[card_zero]

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.

Hmm

[cnity]

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_.

[eitland]

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.

Does this help?

[bonoboTP]

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.

[cnity]

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?

[eitland]

> 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.

[card_zero]

Are you trying to help them believe?

[eitland]

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.

[cnity]

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.

[eitland]

With me I know:

I know if I close my eyes now there is nothing visible.

I also know if I have a good night's sleep and wake up late on Saturday I might be able to see images of things I am working on in the garden or elsewhere.

So I know seing nothing is my default and I know that seing something vividly can be possible.

[card_zero]

Being able to draw better than people who can "visualize" better throws doubt on what type of thing "visualizing" really is.

[khazhoux]

I can draw better than most people, but have nearly zero internal visualization. I learned to draw by direct observation, committing the patterns to memory, and repetition.

As a result, I have excellent (if I do say so myself) drawings from life, some shockingly good portraits in oil, and also I can reproduce a few cartoon characters (which I’ve practiced extensively) almost perfectly. BUT, ask me to draw my mom from memory, and I can’t do it, like at all. I have, really, no idea what my own mom looks like.

[eitland]

I'm referring to this experiment / art thing:

https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...

[vidarh]

I don't think that makes sense. Most people struggle to draw even with something to copy right in front of them. Seeing something is insufficient to draw well. It's also not necessary in order to draw well.

[card_zero]

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.

[bonoboTP]

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?

[roxolotl]

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.

[suddenlybananas]

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.

[roxolotl]

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?

[suddenlybananas]

Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.

[roxolotl]

That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.

[vidarh]

I have aphantasia, but I have had one experience of seeing clear imagery while awake (and it was not on drugs)

They are not remotely similar.

[vidarh]

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.

[cnity]

> 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.

[tekla]

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?

[vidarh]

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.

[khazhoux]

I don’t think anyone thinks it should be like photons. I think we all understand that internal visualization is something different.

[vidarh]

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.

[cnity]

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.

[vidarh]

What you describe makes it sound like you have aphantasia.

People who don't have aphantasia do report "actually seeing" things with various degrees of fidelity, in some (less common) cases clearly enough to "overlay" on objects with their eyes open.

When I had my experience I did "actually see things". Yes, I know they weren't there, but it looked as if they were, in high resolution, full colour, with motion.

EDIT: Also, people "imagine" things with other senses or without too, and people have or don't have inner monologues, or dialogues, in their own voice, or separate voices - the breadth of inner life is very significant.

For my part, I don't recall sounds either, but I "reproduce them" in inner monologue in my own voice roughly in proportion to my ability to reproduce them out loud, but others do recall sounds as they heard them, reporting various degrees of fidelity. The same for smells. Most assumptions about how people's internal life "must" be tends to fall apart once you ask enough people.

E.g. There are writers I know with no internal monologue or dialogue. I know others for whom writing is like listening in to characters acting out scenes and just transcribing it. In some cases watching them act out scenes and just describing them.

[HK-NC]

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.

[khazhoux]

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...

[fellowniusmonk]

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.

[card_zero]

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.

[haswell]

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.

[saltcured]

Well said.

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.

[fellowniusmonk]

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.

[card_zero]

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?

[vidarh]

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.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256

[fellowniusmonk]

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

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.

[graeme]

>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.

[card_zero]

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?

[vidarh]

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.

[haswell]

What are you trying to imply with the “hmm”?

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.

[card_zero]

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.

[vidarh]

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.

[perrygeo]

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.

[card_zero]

You didn't really say anything here yourself other than that you're awed by it. Also that I'm the one who has to do all the work apparently.

[perrygeo]

If you're gonna come out and say "trust my gut, this is bullshit" - yes, you do need to do all the work.

[card_zero]

Why's that, then?

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.

[perrygeo]

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.

[suddenlybananas]

It's not decades of research, the term was coined in 2015. There's a vague reference to something similar earlier but it doesn't constitute pre-existing research. It's an extremely recent phenomenon to research it.

[card_zero]

You can tell me what the testable hypothesis is.

[jpfromlondon]

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.