
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - ingve
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504
======
kazagistar
I'm... halfway. When I try, I can generate images, but I only do so
occasionally. Most of the time, my thinking is exactly like the author
describes. Facts, ideas, connections, hunches, intuitions, etc. The images are
kinda like a serialization of this, no more: they have exactly the data I put
into them, and not really any more "detail".

But what really blew my mind was when I realized that people think with words.
Its always "have an idea, then attempt to serialize it into some approximation
in the form of linear sentence or words". I mean, I can chose to speak a
sentence in my head, but it is strange and artificial. But from what I hear
from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and
which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't
exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?

~~~
Orthanc
I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't _not_ think in words.
It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are
thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head.
Brains are weird.

~~~
kazagistar
Do you know more then one language? I grew up bilingual from a young age, and
I suspect that has something to do with the disconnect between ideas and
words.

The simplest proof I have for the fact that I don't think in words is that I
quite often forget a word, and can't complete a sentence. I know exactly what
I want to express and have thought it through in my mind, but I can't tell it
to someone else because I don't remember the serialization of that idea, and
am forced to try to work around it by describing the word and hoping someone
fills it in for me.

~~~
ijhnv
Exactly. I also grew up to be bilingual from a young age, and I didn't learn
my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with
the words you already know from your first language, but in a way a toddler
would, just by listening to it and maybe some reading.

After I began to think in English (my second language), I found that I wasn't
speaking my first language anymore, I was just translating to it from my
second one. And because the two weren't connected in my brain, I started
frequently forgeting words and having trouble with phrasing.

~~~
stordoff
> I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting
> foreign words with the words you already know from your first language

Mildly off-topic, but I never realised until recently how much of a difference
this can make. I've used French numbers far more, and for far longer, than I
have Japanese numbers [0], but learning that way still results in me going "8
- that's eight, so its huit". Because I learnt the Japanese numbers through
usage and without the deliberate English comparison, I go straight to "8 -
hachi" without the intermediate step.

It's also weird to me that I can count backwards (say 10 to 1) far easier in
Japanese than in French, probably for similar reasons.

[0] Note I'm a long way from fluent in either. I studied French at school, and
have picked up a very small amount of Japanese through usage.

------
kaoD
> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and
> turquoise waves.

Yes, with great detail.

> If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing.

Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!)

> And mom’s face? Of course.

Not at all!

I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but
always struggle with drawing faces in my mind.

My experience with imagining faces: I get the overall head shape, hair...
everything, but the features are blurry, wobbly, and kind of switch nonstop,
like my imagined faces were made of constantly changing cutouts of a multitude
of faces. It's disorienting.

I (think I) don't have any trouble recognizing people's faces. Sometimes I
even remember strangers who I come across occasionally on my city... But I
still struggle remembering/imagining the most familiar people around me.

Am I alone in this?

~~~
Hupriene
Try this:

Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image
is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face.

Does that make it easier? It does for me.

~~~
philsnow
How did you stumble upon that trick?! That's amazing!

------
blakeross
I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions.

About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox.
My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative
writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos
parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird
discovery for me given this new focus.

~~~
codingdave
The question that kept coming to mind as I read this was how you compare
different things?

For example, something as simple as: What is more blue? The sky or a lake?

Or, on a practical note, if you are designing software, do you have a good
sense of color theory, to be able to select colors that will look good
together, or do you have to put it on screen and do some trial and error?

Also, your concept of the "milk voice" was very alien to me. I don't think
like that. My inner voice is my own voice, with full emotion and inflection.

~~~
blakeross
I think I've stored basic information as to color degree, like "X is very dark
blue" and "Y is light blue." I'd have to actually see the objects to settle a
close contest.

Trial and error for matching colors.

Thanks for the insight on the "milk voice." You'd think by now I'd learn not
to assume anything. I thought the "neutral inner voice" was universal.

~~~
frooxie
> I thought the "neutral inner voice" was universal.

For me, most of the time, I don't have any kind of inner voice. I don't
usually think in words; thinking is more like combining abstract
symbols/feelings/concepts in a way that's more immediate and less linear than
language.

~~~
blakeross
Really?! That is fascinating to me. I am 100% language on the inside.

~~~
codingdave
That begs another question - if you are doing something althletic (or even
soemthing simple like driving a car), do you develop "muscle memory" the same
as other people, or do you need to actually think through each motion you
perform?

~~~
UniZero
There was a study done a while back that looked at whether people could
improve at video games by imagining themselves playing. IIRC the participants
who imagined practicing showed a comparable amount of improvement in contrast
to those who actually played. Can't find the link unfortunately.

~~~
fpoling
Similarly I read once that during recovery from a trauma that prevents to do a
particular physical activity if one imagines doing that activity, then it
shorten the recovery time and leads to less muscle dystrophy.

------
crb3
I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a vulnerability, one I
didn't know about until it happened.

Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-
bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd
heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could
do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing --
songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it
first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing
the work to physical fact.

And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-
out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce, single-parenting, work stresses -- and
it was enough to let staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and
suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got
fevered and dissolved away and _I couldn 't code_, couldn't create, because I
couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.

Anybody else gone through this?

~~~
_Adam
I'm sorry to hear you went through that. Did your abilities return once the
course of antibiotics was completed?

~~~
crb3
Yep, it was just the fever that knocked it out.

------
JohnBooty
There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to
everybody.

My wife, for example, _can 't process "left" and "right"_ without great
effort.

She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not
dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very
confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take.

Even more confusingly, _she 's a very good navigator,_ much better than I! I
process "left" and "right" like a "normal" person and yet I'm legendarily bad
at finding my way while driving.

I've tried to get her to explain the left/right difficulty and it's hard for
her to put into words, because of course how can you explain how your brain
_doesn 't_ work? The most she's been able to say about it is that she
understands what her "left arm" or "left foot" is but can't translate that to
what my "left" is, or vice-versa.

Anybody else ever heard of or experienced anything like this?

~~~
bane
I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out
relative left-right to other people.

Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you
and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up.
The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a
backwards "L".

~~~
derefr
I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy.

I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down
3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a
directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a
chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a
direction button both _moves_ it and _turns it to face_ the same
direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this
"model" whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I'd picture
myself in the third person, give myself an "origin point", and then visualize
where I'd be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the
origin.

(All this was without actually 'picturing' anything, in the traditional sense.
Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating
inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the
surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it'll feel
different when you're trying to add yaw if the "south" side of the cube is the
one facing you, vs. the "east" side or the "bottom" side. Now imagine that the
cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands.
Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.)

One interesting effect of this is that I've found that I now get "acclimated"
to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where _north_ is
in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot
while navigating, and so my "origin point" becomes fixed to North, such that I
begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city,
with streets running "up-down" instead of north-south and "left-right" instead
of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of "I'm facing up" when I'm
facing north.

On the other hand, when I'm in a city I _haven 't_ acclimated to, _man_ do I
miss that sensation; I get _completely_ lost.

~~~
JohnBooty
Very interesting!

------
blakeross
I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia
survey embedded in the BBC article:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054).
Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you
take it and report your score?

The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter
neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none
of the questions make sense to me (no image on any of them).

~~~
monkbroc
8/40

I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the
airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other
people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was
entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in
further research.

I'm a computer engineer.

Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?

~~~
LinkDJ
So far I've found
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/)
but it's not very large (yet).

------
dempseye
I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for
richness of mental imagery.

I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine"
things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently
impossible.

And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the
counting and that nobody could actually _see_ sheep when they did it. Do
people really see sheep?

Notwithstanding my apparently poorly functioning mind's eye, I've never had
any problem with spatial reasoning, and have scored +2sd in tests with a
spatial ability component. I find myself able to "feel" the forms in a way
that seems to have nothing to do with vision.

Does anybody else recognize this experience?

~~~
neilk
Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross'
discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic.
It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part
of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less
detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop
and think of a sunset. The first sunset image I get is almost involuntary. For
me it will be cliché, like a stock photo, but I can alter it, or add detail.
(Other people may get fantasy landscapes or particular sunset memories).

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current
visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening
in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think
you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember
a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is
some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But
the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for
you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For
others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people
they shared the space with.

~~~
dempseye
There is a language problem here where it is impossible to be sure that when
people describe subjective experiences in the same words they are actually
having the same qualitative experience.

I don't take it too seriously. It's just a jumping off point for a
conversation about an interesting perceptual quirk.

~~~
Terretta
He says second monitor. My wife just said she sees as though her glasses are
off at first. Very visual words from neilk and her both.

Unlike glasses or monitor, my "collections of attributes" when asked to
actively generate a sense of things ("Picture X") seems more non-visual
attributes.

Picture a chair: wood, cool to touch, weighs this much in the hand, makes a
scraping noise when slid, fairly clean design with straight high back, no arms
but indents for buttocks, sturdy, can be stood on to reach things. I just
don't see an imaginary visual of one.

// I _can_ mentally/visually flip through an endless card deck of them, like
nielk's Google Image Search example. I don't feel like I can visually put an
imaginary one in an imaginary room in my mind.

------
SilasX
Surprised no one's linked this yet: SSC's "what universal human experiences
are you missing out on without realizing it", which describes this phenomenon
in particular:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-
ex...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-
are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/)

Basically, there are a lot of cases where people assume something is part of
everyone's internal experience but which can be refuted with detailed, literal
comparisons of your first person accounts.

For me, it was alcohol. I have never actually liked it, in the sense of
"enjoying the sensation of drinking it". The best drinks to me are merely
"bearable". I always assumed everyone was pretending as some excuse to get
drunk.

------
snarfy
My wife has multiple sclerosis. Aphantasia is one of the complications she's
experiencing. Without being able to visualize she's had to resort to using a
notepad and paper to write everything down. She's always been creative and
it's been very hard on her to come down with this.

~~~
aab0
Is it aphantasia or is it the general severe cognitive changes across many
domains that usually accompanies MS?

~~~
snarfy
We aren't sure. It took a long time before we associated a term to her issues.
The tl;dr is she says she lost the picture in her mind. She cannot visualize
anymore, which sounds like aphantasia.

------
fpoling
This is very interesting!

I just realized that when I imagine things they are rather sketchy. For
example, when I imaging a beach, it is very abstract. When I try to describe
what present on it, I do not use an object from the picture, I first remember
what could present on the beach like a left towel and then sort-of add it to
the mental image.

In school I also had troubles with drawing. I could draw regular shapes like
cubes, spheres or beams, but drawing an animal was a nightmare.

A probably related thing is that I do not get why people drink. I do it
occasionally for a social aspect, but I do not remember that I ever
experienced being more relaxed from it or having any special fun. I just feel
more and more intoxicated :(

------
jacinda
As a child, my dad had the "Mega Memory" tapes around the house and I remember
listening to them. Very early on in the lessons, the instructor talks about
using basic association because we "think in pictures." As an example, he
noted that if he said the word elephant, people picture an elephant, not the
word "e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t." I must have been eight or nine at the time and
remember being terribly confused because I couldn't really picture of an
elephant in my head. I suspect I do have aphantasia to a certain degree.

Unlike the author, I do dream visually (in fact, I tend to have very vivid
dreams; the most vivid ones are difficult to separate from reality, even if
the subject matter is something fantastic like being part of an interstellar
military or something). If I'm in a state between waking and sleeping I
actually do have much more of a mind's eye, but when I'm fully awake I don't
have pictures in my head...but I remember what it's like to visualize things
mentally because of my dreams.

I have at least something of a "mind's ear" in that I can hear music in my
head (the detail is usually not as rich; it's often just the melody with
lyrics). Additionally, I have a very good memory for song lyrics and when I
listen to music the concept of tuning out or not being extremely aware of the
lyrics is something that friends I have described but that I rarely
experience. I can usually only tune out lyrics in music if it's a song that
I'm already very familiar with.

One aspect that I find interesting is that although I can't really picture
places I still have spatial awareness in my mental concept of them. For
example, if I remember one of the houses we lived in as a child I can "place"
various objects in and around the house in their correct spatial relationships
without picturing the objects themselves. Do other people with aphantasia also
have this experience?

~~~
berekuk
My experience is closer to yours than to the author of the original post.

1) I have a phonological loop and can easily imagine music.

2) My visuospatial sketchpad (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_memory))
is almost entirely spatial. I don't know the color of the floor in my kitchen,
unless I paid attention to it specifically and verbally in the past. But I can
use memory palace successfully.

3) I wonder if for me it's just an undeveloped habit which could be improved:
I have dreams with pictures and colors once a few months, and sometimes I see
pictures when I'm half asleep, but it's really hard to put myself into that
state intentionally.

~~~
jacinda
Interesting. I hadn't read about that model of working memory before but going
through the article it does sound like we have similar experiences.

1) I also have a phonological loop - and would consider this the strongest
part of my memory. I have a relatively easy time memorizing large volumes of
text and my verbal aptitude on tests has always been extremely high. I also
have an aptitude for foreign languages and enjoy studying them as a hobby.

2) I would agree. I could probably tell you the color of the floor of the
kitchen where I'm currently living, but any past place would be difficult.
I've experimented with a memory palace before so I believe it would work in
theory but I haven't practiced enough to know for sure.

3) Sometimes I wonder this as well. I frequently have very vivid dreams and
occasionally have flashes of things that I think are mental imagery but
they're fuzzy and not something I can really do on demand.

------
gojomo
There was a digression in another thread about this a little over a year ago,
which was where I first learned of people-without-mental-imagery:

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

Notably, ~gwillen there pointed out Francis Galton's 1880 study of the matter
– where he started with the idea that mental imagery was a hoax, as he himself
did not experience it. His surveys convinced him that it was instead common,
and that only ~3% of people lack it entirely – very close to the 2% estimate
Ross passes along from a 2009 study.

So: still surprising people, but known for quite a while.

------
nkurz
Lots of discussion last year about one of the sources:

    
    
      Aphantasia: A life without mental images (bbc.com)
      91 points by adamcarson 235 days ago | 75 comments
    

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792)

------
kaffeemitsahne
As someone without a mind's eye it's hard to imagine how much this
"visualization" resembles normal vision. I remember from reading up on this
earlier that some people can even superimpose things on an empty sheet of
paper, or in the air. That would almost seem like a hallucination to me.

Key quote from the article IMO: " _I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor._
" I've always thought the same way about daydreaming, only a few years ago did
I realize it's actually something more precise than just 'not paying
attention'.

~~~
cabirum
Normal vision is your display, "mind's eye" is offscreen
rendering/renderbuffer(s). Length, resolution, color depth, scene complexity
varies by person. Not a part of your normal vision, just a readable/writable
visual information in your brain. Can be overlaid into real world with some
effort sometimes.

This topic is fascinating, what else some people have that others don't.

------
blaze33
And now I wonder what someone with aphantasia would see using psychedelic
drugs, or while meditating... Still nothing ? Could that help ?

~~~
blakeross
Meditating has never done anything for me visually. I thought the idea of
"visualizing" while you meditate was just a figure of speech.

I haven't tried psychedelic drugs. Maybe I should start.

~~~
blaze33
So you cannot visualize things while trying to but do you dream at night ?

About psychedelic drugs, it's not something I would advocate lightly as it has
the potential to mess you up pretty badly. From my limited experience it was
more like having my imagination on steroids so I wouldn't know what happens if
there's nothing to enhance in the first place... That said I've never taken
hardcore stuff like lsd or dmt where some people report having full visual
hallucinations.

~~~
blakeross
That's one of the FAQ's in the piece:

8\. Do you dream? No, or I don’t recall them. I’ve had a couple dreams but
there was no visual or sensory component to them. When I woke up, I just knew
a list of “plot points” about things that happened. This is also how I digest
fiction.

~~~
blaze33
Ah thanks, I missed this one when reading the article. Some other commenter
talks about having a coworker with aphantasia but still being able to dream so
they may well be a whole spectrum of what people can / cannot visualize.

------
kaoD
> I do have the ‘milk voice’—that flat, inner monologue that has no texture or
> sound

Sorry to tell you this, but my inner monologue _does_ have texture and sound
:P It sounds pretty close to my voice (or how I imagine my voice, I guess) and
my inflections when speaking (even across languages). Even when I read other
people's writings, I kinda hear myself in my mind.

> However, most of my friends and family describe what they “hear” as
> music—not as vivid as the real thing, to be sure, and not as many
> instruments—but “music” nonetheless.

That reminds me of an anecdote with my older brother: I was very young and I
remember telling him I could hear music in my mind when I wanted to, just like
if I pressed PLAY on a cassette player. He looked at me like I was crazy (note
to self: test if he's aphantasic).

I still can, and (I think) I can reproduce it in high polyphonic detail (even
details I don't consciously remember!) I perceive my aural imagination
(aurination? audination?) as vivid as the real thing (though real sound kind
of "overpowers" my imagination, like my imagination was playing through
earphones close to my ears, not quite plugged in, but _inside_ my head!) It's
much clearer than my visual imagination, which is more blurry and fleeting.

Maybe that's why I became an amateur musician :)

~~~
JoeyJoJoJr
I think my visual imagination is quite detailed (I am a graphic designer) but
I assume my aural imagination is pretty average. I can usually only imagine
very basic melodies. However on many occasions, in the half sleep before
waking, I have been able to aurally imagine multi layered music at a very
detailed level, and it somewhat carries over for a few minutes after fully
waking. I wish there was a way to tap into this during the day.

------
mcweaksauce
The last chapter in Oliver Sacks' book "The Mind's Eye" discusses this
phenomenon and how people who became blind adapted and compensated. Highly
recommend it. He suggests a phenomenon like this is primarily biologically
predetermined.

------
grahamburger
Wow .. I am able to visualize things, but the part of this where he describes
the work that it takes to 'chit-chat' is _exactly_ my experience. Right after
we were married I had nearly that exact conversation with my wife. She would
ask 'how was your day?' and I would be unable to answer. When she pressed,
thinking that I was just grumpy or worse that I was withholding something, I
would become frustrated, without really knowing why, and attempt to come up
with something to tell her - but it was very much just a list of bullet points
from the day. I was finally able to realize for myself and then communicate to
her how incredibly difficult it is for me to both remember and then come up
with an explanation for what I did (or even worse - 'how I'm feeling') today.
It's gotten a little bit easier through practice, and she is much more
understanding now. It's comforting to hear that experience from someone else.
Chat-chat is absolutely abhorrent to me - I feel entirely incapable of
participating in it. He quips about the social oddness of leaving a party for
two hours to think up an answer to a simple friendly question - yup, I've done
that.

------
cottonseed
Thanks for sharing.

I'm also aphantasic and the fun part of reading this was the differences
between our internal experiences. I have a great sense of direction and I love
navigating and exploring new places.

I don't really have a mind's ear, either, just the "milk voice" as he calls
it, although when I started studying Chinese and learning the tones, I had
this crazy experience where I heard a melody in my head for the first time.
Now I'd say I have something like a speaker that sometimes plays music, but I
can't really control it. (Great, now I can get music stuck in my head.)

I have a similar experience with episodic memory, which is strange, because
generally I have a great memory. In high school, I could read a chapter of a
book and remember it word for word the next day (but my memory was not
photographic!) I've always been deeply unsentimental and, instead of being sad
about it, my attitude has always been "destroy the past to create the future."

------
Falco70
Not only can I imagine the beach, but sometimes I don't snap out of it until
an hour (or more) later. At this point I have imagined an entire plot with
myself as the main character and multiple other characters. The "movie" starts
off at the imagined beach, including the bright sun making me squint, the feel
of the sand under my feet, the smell of the salt water, etc. Next thing I know
an hour (or more) has passed by. In this time I have befriended my fellow
imaginary beach goers and joined them in defending the beach from a zombie
invasion.

I had a similar experience to the author. Except that it was when I learned
that not everyone experiences these intense fantasies. I experience a
psychological concept known as Maladaptive Daydreaming. I find it difficult,
and at times impossible, to stop visualizing through my minds eye.

------
pavlov
The test seems nearly useless. What's the difference between "moderately
clear" and "reasonably clear"? Seems like a test subject would need to be
prepared quite thoroughly with image and video examples to define the
available options.

~~~
stupidcar
I believe the test is an attenuated version of one use in real psychological
research, the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire[1], and has proved to
have predictive power. E.g. the scores people give correspond with the level
of activity seen in their brains when they undergo MRI scans, so although
vague, it isn't "useless" in that sense.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire)

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kule
I used to have a lot of trouble with this. It didn't help having the
terminology 'visualisation' which makes it feel like you're not doing it right
if you don't 'see' something.

It's something you can work on by using your other senses for instance rather
than trying to see something, concentrate on what it feels like, or the sounds
or the smells. e.g. To picture a beach feel the sand in your toes, the breeze
on your face, the noise of the waves or the smell of the salt air.

If you can concentrate with that in your mind instead I find a picture will
then quite often form. Especially true if you take the time to quieten your
mind first (e.g yoga, breathing techniques, meditation etc).

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miguelrochefort
Wait, so people can actually _see_ things in their head? Like the author, I
was convinced this was a metaphor/figure of speech... Actually, I'm still a
bit skeptical about whether any of this is true.

I have a sense of how things are located spatially and can recall features of
things I have verbally described to myself, but there is no way I can _see_
anything that's not before my eyes.

Not sure if that's related, but I have a very bad sense of direction,
especially when driving. I'll need to take the same route a dozen of times
before I can stop relying on my GPS.

~~~
stupidcar
Skepticism is healthy, but there is an overwhelming body of evidence that
visual imagination is real. Even if you don't take people's testimony as
proof, MRI scans demonstrate that areas of the brain associated with visual
processing engage when people imagine visually. Disbelieving all of this
simply because it doesn't match with your own personal experience of mind is
bordering on arrogance.

I do think visual imagination varies greatly, even amongst those who have it.
Mine is not particularly strong — everything I imagine is very "shadowy" and
ill-defined, but nonetheless it is there. It is hard to describe such an
intangible phenomenon, but imagining/remembering visually feels qualitatively
different from imagining/remembering facts, sounds, words, etc.

For example, I can imagine the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh,
and when I do, I "see" the painting in my mind. This imagined image is far
from clear or sharp, more like a fuzzy ghost of the original. Also, the
imagined image is separate from the sensory input I'm receiving from my eyes.
I don't see the van Gogh painting plastered over whatever I'm looking at.
Instead, it's as if the two images coexist in my conscious awareness, although
it takes a deliberate effort to maintain the imagined one, and the image from
my eyes is much stronger and clearer. Closing my eyes can help me focus more
easily on the imagined image.

My dreams are similarly lo-fi, visually speaking. The best way I can describe
is that everything in my dreams is very poorly lit. It's like being in a
darkened room, where you can see objects, but can't make out their details.
This tends to frustrate me, and I often spend a lot of my time in dreams
trying to address the problem by reaching some more brightly lit environment,
and then getting confused as to why I still cannot see properly.

------
mc808
I think either most people are exaggerating about their ability to visualize
or I have this impediment to a degree. My mental "images" are extremely faint,
distant, wavering, ghost-like. Any parts I'm not focused on immediately poof
away. Definitely can't conjure up a whole scene and explore it. But at least
it's something.

The reason I think people may be exaggerating is because there are very few
people with the artistic or mechanical aptitude that I would have if I could
produce stable and detailed mental images at will. Also, police sketches.

------
theemathas
I have a problem that sounds similar to this. But instead of visualizing, I
have problems remembering events. I usually remember events "out of order",
perhaps like recording 30-second videos and storing them randomly ordered. For
example, if someone asks me if I have breakfast this morning, I might recall a
certain breakfast, and then struggle trying to figure out whether that was
today's breakfast or yesterday's. This becomes very frustrating when people
ask me "What did you do today?"

------
georgewsinger
Einstein and Feynman claimed to think in vivid mental images. Are there
examples of people who have _exceptional_ mathematical ability with
aphantasia?

------
stupidcar
I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through practice?
My own mental images tend to be dim and fuzzy, far from the photorealistic
scenes some people seem to be able to conjure up. But I wonder if there's a
feedback effect here, where people whose visual imagination is stronger to
begin with tend to use it more, thus further strengthening it, while people
whose visual imagination starts off weaker use it less, and so it remains
weak, or gets worse.

It would seem like learning to draw or paint might be a good way to train
visual imagination. As I understand it, many artists begin by mastering
representative art based purely on reference models, then later develop to
produce works partly or wholly inspired by mental imagery.

I'm curious if anyone here who learnt to draw or paint during adulthood
experienced a corresponding increase in the vividness of their mental images,
particularly in areas not directly related to drawing? E.g. did your dreams
become more vivid? Are you more able to imagine the specific details of your
house, or your friends and family? Do your mental images feel "clearer" or
more defined?

~~~
dempseye
> I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through
> practice?

There are various meditative and esoteric practices based on exactly that.

------
Roritharr
Weird. This explains a lot of my abilities much better than hightened IQ or
something like that. The test, which basically asks you multiple versions of
"how clear can you picture X", told me I'm in the top 20% of people with
Hyperphantasia, although I might misjudge my experience greatly.

Being able to quickly and accurately create mental models is essential to most
of my workflows.

Now I really regret not having learned drawing.

~~~
theoh
Just learn now. But be aware that observational drawing is a different skill
than illustrating your "phantasy" mental images.

In the second category, the engineer Elmer Sperry apparently had a serious
facility for visualizing machinery, and would hold out a pen and paper to
"just draw a line around it". It's mentioned in Eugene Ferguson's book
Engineering and the Mind's Eye:
[https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onep...](https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false)

------
Smircio-
This is fascinating. I have to test every single person in my life. I know my
wife already has synesthesia so I'd assume she also can conjure up images at
will, but who knows. I've heard of people who have no inner monologue, but
never people who have no mind's eye! I wonder how common it really is? Thanks
for this article.

------
commieneko
I'm exactly the opposite. Everything in my head is an image. When I do math,
I'm manipulating shapes, connections, colors. The space seems to be higher
dimensionally, as things can be close and far depending on how I'm "gazing"
through the space. While I can visualize systems as I might see them, I can
also visualize them topologically. That's basically how I write code. I can
"see" the path of operation through a ghostlike view. But only a few paths are
in focus at any one time. Focus is not a great way to describe it, as it's not
like the optical effect of focus. It's more like being able to feel a tension
on a path. The path's I'm "seeing" are tight and the one's I'm not seeing, are
still there but I have no "purchase" on them until I follow them.

The way I do calculations used to drive my teachers nuts in grade school. But
my systems always worked. I do addition and subtraction as complements, which
is how I see them. I do multiplication and division by what I can only
describe as folding number lines. Individual numerals have colors and sounds,
and what I can only describe as personalities. That is, in base 10. In other
bases numbers seem boring and flat. I'm not sure what to make of that. What if
I'd been raised using octal or hex? Binary makes me nervous.

I make my living as an illustrator and animator, I've been doing CGI since the
late 1970s. I've tried to draw some of these things, but when I try and
project them into 2D, I can only get what to most people seems nonsensical.
But if I close my eyes or concentrate they are visible inside my head. I don't
try and do this very much anymore, because I've found that sometimes this
"breaks" the system and I can't see it anymore.

My dreams are very visual. Often my dreams are multi-threaded, with several
plots and sets of characters. I'm often more than one person in the dream, or
sometimes not present at all. I generally remember the dreams as a linear
thing, but they are often connected and "inside" the dreams they seem
simultaneous. I've no idea how to describe the experience better than that.
When I was very young I used to have terrifying dreams that I can only
describe as geometric. Things seemed connected in dangerous or threatening
ways.

As I've gotten older, I've found that I have to work on problems with more
consecutive steps. When I was younger I could "fold" several operations at
once.

------
matthewrudy
I experience something similar but different in my ability to recognise
Chinese characters.

When I see a Chinese character I immediately know what it means.

But beyond the most simple characters I cannot summon them into my mind.

As an example, I cannot hope to handwrite them.

I guess this is the difference between recognition and recollection.

------
lsh
the unmangled link to Penn's podcast is here and actually starts at about the
75 minute mark:

[http://cdn46.castfire.com/audio/522/3454/25338/2512630/penn-...](http://cdn46.castfire.com/audio/522/3454/25338/2512630/penn-15-06-28-ss-
mp3_2015-06-28-180830-7770-0-6421-2.64k.mp3?cdn_id=46&uuid=e7c85533317f374b699565f40c175f4c&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fpennsundayschool.com%2Fepisodes%2F)

------
cko
Is it strange for me to wish I had aphantasia? This sounds like a blissful
condition.

~~~
ijhnv
What exactly makes this condition appeling to you. I, personally, think it
would be a big downside to life.

------
fengwick3
Hmm I wonder if this will drastically affect his spatial reasoning abilities.

------
aab0
The conclusion is a little confusing. If his mother Dorianne is also a member
of 'Aphantasiacs Anonymous', why does he quote a chat log where she claims to
see stuff all the time?

~~~
blakeross
Hm I guess I didn't make that clear. Doriane is just another friend of mine,
not my mother.

------
mbrutsch
I take it from the article that this would solve one of my biggest internal
issues: songs getting stuck in my head. It's gotten so bad in recent years
that I don't listen to music _at all_ , because it may stimulate a "earwig"
that will not stop.

~~~
derefr
AFAIK, we've long solved this one: a song gets stuck in your head from lack of
"closure"—trying to complete a pattern. You likely heard the beginning of the
song, and that set off your mind trying to remember the rest, but you can't
remember the ending, so it just keeps spinning on it.

The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as
you've _given_ your mind closure on the pattern, get your mind out of the rut
of analyzing the pattern by listening to something else (also to completion.)

More precisely, the experience of having a song stuck in your head is strongly
analogous to the experience of having been half-told a joke. You've sort of
allocated a mental context buffer and it's waiting around to receive the rest
of the context, so that it can then evaluate the 'punchline'. The simplest way
to discard the buffer ("ruin the joke") is to just get the punchline early,
without the rest of the context. If you go through a bit of music theory, you
can recognize a song as a pattern of building and releasing tension. You could
actually _just_ listen to the part of a song that finally releases the
tension—closes the matching parenthesis to the opening one your mind is stuck
on—and that would do the trick. Listening to the _whole_ song is just easier.

~~~
Zecc
> a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure".

I usually turn off my car's stereo only at the end of musical phrases for just
this reason. This phenomenon happens _a lot_ to me.

There is a song, stuck in my head since a little over a decade ago, which ends
with a fade out, not providing any closure at all.

It still pops up occasionally, but fortunately I can usually override it by
recalling any of a number of favorite other song loops I have collected
through the years and haven't gotten tired of yet.

