[mkfs]

To some degree, mind's eye clarity is an illusion, with many overestimating the fidelity of their mental imagery. One of the better, more recent examples is the "draw a bicycle" experiment: https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...

Granted, many can't draw at all, but people's inability to reproduce from memory an object of some complexity that they see (and likewise, use) every day is telling.

Also the well-documented inaccuracy of eye-witness testimony.

[roganartu]

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

[harrisi]

I think I have aphantasia, and there's two interesting things about this to me.

One, I couldn't tell you what sound a ball makes when it bounces on a table. I've never thought about absence of other senses but, thinking about it a bit, I can't really think of what a glass feels like or a fire smells like either. I have descriptions for all of them, like a glass is hard or a fire smells like.. smoke? Not really the best description. But in all of these cases, I instantly know I'm touching a glass or smelling a fire when it happens.

Two, I only thought of the ball in terms of the parabola it makes. When I read the color question, I can assign a color to it, but nothing in my "imagination" changes. There's just another word, blue or whatever, associated with it.

Thanks for making me think!

[1d22a]

I also have aphantasia, and find it really interesting to hear about people thinking of things in a similar way to me! Thinking about the ball in terms of the parabola it makes it exactly what I do too. Similarly, the ball doesn't exist as a physical "ball", but rather the knowledge of the concept of a sphere (which doesn't then have size or colour). The table, not a physical table, but the concept of a plane (with no thickness, size, colour (or legs)) - just the 'concept' of the important properties.

Despite aphantasia I have always been able to conceptualise spatial relationships, but it feels much less like trying to visualise it, and much more like "understanding" the fundamental properties connecting each thing.

[Ancapistani]

You've exactly described some of my very early memories - from before I had begun thinking in language.

To this day, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of a "door" is the way I conceptualized it before I knew there was a word. The best I can describe it is a combination of the act of reaching for a doorknob, followed by a plane hung vertically, pivoting inward from the right side. It seems to come from the act of opening a door... but the weirdest part is that while I was an infant in my memories of that type of internal dialogue, the conceptual representation I described describes the motion an adult would use to open a door.

I don't have aphantasia, have a very strong spatial sense, and ADHD-PI is a huge part of my life.

[aniviacat]

I don't have aphantasia and I struggle to imagine anyone truly having complete aphantasia.

If I tell you to draw a (low detail, toy, 2d) car, you probably would be able to - and quickly so.

However, if I ask you to describe the shape of the car, you would certainly take a lot more time to think of a description anywhere near as accurate as what you've drawn.

So what did you draw? Clearly not a description, as you do not have that available. Instead, you drew the image you have in your mind.

Since I see so many people talking about having aphantasia, I assume my thinking is wrong somewhere. Can you tell me where I went wrong in this thought process? Do you, contrary to my assumption, actually have an accurate description of all the shapes you could draw (a car, a tree, a circus tent) readily available?

[tstrimple]

Readily available? No. But if I wanted to draw a car, I'm iterating through parts in that way. And the accuracy of our "mental description" is certainly in question. Similar to how folks who can "picture a bicycle" can picture it incorrectly.

My wife and I have very different navigation skills. She can almost always tell me the compass direction and she's very good at relative directions. If she's in the house, she can instantly point in the correct direction of our children's school. I've got to stop and think through the steps I'd take to get there. I have to "reason" it out and she can just "see" it. It's almost like she's looking at a map of places and I'm dealing with a graph of nodes. I can walk the graph and understand how places are connected. But I can't really step back and see the bigger picture like she can. And I've got a lot of gaps in my graph because I only add nodes when needed. I could drive by a church a hundred times and not be able to tell you it exists. But when my daughter has a girl scouts meetings there, the graph gets updated.

[harrisi]

The discussion is mostly over so this is likely just for posterity.

I do have a list of attributes in my head for things. Things like cars are, in my opinion, not the best example since everyone has seen a car, say, millions of times (that's weird to think about). So the list of attributes is both large and constantly "refreshed" - not unlike dynamic RAM.

However, relatively unique objects, in terms of sightings, have a much shorter list. Not only is the list short, it may be inaccurate. This can lead to, as an absurd example, thinking a car has five wheels and they're on top of the car.

One of the reasons these phenomena seem incredible (as in credibility), I think, is that people don't tend to draw cars as a heap of possibly incorrect attributes. If I drew you a box which encased four wheels, a steering wheel, panes of glass, and doors all randomly placed and called it a car, you'd not be wrong to suggest I see a physician. However, I still have a functioning brain which has experienced reality. I can piece together a short list of attributes because I know that wheels roll, objects have mass, and gravity pulls all towards the grave.

Another way to think about this which is maybe more accessible (although analogues are never perfect) is language. Everyone occasionally encounters words that they're aware of but don't know the meaning of or have assigned an incorrect meaning. That doesn't mean they can't see, hear, or write the word. It's just that, if you press them on it, they either can't give you a definition or they produce an incorrect definition. To continue the analogy, if you know enough about a language, you can give a good guess at an unknown word based on your experience with other words.

Obviously this is just my experience, and I hope this along with the other comments sheds some light on the topic.

[whatevertrevor]

I don't have aphantasia but you might be wrong in many different ways:

- you assume the outcome of your experiment which is not a given

- even if the outcome is what you assume it is: there's the possibility of other explanations: for example having a pen paper to draw the car serves as an aid that helps them draw the car without having to imagine it. Just like having pen and paper can help me compute the square root of 4572847 without having to imagine the computation in my mind.

[saltcured]

Since you seem to want to appreciate the differences... I am also pretty far toward the aphantasia end of the spectrum.

Things like cars or airplanes, I could draw well enough to impress friends as a kid. That was partly partly due to constant classroom doodling. And, this was only for certain iconic types that I really studied. E.g. the round headlights of a classic Porsche 911 or the front view of an F4 Phantom II fighter yet from a Vietnam war movie. Even then, I couldn't really picture them directly, but I could _feel_ their 3D topography and use that almost like a surface model to feed into my hand acting as a 3D rendering pipeline. I don't see the image and reproduce it. I somehow feel the spatial model projecting onto the page and then try to pencil in that feeling before it dissipates. Yet, I can't do that for everyday items like my own car, laptop computer, or toothbrush. I can draw a generic representation, but can't remember and then reproduce any of the distinguishing characteristics that make my own possessions unique compared to the generic concept.

Similarly, I'm not face-blind, but I cannot remember and reconstruct any of the faces I know. I know them when I see them. I can also feel a lot of "this person looks a lot like that person", which sometimes helps me realize the specific expression features, angles, proportions, or even dynamics that are triggering my recognition. But I can't really recite any of that to tell you what I recognize.

I'm a bit like someone else said earlier in the thread. Imagining a bouncing ball, it's a feeling of the diminishing parabolas in 3D. You might sketch it the way a cartoonist shows a trace in the air behind something to indicate movement. But that's already more visual than my own imagining of it, which is more like a faint echo of that cartoon trace. And, it is somehow both dynamic and static. I feel the linked chain of parabolas all at once, but also somehow feel the movement vectors.

If you told me to imagine a particular type of ball, I could even imagine different trajectories and deformations, e.g. a hard rubber "superball" vs an old tired tennis ball vs a big squishy dodgeball from elementary school. But just asked to imagine a ball, I wouldn't select such details. It would just be the abstract path. And even when specialized, I still don't really see the ball or any color, just a feeling of the spatial scene that it traverses.

For me, this aphantasia is all about my waking/voluntary mental mode. I can have completely vivid lucid dreams which can sometimes be mundanely realistic and sometimes surreal. If I'm very tired, I might also get some imagery right as I near the hynogogic threshold. This is true for imagined vision, hearing, proprioception, and touch senses. They are all very "abstract" when awake and take form as the waking world slips away.

Not sure it is relevant, but I also have no internal monologue whether awake or in dreams. I can think about words or speech, but it is abstract and a bit like composing them in an editing buffer (which, due to aphantasia I can't really see!). Thinking is not at all like talking nor like listening.

[tstrimple]

I have aphantasia, but it doesn't extend to imagined sounds. It's almost the opposite really. I can imagine a variety of sounds a ball might make hitting a table depending on materials involved. When I've got a song stuck in my head it tends to be quite detailed. Full instrumentals and all. That doesn't mean I have perfect recall of songs or music to any degree. And it's not exactly voluntary. I can't tell you the full lyrics to any song off the top of my head. But when I get a song stuck there, I can "play" through it all and pick out details.

[Tyr42]

So, I do not have aphantasia, but I do have an impossible time recalling tastes. Kinda like how you describe your lack of memory of glass.

I can tell apart a strawberry from a pineapple, but I can't re-experience a taste later. If I want to compare two things, I need to taste them back to back. Or I need to write down what I think to compare with next time.

But I have no problem remembering things like: how crunchy or floppy the pizza was. That's not taste.

[foobarchu]

Yeah I describe my imagination to people as kinetic. Even if I'm trying to "see" a static object, it's in a form like a sparkler drawing.

Similarly, I can't hear a particular song in my head even if it's an earworm. Instead, I hear a rough approximation of it as if I were trying to describe it to someone else (instruments as mouth sounds, bad falsetto, and so on)

[kordlessagain]

I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.

To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.

The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.

The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.

This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.

This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.

[jiggawatts]

How could people possibly be this bad at drawing a bicycle!?

Was this study done on aboriginals living in a rainforest that have never gone to a paved part of the world where people use bicycles?

Sure, I'd get a bit flustered if asked to draw a modern mountain bike with rear suspension. Err... there's a spring back there... somewhere?

But an ordinary road bike? How could you get that wrong?

[smeej]

I have hyperphantasia, and only realized within the last decade or so that most people are not walking around with a detailed virtual overlay on the whole world.

This bicycle example really helps me appreciate the difference between how things are in my mind compared to most people's, and I appreciate your sharing it!

[constantcrying]

This seems like people who aren't thinking about the problem at all and don't even think about the mechanical problem.

I have no doubt that many of my recollections are bad, but I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.

[jaggederest]

> I can imagine essentially every detail of a bicycle, all the mechanical components and how they interact.

As I understand it, this is extremely uncommon, perhaps you might be categorized as hyperphantasia. How's your memory? They're commonly linked attributes, as per the article, some people with hyperphantasia have hsam - highly superior autobiographical memory, apparently from being able to conjure such accurate mental images.

[criddell]

I suspect if you ask the person who did a good job drawing a bicycle to label the parts, they would do well at that too.

I could do a decent job a drawing a bicycle and know the names of the parts because I’ve done a lot of the maintenance on my bike so I’m pretty familiar with it mechanically.

[smeej]

Perhaps, but I have hyperphantasia and could easily assemble/visualize a bike in my head without a clue what many of the parts are called. I know the big ones like "handlebars" or "pedals," but I haven't spent more than a few hours on bikes since childhood because of a deformity in my neck that makes my hands go numb in a riding position.

In some cases, it very well may be familiarity, but for some of us, it's just memory and visualization.

[jaggederest]

Yeah, that's where I'm at - I could take apart a bike mentally but beyond knowing "those are brakes", "that is frame", "those are gears", I have no specific bicycle knowledge.

[Affric]

So I read your comment before following the link and drew a bicycle perfectly.

I find it absolutely inconceivable that someone could be unable to draw a bicycle in Liverpool or a similar city.

I am not sure this is related to what OP is talking about.

[retsibsi]

I've seen a lot of bikes (and ridden thousands of kilometres), but when I had reason to draw a bike I felt the need to look up some photos to refresh my memory. I'm pretty sure I would have made some basic structural mistakes without that visual reference.

If you find this inconceivable, IMO you're assuming other people's minds work more similarly to yours than they actually do!

In my case (not aphantasic, but I think my visual imagination is significantly weaker than average), the information just didn't seem to be filed in full detail. The image was weak, as are most of my mental images, and I guess I had never paid that much attention to the concept (i.e. how the parts of the bike fit together as a whole; when I had had to pay attention, it had been to specific things like how the brakes work, how to reattach the chain, etc.), so it was all a bit of a muddle.

[jiggawatts]

Did you see the pictures in the link? The chain was going between the front and back wheel! The pedals were where the seat goes! Basically, a bunch of nonsense. There are chat-bots now that can do better.

I couldn't draw a detailed 3D technical drawing of a derailleur, but I can draw a sketch of a bicycle without needing a photo reference!

[wat10000]

Those seem like totally different things. If someone can visualize things in perfect detail, why would that necessarily mean they can remember the configuration of a bicycle?

[burnt-resistor]

Memory uses lossy compression where sometimes the compression is terribly inaccurate or leaves nothing at all. C'est la vie.

[dmos62]

You'd be surprised how developed these skills are in people that are in visual arts.