Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head.
I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA.
I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate?
That's said, I imagine if you rewatched a recent movie, you would recollect every scene during the act of rewatching, just like someone without aphantasia.
For anyone who has a hard time believing this condition is real (because I initially did) here's how I think about it. When I first learned there are people who are color blind, I was stunned and skeptical that I could be looking at a certain colored flower and someone next to me didn't see the same reality. I can also easily believe that someone can imagine something in their mind way more vividly than I can. I'm willing to bet you could do an experiment where you give various people step by step instructions to do origami in their mind, draw a top-down view of the final shape, and there'd be a wide range of accuracy even among people without aphantasia.
> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details.
> Do you think that's accurate?
I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap.
With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of visualization in recalling narratives (and details within them). Fiction books (for adults, anyways) generally lack visuals, yet readers across the entire visualization spectrum[0] can engage with them and recall/discuss scenes, plot points, etc. Absorbing the narrative of a movie isn't so far off from that. I just took my kid to see Inside Out 2 earlier this week, and have a pretty clear recollection (sans whatever gaps I'm incapable of being aware of) of all of it.
[0] I think, but am not sure, that it strengthens my point here to note that people who visualize the story as they read it are nearly certainly visualizing it _differently_, but that almost never poses a problem for engaging with others about it.
Thanks, those are great points. After more thought, I somewhat agree I was overweighing the value of visualizing things in my mind. I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc. So maybe that's analogous to aphantasia. It's just that we're talking about the sense of sight versus taste. From a practical standpoint, there isn't much value even if I could taste something as part of a memory. It would make the memory even stronger and more vivid though.
> I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc.
For what it's worth, I can't conjure anything other than a few fleeting details for something visual. When I manage to surface a distinct image, it vanishes pretty fast. But (if I can remember it) I can "imagine" the taste of a specific chocolate bar, a sound (particularly voices) or how something feels to touch very distinctly. I'd say "accurately" as well, but that's hard to gauge.
Interestingly, I think my tendency to visualize makes me a slow reader. I can suppress it with effort, but typically my pace slows down to let me imagine observing the story.
I don't think that's part of "visualization" itself. I don't visualize a scene, but I still can take a long time if it's interesting or has a lot of detail.
I remember reading the Lord of the Rings books and it has really long descriptions of the scenery and sometime it took me a very long time to read it, just so I can get all the details. In other parts I read over it as fast as I could to get on with the story.
Perhaps, but for me, it's more like having to slow down to let the scene play out in my mind. But that's really interesting to hear about your experience.
Movies and TV shows are a really exciting topic. But first to your questions:
You are totally right, I can't recall a scene from a movie with all the details. I couldn't paint it, as I'm not seeing it like when it's right in front of me (in the movie). But I could definitely describe it and it will sound indistinguishable from what you would describe, the difference is that I'm remembering the description and you are remembering the scene itself.
Rewatching a movie is the same, I remember seeing the movie and I also remember all the scenes (the ones I remember); you might remember a scene by color and "images", I remember it by description or concept. But the result is the same: I remember having seen it.
A really nice perk (for me) is that I don't remember the individual actors. I remember the role played, but not who has played it. It's not like I cannot distinguish actors from another, but I just don't remember actor X played this and that role. I really don't understand the problems with changing actors in sequels, it's the same role; maybe played a little bit different, but still the same role.
I know a total of maybe 5 to 10 actors which I recognize among different movies.
A good way to think about what it is like to be color blind in a world where others see more colors is to consider tetrachromats. From Google:
> "People with tetrachromacy have a fourth cone in their retinas, called a tetrachromat, that allows them to see up to 100 million colors, compared to the average person's 1 million. This extra cone gives them access to new color ranges within the yellow and green spectrum, which can create millions of new color variations. "
I can only imagine how much more vibrant the world looks to them in terms of sunrise and sunset, walking in a forest, etc.
I am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.
I learned about Aphantasia about eight months ago, and it really sent me for a trip. I have no problems visualizing in my mind and sometimes can get lost in it, to me that’s what daydreaming is.
I discussed it with some of my friends, and it seems to exist on a spectrum. The most different from me was one friend who had to really focus to visualize in his mind, and even then he could only do so in black and white.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the human experience can vary so greatly at such a fundamental level, yet it doesn't manifest in ways that are obvious to others, and everyone thinks that their form of thinking is a common shared experience so they don't even bother to talk about it.
We have these common concepts which are actually very personal everywhere.
Even with good eyes the color perception differs a lot between different people. For most it's obvious that this is red and this is blue, but in between the colors it gets very fuzzy.
The same goes for sounds and smell and touch, so for every sense.
Totally, the gold/blue dress picture is a perfect example of that[0].
I think with aphantasia, what makes it so interesting to me is just how much I consider visualizing in my mind to be core to how I think and understand things as well. It's not as subtle or isolated as a reaction to external stimuli but more fundamental to who I am along sitting along side my inner monologue.
When awake I imagine things but they're fleeting, hazy etc. and I have to really concentrate.
But something happened to me a few years ago, I can't really say what. Basically my dreamscape when I was asleep changed. I went from sort of greyscale dreams with 1-2 people at a time, very little audio to basically full-blown movie quality with up to thousands of people in the scene. Long ago I achieved a lucid dreaming state but it was always a bit boring somehow, there wasn't much happening. Now I can do the same and there's a whole storyline going on for me to experience.
Also when waking up I could now just turn around and immediately go back to sleep and resume the dream.
My point in all of that is that somehow when my full conscious mind isn't present it's as if in computer terms I just have a lot more CPU power available for creating the scenery, up to the point where it's as real as real life. I'm sure it's not a "CPU" issue, the brain should easily be powerful enough to do it while conscious, but maybe it's more of a survival thing.
How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation? I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation, as if it’s some kind of minority report style interface that appears before you and is perceived by the eye. It’s simply being able to reconstruct physical entities as mental models. Again, without being able to do that it just seems impossible that you could navigate from memory, unless every destination is recorded in your mind as a series of “left, right, left, left, right at church” instructions that you’ve managed to memorise, but surely you’re not doing that? You must be about to walk through the steps of a journey in your mind? I struggle to believe people are getting through life without this ability, it seems so essential to me in all sorts of scenarios.
Maybe, but what other people write about their visualization experiences is completely alien to me. It's not a matter of degree.
Is there any analogy between reasoning about relationships and paths through complicated source code code vs paths through a street map? I don't think I visualize either, I just kind of absorb knowledge and piece together plans.
I don't have an inner monologue either, and I find that I've not infrequently found myself having to pronounce a word I've only ever read before. Ihhave to invent a spoken pronunciation for the first time ever and get self-conscious. It's not the same as aphantasia, but kind of similar. Well, maybe: when I see a movie about a book I've read, I never say, "oh, that actor looks different than what I thought the character looked like".
I don't mean to argue that aphantasia is "real", but I do feel there is evidence for it.
The difference is the recognition. If you tell me "to go right at the wall with the lion on it and left after the blue door" you're giving me an immense difficult task. If you want to totally screw me just show me pictures of the wall and the blue door, I probably be really lost.
It's not only about what is visualizable, but also what form of representation is comparable. I can read a map in a matter of seconds and find my way. I can find a car plate within my line of sight instantly. The way to the parking lot behind the <insert picture of something> and finding the blue <insert car brand> there is basically impossible for me. Of course I'm able to concentrate, but it doesn't come naturally.
> How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation?
How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
> I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation
I find the utter disbelief expressed by people who don't have aphantasia exhausting. It would be similar to encountering someone who has been deaf from birth and trying to convince them that they're not really deaf, they just don't understand what it means when other people say that they hear things. They could also hear things if they just try harder.
> How do people who are physically blind from birth navigate without mental visualization?
I assume they create a mental model of space. To me, this is basically what I’m describing as visualisation. In ones mind one can arbitrarily place themselves in space and move around it. I guess this is slightly different to conjuring up an image, but to me it feels very similar. If you can “see” space in your minds eye, it seems like you could see other arbitrary things.
I’m not saying I don’t think this is a real phenomena, just that it’s hard to empathise and understand it.
If you could describe your experience of navigation from memory I would appreciate it. When someone asks you for directions somewhere, what goes through your mind?
because the average person relies so heavily on visualization in their day to day life, people that claim they dont have this ability but also seem to have no discernable difference in the way they interact with the world is what is confusing. everyone understands that deaf people exist because its really fucking obvious when someone is deaf. they interact with the world differently.
its really weird to me, and most everyone that you could be looking at a cup and trying to commit its visual properties to memory, and then close your eyes and be complete incapable of re-constructing even a vague visual representation of it.
I can visualize nothing, but have excellent navigation skills. I can accurately remember the geospatial arrangement of cities and locations and routes I visited only once decades ago. That part of my brain has nothing to do with “seeing things”
do you have any experience of feeling like youve been at a particular place before. if you dont remember seeing it, do you just remember the arangement of landmarks like dots on a grid?
It’s an innate sense which most closely resembles proprioception (knowing where you arms/legs/etc are), or remembering where you put your keys. I suppose maybe it’s similar to “seeing” landmarks on a map (not necessarily a grid) but it’s simultaneously abstract while being very well defined in some intuitive sense: I know the Vatican is this way and the Colosseum is that way and the Spanish Steps are that way (and every other spot I cared to notice on the map), and no matter where in the city I walk and so long as I know which way I’m facing, I’ll 100% know the relative direction and distance of every other spot (as well as the pathing! Not just locations but also streets, etc). It’s actually hard for me to get lost.
I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words.
Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery).
So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.
I'm almost aphantasiac, so for me it's actually easy to believe—visualizing things is hard enough that I can imagine not being able to do it at all, but also possible enough that I can imagine it being easier to do.
Similar questions throughout this thread make it clear that people assume recognition and/or knowledge of what something looks like is tightly coupled to internal visualization, but (writing as someone with aphantasia) they're not. I can draw both of the examples you gave, thinking about them (including thinking about how I would go about drawing them) just doesn't include an image in my head.
Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, also has aphantasia[0] and had the staff take the only real diagnostic that exists (the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1]) and found that, on average, the animators had less ability to visualize than the production managers. Obviously they varied significantly - the article mentions one that could play the entire movie in their mind - but lack of mental imagery clearly does not preclude professional level artistry.
Back before GPS, people used to give each other driving directions based on landmarks... go straight 2 miles, turn left at the red brick schoolhouse. Now, that sounds like the condition you describe - you know red, you know brick, you know what schoolhouses generally look like, but since you've never been to this specific place there is zero mental picture. When you finally get there, it's a surprise, you've found the thing that combines all the elements. But the next trip, there is a mental picture. It's probably extremely vague and lacking any detail, but it's still something, the next time it won't be a complete surprise.
Someone with the condition you describe (zero mental imagery) would, constantly, feel like they are seeing basic objects for the very first time, you wouldn't recognize anything at all, this would be a highly debilitating condition just like severe amnesia.
I can only tell you that I do not have mental imagery and am not constantly surprised by my surroundings. Object permanence has absolutely no dependency on visualization; it is completely unsurprising to me that the stop sign near my house looks the same each time I encounter it.
I totally get that you, having lived a life where mental imagery is such an integral part of your baseline experience, assume that many of the things you rely on it for require it. However, the human brain is impressively adaptable, and it turns out many, many aspects that people assume are linked (and may well be for them as individuals) are not globally so.
This thread is full of such realizations - people assuming ability at chess, art, tetris, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, architectural design, conceptualizing of DB schemas, etc. must be correlated with facets of thought like strength of mental imagery, presence of an inner monologue, ability to dream, etc. In all of those cases, people have chimed in with (anecdotal, to be sure) counterexamples. It turns out brains are generally capable of doing a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.
In another comment you wrote "stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue". The fact that you knew all of that without having to actually find a stop sign and look at it, that's mental imagery. It may be a skill some people are very good at (i.e. they can remember lots of small details) and others are not, but it's not that you don't have this skill at all.
What I know is that people describe not having aphantasia like
“I’m sitting in a room with a dog and a TV. Then someone says ‘visualize a stop sign.’ And, so then I’m sitting in a room with a dog, a TV and a stop sign. I’m know the stop sign isn’t real. It might be fuzzy or even black & white. But, I can see it between the dog and the TV.”
Well… I know exactly what a stop sign looks like. But, there’s no stop sign in the room with me and my dog. It’s not there at all.
No, that is more like hyperphantasia, where the visualized object is superimposed on top of one's visual reality. Seeing something in one's mind's eye is more like there is a a buffer right above my visual reality where I can imagine something inside that buffer. It is not superimposed over reality but I can focus on both the visual buffer and the imagination buffer simultaneously.
The woman in the article describes that she has no problem identifying faces she has seen before, in fact, she is better at that than average. It is just that she doesn't see these faces as a picture in her head.
So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the hash of a picture, and performing comparisons using the hash, not the picture itself.
It sounds like people simply have different definitions of "a picture in her head." Her mental processing sounds entirely normal on all counts.
I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes are closed, my guess is everyone would fail.
I suspect the 3.9% estimation is wildly inaccurate but that the condition / spectrum is true.
In the 1-5 guide, I'd probabably rate myself a 99 or something silly. I feel like the equipment is capable of visualising, but I just don't know how to operate it.
However, I do have involuntary visualizations. My dreams are images, very unlike thought. And in the last 5 or so years I can recall 2 occasions where I was in a relaxed state and pictured things without really trying, so I know it's possible to have dream like images when awake.
My wife says she can just perfect recall stuff. I entirly believe she can visualise, but I believe she confuses what happened with what she can see. She also states she can visualise the apple, or pretty much anything else she wants.
For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown".
All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture".
OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".
One of the ways I make myself relax and fall asleep is visualizing a countdown from 1000 to 0. Actually visualizing the shapes of the numbers, to occupy that part of my brain, and then mentally saying the numbers as well.
I'm absolutely terrible with faces and names, though, but I think that's mostly due to poor social conditioning.
Not the GP, but I can. I can play back songs in my head quite vividly or remember and replay how different people sound like, when it's coupled with a memory.
Now I'm wondering about other senses. I can readily imagine sounds and pictures, but it took my brain some time before it figured out how to imagine smells and tactile sensations when I asked it, like a muscle that is rarely exercised.
Since my imagination layers on top of my existing senses, I wonder if aphantasia is really about the (in)ability to induce sensory hallucinations at will (and to what extent). That's about the only way I can make sense of it personally, given my own subjective experience.
I can hear my thoughts and even speak to myself. I don't picture myself doing that and I don't have any image in my head.
Maybe it "looks" like a comic with only speech bubbles. It's still not the right image, because there is no image, but it also doesn't feel like a total void.
How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quickly. I've heard that people like you make great scholars for that reason.
I read about three times as fast as other people. I'm still not better in absorbing the information, I also make errors and miss key points.
The difference is that a book is already in a format I don't need to convert (to images) anymore.
About the 3x: if I need to show someone something to read on a screen and need to wait to scroll to the next page, I just read it 3 times and scroll then, it normally fits a "normal" reading speed.
I read very fast (English and code, and my native language), and I have a very vivid visual (as well as auditory) imagination. Wonder what I traded off in this setup.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
And about the book: Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book. To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
Not OP. I don’t recall any dreams since childhood. If I had not experienced a few myself, I would have a hard time understanding what a dream even is. And my 10 or so dreams only had abstract images. Defo not like a movie or reality where you can “see” things, people, objects. I don’t recall much about them anyway except being slightly mildly freaked out at the time for experiencing something which was not “real”.
Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description.
It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.
I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.