
People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study - lnyan
https://www.sciencealert.com/some-people-can-t-picture-things-in-their-mind-and-it-might-make-it-hard-for-them-to-remember
======
arkades
Without even digging into the paper, let's be clear. They didn't find "they
have memory trouble." They found, "they have trouble recalling sensations."

> "Our data also showed that individuals with aphantasia not only report being
> unable to visualise, but also report comparatively reduced imagery, on
> average, in all other sensory modalities, including auditory, tactile,
> kinesthetic, taste, olfactory and emotion," the team wrote in their paper.

I, for instance, am not aphantasic, but I fall quite close to that end of the
spectrum. But I _don 't use mental imagery to store memory_. When I am
attempting to encode memories, I do so in the form of a narrative - narratives
stick very effectively for me, and I have a pretty good memory (no one without
a good memory survives medical school.) It's true, I can't just "remember" the
image of relevant anatomy, but I'm fine with other mental models for encoding
and retrieving information.

~~~
bnt
Interesting, I on the other hand remember things “geographically”. It’s like I
have precise GPS locations in my head attached to memories. In order to recall
something, I usually try to remember where the memory “happened”, once I
figure out the associated location - there comes the vivid memory as well.

~~~
jnwatson
This sounds like the method of loci [1].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)

------
raxxorrax
How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly
can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my
garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite
abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But
if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc.

What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog
they come out blank?

~~~
3f34f34f
I think most people and journalists who speak about aphantasia are
exaggerating or misleading others. If you actually are able to imagine an
picture with your eyes open and have it cover the real world, that's called
hallucinating. Some people can visualise things stronger than others, some
cannot at all, but let's not pretend like actual visualisation (hallucinating)
is the norm or that more than a few people on earth can do it.

~~~
falsaberN1
I never heard of aphantasia before but having read a bit about it, doesn't
seem to be the same thing. When I "see" things mentally it's not like it
"takes over" my visual input, nor it has weight in the real world. The image
seems to be "nowhere", like when dreaming. Closing my eyes doesn't really make
the image clearer by itself, it's more like there's no visual input to
interrupt my visualization and that's what makes it "clearer".

If I mentally listen to music it's clearly not coming from my ears (in fact
the whole concept of sound direction doesn't seem to exist when I imagine
sound. No stereo separation either.)

I find this whole stuff fascinating though. I wish there was some way to
measure and/or capture those images/sounds and make them physical data, even
if once captured it turns out to be a lot less detailed than what it seems.
It'd be a security nightmare though!

~~~
jpindar
It's as if the image from your memory/imagination appears on a different
monitor than the signal from your eyes.

~~~
falsaberN1
Yeah, it's like some sort of internal framebuffer. I'd kinda equate it to some
sort of SVG-like format where you define a series of objects and your mind
"displays" it as best as it can, with more processing on whatever you are
focusing currently.

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throw1234651234
"Not everyone can see pictures in their minds when they close their eyes and
summon thoughts - an ability many of us take for granted."

I used to be into visualization as focus training. I can't "see" and change
(move, change color) shapes in my mind at all. Artists I know claim to be able
to do this. Obviously, Tesla (, Nikola) supposedly did this.

For those who _can_ do it - to what degree can you do it? Can you imagine a
circle? A cube? A rubix cube with color?

Edit: Since we are discussing this a lot - I am also a skilled lucid dreamer.
In the sense that I trained myself for months to remember and control my
dreams vividly. I realized my dreams have a "bandwidth limit" / "render
limit". If I try to "look" at a detailed scene, it blurs and/or I wake up.
Which, btw, is a huge argument against astral projection, not that anyone here
likely ever even considered it to be real, but as a young child, I did.

~~~
greenonions
Yes, and there are no real limits to this. I can picture a Rubik's cube
dominating the Manhattan skyline. I can also picture abstract images with no
connection to the real world, that have emotions associated with them.

I believe my wife cannot make images, and the differences between us that
result are pretty wild. I'm dramatically better with directions and maps
because she can't make a mental model of the map and how it relates to the
real world. However she's very aware of her emotions in a given moment where
it's very difficult for me to express how I'm feeling.

~~~
throw1234651234
Can you draw what you visualize? Can you recall a face exactly and draw it? As
an amateur artist, I don't think there is as much "mechanical skill" in art,
as there is clearly imagining what you are trying to draw. Any time anyone
claims to be able to visualize, I ask them this question.

To be clear, I am not "challenging" you in any sense, but it's a good reality
check.

Anyway - I am the same with maps, I can easily see the route in my head, but
that has to do with being aware of where north is and a vague notion of where
I am.

~~~
Balgair
No OP, but I fall into the camp that can draw/sculpt/paint/etc what my mind's
eye produces. I'm not as good a sculptor as a painter, but I can generally
paint a face/landscape/car/etc that my brain is seeing, at least to a degree
that I am satisfied with. Paintings take a long time to get 'good'.

Getting better at drawing and creating takes time and practice. I'd go on
youtube to take a look at how to get better quickly, there's a lot of good
people on YT that are happy to share and teach.

One good 'cheat' is to use a camera lumisia or a reference mirror to see how
light interacts with your media directly:
[https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-
to...](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-
lenses)

I'm likely an outlier though, as I'm a synesthete and my senses get a bit
mixed up from time to time. So take that into account.

------
c3534l
I came to the realization that not everyone feels emotions the same way. In
therapy, I often had people ask me to try to describe my emotions in terms of
bodily images and ask me to justify how I know I'm sad or angry or whatever.
It always seemed like such an absurd waste of time, but apparently some people
don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My
therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract
feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same
goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch
with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut.

It makes me realize there's a lot of experiences we probably all take for
granted and assume that everyone experiences the way we do, but we just kind
of assume that when someone says they can see it in their head or they can
feel it in their heart we just assume everyone means that metaphorically.

~~~
Izkata
> but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them
> from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of
> sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain
> or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel.
> The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch
> with a punch in the gut.

That's what that phrase refers to? I've never even heard of that before. "An
abstract thing that you feel" has always been what emotions are to me.

------
m3kw9
I’m not getting how someone can close their eyes and a high res picture shows
up like the image on your desktop background? Is that even possible?

~~~
cercatrova
Yes, that is what the experience of most people is like without aphantasia. I
can even, for like a second, see a fully formed picture in my mind, like a
scene from a sci-fi movie, or anything else, really, although it can disappear
if I don't focus on the exact details. I can see everything, the shapes, the
layout, colors, all of it. It really is like playing a movie in your mind.

~~~
ip26
Picture a soccer ball in your mind.

Can you now count the black hexagons in view, or do you have to decide how
many there are first?

(Ok, now did you notice that they aren't actually hexagons, they are
pentagons?)

~~~
cercatrova
Sure, I can count them. I can make them hexagons or pentagons at will when I
think about them. It does take some time however to remember what a soccer
ball actually looks like but after that I can see every details of it.

------
missingrib
I'm worried I have this but I'm not completely sure I do. My dreams are not
very vivid at all and usually I just "know" that things are happening in them
instead of vividly seeing what's going on.

However I can hear music very clearly in my head. If asked to visualize, say,
an apple in my head I really don't see it very vividly at all. It's depressing
if I'm being honest.

~~~
3f34f34f
No one on earth can 'visualise' an image in their head as if they were seeing
it in real life. This entire fiasco is just people on different spectrums of
mental picturing that are freaking out because they are misinterpreting what
aphantasia is. I assure you you are most likely normal, and it's common to not
recite a sentence word for word or picture an object perfectly. Others can do
it very well. Just like you can visualise music very well, whereas I cannot.
It's a (tight) spectrum.

~~~
jjk166
Plenty of people can visualize an image in their head as if they are seeing it
in real life. As one of those people, trust me that if your brain is set up to
work that way, it's pretty difficult to imagine any other way of picturing the
world. Likewise there are plenty of people who honestly can't picture things
in their mind at all. The fact that you are towards the middle of the spectrum
does not mean the extremes don't exist.

~~~
plutonorm
So you can draw photo realistic impressions of those memories? Come on now. I
can visualise pretty vividly, but I know that my memory is conning me, the
textures and details are the feelings of textures and details. If I actually
interrogate the visualisation the detail is not there. It's like trying to
read writing in a dream, you imagine that it's perfect because the feeling is
the same, but try to actually read - the detail is not there.

~~~
jjk166
Well I can't draw anything very well, but I can see in my mind a photo-
realistic image indistinguishable from what I am perceiving in real time. No
matter to what degree I interrogate it, I find no discrepancies with the real
world. Everything I revisit is exactly as I remember it. I can read text in my
dreams. I can make arbitrary changes to whatever I visualize and project them
onto the real world as if my eyes were seeing it for real.

Compare your memory of, say, song lyrics - you might misremember some of the
words but that doesn't mean your memory of the lyrics aren't real, you are
remembering a real and coherent set of words, not making them up as you go.
When you hear that song again and you know what word is coming up next that is
not your mind conning you, that is just successful recall. Likewise you
probably know the melody of the song; though you might not be able to
transcribe it, you would immediately notice if even a single note was off.
More impressive, you can probably correctly identify a song you haven't heard
in years from a fraction of a second long sample. If you show me some tiny
portion of a photograph of something I've seen before, I will similarly be
able to identify it instantly.

I used to think that everyone experienced the world the same way as I did.
Personally, as a visual person, I found graphs to be the most intuitive way of
conveying information. How could anyone not understand a graph? But my brother
can't make heads or tails of them. He's an incredibly intelligent person, but
he fundamentally does not process and store information visually. I've met
many other people who can think in ways I can't, such as people who can think
visualize objects in 4 dimensions.

If you want further evidence that thought processing is not constant across
different people, consider that it is not even constant over a single
lifetime. What language do you process language in? If you learn a second
language, most people, myself included, eventually reach a point where you can
think in that second language without using your primary language as a
mediator. The brain is simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly
plastic. Entire regions can be repurposed to function in radically different
ways. All evidence points to extreme variability in how our individual minds
work.

~~~
plutonorm
Ok I kinda believe you. But I do not understand why you wouldn't be able to
draw perfectly. Why can you not simply overlay what you see with you're minds
eye over the real world? I do this when I am drawing, that's why I'm not a bad
drawer. And it's also how I know the limitations of my visualisation. As I
learn to draw, say, faces better, the detail and accuracy of my visualisation
improves.

~~~
jjk166
I can't draw what I see with my mind very well for the same reason I can't
draw what I see with my eyes very well: my hands are terrible. I do enjoy
drawing, but it sucks to be painfully aware of how different what I produce is
from what I intended to produce. Where I am not limited by my dexterity, such
as with computer aided design, I can perfectly recreate what I envision.

~~~
plutonorm
So you can't trace a picture using tracing paper?

~~~
jjk166
Not photo-realistically, no. Fine motor control and visualization are
different skills. I can probably keep a pencil point to within .5mm of where I
want, but that still produces a very crude final result.

It would be absurd to conclude that just because a physicist isn't a champion
at billiards that he can't think in terms of vectors, or that someone with a
speech impediment can't process words clearly in their mind. That someone who
can see an image clearly should be able to perfectly reproduce it does not
logically follow.

------
wnoise
I think the takeaway here is that there are lots of people who are _partially_
p-zombies: missing important "inner experiences" that everyone else has, but
otherwise appear normal.

------
silveroriole
Makes sense. I’d like to see an experiment done with reading comprehension as
well as real memories. When I read something, I hear and see it. I’m reading
it out loud in my mind and I either have instant visual associations with
certain words (e.g. when I read the word aphantasia I think of the hippo from
Fantasia, when I see the word tea I instantly ‘see’ a teacup) or I visualise
the scene (like where they have the quote from the man who can’t imagine
music, I ‘see’ and ‘hear’ it like it’s a TV interview). So I suspect I’m going
to remember it better than someone who purely reads the text - but maybe not!
Maybe people who don’t do all the ‘translation’ work to turn text into
audio/visuals will in fact turn out to be MORE efficient at remembering.

I have no idea how reading would work without at least hearing it though. If
you told me to read without doing this stuff it would be like telling me to
think without having thoughts. Impossible.

~~~
JshWright
I do not see/hear/smell/taste anything with my "mind".

Speaking from my own personal experience, my reading comprehension doesn't
seem to suffer at all, and the speed at which I read seems to be much faster
than average (for instance, if my wife and I are reading the same page of
text, I'm done long before she is).

~~~
YinglingLight
I'd take slower reading speed for the ability to recollect my childhood home,
or the face of my wife when she's away.

~~~
JshWright
Yep, given the choice, I would too.

------
pengaru
Teaching people how to tie even simple knots is effective at distinguishing
the visual from non-visual thinkers. It's one of the interesting aspects of
going sailing.

~~~
JshWright
I'm pretty convinced I experience aphantasia (never been clincially tested), I
can't even fathom what it means to "visualize" something.

I'm also very good at knot tying. It's a hobby I enjoy, and a practical skill
in rope rescue activities I participate in. Knot typing seems much more
"spatial" than "visual" to me.

Interestingly, the article specifically mentions differences in spatial
abilities as not being correlated to the ability to visualize.

"But other aspects of the findings suggest self-reporting may not be biasing
the results that significantly: there were variations in answers coupled with
data suggesting that spatial abilities - an ability to map relationships and
distances between objects - appear to be unaffected in the volunteers."

~~~
Arelius
I resonate with this as well. Anything strongly spatial, such as tying knots,
navigating really any sort of space, even after just a single visit, and
things such as sports come very easy to me. But even visualizing an Apple in
any capacity (as an arbitrary example) seems to escape me, And asking me to,
for instance draw one, would rely on a list of facts that I know about apples:
* Apples are red * Apples are generally spherical * Apples have a stem on one
side, and a little flowery bit on the other. * There are indentations around
those bits. * An Apple's shape is a bit heart-ish. * Bits of the apple are
bumpy when as swept around it's primary axis (I.... think only on the
bottom???)

Maybe that gives you a sense of my ability to visualize.

While in stark contrast, I can often take a few looks at an already tied knot,
and reverse-engineer/decompose it's construction down to a series of steps
that I can _feel_ spatially I can then often, much later be able to
reconstruct that knot based on the combination of the few bits I remember, and
the general knowledge I have about space in general and knots in specific.

------
khazhoux
Glad to know there's a word for it. I'm aphantasic. I can't see things in my
mind, and the vague imagery I do see literally cannot hold still for even a
second -- any image I conjure up will twist and shift from one shape to
another.

Somehow, I can draw quite well though. But not from mental imagery.

And, I can hear music clearly in my head, with a very long memory. I can
easily play back a song as almost perfect audio, even if I haven't heard it in
decades, with clear little details.

But I mostly can't make out the words of any music I remember, and in fact I
struggle to remember lyrics in general, even of songs I've listened dozens of
times. And my sequence-memory is crap.

Sigh... memory is fascinating.

------
_ink_
I only learnt about aphantasia very recently. I seem to be affected. It was
very surprising to me, that people can "see" things only by thinking about
them. It explains a lot. For example I never understood what's so great about
reading books. But I can imaging that this is great if you actually see the
things you read about.

I can also confirm the findings of this study. I rarly dream. I cannot hear
music in my head. I also learnt quite a while ago, that my peers can remember
the past in way that is mind boggling for me.

It's pretty depressing to be honest.

Do we already know if this is something which is inherited?

~~~
thedevelopnik
I believe I’m aphantasic and I still enjoy books. I think about the things
described. To go the other way, I read recently that the author of the Witcher
books doesn’t “see” the things he’s writing, it’s pure text description for
him but his books are still great.

------
unexaminedlife
I'm pretty sure I have this condition. Never even knew the vast majority of
people experienced the world differently than I do until recently.

One of the perceived benefits IME has been that I seem to have a substantially
higher capacity (on average) to understand things at a conceptual level than
my co-workers.

Not sure if that's just a testament to how I learned to learn early in life,
or if it's somehow a way my mind has compensated for the lack of sensory info
in my imagination.

------
ajkjk
One question I like to ask in conversations about aphantasia: when you do
relatively complex arithmetic in your head (for instance, compute 47 * 68 real
quick), do you visually perform the gradeschool multiplication algorithm? Or
something else?

I've surveyed a lot of people on this - probably forty or so in person, plus
another 100 or so in a poll on reddit once - and there's a pretty clear trend:
people who perform the visual algorithm tend to be 'not math people', and are
less accurate and less confident in their answer, or not even willing to try.

I'm aphantasiac and I can do a calculation like that fairly quickly and
accurately, without any special practice. I basically use my verbal memory to
store and recall cached computations instead of any visualization. My theory
is that the visual brain is not really designed for storing precise
information so much as the gestalt of an image, so it does less well on
precise numeric details.

~~~
gretch
FOIL it :)

40 * 60 + 40 * 8 + 60 * 7 + 7 * 8

Basically a bunch of single digit multiplies followed by stacking zeroes

~~~
ajkjk
My mental method is not quite FOIL, for what it's worth. I distribute over one
of the numbers -- so 47 * 68 = 47 * 60 + 47 * 8, and then compute the compute
those (2400 + 420 = 2820). Then I grab additional terms: 2820 + 40 * 8 = 3140.
3140 + 7 * 8 = 3196

Among other things this scales better to larger numbers. I use it because it's
more 'linear' \-- I only need to remember one accumulated number at a time.

------
georgewsinger
__Question: __Beyond aphantasiacs, could there be living humans who lack
qualia altogether?

The Hard Problem of Consciousness™ is "how can a physical system generate
qualia?", where "qualia" is something like "the internal and subjective
component of sense perceptions", or "what it feels like to have experiences".

I once ran into a very intelligent person (philosophically trained) who
genuinely didn't understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness, or what was
even meant by qualia. It occurred to me during this conversation that there
might be genuine instances of humans out there who lack qualia. As opposed to
p-zombies (hypothetical humans who lack qualia but claim they have qualia),
real life qualia-less humans might just find the notion of qualia nonsensical.
Perhaps there are even people out there who understand what qualia is, and
outright deny that they have it?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
There are those who lack an internal monologue. People with a lack of critical
thinking skills may be overrepresented by this group without an equivalent
tool to analyze abstract concepts.

------
mac01021
How can I tell if I have aphantasia?

~~~
Cactus2018
Take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz

[https://aphantasia.com/vviq/](https://aphantasia.com/vviq/)

