10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @[email protected] about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.
It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
Ahhh finally I have met someone who understands the curse of an eidetic memory for sounds. Earworms can be absolutely maddening when your brain is playing the Cheeky Girls song on a loop for days.
Very interesting that you have a good visual mind but still struggle to remember names and faces. Have you ever tried using mnemonic techniques for memory, eg linking a name to something amusing, or a memory palace? Can’t remember the whole string anymore but about a decade ago I memorised the 8-digit alphanumeric code for my train ticket to prove a point. BG96 is all I have these days (big goat with 9 horns and 6 legs). Apparently the sillier the story, the easier it is to remember (something to do with brain responding to novelty).
Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades
I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.
im going pray for you 🙏
There’s probably more productive ways you can help people in the real world. Soup kitchens & charity shops are almost always looking for volunteers!
I don’t understand what it is. I read a blurb about it, but i don’t really get it. I can remember what my house, car, dog, etc. generally look like, but i can’t think of a time i tried to imagine a picture or visualize an item. I’m terrible with faces and intruduce myself to the same people repeatedly. Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they’re thinking or reading.
Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they’re thinking or reading.
I don’t think that’s off topic, it sounds as if you don’t have an internal voice which is the audio-form of aphantasia. My inner monologue is ever-present, and often takes the voice of whoever I’ve been talking to recently, especially if I’ve been bingeing a series or just watched a film. Having Morgan Freeman as my inner narrator was awesome, but as you can prob guess it’s a curse as often as it’s a blessing. When I get an earworm it can last for days.
It is hard trying to imagine the absence of something that you have. Like trying to think up a new colour.
My inner voice doesn’t usually change but when it does it’s a bit creepy. There’s few occurences when I have had my co-workers voice as my inner voice. It seems like it came out of nowhere (well, I was also drunk and tired) and after a while I thought I’ve had enough of his voice but it didn’t go away until much later.
You really hear a voice? Like it’s someone with you? I cannot get my brain around the idea of having a voice inside my head and i just think of old cartoons where there was an angel and a devil on someone’s shoulders. It would be crazy to have Morgan Freeman narrating my life - like that funny penguin movie he did. I do frequently get songs stuck in my head that keep me awake. I don’t hear them, i just can’t stop trying to get all the words in the right order.
If you neither hear nor see the words in your head, how do you experience them to reorder them?
Reorder them?
i just can’t stop trying to get all the words in the right order
Oh, with a song. I dunno, i just think of the words and try to get the verses right and feel like i want to sing it. What’s it like when you get a song stuck?
Yes but my question is that if you say you neither hear nor see the words, what experience does “I just think of the words” mean?
For me if I think of the words in a song I experience that as an auditory thought that may have some more abstract or emotional types of thinking attached to those words (ie, if I’m think of the word “cold” I might hear the word cold in my head and also feel the idea of coldness, or if I think of the word “angry” I’ll hear the word angry in my head and angry associations will come up. Note, this hearing of sounds inside the mind is not the same as experiencing an auditory halicination where you perceive you have heard an external noise with your ears.)
What’s it like when you try think through a math problem? Like do you just follow your feelings and intuitively get to the answer?
For me it’s definitely a clearly defined voice in my head. “First I do this, add those together…” etc
I don’t know. I just think about the idea of it i guess? If i want to build a flower bed and I need to know the area, I just measure and multiply.
That’s super interesting, thanks. Figure describing thoughts is pretty hard haha
I have really strong audio imagination (if that’s a sensible term) and if i’m in a quiet area and relax sufficiently i can literally play music in my mind like an mp3 file, it’s precisely as wild to experience as you’d think it is. Obviously i’m probably not actually remembering all the details of the audio but to my subjective experience it’s like 95% identical to just listening to a pair of headphones.
But when i’m not relaxing and in a noisy environment it’s much less extreme, i definitely hear what i imagine but it’s like… in the background and on a separate channel so there’s no way i’d think i’m actually hearing it with my ears, and it’s significantly lower fidelity, more like how those AI tools tended to spit out things that are sensible on a surface level but when you look at the detail it’s nonsense.
I can totally make morgan freeman narrate my life so long as i remember what his voice sounds like, so if it’s been a while i’ll need to look it up online first to refresh.
And for reference i think? i have visual aphantasia, and my visual imagination works the same except that it’s like 20% as vivid unless i’m just about to fall asleep, and when i dream it’s fully vivid like real life.
Not the person you responded to, but yeah, I hear a voice as an inner monologue. It’s just my voice though… or rather, how I hear my voice when I talk. I don’t have other voices in my head as a general monologue.
Like, I can think of other voices and what they sound like, but it’s very much not ‘me’, if that makes sense.
The voice in my head is me. Sometimes if I watched a movie or talked to someone, the voice might sound different but it’s still me. It doesn’t talk to me, I talk with it. It’s as if I was speaking out loud, but only I can hear it. Look up subvocalization. This voice in your head is so much like talking that you make some larynx movements to match the words.
Visualization, or seeing things with your mind’s eye is similar. The closest metaphor I can come up with is if your regular perception was the main monitor of your computer, subvocalization and visualization would be the monitor and speakers on the side. It’s doing its own thing without taking away from the main monitor, and you can focus on it (zoning out), and for some people it’s higher res or higher quality than others. For you, there is only the main monitor and set of speakers. In this metaphor, there is nothing outside of the monitors and speakers in terms of perception.
Some examples of what my stuff works like: When I remember something I saw, it “plays on the second monitor”. Having a song stuck in my head is like having the “second set of speakers” play the song on repeat. If I say “this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman”, then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman. If I want to visualize anything, I “turn to my second monitor” and the thing is there. It can be still or animated, black and white, 2d or 3d, I can do it. I can’t do 4d or anything like that.
f I say “this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman”, then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman
After that sentence, I read the rest of your comment in his voice, always a win when the inner narrator switches to such a velvety-rich voice.
Here is a well-done podcast about this: https://www.20k.org/episodes/voiceinside.
It’s not a voice in one’s head like there’s someone else there. It’s like you talking aloud to yourself, but in your head.
Not the person you’re responding to, but yeah, the voice-in-my-head CAN (but does not always) sound just like actually hearing someone.
I have a caveat there because the “voice” that is “me” (that is to say, I don’t perceive it as someone else talking, but me talking/thinking to myself–it does not have the feeling of an outsider or stranger talking to me) does not always hold all the “information” of an actual audio voice.
Like, I don’t normally carry the same “pitch” as my real-life voice, it’s usually without pitch, but can still contain emotional prosody? It’s a shifting mix of soundless but verbal (as opposed to nonverbal) thought and sound-markers that indicate emotion in real life when spoken out loud.
However, I’m also a writer, and when I write dialogue of a character, it usually carries “sound information” much more distinctly in my head, like listening to a radio narrator or watching an actor. Like, a male character will have a lower voice, a female higher. A flamboyant character might pronounce and say things with a lot of drama and theatrics, where a stoic bored character might be closer to a monotone. It’s all controlled by me, by the way–it’s not schizophrenia where I perceive it as an outside person or force talking to me. But it is very “audible”. (But there’s still some mental filter where I know it’s thought and don’t mistake it for real in-the-present sound.)
…I did have musical training as a child which might play into my ability to have strongly imagined sound in my head. When I get songs stuck in my head, I actually do “hear” them. I hear the singer singing, but also the unique tones of the various instruments. So if a song has a guitar I hear that, but if it’s a piano I hear a piano playing it in my memory and not a guitar.
…these things don’t always have 100% fidelity though, it’s not like playing a file on a computer. It’s a fuzzy in-and-out-of-focus thing. But when it’s “in focus” it’s definitely something tagged by my mind as “sound”.
It’s pretty wild how we never think about other people having different methods of thought. When i learned that some people can hear in their heads i googled a bit and found some interesting articles about thinking in words, pictures, and patterns. There’s a Temple Grandin book about it - haven’t read it yet.
Hard to describe but I’ll try. Not sure if you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s a lot like that; announcing things other people are doing, commenting on what I’m doing, or sometimes a choice phrase that my brain seemed to find amusing might repeat a few times. Sometimes it creates a full-on musical number, like a song from American Dad, based around some fairly-banal incident. I’ve spent around 30 years writing various types of music so not sure if it’s the chicken or the egg there.
I would think I’m insane if I hadn’t been assured by many people (and a psychologist) that having an internal narrator is perfectly normal. It’s when the voice starts talking directly to you and issuing commands that it becomes a problem, which fortunately I’ve never had. My stepbro is schizophrenic and from what he describes it’s nothing like my inner voice, his is quite malevolent and conspiratorial when he’s off the meds.
Is that how you write songs - by hearing then in your head first? I’ve wondered how musicians, artists, etc. produce art. I’ve started asking people if they have voice or images and most have the same reaction of shock that other people do or don’t.
Is it called the same thing if you can’t visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife’s. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child’s face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can’t remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
I lost my mom recently and it makes me sad that i can’t see her in my head. I ‘meet’ the same people repeatedly. I’m worried that i won’t recognize my family one day.
Wait. So when you look in a mirror it’s a surprise every time? Im also unable to draw myself, but that’s more of a drawingskill issue than anything else I guess…
Yes, in fact if I look in the mirror and close my eyes, I forget what I look like in about a second, or two… maybe much quicker. Timing the brain is hard to do on yourself.
Yeah, it’s not a skill issue. I am not super great at drawing, but I can get a rough sketch of someone in front of me or a picture. But I could never realistically draw myself without a picture or image, nor could I draw anyone else without that or them being right in front of me.
That’s really interesting. I don’t have this condition but I wear glasses all of the time I can’t see without them, but if I were to think about what I looked like I don’t actually include the glasses.
But in my case it’s more that they’re just not part of my mental image of myself than the fact that they don’t know what I look like.
I think it’s really cool you can see yourself in your mind. I was blown away when I found out thats normal. If I want to try to picture myself I kind of have to build the image, and it comes out like a shoddy police sketch of myself than anything close to a mental image.
So I can have glasses or not, because I am not viewing, I am creating. It’s kind of like learning how to sketch for basics. First you make a generic face, then I add the facial features I know I have, and then come up with a generalization. But it’s different every time I do it, and looks far more like a generic man, then it looks like myself.
This happens to me too, but isn’t it normal?
Drawing or mirror? Drawing might be, but not knowing what you or others look like without viewing them is not “normal”
Man, they let that bum in here… Again…
Look up face blindness. I have that and some level of aphantasia too.
I think I have this.
It’s hard for me to communicate online to my coworkers who do not have a profile picture. And then when I do meet them in person, I don’t recognise them straight away the next time I pass by them (or worse, in a social function).
The ways I remember people by are their mannerisms and everything else about them, except for their physical appearance. But because people change styles and environments change, it’s hard to instantly recognise them on the third or more times I see them.
What’s the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
Hyperphantasia. A subset of that is prophantasia, where you can physically conjure a mental image in your field of vision, but that case is extremely rare.
Sounds like schizoaffective disorder to me.
Prophantasia is voluntary, and people not only control it, but as other comments point out, it feels like ‘self’. My brother, a PhD psychologist, has developed an interest in aphantasia. Aphantasics rarely hallucinate. So, from talking with him, we have a pretty good working hypothesis that schizoaffective disorder affects the same brain pathways as prophantasia, i.e. hallucinations that are not under voluntary or conscious control. (As an interesting side note, in highly-individualistic cultures, the voices and images more often feel malevolent and ‘other’ to sufferers, in contrast to people in collectivist cultures, who experience them more often as friendly and familial. It’s not necessarily maladaptive.)
Interesting stuff. My response was a half-joke, but I appreciate the additional information!
One of the reasons I smoke marijuana is so that my dreams chill out. When I’m not smoking I can wake up still feeling tired because my dreams were too intense.
I can’t “picture” things in my mind, but I get pretty strong “feelings” about relative volumes, lengths, shapes, etc. As a result I can eyeball measurements pretty accurately.
When it comes to physically organizing things in space, I literally have to guess and test, and just rearrange things until they work… But, I do still get that “feeling” about how it might work.
It’s the same with empathy. If I see someone about to injur themselves, I don’t “see” it, but it definitely get a flash of feeling and I’ll wince and feel the thing.
Is that aphantasia? I didn’t even know this was a thing, but… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I can’t see things in my head, but i love Tetris and I’m excellent at fitting a lot of suitcases in the trunk of a car.
Hyperphantasia is the opposite.
Mind sharing the kinda of problems it causes?
- Difficulty with spatial awareness (often have to put the too-small pan lid into the pan before I know it’s too small). I’ll likely never learn to drive because I know I’d be a menace
- finding routes in unfamiliar places, learning routes takes me a few more times than the average person
- I’m a little bit faceblind (I often recognise actors by their voice instead of face)
- I’ve always had a bad memory and apparently this is a common trait for aphantasic
ironically, I think my spatial awareness is impeccable because of my aphantasia. Put me in a small area for ten minutes and I’ll instinctively know where its safe to move and where stuff is. Also really know how to gauge effective distances in the video games I play. HOWEVER, ask me to assign a value to all this and I’ll completely blank out.
Those first 3 traits are all true of me but I can imagine images quite vividly. I don’t think those traits are as rare as the condition.
Imagining a pot around a lid is useless because your mental image can scale.
can confirm because i have jackshit visual imagination but really good spatial imagination, and thus no such problems.
So when learning routes, do you turn the corner and think, “Oh, yeah. This is here.”?
Pretty much hahaha. I’ll get a lightning bolt realisation that I’m actually somewhere I know, especially if I’m coming in from a different route / angle.
Thanks for sharing this. I was aware of the condition, but never really thought about it or could think about how it could make life difficult for a person.
This was really interesting to read. I’m guessing their are no treatments for it. I’m going to have to read about this more.
On the good side, we’re much less affected by trauma, because we’re not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there’s that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
That proper made me laugh. Funnily enough I was reading the wiki page earlier for the condition, and remember seeing about an experiment where aphantasics didn’t have the same fear response as ‘normal’ people when reading a scary story. I’m guessing for the reasons you described.
So when Stormy Daniels described Trump as having “yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart” you didn’t get a perfect(ly traumatizing) image of that in your mind?
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Don’t you dare. I have this especially bad when someone mentions a medical condition or an operation they underwent. Anything involving cutting, implanting, or anything of the sort makes it feel extremely real to me.
Someone once mentioned off-hand about having a couple of screws in their leg bone and I started to imagine myself in their position on the operating table. It’s not a fun experience.As someone on the opposite end of this spectrum, with highly detailed visualisation, I had never considered that this could be weaponised against me….
Granted moist seems to be a problem for some people more than others. I wonder if that’s due to word associations.
Perhaps word assosciations or just bandwagoning with the trend of ‘omg moist gross’. Honestly the only times i really think of things being ‘moist’ is for cakes/baked goods.
I don’t have aphantasia but I have ADD. It causes me so many problems in my day to day life and in my relationships. It’s one of those things that people think that either I am too lazy to “just do it” or “just make an effort to remember” or that I am mentally challenged If I try to explain it. Or worse, people think they have it too because they have all the symptoms some of the time. For me it’s not a woopsie daisy kind of forgetfulness, it’s every. Single. Time. All. The. Time. So I don’t have aphantasia but I kind of understand the struggle, of not being neurotypical. I am very curious about what it means to have aphantasia, would you care to explain what it’s like?
While I never discounted other peoples’ experiences, it was hard for me to understand ADD until I spent some time with a friend who has it bad. It must be incredibly frustrating to live like that, you have my sympathy and I don’t understand why you’ve been downvoted for sharing your experience and asking for more info.
So, if I ask you to picture something in your mind like a blue circle, can you shut your eyes and see it? I know what a blue circle is, but when I shut my eyes, all I see is the backs of my eyelids lol. If I really, really try I get a brief impression which then ‘dissolves’ to black.
It’s frustrating because I can hallucinate, I can dream, I just can’t seem to control it.
It’s fine I am not here for imaginary points but for good conversation like this 😁. That sounds very hard, for my part most of my thinking revolves around imagining objects, even when they’re metaphores like trees when coding and such. You have all my sympathy as well, hopefully you can find ways to work around it and figure out solutions.
Well I’m glad you’re strong-minded enough not to let an online herd influence your thinking!
I was very interested in Neuralink until recently, thinking it might be an eventual solution to many conditions including aphantasia. Not sure I like the idea of something in my brain potentially controlled by Musk.
Hi! ADHD and Aphantasia here :)
How’s your sleeping… do you find it easy to fall asleep?
Yep, but not in a good way. I basically fall asleep whenever I’m horizontal, even if I don’t want to
Sounds like mild narcolepsy, I wonder if there’s any link between aphantasia and severe sleep issues.
Out of interest, have you ever tried modafinil? It’s the only thing I can take when clubbing nowadays but traditionally it’s prescribed for narcolepsy / shift worker sleep disorder. It’s very mild & very clean compared to other stimulants.
I haven’t, because it’s not really a problem unless I’m laying down. I don’t struggle with fatigue or wanting to sleep or the like. It’s just that when I lay down, I fall asleep, even if I am trying to watch a movie or talk to my partner or read…
I’ve tried stimulants over the years for my ADHD, and they all stop that problem. When they’re still active in my system, I don’t drop off simply by laying down. But I avoid taking them late in the afternoon
I’m sorry that it sounds like it causes more problems for you than it solves (being able to fall asleep so easily). I feel a bit envious but it’s probably one of those monkeys-paw-esque ‘careful what you wish for’ things.
So not exactly the subject, but: when I am about to fall asleep/ extremely tired / just woke up, my «phantasia» ability gets multiplied like by an order of magnitude. I can literally picture any object in perfect details from any angle. It only lasts for about a minute tho, then it fades away, and it all becomes kinda boring and not that exceptionally good.
It’s like I have access to a new hardware acceleration for a minute
I definitely have had this exact thing happen to me several times as well.
I have this!
And sometimes when I am in that mode, I can close my eyes and still see the room perfectly (including correct rotation/translation as I’m sat up in bed with my eyes closed and moving me head around like an idiot)
It’s great fun, I wish it could always be like this
I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy “place” so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that “room”. That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.
I’ve had this too but in music. I have no training or ability to write and can barely play easy piano music. But just on the edge of sleep, I feel like I can compose piano pieces that are beautiful and complex. The tune swirls in my head as I add a harmony to go with the melody.
Of course, having no way to write them down, even the tune is quickly lost. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing and it was just nonsense sounds. Who knows?
I hadn’t known a thing about this until last year.
I was a 0/10 until college, though I have improved quite a bit over the past few decades using tabletop role-playing games. I can now keep several blobs in my head and know the general distances between each.
I’m still flummoxed with colors and definition, but I’m happy with what I have.
Hey, blobs is infinitely better than the back of your eyelids. Good job!
I sometimes wonder if there’s not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don’t have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it’s like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it’s like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn’t there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that’s certainly not my experience (though it’s possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don’t actually exist in my vision. It’s definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there’s a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it’s sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it’s doing, all of the physics and such still work, it’s just not ending up on my brain’s screen.
Mental images are how I spot typos and misspellings. The way a word is spelled on a page looks wrong to me because it contradicts the visual memory I have for that word. I recently saw spicy misspelled as “spicey” and I knew it was wrong because it looks different than my mental image of the word spelled correctly.
That sounds a lot like aphantasia. I have friends who can strongly visualise and they claim it’s like an inner TV that they can control & manipulate.
Since how I’m describing things seems to be ringing at least partially true to you, I feel like that kind of reinforces my point, because I would absolutely not say that I have aphantasia. I think we may be having very similar experiences, and we’re just finding very different ways to describe it because the right words to describe it don’t really exist, at least not in English at the level we’re able to converse at (maybe there are better words that are in common use in psychological or neurological circles, but to most of us would just be meaningless jargon.)
The inner TV thing is not a bad way of putting how I experience it(personally I tend to think of it as more of a 3d animation program, because I have far more freedom to move things around, change “camera” angles, sizes, shapes, etc.) but it’s also not not totally accurate to what I experience either. I could describe it as a full-on audio, video, smell, taste, touch, temperature, etc. experience happenening in my head, but it’s also different sort of experience than actually experiencing those sensory inputs in the real world. It happens in parallel to my real world experience, and is equivalent, occasionally even overlaps with it, but is still a separate and different experience.
I think of it sort of like how hot (temperature) food and hot (spicy) food activate very similar sorts of pain receptors in your brain but are still very distinct sensations. I’m pretty confident that if you found people who have absolutely no experience or knowledge of hot peppers and fed them a habanero, then asked them to describe the sensation of eating it, that most of them would probably come up with descriptors like “hot” or “burning,” and we can all understand that, there is something in common between those two sensations that is hard to describe, but they’re not exactly the same, you’re not going to eat a ghost pepper and think that your tongue is actually on fire.
For me, the relationship between visualizing something in your mind and actually seeing something with your eyes is a lot like that, and probably even more similar.
And if someone lands on different words to describe spicy food, like maybe “tingling” or “itching” they’re not wrong, even if we disagree with their word choice, nor are they experiencing something totally different than we are, their personal experiences have just led them to choosing different words to describe the same thing. What I’m describing as seeing or visualizing, or as an inner TV or 3D modeling program, you might might be experiencing the exact same thing but finding different words to describe, and we’re both using our words in ways that don’t make sense to each other.
There may also be sort of a skill component, some people have a knack for visualizing, and others have to actually develop that skill in some way, and maybe not everyone has the right opportunities or desire/motivation to develop that skill. You say you’ve somehow built yourself up from a 0 to a 2, so who’s to say you haven’t been doing it sort of subconsciously your whole life and you’ve just grown to have more conscious control and/or awareness of it? And maybe with the right training (and I don’t know what sort of training that would be) you could continue to develop that.
And even with that increased skill, you may still find different words to describe how you’re experiencing it.
I think that you’re falling into the same trap like many others here. Not saying you don’t have aphantasia, but e.g. the subreddit is full of people deluding themselves into believing they suffer from aphantasia. Because their experience is similar to what Fondots said.
I have the same exact experience. But I can still rotate 3D images, paint scenes, draw maps, watch spaceships or compare color palettes in my mind.
Every questionnaire is kinda based on “do you see it like in real life or nah?”. Depending on your definition of “seeing”, imo people with the same level of visualisation might choose opposite ends of the spectrum.
I think the “mind’s eye” is also partly a “skill” thing.
I remember distinctly as a child doing a great deal of “work” developing my mind’s eye. I didn’t have TV at home, so I read a lot, and that necessitated me being able to take text on paper and make mind’s-eye models of what the things on the page might actually look like (often without any visual references at all)…and I recall the early ones were definitely vague and fuzzy.
As I got older and did this more, and was exposed to more visual images of different things, my ability to visualize (and “hear”) with detail got better, as with any skill.
I suspect folks who have the ability to use their mind’s eye, but who haven’t been pushed into (or interested in) developing it might not realize what a “trained” mind’s eye can do because they haven’t developed that skill.
But I do think there are some people with legit aphantasia who don’t even have the weak, untrained mind’s eye that most people start out with.
Sorry I’m well late replying to this! For some reason I didn’t get the notification.
I’ve been trying really hard to boost my visualisation skills. The best I can do is a vague suggestion of an image, it’s like made out of mist and dissipates instantly.
I think there’s probably like you said, a lot of people who think not being able to conjure a distinct internal image = aphantasia. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m aphantasic as I score extremely poorly on any tasks that require mental image projection (eg manipulation of 3D objects, spatial reasoning etc). Iirc last time I did an IQ test which broke down IQ into various regions, I scored 17% on that part. And there’s practically nothing there when I shut my eyes and concentrate.
I would wager that without having done halucinogens a number of times, that score / my ability would be even lower.
I know exactly what you mean. To my, my form of internal visualization has always been more what some people consider to be their “mind’s eye”, but even that has a wide-ranging definition depending on who you ask. I like your explanation quite a bit more than just “mind’s eye” though!
I can’t “visualize” a full blown table, the example used in the article I linked, but I can imagine a very abstract form of a table. More like, if you were to take a modeling or 3D drawing program like Microsoft’s Vizio and created a table in it, that’s more what I can visualize. Or if someone asks me to imagine the sun, I can imagine a clip-art version of the sun, but I can’t imagine vibrant brightness with it (another example used in the article).
Anything much more than that, and I’m no longer visually seeing it, but doing something more that you describe. As a random example, if you asked me to visualize a white neutron star, I can’t literally see one in front of me - but it does make me recall memories of seeing one in the game “Elite: Dangerous”.
I’ve heard theories (I don’t know the accuracy of said theory) that when you’re dreaming, your brain can’t come up with something that’s never existed - so when you see people, even random people, they’re just random people you’ve encountered in your life but don’t have any connection to. It’s a sound theory for me, because that’s how my form of mental imagery works, you could describe some totally fictional dragon as accurately and detailed as possible, but I won’t be able to visualize it past a really abstract level. So if someone describes a purple dragon but gets really descriptive, I could visualize a generic animated dragon that is purple - probably would look more like Barney to me but… yeah.
Edit: Although that being said, I’ve noticed I’m a lot better at visualizing text. When I’m asked “How do you spell $some_word_here” I often find that I’m spelling it out-loud by reading out each individual letter. With programming, I find that when recalling something along the lines of “How do you make a function that does…”, I’m using a combination of looking at a block of code I remember, and inferring the missing pieces.
I guess my brain is just weird…
This is what I have. basically not aphantasia (we can still manipulate visual imagery in our brains) but it’s also not prophantasia which is essentially just seeing, but with thoughts.
Thank you for teaching me the word prophantasia.
The way I’ve seen a lot of people try to describe normal mental visualization (phantasia I suppose?) can end up sounding like they’re sort of projecting a mental object into their actual vision, which seems to be more of a prophantasia thing.
I can mentally design an object, have a very clear mental picture of what that object looks like, and I can look around me and I can know what that object would look like if it existed in the same space I’m in, but I cannot actually see that object in the room with me. I can also mentally build a copy of the space I’m in and visualize that, I could put that mental object in that space and mentally look at it, manipulate it etc. but that’s still a different experience than actually seeing it with my eyes.
Right. “prophantasia” is a word used to refer to that “it’s like you’re actually seeing it”, whereas visualization for me isn’t like that and it’s more like what you described, a sort of mental idea, like I can think of and mentally understand imagery, but it’s not like I’m actually looking at it with my eyes (like when I see things or am in a lucid dream).
It seems some people with visualization do this “minds eye” kinda thing, and the some have that “it’s like you’re seeing” type.
I still have no idea if I have aphantasia. People are inconsistent in how they describe visual memories, and visualizing things generally.
If I think of a particular location I don’t know if I “see” it in the normal way, or if I simply know what it looks like. Costcos are usually white with a red stripe near the roof. But I’m not sure if I actually “see” that or simply know it to be true
Yeah like when I “imagine” something I think about it more like a list of things about it kinda like what you said. Some people I talk to talk about actually seeing stuff when they visualize while others have said they don’t really “see” it and it’s something different. I’m starting to feel like maybe it’s one of those things like trying to describe colors to a blind person that just can’t really be done without already having a frame of reference about it.
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That’s how I describe my aphantasia, only the wireframe is metaphorical.
The biggest indicator to me is if I see something gory or otherwise visually disturbing it doesn’t haunt me in my mind, as soon as it’s no longer there it’s gone. People who can visualize do run the risk of seeing it later (although some don’t get random imagery).
I’ve always been so curious what it’s like for aphantasic people to read fiction. If you don’t see everything playing out in your head like a movie, how do you follow along with the story? How do you remember what happened a paragraph ago if you can’t see it?
I also wonder about this same thing with people who have no inner monologue. Do they not hear the books that their eyeballs are reading to them? Do the words just go into some dark void and become a silent kind of “knowing.” How does that work? I don’t understand.
Opposite for me - I don’t understand how people have sounds and pictures inside their heads.
I mean, I just know the story because I’ve just read it. It’s hard to describe. I don’t see color in my head but I know what the color red is, same thing with shades. Possibly more relatable is smell/taste - most people can’t recreate smell or taste in their head but they innately know what a smell or taste is after some exposure to it.
Interesting. I think I know what you mean about taste and smell. BUT for me, just like when I see something or read something traumatizing and keep randomly seeing the images over and over in a fairly obtrusive way, if I smell something absolutely awful, I will get sort of “smell flashbacks” for a few days or even weeks.
The worst one that ever happened was when I was a massage therapist, working on an old man. He had these blackheads on his back the size of pencil erasers and when I put any pressure on his skin they would poop themselves out and the further out they came the worse they smelled, like rotting pork, but mixed with poorly cleaned dentures. I drove myself crazy cleaning my equipment, studio and self because I kept smelling it no matter what I did for weeks. I started carrying a bottle of lavender essential oil to sniff when it got bad.
Since then I tell all my male friends to start getting back facials by the time they’re 40 and keep doing it at least annually until they die.
The only stuff that’s obtrusive for me is sounds, and even then it’s usually only sounds that have rhythm. For the most part once I am no longer actively observing something and shift my attention elsewhere it stops existing for me. It makes forming attachments hard to say the least.
Huh. I never knew before for sure that I didn’t have aphantasia. Thanks for confirming. My fear of the dark strengthens my memory of horrifying images I’ve seen, so. Fun.
Yeah I don’t think I get the wire-frame model type thing at all. What shape it is is just part of that list of attributes for me I think.
I’m kinda the same way but at times I feel like I can think up of something completely random that I’ve never seen and can imagine it in perfect detail
Just want to point out there is [email protected] if you are interested.
I have no success on visualizing, but I have read some experimenting with technique called image streaming.
Awesome, thanks! I’m sure there will be a lot of interesting responses & experiences to read there.
And here I am, just cluing into how the Disney movie “Fantasia” is literally artistic visual interpretations of old classic music. Maybe they say that in the movie? Blew my own mind here.
Wow, that’s really cool. I was a little kid when I saw it so memory is very hazy, perhaps I should watch it as an adult with a career in music production, knowing what you’ve just told me I might have a different reaction to it. Thanks for the info.
I have aphantasia. And also extreme crippling insomnia, it has been the last 3 or so years that i learned that other people can actually visualize at all. I always thought it was a metaphor. In my searching about a way to potentially improve it I found this article.
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/
And it absolutely cured my insomnia. I can sleep easily for the first time in my life. Didn’t do a lot for the aphantasia but i did manage to successfully get an image or two a couple of times. Mostly i just love that i can finally sleep without hours of lying in bed beforehand.
I also have severe insomnia since childhood, so your comment is REALLY interesting to me, thanks for responding. This is the kind of stuff I was hoping to come across, some sort of common experience linking the condition. Very interested to hear from other aphantasic people to see if they also experience insomnia.
I mentioned image streaming below to someone else. Tried it briefly but got frustrated and stopped. 100% going to give it a concerted effort because I’d gladly swap my left nut for the ability to sleep like a normal person, cheers for this info.
Can I ask, do you remember any of those ‘24 backup techniques’? Unfortunately the important links are now dead
I’m sorry i don’t, i just did the eye rubbing thing.
I managed to find some additional info from the reference Dr, seems the info is now in an expensive book and therefore not public. Found a wordpress doc from him with 5 additional techniques though which I’ve added to the main post
Not who you replied to, but you can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine (archive.org) to view an older snapshot of the site
Thanks, I did try that. Unfortunately the links themselves were still dead when I put them into wayback machine
