
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - Tomte
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/aphantasia-minds-eye-blind.html
======
hanoz
Every time this intriguing subject comes up on Hacker News, which is a lot, I
end up with the distinct impression that the spectrum of reported condition is
more a function of our inability to convey and compare the inner experience,
than of variation in the inner experience itself.

~~~
Terr_
Alternately, individual humans function totally differently on the inside, but
the language-adapter provides a comfortable illusion of consistency :P

I admit that improving objective measures, like brain-scanning techniques,
indicate that isn't so likely.

~~~
the_af
> _individual humans function totally differently on the inside_

My completely uninformed guess is that this is unlikely to be true. I expect
with roughly the same biological equipment we are more or less the same, with
some minor differences, _some_ surprising innate exceptions, and of course
cultural/upbringing differences. And of course, some visible biological
differences which cause behavior/thought differences.

Like the parent post guesses, I think at least _some_ of the reported
differences with aphantasia come from people reporting their inner experiences
differently, and that they are probably more alike than we think. But of
course, I also believe there are some real differences, too.

~~~
everdrive
It's hard to have this conversation without having a specific way to talk
about the inner workings of the mind.

For example, a biologist could (possibly) say that a person who couldn't
visualize things had a mind that was almost identical a person who could.

A psychologist might say that nonetheless this represents a large difference
in function.

Both would be right in their own way, but you'd need to define the internal
thought process in a specific and uniform way before you could qualify it was
a "different" or "similar."

~~~
the_af
Yes, agreed. It's very hard to have this conversation!

I guess I'm just saying it's very unlikely (to me) that any given two people
function "totally differently" internally. I agree there must be differences,
some of them astonishing, but I have a hard time believing those two people
are totally different. It's the same biological hardware supporting the same
kind of software -- maybe one is Windows and the other is Linux though ;)

Nothing of what I'm saying is scientific or definitive, just my gut feeling.
I'm aware of the dangers of comparing people to hardware/software, and I know
it's a flawed analogy.

------
nil-sec
The best “test” for this I’ve heard is to ask people how many windows they
have in their apartment. They might say 5 and then you ask them how they came
to this conclusion. A normal thing to do is to walk through your apartment in
your mind and count. Someone with a Aphantasia either remembers the number or
cannot answer this question.

~~~
djrobstep
That test doesn't work, at least for me. I can't visualise at all, but I can
think about my house and remember how many windows are in each room. The
difference is I remember them abstractly, not visually.

~~~
harel
Same with me. My description of it is that my "visualisation" is not "visual"
but "conceptual". I don't SEE the room and therefore the windows, but I know
the concept of the room with it's windows.

~~~
RHSeeger
That's a really good way of putting it, and it's fits me to some extent too.
Thanks.

------
rhythmofrest
My brother in law has aphantasia. We've had long conversations comparing our
experience, or lack thereof, of mental images. One thing he says is that for
remembering faces, its more like he can store a hash or metadata of a face,
then when seeing a person again, can check that the hash or meta matches.
Also, he doesn't get "earworms", that is, pieces of music that encode and
replay in his mind ad nauseum. When asked to imagine a given piece of music,
he inadvertently hums.

~~~
joesavage
I have aphantasia and love the analogy to hashing. It matches my experience
quite closely in as much as I can't really imagine faces in the abstract, but
can verify a match in the real world with ease. Reminds me of NP-hard problems
in that respect – verification is easy, calculation is hard.

With respect to not being able to imagine music though, I don't think the two
are necessarily linked. I most definitely get earworms, and as a guitarist
rely heavily on my "mind's ear".

------
HHalvi
When i was in 9th grade preparing for a bio paper my friend told me to just
visualize diagrams with your eyes closed, i just couldn't and found out this
was not normal. I stumbled on Blake Ross's note* on this and realized i was
not the only one. When i showed this to my younger brother, he told me that he
had the same condition, while our parents don't.

*Link to the note: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/)

~~~
eozoon
I can visualize specific, static picture like stock photos, but I cannot
manipulate them.

eg. "picture a venn diagram" \- I can imagine the basic one with A, B and C
overlapping a bit. I cannot adjust how many items are there or how they
overlap or what colour they are.

"imagine a beach" \- standard photo of a beach you see in travel ads. Usually
include text like "discover Greece!"

"picture a cat" \- the most common photo of grumpy cat, I can also switch to
keyboard cat, poptart cat, Garfield, Felix the cat, but I can't picture a
"regular" cat despite having owned one for over a decade

I wonder if that counts as aphantasia or just severe lack of imagination.
Since I'm not "blind in my mind" \- I've a large internal database of
pictures, but I can't do the "picture yourself on a beach" thing either.

~~~
HHalvi
I can draw anything somewhere but can't really close my eyes and visualize be
it stock photos or manipulated.

I think there is a fine line between "picture yourself in X,Y,Z" vs "close
your eyes and visualize a simple thing that you know well". Don't know if
there is a standard test to find out if you indeed(medically) have it or not.

------
martin-adams
This reminds me of the recent article where not everyone has an inner
monologue

[https://insidemymind.me/2020/01/28/today-i-learned-that-
not-...](https://insidemymind.me/2020/01/28/today-i-learned-that-not-everyone-
has-an-internal-monologue-and-it-has-ruined-my-day/)

------
seemslegit
I wish more discussion of aphantasia would discuss what the people who have it
do instead, as they do not appear to be cognitively impaired and perhaps even
the opposite they do posses the ability to reason counterfactually, so could
it all be about the level of abstraction - symbolic/verbal imagination by
default ?

~~~
harel
I just "see" in concepts, not visuals. Until a year or so ago when this all
broke out (some Pixar head of animation spoke about himself having it), I had
no idea that was a thing. I thought everyone "see" in concepts. I had no idea
people actually "see" when they "see in their mind". It was quite a shock
knowing I'm missing out on free cinema. But I managed 40+ years without
knowing about it, I can pull another 40 at least being aware of it.

~~~
seemslegit
What about memories, can you audio-visually recollect conversations, arguments
etc. that you've had or just their content ?

~~~
harel
I can recollect the conversation's audio track, down to diction and
intonation. I cannot recall a visual image of it, but I have the "abstract
concept" of it pegged down. It's the best I can do. Considering i didn't know
any better most of my life I guess it's ok. I just wish I could get some
visuals. On a side note - dreaming works - i rarely remember dreams but when I
do they are visual, and hmmm... some substances in my youth did trigger actual
visuals.

~~~
seemslegit
Interesting, what about looking at a photo - say of a red apple on a green
plate like this one:

[https://previews.123rf.com/images/anthonycz/anthonycz1711/an...](https://previews.123rf.com/images/anthonycz/anthonycz1711/anthonycz171100035/90671500-red-
apple-on-green-plate-healthy-food.jpg)

Then closing your eyes and not trying to imagine a red apple on a green plate
but instead trying to recollect the image you saw ?

~~~
harel
I will recollect an apple on a plate. I can maybe tell you the colour of the
plate if I'll remember it. But the image will be 100% blank. Nothing there but
darkness. You know those spy films where the hero memorised all the exists and
items on the table so he can use them later? I'll be lost and/or dead in those
situations. My sense of direction is horrible at best. I get lost on a
straight road with a GPS (this is not an exaggeration - I do).

------
reedwolf
I'm still skeptical that this is an actual thing. I think people might just be
overestimating how clearly other humans can visualize something in their
minds.

Do people with "aphantasia" see visual imagery in dreams?

~~~
vallavaraiyan
I have this condition and used to think `mind's eye` was just an expression!

In this tweet, I'm a hard 5, while everyone I have spoken to is a 1 or a 2 -
[https://twitter.com/premium__heart/status/122561067717752013...](https://twitter.com/premium__heart/status/1225610677177520130)

I do see visual imagery when I'm dreaming, but cannot voluntarily bring the
imagery back when I'm awake.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think that this other image with simple geometric shape (a star?) that was
circulating on Twitter was better for ranking the mind's eye; I think on your
image, some people responding 1-2 may really be 2-3.

Myself, I'm 5 too. And it really pisses me off. I wish the mind's eye was
trainable. Is it?

(And to answer GP's question, during the - infrequent - dreams I have, I'm
usually a perfect 1.)

~~~
Kaiyou
Nobody has proven that it's not trainable, so I'd assume that it is. But
what's a good training method? Maybe a visual hobby, like video gaming?

I'm someone who is exceptionally good at visual things. For the apple, I can
do way better than the example picture (1) on the Twitter image. I can not
only do 2D, but 3D. I can rotate the apple in my mind and slice it and then
rotate the slices etc. Found out about this by accident, while watching
YouTube videos with visual puzzles, that were completely obvious for me with a
single glance.

And I spend most of my free time on visual hobbies, like playing video games
or watching movies. But maybe I'm just attracted to those hobbies, because I'm
a visual type.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Nobody has proven that it 's not trainable, so I'd assume that it is._

I've never heard of a successful training regime, or even of anyone who
successfully trained it, so that's an evidence against it being trainable.

> _And I spend most of my free time on visual hobbies, like playing video
> games or watching movies. But maybe I 'm just attracted to those hobbies,
> because I'm a visual type._

I'd guess the latter, because I also spend a lot of time on visual hobbies,
like playing video games or 3D modelling, and it didn't help me in any way. I
still don't have a mind's eye when I'm awake.

~~~
Kaiyou
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. A good training exercise I can
think of is to build complex Lego models according to the instructions. It's
how I spend lots of my time in my early childhood, before I was allowed to
play video games and watch TV. By touching the pieces and rotating them
yourself you get good image training of how shapes look when you rotate them.
Building things in a 3D space based on drawn instructions from only a single
point of view should also help to build mental images.

------
Ezku
I have a hypothesis that this condition and ADHD are related. ADHD researcher
Dr Russell Barkley links Vygotsky’s theories of childhood development to the
mechanism by which ADHD interferes with executive function [0]. An ADHD brain
would be less capable of imagining things and holding those images, which
would lead to failure in development of self-directed action via those
imagined images. Is this ”aphantasia”? I’m not sure, but I find it plausible.

The prevalence for ADHD has been cited at 5% in children and half of that in
adults. A commenter here says aphantasia has been guessed to be at 1-3% [1],
which would be a rough match. Another commenter describes their ADHD and
aphantasia [2], and I am under the impression this has been reported often. If
there was a causal relation I would expect to see these kinds of overlaps in
the data, but it’s really the researcher’s description of a failure of
imagination that makes this hypothesis especially interesting to me.

What do you think? Has anyone looked into this?

[0]: [https://youtu.be/sPFmKu2S5XY](https://youtu.be/sPFmKu2S5XY)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810934)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811184)

~~~
spacedcowboy
I don’t have ADHD, I’m pretty laid back actually, but I don’t have a mind’s
eye.

I was 30 or so before I realised “the mind’s eye” wasn’t a metaphor, and
people really could visualise things in their head. My brain doesn’t work like
that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature...

I remember things using rules. Whenever, for example, I need to tell someone
to turn right or left, the mantra “I write with my right” pings off, somewhere
in my head. It just did, writing this. It’s the way I remember facts,
apparently rules are much easier than random facts.

But how could that be a feature ? Well I can build fiendishly complicated
mental models layering rules on top of rules. I can’t see them, but I can use
them to predict results, and it gives me insights that most people don’t grasp
without the explanation that I’ve just discovered for them. My brain just
makes these rulesets up, examines, discards, and reformulates them without
conscious effort. I get the end result, and (most times) a consequence-chain
back to the problem starting conditions.

I do wonder if being forced to figure stuff out without the ability to
visualise is what made me have what I consider my primary skill - the ability
to look at something, conceptualise how it could work relationally, solve the
problem in my head, and only then justify that solution by working back from
that solution to the problem I was trying to solve in the first place.

For the people I work with, it sometimes seems like magic. For me, it’s
Tuesday. I do sometimes wish I had a mind’s eye, but I think what I do have
makes up for missing out, just in a different way. So as I said, bug or
feature, it’s really not that clear to me - I could see the argument from both
sides... :)

------
DigitallyFidget
This lead me down a rabbit hole of researching to try and understand what it
is, if I have it, and really understand what it is not. At first, yes, it
matches me, I see nothing but my eyelids when I close my eyes, because that is
the stimulation my eyes are receiving, no different from waking up at night
and it's pitch ass black in my room.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqJ42oGOM8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqJ42oGOM8)
This video gave me a context to what it is not and answered that no, I do not
have it. I can mentally visualize my cat, in full vivid description though I
see (visually with my eyes) nothing but my eyelids.

So to actually see something, to hallucinate vision which does not exist, is
not what people normally experience. People can learn to hallucinate and see
actual vision when their only visual stimulation is their eyelids, to project
what they think visually to the actual sensory input of vision.

So as I understand from the few hours of research, if you are unable to
describe an object without visually seeing it with your (open) eyes, then you
would actually be aphantasiac.

------
sherincall
Various sources are putting the base rate of Aphantasia between 1% and 3%.
Both myself and my brother have it, but neither of our parents do. I feel like
this is evidence for it being a recessive inherited disorder. Considering
we're both male, it might also be weak evidence for X-linked recessive in
particular.

~~~
supermatt
I saw a video on youtube of someone claiming to have aphantasia, but to me it
just seemed that they were misinterpreting what others would "see" when they
visualise something.

When asked to "picture" something, for some reason they assumed people would
actually see a faint version of it in their visual field - and because they
couldnt "see" it, they believed they had aphantasia.

e.g. when asked to visualize a clown sitting in a chair in front of them, they
expected people to actually (however faintly) see a clown in a chair in front
of them. To me that is hallucination, not visualization.

Of course, it could be ME misinterpreting it, and people do actually "see"
things they visualize, and I have aphantasia.... How would I know? What is the
experience for you? (if you dont mind me asking)

~~~
sherincall
Since I had discovered I have this condition (about 9 years ago), I spent a
lot of time interrogating many people about how _they_ 'see' things, and it is
definitely a spectrum, though I'm very close to one end of it.

For example, a simple "Close your eyes and imagine a cat. [pause] What color
is it? What's it doing?" question results in:

Most people: Orange. A bit scruffy. It's playing with a ball of yarn beneath a
chair. I can clearly see it jumping around.

Fewer, but still common: It's orange. It's just suspended in nothingness in a
fixed position.

Me: What do you mean color? You didn't tell me I need to give it a color!

Imagining something just summons the concept of that thing to your mind. You
can attach properties to the cat and you can analyze it, but unless a given
property has been attached in particular, it's simply null.

On the other hand, the people at the far end of the visual spectrum draw a
complete blank when you say "Imagine an un-cat leaping over the chair".

~~~
supermatt
OK - I think I understand what you are saying. I would have the same problem
as yourself with that visualization.

I also have an extremely poor memory. For me, the (very few) memories I have
are like a very blurry monochrome photo. I have always believed this is
anxiety related (I have chronic anxiety and ADHD).

FYI, I have just done this cat question on my partner, her cat was grey and
was sleeping... I asked her if that cat had a colour before I asked her what
colour it was, and she said it did. For me, that cat would have no colour. Its
possible I would then add a colour when asked the colour.

~~~
sherincall
The most spectacular thing about this is that no matter how people visualize
things, everyone always assumes the rest of are the same. So for me it was
completely mind blowing that others can truly _see_ things, while for them
they couldn't understand that I couldn't. It's just not the kind of thing you
discuss with people often, so we just instinctively generalize from one
example. Typical mind fallacy.

I've since heard of a second instance of the generalization phenomena - Some
people wipe their butt while still sitting, some stand up. Unscientific
polling showed that the split is roughly 50/50 in a population. But no one had
any idea of the other groups existence at all.

~~~
eozoon
I'm highly suspicious of that 50/50 split.

Every time I see that stated, I only ever see sitters being surprised that
standers exist, not the other way around.

They might exist, but either they're are much smaller minority, or it has a
strange correlation with how they use the internet.

------
comprev
Another interesting read on the topic (April 2016):
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-
it-...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-
be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/)

~~~
comprev
It's actually a condition I seem to have. I cannot for the life of me
"imagine" what a room would look like with furniture re-arranged, and also
have immense difficulty in "imagining" situations even with faces I've known
my whole life.

------
kkylin
This always reminds me of the following Feynman story about how we do
something as "simple" as counting:

[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf)

Anecdotally, most people I've asked (myself included) seem to have an easier
time counting in their first langugae, even if they haven't spoken it very
often in years (I'm far more fluent in my second language, English). So it
seems like for many mental tasks, there can be a variety of neural
implementations.

OTOH early sensory areas in the brain all seem more or less isomorphic (modulo
injury & disease). Where, when, how do individual brains start to diverge?

~~~
gdubs
Side note: I finally read “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman”, and found out
about his discovery of art — I believe those are some of his drawings in the
link you shared, and they’re quite beautiful.

------
Cactus2018
Try the Aphantasia study from Exeter University:

Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)

[https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153](https://wh.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=148940557153)

------
throwaway55554
I wonder if there's any overlap between people who don't have an inner voice
and those who can't visualize.

------
ur-whale
[http://archive.is/7SeN3](http://archive.is/7SeN3)

------
anjel
This makes me wonder how aphantasia correlates to the small subset of people
who report absolutely no visual fx from hallucinogens. They definitely feel
the potent effects of the halucinogen, but somehow non-visually.

------
arketyp
Francis Galton writes about this and related phenomena such as synaesthesia in
Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. A remarkably personal
account by a pioneering scientific mind. Highly recommended.

