
Aphantasia: A life without mental images - adamcarson
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054?ref=hn
======
x3n0ph3n3
Wow, I finally have a word to describe my mental experience. To others, I've
described the vividness of my memory as like a wireframe. I can _feel_ spatial
relationships but I don't see them like a picture in my head. There are
occasions that I can see color in my minds eye, but it's mostly greyscale.

~~~
rokhayakebe
How do you dream?

~~~
cottonseed
Rarely, if ever, and never as images. If your dreams are like movies, mine are
like stumbling through a dark house.

~~~
rokhayakebe
@cottonseed, @sall, @x3n

How do you remember faces or your house, or your car?

~~~
m_i_s_t
This is not about memory, it is about what you can access consciously. Those
of us who have no image in our minds have memories of our houses, cars,
friends, etc. just like you do (as far as I know!), they are just not part of
our conscious experience. If you want to relate to this, think of language
processing: you are not aware of how your brain parses the sentences you hear,
though you still have access to the meaning that is produced by that parsing.
We don't have access to the visual images, but they are there somewhere and
can be used by our memory system. (ps. I suspect that getting images to reach
consciousness or not is not just a random 'accident', but rather reflects a
more generally different brain organisation -- just not wrt memory having
access to visual representations or not)

------
tempestn
I think I have a mild version of this. I can picture things, but it generally
takes a fair bit of effort and concentration to get decent detail if the thing
is complex, and it's a fleeting image. Especially picturing people's faces is
difficult. I can get like.. an idea of the person's face, so I know I'd
recognize it if I saw it, but I rarely see a picture of their face in my head.

I do have normal visual dreams though, which apparently many people with full-
on Aphantasia don't. And I can picture and manipulate geometric objects in my
head, that kind of thing.

Again, I guess it's mostly that my mental images tend to be vague and
indistinct. I really wasn't aware that some (apparently most!) people see
perfectly clear mental photographs of things. Now I'm trying to figure out how
I haven't noticed the lack of this ability more! It seems pretty significant.

~~~
jacobolus
Your self-description sounds entirely typical to me. I don’t think most people
can imagine detailed photographic images (e.g. of faces), though there do seem
to be some who can, like certain autistic savants.

It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal
experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a
useful understanding of that experience from survey answers. Sort of like when
people claim non-human mammals have no consciousness or sentience because they
don’t talk.

For example, just because the picture-book illustrator profiled in this
article has a “vivid imagination” doesn’t mean she can literally visualize a
full-fidelity photographic mental image of a whole book spread. As a
photographer, when I see a scene I can “previsualize” what kind of picture I
might get after fully editing/printing the image days later. But that just
means I can conceptualize particular visual effects, think about the lighting,
texture, contrasts, colors, and put them together in an abstract thought, not
that I can precisely “see” the picture exactly as if it were finished in front
of me. I would say I have a “vivid imagination” for photographs, but my mental
experience of remembered or imagined vision is probably pretty similar to
yours.

~~~
tgb
What about people who complain about how a character looks in a movie
adaptation of a book? I never see characters in a book so the movie can do
whatever they want as far as I care. But other people get quite indignant over
this. Can anyone here attest to what level of imagination one has to do that?
I strongly suspect you're over generalizing from your own experiences, this
might be a way to test it.

~~~
ewzimm
Maybe it's difficult to judge because people don't usually talk about it. I'd
say I can visualize things just as vividly as I would experience when I look
at them. That is, I won't notice every detail, but I don't notice every detail
even when I'm staring right at something. I can look at something, look away
for a while and visualize it, then look back at it and compare the subjective
experience, and it's pretty much the same. It's more along the lines of
getting the same mental stimulation of recognition and experience as I would
get if I were looking at something, and it's the same as other senses. I can
imagine myself on a beach, see the contrast of colors of leaves and the sky,
hear the waves, feel the courseness of the sand, smell the sea, and I know
from experience that if I were actually there, I would have the same
sensations except I couldn't turn them off easily.

~~~
tempestn
See, descriptions like this make me think that many people do indeed see
clearer mental pictures than I (grandparent post) do. I'm going to have to do
some informal surveys of friends and family!

------
saalweachter
Is there a more objective test than telling someone to visualize something and
then asking, "Well, could you visualize it?"? For instance, are there visual
tasks a person with or without aphantasia objectively could not perform?

Like a psych 101 student, I immediately think I have a touch of any vaguely
described mental condition, but I also know I probably don't.

~~~
chime
How about this - Picture an elephant sideways. Don't let the elephant move. Is
the trunk on the left or on the right side? If they can't answer, then it's
possible they have Aphantasia.

~~~
Bjartr
Might want to say "side-on" instead, I rotated the elephant around the wrong
axis and was confused for a moment.

~~~
donutz
Me too. I had the trunk at the bottom. :-p

------
kazinator
> _Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing
> over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to
> mind?_

Very clear; I see some cons cells, making up a list, whose CAR holds the
symbol BEACH, the main connective of an abstract syntax tree describing the
whole situation.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Master, let me be your padawan. Teach me Your ways, for my path is twisted and
I see now I am yet to reach the Enlightenment.

------
rhino369
How clear are the pictures normal people can visualize. Is it like seeing but
with your eyes closed? Because what I can do is nothing like seeing. Visual
memory doesnt appear like a vision. Just a vague memory.

Can people actually see memories. I'm really missing out if so.

~~~
Paul_S
I'm baffled as well. I had no idea people could do that. I thought that was
called hallucination. I can remember images, I can't see them. I think I'm
missing the point somewhere.

~~~
gojomo
Can you draw things from memory, and get the general shapes and colors right?

~~~
tempestn
I'm not particularly skilled at drawing, but otherwise I'm fairly sure I could
do that. I can remember all the major visual details of something like a room
in my house, for example. But it's still not really like 'seeing' a picture of
it in my head, except for little bits at a time, or a somewhat hazy collection
of the whole. If I really focus it's a bit better, but some people seem to be
able to just "see" memories by default.

Also, most of the time I have a lot of difficulty pulling up a mental image of
a face, even one I know well, or holding onto it if I do manage to briefly
capture it. (But I don't seem to have any particular difficulty recognizing
people by their faces; I'm not picking out features or anything like that -- I
definitely remember faces and what they look like; I just can't see an image
of a particular face in my mind (clearly, most of the time).

------
gojomo
There was an interesting subthread on this, on another article entirely, a
while back:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280134)

Meanwhile, I once answered a question from a person on Quora whose premise was
that people can imagine "audio and visual" stimulus, but not "odor, taste, or
touch". I suspect that was based on the asker's own peculiar dominant senses
and style of memory, as I addressed in my answer:

[http://www.quora.com/How-come-our-brain-can-interpret-
ideas-...](http://www.quora.com/How-come-our-brain-can-interpret-ideas-and-
memories-as-audio-and-visual-but-not-as-odor-taste-or-touch/answer/Gordon-
Mohr)

------
claar
I've always known I'm terrible at visualizing. The first question from the
quiz in the article is "Conjure up an image of a friend or relative who you
frequently see". I chose my wife whom I see for hours each day. I tried to
visualize what she looks like -- nothing. Is this really so rare?

~~~
EC1
On the opposite end I remember every face I've ever seen (that has been put to
a name). I remember most names and faces from each of my elementary classes
including pre-school. Completely useless skill as I can't remember other
things to save my life unless I read them 100 times over.

~~~
meric
You can use it to pretend you know everyone in a party even though all you
know is their face and name. :)

------
dcw303
I have this too. If I try to recall images of people close to me, I get an
instinctive flash, which is like an outline. If I try to focus in on the
detail, the image disappears.

Happens in dreams to some extent too - I generally dream normally (?) but if I
become lucid then everything I try to look at disintegrates.

For the record, I'm a programmer who always wanted to do something artistic.
Coming to the realization that I just wouldn't be very good took a long time
to accept.

~~~
meric
I can recall anyone in a scene. I _think_ it's a detailed image I can zoomed
in, and I _think_ I have all their details (eyes, hair, eyebrows, etc) down.
It's a full color scene where the person of interest can be moving in their
characteristic walking style, waving their arms the way they wave their arms,
and talk the way they talk. However if I try to focus on the details, it's all
a blur. It's like when you have a small 50px by 50px photo, and it looks
sharp. Zoom in, and you realise it was an illusion. That's exactly it for me.

I can imagine my girlfriend's foot a _little_ more in detail, e.g. changes in
skin tone, but I can't remember the shape of her individual nails. Some of the
details of my girlfriend's, I can see in my mind, the others are mostly a
blur. I can't see in detail what I haven't noticed in real life. The details I
see are because there was a scene where she made a very appropriate facial
expression in response to a situation and I remember that detail very clearly
- like the way she smiled and tried to convince me everyone said she had a
beautiful smile on our second date.

Also - I notice the images I conjure in my mind are always a lot dimmer in
brightness than when seeing images with my eye. I can remember them being
bright, but I see them as dim - even when imagining the sun and the sky. It's
like looking at a computer screen in bright sunlight.

It still doesn't seem that vivid to some of the people described in the
article.

------
carlton7
This is fascinating. I took the quiz and had to select "No image at all" for
all the questions. I always knew I had trouble picturing things, but never
realized others didn't also have a hard time. Strangely, I can play back songs
in my head nearly perfectly, almost as if I was listening to them.

~~~
bonobo3000
ME TOO!!! I also think almost purely in voices, sometimes my own, sometimes
things others say (and I always remember the way they said it). I can play
back songs I heard 10+ years ago with no problem. Some of us just think audio
instead of video :) I didn't know there were others who thought like that!

------
nicklaf
So many people these days seem to be writing about something "begging the
question", whereas I am partial to reserving that idiom for a very specific
logical fallacy, and simply saying that something "raises the question" in all
other cases. Alas, language evolves with popular usage, and this may be a
dying distinction.

~~~
baxter001
Yes it's a dead distinction in all but a very narrow area of discussion, even
then in which it should be stated more plainly.

------
realitygrill
_But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which
some people are unable to visualise mental images._

This year? Galton (famously) published on this in 1883!

~~~
gwern
Background:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

------
glass_of_water
I wonder if you can improve your visualization ability.

I stopped reading novels for fun about 5-6 years ago but this past year I've
started reading at least one book every couple of weeks, and I feel that my
ability to visualize things has improved.

On a related note, I wonder how you could measure one's change in
visualization ability, since it's so subjective. I had a very difficult time
answering the questions in the article, since I had no frame of reference.

------
nickledave
Just want to point out that there could be a wide range of ability to
recognize faces and it's probably realy hard to find a good measure of that.
If someone shows you a picture of your wife (to take an example from one
comment) and a picture of eg another woman with the same hair color, skin
tone, whatever, would you be able to distinguish them? I'll bet you would
unless you suffer from prosopagnosia, the _loss_ of the ability to recognize
faces that we know can occur after damage to a certain part of visual cortex.
Then try to describe how you can tell the pictures apart. Not as easy. Artists
(like the one in the article) spend all day thinking about faces (ok, not all
artists, but many of them). They probably feel more confident in their ability
to recognize faces and in their ability to describe them--because they discuss
faces for portraits, with clients, etc. As a skeptical neuroscientist, I'm
thinking you should hold off on diagnosing yourself with this condition until
we come up with better evidence for it.

------
m_i_s_t
This is supposed to be a 'condition' and an 'inability'? I have this and have
always associated it with an enhanced ability to think abstractly, and more
generally intellectual facility. I had never met anyone else having this,
until I came upon a paragraph by Einstein who comments about his absence of
mental images, replaced by geometrical-like thinking. That only confirmed my
intuitive assumption that it related to enhanced intellectual abilities in the
analytical and abstract thinking domain. It is therefore bizarre to read about
this as a 'condition' or even 'disability'... On the bright side, it is
wonderful to see that it is shared by others, even studied and meet fellow
geometrical thinkers here -- hi fellow Jedis ;)

~~~
HappyTypist
What about someone who doesn't see wire frames and are only able to visualise
with features?

------
matchu
Hm, I never really realized that the rest of the world was better at
visualizing than I am, but I'm definitely below average. My ability to imagine
vividly comes very rarely, and, when I'm trying, I can usually only conjure a
small image and only for what seems like an instant.

Definitely not the severe case that the article describes, but I didn't
realize that this was unusual.

------
MarkPNeyer
i used to have this ability. i know i had it as a child. i remember
visualizing fantastically complex systems.

i seem to have lost it at some point in adulthood. i have no idea when.

i started doing it again while using drugs, and this caused me to become aware
that i'd lost an ability i once had. it was very hard to explain to people
what this ability was, but i rememberd being able to visualize fantastically
complex scenes in my head, as a kid, and getting some sense of this back while
high.

in the past i could imagine any complex system of gears - like a clock, and
zoom in and look at any part of it.

it's like the projector bulb is broken. an image flashes and goes away.

has anyone found a way to redevelop this?

~~~
hncomment
Of course insights from drugs may not always be fully reliable, but what drug
did you take, and did you try taking more?

Almost everything gets better with practice. Memorization experts have often
used visio-spatial 'memory palaces', imaginary places they can fill with items
to remember. Simply trying to use that technique might help build visual
recall flexibility.

Perhaps it'd separately be worth trying a sensory-deprivation soak-tank?

------
mgraczyk
My experience has been that visual vividness comes and goes with mental
fatigue. When I am well rested, comfortable, and haven't spent much time
thinking earlier in the same day, I can close my eyes and plainly see detail
in childhood toys, places I've traveled, faces, and even illustrations from
high school textbooks. When I'm tired or have spent the whole day thinking
intensely, I can barely remember what my roommates faces look like. I suspect
that the ability to vividly imagine images is an expensive neural process that
becomes much more difficult when the brain is not at peak performance.

Curiously, my ability to recall sounds and music does not seem to change with
fatigue. Whether I'm feeling energetic or super tired, I can bring to mind any
song I'm familiar with or hear arbitrary words spoken in the voices of my
close friends and family. My suspicion here is that simulating sound is much
less expensive and therefore the ability not as easily degraded. That would
not be surprising considering the anecdotal point that I can get headaches
from too much sunlight but not too much noise (unless it interrupts my sleep).

------
ajb
"But _this year_ scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which
some people are unable to visualise mental images."

Actually this was discovered by Sir Francis Galton more than 200 years ago:
[http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm](http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm)

Nor is it particularly rare.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is not the experience itself, but the fact
that people are so surprised when they discover that other people's mental
experience can be so different to their own.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
It does fundamentally divide humanity into those that can imagine, and those
that can't. Its not unreasonable to guess others experience the world
similarly to oneself; not at all interesting that folks would be surprised by
that.

~~~
ajb
It's perhaps an exaggeration to describe them as 'those that can't imagine':
Galton noted that inability to visualise was much more prevalent among his
colleagues, the scientific men of the day, than among the general public.

------
DanBC
If you have aphantasia, and wantto describe it to someone else: try asking
them to picture "democracy" or some other abstract concept. Most people don't
then have mental images of ballot papers or flags. Then tell them that what
they're experiencing is what you experience when someone asks you to picture
an elephant.

~~~
richardjdare
That's interesting, because I did! When I read the word "democracy" I started
thinking about the concept, and my mind delivered pictures (or really, scenes)
to me, The White House, scenes of the UK Parliament, diagrams representing
political systems, a game of Civilization, me queuing to vote at the last
election etc. etc.

In a conversation that moves quickly, I probably wouldn't begin this process
of streaming images, but if I spend more than a few seconds on an idea, they
just start arising. To me, it is "thinking" \- it is much closer to me and
more effortless than the logical articulation of abstract concepts.

~~~
DanBC
I wonder if that means you hae an excess of visual imagination or I have a
deficit?

------
irremediable
Interesting! I think I have this, though I didn't know there was a name for
it. I don't imagine things visually at all -- I just kind of "feel" things. I
also have a limited degree of something like touch-synaesthesia... music,
mathematics and emotions have some strong haptic associations for me.

And I'm terrible at recognising faces, but pretty good at remembering facts.

------
techbajaj
I usually practice the art of visualization to picturize images in my mind.
The more visual impact you have in your mind, its better to create things
positively.

------
beering
For those who are talking about how they are bad or below average at
visualizing things, how do you know? Is there a test that measures this
ability?

~~~
claar
There's a quiz in the linked article that matches the one on
[http://www.aphant.asia/](http://www.aphant.asia/)

------
snarfy
My wife developed this as her multiple sclerosis has progressed.

