It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.

[anyfoo]

And you are able to manipulate complex equations without any visual tools, just by "thinking about what they are"? For example mentally multiply a term into nominator and denominator of a rational function? That's just inconceivable to me. Where's your "scratch pad" essentially. To me it works pretty much like it works on paper, only that the "paper" is in my head, and the visuality of it all (being able to "focus" on a particular part of the equation etc.) helps in keeping the problem tractable, otherwise even a relatively simple equation quickly becomes overwhelming to manipulate.

(To say nothing about the other meaning of the word "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it" without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because that pun was also too good to pass up).

[whatshisface]

You are able to conceive of it, you're just doing it without realizing what you're doing. Someone with a good imagination but no math knowledge at all could picture the same squiggly lines as you can, but without meaning. In your head there exists both the squiggly lines, and what they mean. All you have to do is fill in the last quadrant, which would be holding the meaning without picturing the lines. I would suggest that you might be using the meaning scratch space without using the imagination scratch space every time you think about something that can't be pictured.

You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is going, people with bad imaginations would be people with an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking.

[anyfoo]

And yet in some areas at least so much about the language in math itself seems to be centered about a visual understanding.

I mentioned the s-plane earlier: We talk about poles and zeros in the s-plane, because they form poles and zeroes visualized in an actual plane, a 2-dimensional plate with protrusions into the 3rd dimension. The poles pulling the plane upwards into infinity, the zeroes tacking it down to the "floor". In the z-plane, we talk about getting the spectrum of a signal or filter by tracing the unit circle, because you can imagine tracing a literal circle in the plane. We "shift" signals up, down, left, right, we "flip" spectrums, we "cross" the origin.

To know whether a z domain transfer function is stable, I don't read "the complex roots of the denominator have to have a magnitude < 1" past some initial textbook definitions, it's just "the poles have to be inside the unit circle". In the s-plane, we instead talk about the poles being on the left half.

And yet the subject matter, signals and filters, has nothing to do with "visual objects" per se (like geometry would, for example). Even if the signal is a video signal, what we are manipulating here has nothing directly to do with what the video signal shows. And the signal might be an audio signal or just some nondescript digital data to begin with.

It just amazes me that someone can grasp such a complex subject without working with its ubiquitous visualization, so pervasive that its objects were named accordingly. It's true that I can build enough intuition to say things like "okay, if I put a capacitor there I'll have another pole" and not think about the actual plane for that instant, but as soon as it's something more complex that I don't immediately "know", I have to resort to my visualization again. I probably speak out of envy, because this also means I can never fully have the feeling of "grasping" higher dimensional problems for example, especially when familiar properties that are true for n<=4 break down there. I always only feel my understanding is working with a "shadow" of what's actually happening, to use another visual metaphor.

[anyfoo]

* I meant Laplace Transform, not Laplacian. Different things (and I can't edit anymore).

[zepto]

Why? There are seemingly plenty of different ways that people are wired. Assuming everyone is wired the same seems like a preposterous null hypothesis given how varied we are in every observable way.

[stevebmark]

I wonder about this too, and what's interesting is it seems very difficult to objectively say if people perceive things "visually" in their mind's eye. I can imagine a flat gray 5 pointed star in my mind, and of course there's not a visual experience like my eyes, it's more of an imagination of the visualization of seeing.

I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable.

When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training?

I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.

[Accacin]

Yeah, it's one of those things people like to claim because it makes us that little bit more unique.

I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept.

Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.

[phaedrus]

I have hyperphantasia. It's like having a CAD program inside my mind, and I can design entire physical devices, machines, or structures and later when I build them the 3D arrangement of the parts works out just as well in the physical world as my mental model indicated. I can also plan out algorithms for generating or slicing 3D triangle meshes in my mind, and when I write out the algorithm it works on the computer just as I thought it would.

I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain:

I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought.

So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.

[pseudalopex]

Some aphantasics weren't born with it. Many have vivid dreams. So they can compare their own experiences.

How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in that article?

[nicoburns]

> That explanation seems more reasonable to me than a few people are wired differently.

Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.