For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization. For more on the known neurodifferences in imagery experiences, check out these shocking insights. For a deeper dive into how this brain activation can be used to decode mental imagery, you might find this study enlightening."
You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).
A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:
1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake
2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery
Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.
This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.
It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.
It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this:
"We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization. For more on the known neurodifferences in imagery experiences, check out these shocking insights. For a deeper dive into how this brain activation can be used to decode mental imagery, you might find this study enlightening."
You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically.
- Imagine a beach when meditating
- If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked
- Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast
- Undressing someone with your eyes
- Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
I was completely sure that these were just metaphors. Imagine my shock when I realised that the majority of people can actually DO IT.
Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.
And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.
The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
Aphant and SDAM are linked with many neurological disorders. I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type and OCD.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.
Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.
My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.
I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
They are real for some. I have Aphantasia but my wife has Hyperphantasia so we compare notes often. Each of us are at the edge of the spectrum.
Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.
and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
> it opened my eyes to many things
Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
From what people report some can see a full picture.
Photographic memory is very rare.
I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".
And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.
This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally.
Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more directly recognizable than a stick figure. If you can't, then maybe your capacity for visualization is a story your brain tells itself, related to your capacity for recognition.
On the other hand: I cannot tell you the eye color of people I've known all my life unless I've gone out of my way to memorize it as a textual fact. And I assume most people lack that limitation.
(My capacity for visual memory is not zero, and my color perception is excellent. But my visual memory works way, way better in the very short term.)
I do think it can be trained a bit. I've been doing more visual projects lately, and spending a lot of time with my very visually-oriented partner. Just now, I spontaneously visualized one of our chipped yellow cereal bowls on the counter. That's a newer memory of course.
> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.
Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.
When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).
A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:
1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake
2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery
Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.
This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.
It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.
It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.
I think this is a better self-test.
Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?
Now, answer these questions:
- What color was the ball?
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
- What did they look like?
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia can be measured. See section 6 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11437436/
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
exactly the same for me
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
I find it harder to conjure up the sensory experience of scents and flavors, is that something other people can do instinctively?
Is there an equivalent to perfect pitch smelling out there?
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche to cling to any opportunity to feel “special”, mostly harmless but might but at times hinder search for help for those who really need it
I think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.
People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.
That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?
We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.
The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
Aphantasia is about the mind's eye, not visual memory. Many people with aphantasia can still remember visual/spatial details of memories, they just can't see them. Not sure if those had to be recorded at the time of the memory or if they can be derived later, though. Based on some cursory research, it's not particularly uncommon for aphantasics to build a habit of intentionally making spatial observations in the moment for potential recall later.
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
- kudos to whoever made this
- need one for alzheimers
I've often thought I had aphantasia because I just do not visualize a ball or anything when asked. I can totally make up a ball that is like the pixar ball as in the example they gave, but I will just put details in the literary description of the object and remember it.
But, the site doesn't mention this, and from my research it seems that I'm an outlier on this, if I have aphantasia, because I have especially rich dreams
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92...
including:
narrated movie like dreams in which I am not present, animated dreams, controlled dreams, the ability to have a dream, wake up and go back to the dream I woke from and so forth. I cannot visualize like most who can, and I always have suspected that they lied about it because, their dreams are so bland and boring - how could someone who's dreams are just... "I was back at the cafe and my ex-boyfriend was there, and then somehow were walking at the beach, but not the one by the cafe, but the beach back in that other country where he's never even been with me..wooo" ever muster the processing power to render a complicated image and view it using "their mind's eye"
There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
But also recently I was laying in bed and tired and while I did not fall asleep as I lay there with my eyes closed I was visualizing all sorts of things, I so wanted to get one of those proposed brain scan draws what you imagine tools because really I could have made my whole graphics output for the month in a couple of minutes. Is that though involuntary, I suppose, but not the same involuntary as asleep. I could sort of move the images about go back what I just saw and replay it. Stuff like - Batman on top of sinking alien ship in a swamp. It really made me think of generative AI, although, I felt, with a better aesthetic.
But still - I can't visualize that if I try to. I can't even visualize a simple workflow diagram.
> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?
N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.
Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.
I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".
Thank you for this post. I have read several guides but this one is great and not just for me. I have aphantasia and Severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) which often go hand in hand. Glad to have something I can give to people so they understand when I never remember their name.
It is a weird thing to discover you have this. It has really added more difficulty to my already difficult life neurologically speaking.
What I find interesting is that I have closed eye hallucinations. That is I do see things sometimes when I close my eyes but the things I see are not in my control. My psychiatrist told me that is because they are two different pathways and that is why we can still see dreams.
I think these people may literally be P zombies.
then you haven't understood what P zombies are