I read much of that guide. I was initially led to believe that I have aphantasia. I certainly don't see things that don't exist - that would be an hallucination. I can imagine and describe it in vivid detail if I want, but it's not there - I don't see it in the same way I see the physical reflection of light on surfaces.
Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres.
Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though.
Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia.
Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D
It leaves you with not having aphantasia! I rather suspect quite a lot of people who believe they have it simply differ on the level of literalism they're willing to use to describe their imagination than those who've led them to believe they have it.
That's what I always assumed from reading about it in the past, where it was mostly "I can't imagine things in my mind". Well, I can certainly imagine things.
Now, the guide in the top comment talks about actually seeing things. I don't. As in, really not at all, for any interpretation of "seeing" I can think of.
I wouldn't even describe it as fuzzy - it's just not an image at all, it's more abstract thought and abstract perception.
Can you sit back and picture something at all? Like if I said "imagine the exterior of your house" would you actually imagine that or would you just be unable to do that at all?
I've been trying to work out for a while how much aphantasia I have, and I think it might help to give more detail to your instruction, and then your follow-up question.
If you said that to me, I would imagine the exterior of my house. But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different. I would think of, and sort of see different details of the house at different times. Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.
I've tried a few times to actually _see_ something in my mind, and there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly. So much more vividly than usual, that I remember thinking that if this is what other people can do easily, then sketching must be far easier than for me - you'd just copying down what you see in your head!
Edit:
I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it. I picture things with less vividness/detail, so I'm not sure whether I really see them.
> But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different.
Yeah that's where I'm at as well. I can answer yes to that question but I'm not sure my answer means what GP might interpret from it.
> Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.
Similar here, though in my case I wouldn't necessarily call it "remembering". I can "picture" a completely made up house and it will "appear" similarly in my mind.
> there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly
Same, or during actual dreams.
> I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it.
If you mean the one with the apple inside the heads, it doesn't help me at all. I can't relate to any of the pictures in it. :D
Your comments, and your other reply to the parent post I was replying to, really resonated with me.
I think by default I imagine things the same way as you - not images, not words, but just knowing how something is. I think perhaps that is similar to what I called remembering. When I think of something that way, I can think of, for example, a whole house. But I don't see anything.
But, if I try to picture something instead, as an actual image, I can actually picture smaller specifics parts of something. I think when I do that I am actually doing what people are talking about when they say they are picturing something, or seeing something in their mind's eye. All I get then is like an outline, or faded details, and I can only do small details at a time. Between a 3 and 4 in the Wikipedia representation of aphantasia. It sounds to me like you aren't able to switch to seeing something at all.
A while ago, after reading about someone curing their aphantasia, I thought about this a lot, and I think at the time I suddenly remembered something that made me think I could picture things clearly when I was a child. I also know that I see things when I dream, so I decided I should be able to get the ability back.
I used to try quite often to picture things in my mind, and would do some of the tricks like having eyes open a crack, and just waiting to recognise things in the patterns on my eyelids, etc. Occasionally I would suddenly see something as if it were really there. Like a 2 on the scale. The one thing I remember now is that I saw an entire chair, well enough that I could have sketched it. Have you tried often, or I guess practiced?
Edit: I tried some of the things this person described. They took a Better Living Through Chemistry approach that I didn't want to try though, so I skipped all drugs/chemicals/teas:
I can imagine it, yes. But there's no images. Not in practice, at least. I don't see the shapes and colours, but I know how they are. It's more abstract thought than image per se. It's not words either, so it's very hard to describe.
I feel in my gut that this is fad-driven internet bullshit, and I would like to learn less, if it were possible.
> Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurologist from Exeter, receives a patient who can no longer imagine — known as patient MX. MX goes blind in his mind’s eye after undergoing surgery.
> Media outlets like the New York Times report the findings. This leads to an outpouring of new discoverers.
My gut feel has always been that it is just a language thing where some people think that when others imagine things that they literally see it right in front of them _the same way_ they see real things.
Like, when I imagine a scene or object in my head, I am not literally seeing it. It's like some vague in-between thing. And that people who claim to have aphantasia just have a higher bar for what it means to "see" something.
Though I'm open to being corrected if there's some concrete experiment that can be performed that shows definitively that some people can not imagine things _at all_.
Maybe you have aphantasia as well. I had without knowing it.
Some observations:
Someone told me to close my eyes and think about "an apple at a table".
Then I was told to open my eyes and tell what color the apple was.
The question didn't make sense to me:
I only thought about about the concept of "an apple on a table". When my eyes are closed it is black. Absolutely black. Blacker than a Norwegian winter night with cloud cover and no moon. There is nothing.
Until then I thought all this talk about seing things was just a metaphor for what I had also done.
But when I talk to others they will often immediately say it was green or red. Because they saw it.
Two extra observations:
Sometimes just before I fall asleep I can sometimes think images of stuff that doesn't exist: think 3d modeling with simple shapes.
And just after waking up I can sometimes manage to see relatively detailed images of actual physical things.
Both these only last for a few seconds to a few minutes.
I also have this mostly when I'm half asleep and have had some very 4K sharp lucid dreams as well, including seeing leaves on a tree up close and feeling the texture.
Under normal circumstances, my imagination is also colorless and is more about spatial layout and shapes. Like an untextured 3D model.
It's hard to describe. I think there's more nuance here. When you ask "What colour was the apple?" then I can "fill in" the colour and imagine a "red" one. But it's more like the details are filled in "on demand" or "lazilly" rather than "ahead of time". And like I said, it's not the same thing as actual visual hallucination.
It is helpful to have someone engage, for sure. I have a question for you: if you look at a 3d object that you can only see one side of, can you make inferences about the other side of the object? Can you rotate it in your head? Could you quickly be able to tell whether an object will fit in a particular hole, without actually trying it?
> if you look at a 3d object that you can only see one side of, can you make inferences about the other side of the object? Can you rotate it in your head? Could you quickly be able to tell whether an object will fit in a particular hole, without actually trying it?
Obviously I cannot know for sure what the other side looks like without seeing it, but I can make a reasonable guess and yes, I can mentally turn around objects in my head to see if they fit.
I also enjoy woodworking and repairs and other activities that force me to think 3D, but I believe it would be much easier if I could think in images.
Yes. Or maybe rather understand. For me it was a lightbulb moment just like my realisation of exactly how bad my colourblindness was: what is next to impossible for me to see (red drawings on woods in maps) was chosen by someone who thought it stood out.
I'm at least pointing out that I now know personally that there are multiple levels of visualisation, from me just "feeling" what it would mean to rotate a 3d object (it works, I can absolutely determine if it will fit but it is absolutely not visual) up to some close friends of mine that see vivid pictures of faces and can combine them with eyes closed.
For me who cannot see images except what I physically see it certainly is interesting to hear people describe remembering peoples phone numbers as text that they can see (I remember the feeling of myself saying it, not the sound) or memorising my name by mentally putting the image of ne next to their image of their brother who has the same name as me (!)
It really is funny, because I can draw. For example the famous "draw a bike" thing seems weird to me because I can't see myself making any of the mistakes from any of the drawings. Not because I can see a bike, but because I know it.
I really wish I could occupy your brain for a few minutes to see just how much of this is language. There's an amazing effect in this conversation where I remain convinced that basically everything I've heard could come down to definitional differences, and yet it really could come down to a radically different subjective experience between us, and I have no real way of knowing.
Patient MX there is quite persuasive. Lots of neuroscience discoveries start with somebody having some brain damage and losing a facility of some kind. However, most of the people claiming aphantasia, or the extreme opposite, are not brain damaged. At least not literally.
It would also be more valuable information if some area was damaged that was known to cause the effect.
My gut feel is that people's experiences can be quite different. V.S. Ramachandran's books have nudged me to take these things more seriously.
I think visual imagination is also related to spatial rotation abilities. For example can you imagine yourself in your hometown, then imagine an "animation" as you (from a first-person perspective) fly up vertically, then turn in various directions and sort of feel where the landmarks are in the mind's eye? Or does that sound nonsense to you? Would you agree that being faster at certain tasks (that require a visual scratchpad - e.g. imagining a tabletop and being told what happens e.g. add a triangle on the left, add a square halfway overlapping the triangle etc) indicates that someone has more vivid imagination?
The parent article has brain scans showing different activations in control brains vs aphantasia vs hyperphantasia. Also when people self report that their experience has qualitatively changed that seems like a pretty strong indicator that’s at least a range.
The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.
So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?
Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.
I have aphantasia. I do not normally see things in my inner eye at all, but I still "imagine" things. I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them.
But I do see images while dreaming. It's very distinct from imagining things while awake and unable to see them.
And I have had one waking experience where I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake, in a dark room, with my eyes closed during meditation. It was very different from when I'm dreaming.
This is not a "language thing". Until the experience mentioned above, I had gone ~40 years with no idea seeing things in your minds eye while awake was a thing at all.
> I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them.
This is what I mean though. What do you mean by "see" exactly, if not imagine? You can imagine something so clearly that you are able to replicate it on paper, yet that is not the minds eye? I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things.
> I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake
If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
It's super interesting to read these accounts. I have my doubts that Aphatasia is real for 99% of people who claim to have it and its a language issue.
What is imagination if not seeing the thing in your head. Do people think others LITERALLY see an object like photons are hitting their neurons directly?
Some people do report seeing things as clear as if photos are hitting their eyes. Most people report more diffuse views.
I see nothing, but I have seen once, and when I did, I did "literally" see an object as clear as if I was looking straight at it, or to be more precisely a I saw a whole scene.
This is hard to talk about because all of our terms for it involve assumptions of seeing.
But when I "imagine" something, there is unambiguously no visual whatsoever. I can't see lines, colors, points. Nothing, any more than if there was a wall between me and an object I have never seen.
But that doesn't mean I don't have knowledge of it.
> I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things.
Then how would you describe imagining things? Because if you don't see something when imagining it while awake, then that sounds like aphantasia.
> If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
And yet what I experienced isn't even near the high end of reported experiences of people.
Maybe let's loop in other senses for a second. Since, presumably aphantasia doesn't apply to all senses? I can imagine the sensation of my tongue on a cold ice cream, and even the taste. But I don't _taste and feel_ it. I can imagine burning my hand on a hot stove, but I don't recoil. See how they are separate but related? The same is true for how I imagine things visually. I don't actually see them, but I imagine them. I don't know how else to articulate that seeing and visualising are not the same thing.
Personally I can imagine something with such detail and depth that my eyes are effectively blacked out despite being open. I can also imagine a grayscale 2D apple fine too, so Im not completely fucked if I have an abstract thought driving a car.
Are you saying you think everyone can see basically the same amount of imagery?
I’m quite convinced it’s a real distinction. I have nearly zero visualization. The main thing for me is that I may get a fleeting glimpse of part of an image if I focus, but it evaporates instantly. I can’t hold it for any amount of time whatsoever.
On the other hand, I have very strong internal audio. I can play back music I haven’t heard for years or even decades. I hear the different instruments come in, the timbres, etc. It’s obviously not the same as music hitting my eardrums, but it is full, detailed audio which I can pause at will, rewind and pick apart. I’m told there are people that can’t hear any sound in their heads at all...
I also lost the ability to think in images after a series of surgeries at 13. I went from being a very imaginative kid with dream like states while awake to purely lexical. I stopped enjoying playing pretend with my sister basically overnight, I just couldn't see it any more.
I still do have visual dreams though they are rare, I can no longer conjure any sense of an object while awake. I have a couple images from before this (my mother's face before she died) that I can kind of almost see, idk, or I have the feeling like I'm seeing them.
Call it whatever you like, maybe there is a natural distribution, I always thought of it as the cost I paid to stay alive, my own personal brain damage even though my surgeries were all cardiovascular.
I respect you, fellowniusmonk, but all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. People want me to be nice about this and acknowledge that the thing exists because they all say it does. The best I can offer is acknowledgement that you all say it does.
On the other hand, you have a special claim to plausibility because of the surgery. Oh wait cardiovascular surgery? So, are we saying anaesthetic side effects? Or brain damage from reduced blood flow maybe.
I'll note that a lot of people's impressions and feelings about ... what it's like to be alive, generally ... undergo a radical transformation at about age 13, because hormones.
As someone with aphantasia, all I ever get from people who can visualize is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment, etc.
By definition, this will always be the case until we have a deep enough understanding of the brain to diagnostically assess this.
What I can assure you is that I cannot see/imagine with my mind, and that many other aspects of my life make sense given this limitation, e.g. when people describe their experience of reading books and mental world building, it’s entirely foreign to me. Or when my brother describes his ability to create mind palaces, manipulate visual concepts mentally as if he were using CAD software, etc. it seems preposterous.
But I have to take his word that it’s something he can actually do. Such is the nature of this subject.
Until I discovered the concept of aphantasia in my early 30s, I genuinely thought that people’s descriptions of “visualization” were just a figure of speech. It was mind blowing to learn that people actually see anything more than nothing at all, and a lifetime of experiences and confusion about what other people described about theirs suddenly made sense.
I have similar feelings about those who claim to have an internal monologue or voice etc. It's all so alien to me. Outside of dreams or hynagogia, my "self" and internal experience is non-verbal, non-visual, and mostly lacking any other sensory qualia.
If "me" is rooted in any perceptual qualia, I think and experience a vague mixture of a spatial awareness, proprioception, topology, and emotion. I can barely summon sound memories like music, and this could include lyrics. This recall is very faintly rooted in auditory qualia. Like the ghost of an echo down a distance corridor. Moreso, I can "feel" such music memory as a hint of proprioception, i.e. the after-thump of bass in my body or the after-tingle of a cymbal in my ear. But it utterly lacks the presence and richness of real listening.
I can think about words and phrases I've either heard or read, or try to arrange some words to write or speak later. But they're fleeting concepts, neither visual nor auditory in quality. They're not like the sound or music memory above. They're also not visuals of typography. In fact, I've more than once had words in my lexicon that I could neither pronounce nor reliably spell. I could readily match them to parsed words when reading, but would be unable to express them.
Finally, I have a relative with schizophrenia. I've witnessed how she behaves when hallucinating and/or having delusions. She often seems to experience her thoughts as if being talked to over her shoulder, or can manifest a fear into seeing dangerous threats. Her experience seems a kind of polar opposite to mine.
I wonder how it is to be somewhere in the middle of this range. It must be different from hers, to be useful but not schizoid. And it also seems like it must be a lot more vivid and accessible than my usual experience.
If your core issue is with trying to quantify and observe others Qualia I think you're going to have a hard time.
I still have people tell me I must be faking my colorblindness, or just treat me like I'm blind. Normally teenagers, theory of mind is tough at that age.
I'm not sure nice or just a smidge of humility/uncertainty in expressing doubt.
Propagation of information pre-internet was so low people just couldn't easily triangulation on some of these things.
Fwiw I generally agree with you, my wife brought this up to me just in the last few years and I was like, oh I just thought this happened to everyone around 13 like a reverse Hook (the movie) thing.
But I can't paint or draw worth a damn sense then and she can freehand paint hyper realistic pictures. I don't see how she could do that without the imagination version of a stencil.
After I found out it wasn't a normal part of puberty I just figured it was brain damage acquired during the surgeries.
Also, from what I understand fMRI shows enough of a difference I'm inclined to believe the other people who say they were born that way.
Well, I'm an artist, but I don't insist that I can visualise things vividly, whatever that really means.
I'm looking at the brain scans in the article now. It's good that it's got 'em. Do they really mean what they're presented as meaning? It shows that some people, when told to imagine things, activate a bunch of brain regions. Some of those are also involved in actual looking, though not with clear purposes. Then there's also
areas to do with memory and salience. I'll say that the people in this group are having a more emotional experience when they imagine. They give more of a shit, they pay more attention. I'm not sure that this qualifies as a skill, or an ability, or "seeing". But heck, what's seeing anyway?
Ed Catmull surveyed people at Pixar, and there wasn't a particularly strong correlation in their staff between ability to draw and aphantasia or not - they had artists with aphantasia such as Glen Keane, who created Ariel[1]
For my part, while I'm not a great artist by any means, there was absolutely a time where I was well above average at drawing, despite aphantasia.
People struggle to draw things that are right in front of them - being able to see what you draw is not inherently a huge asset.
Obviously because each person is different a/b tests are somewhat impossible for qualia issues. All I have is access to my pre/post expierence. It seems aphantasia can be intrinsic or emergent and since mine developed potentially through damage or re-wiring during surgery I wouldn't be suprised in the slightest that the pathways and compensations are different or non-existent for my case but not for others.
>all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression.
Is there any other way to get information on what people see internally?
The idea that great artists, for example, don't have dramatically different visualization than people who report not seeing sharp images or images at all seems like the theory in need of proof.
You can't just say the evidence is subjective so you're right. The evidence only ever could be subjective.
Did I say I'm right? I assume we're all wrong in ways yet to be discovered, that's my default position on everything. And I've modified my viewpoint slightly just now: I accept that there are loose groups of people who experience imagination differently. So I'm being decently open-minded here, what do you want, blood?
The only basis we have for assuming you're a self-aware sentient being is also your self report.
For my part, I have experienced both aphantasia - for my entire life - and seeing images clearly. Once, during meditation. No drugs involved. No health issues. Not during puberty.
The two are not remotely alike.
I also see images regularly while dreaming. That is different from both experiences.
I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.
So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.
Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.
It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense.
I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like.
And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical.
And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream.
It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real.
But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike.
And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.
Aphantasia makes a number of testable hypotheses and can/has/continues to be dealt with as a serious scientific question. But instead of taking the time to do even the bare minimum of research, you trust your gut to tell you that it's bullshit. Classy.
I'm digging around in the Wikipedia article on "burden of proof", quick, head me off at the pass before I quote it.
Heh, it mentions "burden tennis". It all devolves to who's got the status quo on their side and who's making the extraordinary claim, or not. I can see why fistfights are a popular way to resolve disagreements.
Google scholar has 5000+ hits on the term, I'd suggest starting there. Once you've completely your meta-analysis proving that it's all "bullshit", let us know. That's how science works. You think your 10 minutes scrolling wikipedia substitutes for decades of research? Surely, since you and your gut feel so strongly about it, the evidence should speak for itself.
it is, it's unfalsifiable nonsense because nobody actually "sees" things in their "minds eye", when someone imagines something it's just a generic default instantiation of whatever, the properties might list "red" and "cube" but the individual doesn't "see" the red cube.
It's just another way for attention seekers to feel special.
Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres.
Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though.
Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia.
Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D