Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits—how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives.
When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn’t remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England. He didn’t remember this, either, but he’d been told that it happened. That Christmas, he and his brother were given matching space helmets. He knew that on Christmas morning the helmets had been waiting in the kitchen and that, on discovering his, he felt joy, but this was not a memory, exactly. The knowledge seemed to him more personal than an ordinary fact, but he could not feel or picture what it had been like to be that boy in the kitchen.
When he was eight or nine, he read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” over and over. At the beginning of the book, aliens implant images of tool-using into the minds of man-apes. Near the end, the main character, David Bowman, spools backward through memories of his life:
Not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed. . . . Faces he had once loved, and had thought lost beyond recall, smiled at him.
To Nick, these events—the images in the minds of the man-apes, David Bowman’s reliving of his life—were thrilling and otherworldly, with no connection to reality, brought about through the intervention of aliens, in distant, fictional worlds.
He became a physicist. He was drawn to statistical physics and quantum mechanics, whose concepts were best described in equations. The abstraction of these ideas suited him.
One morning in 1997, when he was thirty-five, he was sitting at breakfast, paging through the newspaper. He started to read an article by a columnist he admired, Michael Bywater. Time was an illusion, Bywater wrote, because you could roll it backward and relive it: “You choose a memory, focus on it, let the rest of the mind go blank, and wait.” Bywater described particular memories of his own, not only the sight but the sound and feel of them—“the special weight of girls in autumn . . . when they lean against you as you walk along.” For some reason, these sentences revealed all at once to Nick what in the whole course of his life he had not realized: that it was possible to see pictures in your mind and use those pictures to reëxperience your past.
This was startling information. He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. And then there was the notion of using those mental images to revisit a memory. It was an astonishing idea. Was it possible that this was a thing that people other than Bywater could do? Bywater had written about it quite casually, as though he took it for granted. Nick asked some people he knew, and all of them seemed to be able to do it.
He wondered whether there was something wrong with him—some kind of amnesia. He’d had no reason to worry about his memory before. He had a Ph.D. in physics; clearly his mind was functioning reasonably well. He knew the usual facts about his life—his parentage, the places he’d lived as a child, important things that had happened. It had never occurred to him that remembering could be more than that.
For many years, Nick would search for information about mental imagery, sporadically and alone. In the beginning, he did not yet know that his inability to visualize—this odd feature of his mind which appeared so insignificant that he hadn’t even noticed it for thirty-five years—would come to seem a central wellspring of his self. But then, in 2015, his condition was given a scientific name, aphantasia, and tens of thousands of people experienced the same shocked realization that he had. A flurry of research in the following decade would uncover associations between mental imagery and a bewildering variety of human traits and capacities: a propensity to hold grudges; autism; a vulnerability to trauma; emotional awareness; ways of making art and hearing music; memory of one’s life.
But this was all in the future. In 1997, as much as he interrogated his acquaintances, Nick did not find anyone like him. He couldn’t be the only person who lacked this ability to visualize, he thought. Surely it was extremely unlikely that he was unique. But, until he encountered someone else, he had to admit that it was a working possibility.
He went online and started looking. Initially, he found only work from the nineteenth century. The first useful thing he came across was William James’s book “Principles of Psychology.” James referred to observations recorded in 1860 by Gustav Fechner, a German scientist and philosopher. Fechner had subjected his own “optical memory-pictures” to introspective scrutiny and deemed them weak and lacking:
With all my efforts, I cannot reproduce colours in the memory images of coloured objects. . . . I also never dream in colours, but all my experiences in dreams seem to me to proceed in a kind of twilight or night.
I can’t hold the image steadily for even a short time, but in order to observe it for a longer time, I have to recreate it again and again.
What was very unexpected to me . . . is that it is easier for me to produce memory images . . . with open eyes than with closed eyes.
Fechner didn’t pursue the subject, however, and it lay dormant until 1880, when it was taken up by Francis Galton, a British scientist who later became notorious as the father of eugenics. Galton, supposing that he could depend on scientists to give accurate answers, wrote to several of them with a query:
Think of some definite object—suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye. . . . Is the image dim or fairly clear? . . . Are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?
The responses he received were not at all what he had expected.
To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words “mental imagery” really expressed what I believed everybody to suppose them to mean. . . . They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who were normally endowed, were romancing.
Finding this Galton study came as a relief to Nick. Now at least he knew that there had been other people lacking mental imagery who’d lived normal lives, so it wasn’t a disease, or a symptom of a brain tumor. Galton had subsequently observed that women and children appeared to have more vivid imagery than the scientists did. “Scientific men as a class,” he concluded, “have feeble powers of visual representation.” Nick found this intriguing. Perhaps his own lack of imagery had somehow enhanced his scientific ability. He knew that there was, among some mathematicians, a kind of snobbery about images—a notion that, even in geometry, drawings were distractions from a purely analytical proof. But he also knew that there were any number of legends in the history of science of visions leading to discoveries. Einstein had visualized himself travelling alongside a beam of light, and this had led to his conception of relativity. The best-known instance that Nick was aware of was the German chemist August Kekulé, to whom the structure of the benzene ring had appeared in a dream:
Long rows . . . all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. . . . One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and . . . spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.
At one point, Nick came across a paper from 1909 that stressed the importance of distinguishing between voluntary imagery (the ability to call up mental pictures at will) and involuntary imagery. Sometimes people who couldn’t call up images on purpose did experience them involuntarily—usually during migraines, or high, hallucinatory fevers, or in dreams, or the hypnagogic state just before sleep. This caught his attention because he was almost certain that he saw images in dreams, although he couldn’t be sure, since nothing remained of the images after he woke. If he was right, and he did see images in sleep, then it was strange that he couldn’t summon them at other times. Was he repressing them?
When he searched for scientific studies on imagery in the mid-twentieth century, he found very little. It seemed that the study of imagery had largely disappeared from scientific research from the nineteen-twenties to the fifties, owing in part to the dominance of behaviorism in America, which condemned inquiry into internal psychological states as unscientific. J. B. Watson, behaviorism’s founder, repudiated the existence of mental imagery altogether:
What does a person mean when he closes his eyes or ears (figuratively speaking) and says, “I see the house where I was born, the trundle bed in my mother’s room where I used to sleep—I can even see my mother as she comes to tuck me in and I can even hear her voice as she softly says good-night”? Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are merely dramatizing. The behaviorist finds no proof of imagery at all in this.
Later, researchers would debate whether Watson became a behaviorist because he had no internal imagery, or whether he actually had strong imagery but denied it because of “ideological blindness.”
In the nineteen-seventies, Nick discovered, a few psychologists, liberated from mid-century behaviorist orthodoxy, had begun to explore imagery again. A British psychologist named David Marks, for instance, developed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, which sought to measure a person’s ability to picture not only a stationary object but also movement (the characteristic gait of a familiar person), change (the shifting color of the sky at sunrise), and degree of detail (the window of a shop you frequently go to). But the psychologists in the nineteen-seventies were interested in people with typical imagery. When Nick searched for studies on people like himself, he found nothing.
Sometime in the early two-thousands, Jim Campbell, a Scottish surveyor in his mid-sixties, made an appointment with a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh named Adam Zeman. Jim had recently had a cardiac procedure, and afterward he’d noticed that he could no longer picture anything in his head. Before the surgery, he used to put himself to sleep by visualizing his children and grandchildren; now he couldn’t see anything at all.
Zeman had a general neurology practice—Parkinson’s, M.S., dementia—but he had also been interested in consciousness since he was a student. He speculated that one of the things that made humans different from other primates was their ability to mentally project themselves into the past or future, or into worlds that were purely imaginary. So he was fascinated to encounter, in Jim, a syndrome he had never heard of before, which appeared to be an excision of just this species-defining ability. And yet Jim was clearly very much a human—wry, reserved, down to earth. His neurological, psychiatric, and cognitive tests were all normal. If Jim had not described his condition, Zeman would not have known there was anything unusual about him.
Even questions designed to evoke imagery—Which is darker, grass or pine needles? Do squirrels have long or short tails?—Jim answered without hesitation. When Zeman asked him how he could answer without picturing these things, he said that he just knew. Zeman searched for recent scientific papers that could shed light on this strange condition but was unable to find anything useful. The case reminded him of blindsight—a rare phenomenon in which people who can’t see behave as though they can, picking up objects and avoiding obstacles. Their eyes and brains can take in visual information, but the information doesn’t rise to consciousness.
Zeman felt that Jim was not the sort of person who would make something like this up, but he wanted proof that his brain was functioning in an unusual manner. He recruited a control group of men of similar age and put them and Jim through cognitive tests in an MRI scanner. Here, he found the neurological correlate that he was looking for. Although Jim’s brain responded normally to tests of recognition (being shown images of famous faces), when he was asked to generate a mental image the scanner showed only faint brain activity, compared with the brain activity in the control group. Instead, there was activation in areas of the frontal lobe that were typically activated in situations of cognitive effort or dissonance. Jim was trying, but failing.
In 2010, Zeman, along with several colleagues, published these findings in the journal Neuropsychologia, terming the syndrome “blind imagination.” The science journalist Carl Zimmer noticed the study and wrote an article about it in Discover magazine. In the years that followed, a couple of dozen people contacted Zeman to tell him that they had the same condition, except they’d had it since birth. Zeman sent them questionnaires and tabulated their answers. At this point, he decided that lack of mental imagery was a valid syndrome that ought to have a name. After consulting with a classicist friend, he decided on “aphantasia,” phantasia being defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure an image in the imagination. In 2015, Zeman co-wrote a paper in Cortex describing the condition as it appeared in twenty-one subjects: “Lives without imagery—Congenital aphantasia.”
An article about Zeman’s second paper appeared in the New York Times, and, after that, e-mails poured in. Around seventeen thousand people contacted him. Most were congenital aphantasics, and most not only lacked visual imagery; they could not mentally call up sounds, either, or touch, or the sensation of movement. Many had difficulty recognizing faces. Many said that they had a family member who was aphantasic, too. Most said that they saw images in dreams. Zeman recruited colleagues to work with him, and together they tried to reply to every correspondent.
Some people who wrote had once had imagery but lost it. About half of these had lost it as a consequence of physical injury—stroke, meningitis, head trauma, suffocation. The other half attributed their loss to a psychiatric cause—depersonalization syndrome, depression. A few told him that they thought they’d suppressed their capacity to visualize because traumatic memories had made imagery intolerable. Zeman learned that there had been a case in 1883, described by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, in which a man, Monsieur X, had lost his imagery; at the same time, the world suddenly appeared alien to him, and he became intensely anxious. “I observed a drastic change in my existence that obviously mirrored a remarkable change in my personality,” Monsieur X wrote to Charcot. “Before, I used to be emotional, enthusiastic with a prolific imagination; today I am calm, cold and I lost my imagination.” Another nineteenth-century French neurologist, Jules Cotard, described a patient whose loss of mental imagery was accompanied by what became known as Cotard’s delusion, or walking-corpse syndrome—the belief that he was dead.
“I hope you brought me food that isn’t trail mix or energy bars.”
Zeman also received messages from people who appeared to have the opposite of aphantasia: they told him that their mental pictures were graphic and inescapable. There was evidently a spectrum of mental imagery, with aphantasia on one end and extraordinarily vivid imagery on the other and most people’s experience somewhere in between. Zeman figured that the vivid extreme needed a name as well; he dubbed it hyperphantasia. It seemed that two or three per cent of people were aphantasic and somewhat more were hyperphantasic.
Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.
Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.
Among the e-mails that Zeman received, there were, to his surprise, several from aphantasic professional artists. One of these was Sheri Paisley (at the time, Sheri Bakes), a painter in her forties who lived in Vancouver. When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.
To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe.
Years later, she remembered that, one night at her parents’ house, when she was still in art school, she had stayed up very late painting. She suddenly felt a strong presence behind her, and, even as she kept working, she felt the presence ask her, What do you want? In her thoughts, she responded, I want to be a great painter, and I will do whatever I have to, except take drugs. Later, she thought, Well, that is what happened. My life is very hard, but my painting is so much better.
Sheri had been an artist before she lost her imagery, but there were others who had been aphantasic for as long as they could remember. Isabel Nolan, a well-known Irish artist, had recently discovered, in her forties, while reading about Zeman’s work in New Scientist, that other people could see pictures in their heads:
There was an element of like—fuck! is the only way I can put it. Horrified and cheated. I still feel a bit cheated.
She wondered whether she had always been like this. When she was a child, her mother would occasionally go on business trips, and while she was away Isabel stayed with cousins who lived up the road. She remembered lying in bed one night at her cousins’ house, thinking, What if Mam dies? I can’t remember what she looks like. She was an anxious child, frightened of many things, but this particular thought stuck in her mind for years. Now she wondered how she could have been so upset at the thought that she couldn’t picture her mother unless she’d had a notion, some vestigial memory, that such a thing was possible.
Her fear of things vanishing had not gone away. In fact, it had expanded, from her mother to everything. She had lived in Dublin almost all her life, although it would probably have been better for her career if she’d moved to London. As it turned out, it hadn’t held her back—she would be representing Ireland in the Venice Biennale in 2026—but when she was younger she’d wondered if she was making a mistake. She thought that maybe she’d stayed because having the physical infrastructure of her past around helped her to remember it. For a long time, she had felt that everything around her was ephemeral, precarious, not to be relied on:
I was putting together a book in 2020, gathering about nine years of work and writing, and there was an awful lot of writing alluding to the fact of barely having a grasp on the world and how slippery it all is. I realized that my inability to recall things was really playing on my mind, and that my connection to my social world felt insubstantial. I wrote a lot about how touch was important to me, and how making work was setting down little anchors that reminded me that the world does exist.
Surely this had something to do with not being able to picture anything when she wasn’t looking at it.
The world does disappear completely when you close your eyes.
At a conference, she heard artists with vivid imagery say that they were often disappointed by their work because it could never match up to the glowing vision in their heads; she felt sorry for them. When she was working on something, she never knew how it would end up. Sometimes she started with an idea, like the cosmos; she liked to look at images of deep space and draw abstractions that resembled them. She thought a lot about subjective experience, but not her own experience in particular—more what it was like to be any human, wandering through the world. She didn’t feel that her work was an extension or expression of herself, so she didn’t mind criticism, or not being understood:
I don’t think I have a very strong sense of self, and it’s not something I’m super interested in.
Was this because of her aphantasia? If her mind were filled with pictures, would her self feel fuller, more robust? When people learned that they were aphantasic, they tended to wonder whether this or that aspect of themselves was due to their lack of imagery; sometimes it had nothing to do with it, but in this case it did—several studies had found that people with vivid imagery tended to be more inward, absorbed in the drift of their own minds.
Someone had told Isabel about a British moral philosopher, Derek Parfit, who had no imagery. He had few memories and little connection to his past, although he felt strong emotions about people and ideas in the present. Parfit believed that a self was not a unique, distinct thing but a collection of shifting memories and thoughts which intersected with the memories and thoughts of others. Ultimately, he thought, selves were not important. What mattered was the moral imperatives that drove everyone, or ought to—preventing suffering, the future welfare of humanity, the search for truth.
Isabel, like Parfit, remembered very little about her life. She kept boxes of souvenirs—ticket stubs, programs—but unless she looked at these things, or a friend reminded her, she didn’t recall most of the places she’d visited or things she’d done. She imagined that this could be a problem in a relationship, if you didn’t remember what you’d done together and the other person got upset and accused you of not caring, though fortunately she’d never been with someone like that. When she went out with friends who were full of stories, she’d worry that she wasn’t entertaining enough; normally, she drew people out and got them talking so she didn’t have to:
I don’t really have a sense, with some friends—how well I know them. I’ve kind of forgotten. They’d be like, Oh, yeah, do you remember we went to the play that night? And sometimes I’d just pretend, I’d be like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think when my relationships are continuous, it’s much easier. You remember more because you’re constantly reëxercising the memories of stuff that you did together—you know, the time we went to Cologne and got hammered and lost our cameras, blah, blah, blah.
It would be nice to remember all the funny stories that people told, but in the end she didn’t mind too much. She could just sit there and bask in the pleasure of being with old friends. It was the feeling that was important; she didn’t need to know what had happened years ago. In some ways, this made things easier—she mostly didn’t remember arguments or bad feelings. She hoped that the significant moments in her life, good and bad, had left their imprint on her in some way, but it was impossible to know:
“I’m all for democracy as long as we retain veto power.”
I feel like my past is kind of imaginary. I know what happened, but it doesn’t feel like—I don’t know. It’s hard to know what having experiences means, because sometimes experiences that I have can leave one so quickly. . . . One can feel a little disconnected from your own past.
Clare Dudeney was an artist who worked in southeast London, in a warren of old factory buildings by the Thames. Against one wall of her studio was a wooden loom, above which large spools of cotton thread in a rainbow of colors were slotted on pegs. She made works in many media, all cornucopias of color: pieces of fabric dyed robin’s-egg blue or pistachio or hazelnut or citrine and pasted into collages, some so long that you couldn’t take them in at once and hung near open doors so that they rippled. She made murals of ceramic tiles painted with irregular shapes, like countries on a map, in powder-puff pink and celery and yellow and wheat; rectangular blocks of rough wood that she called woodcut paintings, with teal, red, cornflower, and lime pigment staining or filling the crevices and gouges of the surface; long clay worms, basket-woven and glazed—forest, mustard, chestnut—like ceramic macramé. She draped herself in colors, too: thick scarves and nubby sweaters that she knitted herself; geometric-patterned skirts.
In talking to a friend of hers, an aphantasic painter who was one of Zeman’s research subjects, Clare had realized that she was the opposite—hyperphantasic. Her imagery was extraordinarily vivid. There was always so much going on inside her head, her mind skittering and careening about, that it was difficult to focus on what or who was actually in front of her. There were so many pictures and flashes of memory, and glimpses of things she thought were memory but wasn’t sure, and scenarios real and imaginary, and schemes and speculations and notions and plans, a relentless flood of images and ideas continuously coursing through her mind. It was hard to get to sleep.
At one point, in an effort to slow the flood, she tried meditation. She went on a ten-day silent retreat, but she disliked it so much—too many rules, getting up far too early—that she rebelled. While sitting in a room with no pictures or stimulation of any kind, supposedly meditating, she decided to watch the first Harry Potter movie in her head. She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.
She tried not to expose herself to ugly or violent images because she knew they would stick in her mind for years. But even without a picture, if she even heard about violence her mind would produce one. Once, reading about someone undergoing surgery without anesthetic, she imagined it so graphically that she fainted. (In 2012, two Harvard psychologists published a study about visual imagery and moral judgment. They found that people with weak imagery tended to think more abstractly about moral questions and believe that good ends sometimes justified harmful means. But for people with strong imagery, the harmful means—injuries done to one person in order to save several others, say—formed such lurid pictures in their minds that they responded emotionally and rejected them.)
Even joyful images could turn on her. She’d had a cat that she loved; she was separated from her husband and living on her own, so she had spent more time with the cat than with any other creature. Then the cat died, and after his death she saw him everywhere—on the sofa, on the floor, on her bed, wherever he had been in life. She saw him so clearly that it was as though he were actually there in front of her. Her grief was made so much worse by this relentless haunting that she began to feel as if she would not be able to cope.
Her father was a physicist and for many years the deputy director of the British Antarctic Survey. When Clare was a child, he promised that one day he would take her to Antarctica, and finally, when she was in her thirties, in 2013, he did. There, on the boat, she found herself looking at a landscape so wholly unfamiliar that her brain struggled to make sense of it. At times, it barely appeared to her like a landscape at all, more like an abstract surface, without reference or meaning. The place was vast, and there were no people. Snow and ice formed strange patterns on the surface of the sea. As they travelled, the terrain kept changing, so her sense of alien newness persisted. It was as if, for the first time, she was seeing not through the cluttered, obscuring scrim of her visual memories but directly, at the world itself. Just looking at it was so demanding that it occupied her whole mind, so that she wasn’t thinking about anything else, she was just there. At the time, she was consulting on climate and sustainability issues, but after that trip she decided to become an artist.
Usually, her ideas for art works came not from anything external but from images in her head. For a while, she had made paintings based on her dreams. She kept a journal and a pen by the side of her bed so that she could describe what she’d dreamed the moment she woke. The more she wrote down her dreams, the more she remembered them; sometimes she would remember ten dreams in a single night. Eventually, the process began to fold in on itself—while she was still asleep, she’d begin to dream that she was taking notes on the dream, and planning how to draw what she saw.
When she thought about making a new piece, she often worked it out in her mind beforehand. Being hyperphantasic didn’t mean only that your imagery was bright and sharp; it meant that you could manipulate your images at will, zooming in and out, cutting and pasting, flipping and mirroring, creating pictures from scratch, assembling and disassembling complicated objects. Even when she was trying to evoke the colors of a landscape at a certain time of day, she did it not from life but from memory.
She didn’t know how common this was among artists, but there were some who she was fairly sure had worked from their imaginations rather than from life. J. M. W. Turner, for instance, made rough sketches outdoors, but the seas and skies and light of his paintings all came from his head. There was an English portraitist working in the late eighteenth century whose prodigious powers of visualization had been described in a case study. The study didn’t name the painter but said that he’d inherited most of the clients of Sir Joshua Reynolds after Reynolds’s death, and had proceeded to take full advantage of this by painting three hundred portraits in a single year. The study’s author, a British physician named A. L. Wigan, reported:
This would seem physically impossible, but the secret of his rapidity and of his astonishing success was this: He required but one sitting, and painted with miraculous facility. I myself saw him execute a kit-cat portrait of a gentleman well known to me, in little more than eight hours; it was minutely finished, and a most striking likeness. On asking him to explain it, he said, “When a sitter came, I looked at him attentively for half-an-hour, sketching from time to time on the canvass. I wanted no more—I put away my canvass, and took another sitter. When I wished to resume my first portrait, I took the man and set him in the chair, where I saw him as distinctly as if he had been before me in his own proper person—I may almost say more vividly. I looked from time to time at the imaginary figure, then worked with my pencil, then referred to the countenance, and so on, just as I should have done had the sitter been there—when I looked at the chair I saw the man!”
This painter’s imagery was so lifelike, however, that he began to confuse his mind’s pictures with reality, and succumbed to a mental illness that lasted thirty years.
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
I can imagine my hand burning, to the point where it’s painful. I’ve always been curious—if they put me in an fMRI, would that show up? That’s one of the biggest problems in my life: when I feel something, is it real?
One hyperphantasic told a researcher that he had more than once walked into a wall because he had pictured a doorway.
Because their imaginative lives were so compelling, hyperphantasics tended to be inwardly focussed. This could mean that they were detached from reality, living in the remembered past and the imaginary future rather than in the actual present. But it could also mean that they were hyperaware of their internal reality, tuned in to the cues of their bodies and the shifts in their emotions. Some researchers hypothesized that the heightened awareness of these bodily and emotional signals were one reason that people with vivid imagery usually had strong memories of their pasts—these signals somehow helped to “anchor memories to the self.”
Hyperphantasics’ memories could be exceptionally detailed.
Someone might mention something like Did you ever skateboard as a kid? And then I have to watch out for the avalanche of every skateboarding experience I ever had. It’s like being in virtual reality and having a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree video of a thousand skateboarding experiences at the same time.
Memories might take on quasi-physical forms in their minds. They might picture sheaves of recollections, or files of information, sitting on shelves in a mental warehouse. They might envision lists of facts about a particular place pinned to that place on a vast and detailed mental map that they saw spread out before them, like a hologram.
Reeder had tested children’s imagery and believed that most children were hyperphantasic. They had not yet undergone the synaptic pruning that took place in adolescence, so there were incalculably more neuronal connections linking different parts of their brain, giving rise to fertile imagery. Then, as they grew older, the weaker connections were pruned away. Because the synapses that were pruned tended to be the ones that were used less, Reeder thought it was possible that the children who grew up to be hyperphantasic adults were those who kept on wanting to conjure up visual fantasy worlds, even as they grew older. Conversely, perhaps children who grew up to become typical imagers daydreamed less and less, becoming more interested in the real people and things around them. Maybe some children who loved to daydream were scolded, in school or at home, to pay attention, and maybe these children disciplined themselves to focus on the here and now and lost the ability to travel to the imaginary worlds they’d known when they were young.
Clare had not been discouraged from daydreaming as a child, and she had preferred it to the other common form of imaginative dissociation, reading. Daydreaming was more pleasurable for her because she had struggled to learn to read, and even once she knew how she’d found it slow going. When she received a diagnosis of dyslexia, as an adult, the tester told her that, rather than processing individual letters or sounds, she was memorizing pictures of whole words, which made it hard to recognize words in different fonts. Her visual sense was so overweening that reading was strenuous, because she was easily distracted by the squiggles and lines of the text.
Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.
Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.
Presumably, novelists who invented characters also had a variety of responses to seeing them instantiated in solid form. Jane Austen wrote a letter to her sister in 1813 in which she described going to an exhibition of paintings in London and searching for portraits that looked like Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Bingley, two main characters from “Pride and Prejudice.” To her delight, she’d seen “a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her . . . exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her.” Austen did not see Elizabeth at the exhibition but hoped, she told her sister, to find a painting of her somewhere in the future. “I dare say Mrs D.”—she wrote, Darcy being Elizabeth’s married name—“will be in Yellow.”
One of the twenty or so congenital aphantasics who contacted Adam Zeman after his original 2010 paper was a Canadian man in his twenties, Tom Ebeyer. Ebeyer volunteered to participate in Zeman’s studies, and, after Zeman published his 2015 Cortex paper on congenital aphantasia, Ebeyer was one of the participants quoted in the Times article about it. After that, hundreds of aphantasics reached out to him on Facebook and LinkedIn. They asked him questions he didn’t know the answers to: Does this mean I have a disability? Is there a cure?
Many of Ebeyer’s correspondents felt shocked and isolated, as he had; he decided that what was needed was a online forum where aphantasics could go for information and community. He set up a website, the Aphantasia Network. He didn’t want it to be a sad place where people commiserated with one another, however. There were good things about aphantasia, he believed, and he began to write uplifting posts pointing them out. In one, he argued that aphantasia was an advantage in abstract thinking. When prompted by the word “horse,” a person with imagery would likely picture a particular horse—one they’d seen in life, perhaps, or in a painting. An aphantasic, on the other hand, focussed on the concept of a horse—on the abstract essence of horseness. Ebeyer published posts about famous people who had realized that they were aphantasic: Glen Keane, one of the leading Disney animators on “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast”; John Green, the author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” whose books had sold more than fifty million copies; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome; Blake Ross, who co-created the Mozilla-Firefox web browser when he was nineteen.
Ebeyer also wanted the Aphantasia Network to be a place where aphantasics could find recent scientific research. For instance, estimating the strength of a person’s imagery had been thoroughly subjective until Joel Pearson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, devised tests to measure it more precisely. In a paper from 2022, Pearson reported that when people with imagery visualized a bright object their pupils contracted, as though they were seeing a bright object in real life, but the pupils of aphantasics imagining a bright object stayed the same. Another study of his had shown that, although aphantasics had the same fear response (sweating) as typical imagers to a frightening image shown on a screen, when exposed to a frightening story they barely responded at all.
Ebeyer kept in touch with Zeman and published bulletins about his research. Zeman had found that aphantasics could solve many problems that would seem to require imagery, such as counting the number of windows in their home. This, Zeman hypothesized, was due to the difference between object imagery and spatial imagery. There were two streams of visual information in the brain that were, to a surprising degree, distinct from each other: one had to do with recognition of objects; the other, with guiding action through space. Aphantasics lacked object imagery, but they might have the kind of spatial imagery that would enable them to count windows. One aphantasic described his ability to do this as a kind of echolocation.
To Zeman, one of the most tantalizing promises of the study of mental imagery was the light it might shed on the neural correlates of consciousness. Connectivity in the brain seemed to be particularly important in both consciousness and aphantasia. fMRI studies had shown reduced connectivity in aphantasics, and Brian Levine, a neuropsychologist at the Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, in Toronto, had found that connectivity between the memory system and the visual-perceptual regions in the brain correlated to how well people remembered their lives. Many of the aphantasics who had written to Zeman identified themselves as autistic. Autism was thought to be a state of reduced long-range connectivity in the brain, so Zeman theorized that there could be a link. But autism had also been associated with thinking in pictures—Temple Grandin, for instance, the autistic writer and professor of animal science, described her autism that way—so clearly the link was not a simple one.
After creating the Aphantasia Network, Ebeyer received tens of thousands of messages from all over the world—Korea, Venezuela, Madagascar. He launched Aphantasia Network Japan, and made plans for a Spanish-language site. When the city of Rowlett, a suburb of Dallas, declared the world’s first Aphantasia Awareness Day, on February 21, 2023, his site published a celebratory post. Once hyperphantasia began to be written about, he started to hear from hyperphantasics as well. When he wrote a post about how some people could “hear” music in their heads, or relive touch or tastes, most responses were from aphantasics amazed to learn that such things were possible. But one person wrote to him describing a kind of auditory hyperphantasia:
I can—and do—listen to entire classical works in my head. The longest continuous one was the entire Verdi requiem, listened to internally on a long-haul flight. The imagery is very detailed. I can summon up a work and identify the instruments playing in an orchestral texture, or the registration being used in a particular organ piece. I can’t turn it off though. It’s in the background as I write (Schumann, third symphony, last movement). Sometimes a short passage will repeat endlessly, typically when I am stressed. And if I wake at night, it is usually with a short sequence of harmonies repeating themselves.
This past January, Zeman and others published a short article in Cortex clarifying that the definition of aphantasia encompassed people with weak imagery. Ebeyer wrote a post in response, wondering whether this inclusive definition risked diluting the experiences of those with total aphantasia, such as himself. Might it threaten the cohesion of the aphantasia community? Aphantasia, at this point, wasn’t only a syndrome, after all—it was an identity.
In the course of his quest to learn about imagery, Nick Watkins, the physicist, came across an essay by Oliver Sacks. Sacks mentioned that he normally had almost no mental imagery but that, during a two-week period in his thirties when he’d been downing heroic quantities of amphetamines, he’d suddenly been able to retain images in his mind—though only images of things that he had just looked at. During that time, he also found it much more difficult to think in abstractions. When the drugs wore off, the images dissipated and his abstract thinking returned. This was an auspicious discovery, Nick thought, that you could somehow turn imagery on. He was certainly not going to take amphetamines himself—he was a pretty cautious person—especially if doing so might jeopardize his ability to think abstractly. But if amphetamines could work, maybe something else could, too.
He kept looking. He discovered that Aldous Huxley was aphantasic and that, in “The Doors of Perception,” he had written that he was expecting mescaline to change this, even if only for a few hours. (It didn’t.) Unsurprisingly, amid the recent research on psychedelics, this hope of arousing mental vision with drugs had been revived. In 2018, the Journal of Psychedelic Studies published a paper about an aphantasic man, S.E., who had taken ayahuasca and had an intensely emotional experience of visualizing, and then forgiving, his father, long dead, who had left him when he was very young. Afterward, S.E. was still able to see images, but only faintly. He and the paper’s authors concluded that his aphantasia had likely been psychological in origin, since it was resolved by his feeling that things between him and his father had been settled. Another paper, published in the same journal in 2025, described an autistic aphantasic woman in her mid-thirties who had eaten psilocybin truffles and experienced mental imagery for the first time. Her imagery persisted for many months, although it was not quite as vivid as during the trip itself.
Nick kept hoping that someone would find a way of stimulating imagery that didn’t involve drugs. On the other hand, as he learned more about people with imagery, he was less inclined to envy them. At first, he had thought that having imagery would be like having a VCR, being able to play home movies whenever you felt wistful. But, reading more about it, he had learned that memories and images could break in on you, unbidden and uncontrollable, and not necessarily happy ones. Even if the imagery wasn’t frightening, it would surely be a distraction. He had come to value the dark and quiet of his mind.
Nick knew that whenever Zeman talked about aphantasia he was at pains to emphasize that it was not a disorder, or even a bad thing. It was best described as an interesting variant in human experience, like synesthesia. Nick appreciated this about Zeman, and reckoned that it was probably the right thing to say, but he thought that, though aphantasia itself might be neutral, the memory loss that came with it was definitely a bad thing. Many others felt the same. At one point, Zeman had been contacted by an automotive engineer from Essex named Alan Kendle, who had realized that he was aphantasic while listening to a radio segment about the condition. This revelation affected him so strongly that he put together a book of interviews with aphantasics, identified just by their initials, to help others navigate the discovery. Some people he interviewed were unbothered—there was definitely a range of responses—but others saw it as a curse.
Many could remember very little about their lives, and even with the events they did remember they could not muster the feeling of what they’d been like. They knew that some things had made them happy and others had made them sad, but that knowledge was factual—it didn’t evoke any emotions in the present.
M.L.: It leaves me as an outsider. As a viewer of life, not particularly a participant. I don’t like holidays or sightseeing—what is the point? You go, you see things, you leave, and it is gone. Not a trace or a sensation remains.
The advantage of a bad memory was that aphantasics seemed to suffer less from regret, or shame, or resentment.
L.: I can easily move on, forget, not hold grudges, no living in the past, and no dreaming of the future. This is it! I can live in the NOW.
S.C.: I work for the emergency services, and I’ve spoken with my workmates about what they think the hardest part of the job is. They all said it is definitely reliving traumatic things they have seen. . . . It is for this reason that I am glad I can’t visualize. When I go home, after having someone die in front of me, I go to bed, close my eyes, and see nothing but black for a minute. Then, I’m off in my dream world.
“Any questions about the medication?”
But this supposed advantage was just the silver lining of something pretty dark. When aphantasics recovered from bereavement, or breakups, or trauma, more quickly than others, they worried that they were overly detached or emotionally deficient. When they didn’t see people regularly, even family, they tended not to think about them.
M.L.: I do not miss people when they are not there. My children and grandchildren are dear to me, in a muffled way. I am fiercely protective of them but am not bothered if they don’t visit or call. . . . I think that leaves them feeling as if I don’t love them at all. I do, but only when they are with me, when they go away they really cease to exist, except as a “story.”
One of Kendle’s interviewees was Melinda Utal, a hypnotherapist and a freelance writer from California. She had trouble recognizing people, including people she knew pretty well, so she tended to avoid social situations where she might hurt someone’s feelings. When she first discovered that she was aphantasic, she called her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon. He had been a musician in big bands—he had toured with Bob Hope and played with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. She asked him whether he could imagine a scene in his head, and he said, Of course. I can imagine going into a concert hall. I see the wood on the walls, I see the seats, I know I’m going to sit at the back, because that’s where you get the best sound. I can see the orchestra playing a symphony, I can hear all the different instruments, and I can stop it and go backward to wherever I want it to start up and hear it again. She explained to her father what aphantasia was, how she couldn’t see images in her mind, or hear music, either. On the phone, her father started to cry. He said, But, Melinda, that’s what makes us human.
Melinda had an extremely bad memory for her life, even for an aphantasic. She once had herself checked for dementia, but the doctor found nothing wrong. She had become aware when she was in second grade that she had a bad memory, after a friend pointed it out. In an effort to hold on to her memories, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, recording what she did almost every single day, and continued this practice for decades. When, in her sixties, she got divorced and moved into an apartment by herself, she thought it would be a good time to look through her journals and revisit her younger days. She opened one and began to sob because, to her horror, the words she had written meant nothing to her. The journals were useless. She read about things she had done and it was as though they had happened to someone else.
It was not just the distant past that she had lost—she was continuously aware of the present slipping away as soon as it happened. She had already forgotten what her two sons had been like when they were little, the feeling of holding them:
It’s like, this is who they are, they were never anybody else, and that’s like a knife in my chest.
Now her greatest fear was that, if she hadn’t seen her sons in a while, she might forget them altogether:
I have had to accept that my life is like water flowing through my fingers. It’s just experiences moving through my hand that I can’t hold onto.
Although Nick had made his peace with his lack of imagery, he still grieved his inability to revisit his past. At one point, he came across the work of a Canadian psychologist, Endel Tulving, who, in the early nineteen-seventies, proposed that memory was not a single thing but two distinct systems: semantic memory, which consisted of general knowledge about the world, and episodic memory—recollection of experiences from your own life. Episodic memory, the sense of reliving the past, was, Tulving believed, unique to humans, and among the most astonishing products of evolution. This, Nick realized, was what he didn’t have. Learning that he lacked a profound human ability—one that, he had to assume, regenerated and immeasurably deepened your connection to your past life and the people in it who were now gone, including yourself as a child—well, there was nothing good about it. He would have preferred not to know.
He wrote to Tulving, who told him about a study to be conducted by Brian Levine, the Baycrest neuropsychologist, who had been a colleague of his in Toronto. The study would investigate exceptionally poor autobiographical memory in healthy adults—people who did not have amnesia or dementia or brain injury or psychological trauma. Levine later named this syndrome “severely deficient autobiographical memory,” or sdam. Nick was accepted as a participant and travelled to Toronto. The study found that the participants’ experience of sdam could be objectively corroborated, using a variety of methods, by comparing them to a control group. fMRI, for instance, showed reduced activation in the midline regions of their brains, an area normally associated with mental time travel.
Nick was surprised to hear that another participant in the study had described an even starker experience of episodic memory loss than his. She felt so detached from her past that the facts she knew about it felt to her no more personal than facts about someone else. He definitely didn’t feel that way. The things he knew about his life felt more personal to him than facts he knew about physics, say, even though he couldn’t inhabit them in the way that other people could. He realized that Tulving’s binary schema, which categorized all memory as either episodic or semantic, was too simple. His own memories were somewhere in between. He remembered that on the day that his mother died, in 2003, his sister had phoned him to say that their mother was being admitted to the hospital; he had taken a train from Cambridge to London, and he had phoned an old friend to meet him in London because he was worried that, in his distress, he might go to the wrong station and miss the second train he needed to catch, but the friend helped him, and he got on the right train, and it was around Guy Fawkes Night, fireworks going off outside the train window, and then he got to the hospital and was there for a while, and then his mother died. He knew these things, and the idea of his mother dying aroused emotion in him, but he couldn’t feel what it had been like to be in the train, or the hospital, and he could not remember his mother’s face.
From an evolutionary point of view, he supposed, he had all the memory he needed: enough to know what and whom he had loved, and what he should try to avoid doing again. But to think about it that way was to miss what was most important—not the function of episodic memory but the experience of it. As he absorbed what it meant to lack episodic memory, he started wondering whether there were ways he could simulate it. He was attracted to the idea of video life-logging with wearable cameras—the footage would be a decent substitute for mental time travel. His childhood and early adulthood were lost to him, but if he started filming now he would be able to relive at least the last decade or two of his life.
On a trip to Pasadena, he went to the Apple Store and tried on a virtual-reality headset. This, he thought, must be what episodic memory is like. He knew it would probably be a long time before people accepted such technologies, but perhaps one day wearable cameras would be recognized as prosthetics for people with SDAM, no more remarkable than glasses. Then again, film would be very different from memory. Like memory, it would be partial, but, unlike memory, it would be accurate. This, he suspected, might not necessarily be a good thing. There was something to be said for a degree of blurriness and uncertainty in recalling the past; it was helpful in forgiving other people, and yourself.
At some point, Nick became interested in the ideas of a British philosopher, Galen Strawson, who claimed to have no sense of himself as a continuously evolving being—a creature whose self consisted of a coherent story about accumulating memories and distinctive traits. Strawson was, for that reason, uninterested in his past. He acknowledged that his life had shaped him, but he believed that whether or not he consciously remembered it didn’t matter to who he was now, any more than it mattered whether a musician playing a piece could call to mind a memory of each time he’d practiced: what mattered was how well he played. What was important, Strawson felt, was his life in the present. He liked to quote the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a British philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had felt the same way:
The metaphysicians . . . affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more?
Nick wasn’t sure he agreed with Strawson, and he certainly didn’t feel, as Strawson did, that his memory of his own life was unimportant, but he found the argument somewhat comforting. He still longed to relive important moments in his life, but it was easier to think about this experience as just one of many he hadn’t had, like paragliding, or visiting Peru, than as a void at the core of his self. Many people believed that their selves were made up largely of memories, and that the loss of those memories would be a self-ending catastrophe. But he knew now that there were also thousands of people like him, who had work and marriages and ideas and thwarted desires and good days and bad days and the rest of it. All they lacked was a past. ♦
I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
Yep. Problem is that there's actually a spectrum of vividity of mental imagery, but in popular discussion it's always seen as a binary on/off thing.
An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.
Modern brain imaging techniques also weigh in on this issue. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
I've been experimenting over the past year or so, and keep trying to visualise things. Part of this spun out from the fact that I can dream (I rarely seem to, or at least remember them), but when I do, I remember that it was a vivid real thing.
I actually feel like I'm closer than ever to getting towards visualisation. I've gone from a rock solid "zero" to "solid feeling, occasional split-second flash of something"
For most of the time with this exercise I was aiming for something simple. A red triangle in a blue square, but I'm not convinced that was an effective approach, I seem to be getting closer to the mark trying to picture something real.
When I want to close my eyes and distract myself, I've been visualizing the banana from the cover of that Velvet Underground album. (Not sure why I settled on that!) I can rotate it. I can peel it. With practice it has gotten larger and I can shift it away from the centre of the visual field. But I can't make it seem yellow.
In Russia, color-blindness is referred to as Daltonism, and I figured Francis must have been the one to be the source of that (given this topic), but apparently it was John Dalton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalton
Oh man, I don't think I've written cursive Russian in something like a decade. I honestly have no idea how Russian historians parse old documents; old hand-written English is hard enough, but cursive Russian is a whole other thing.
My last name just looks like a child drawing a wavy ocean!
Quite a lot of languages use daltonism actually: French (daltonisme), Spanish (daltonismo), Italian (daltonismo), Portuguese (daltonismo), Catalan (daltonisme), Romanian (daltonism), Polish (daltonizm), Russian (дальтонизм), Greek (δαλτωνισμός), and Turkish (daltonizm).
Comically, though, programming communities really seem to have a statistical over representation of both aphantasics and hyperphantasics. One of these articles comes out every few years and I've witnessed at numerous workplaces how quickly a large portion of the engineers realize they're aphantasic and everyone else is aghast that they can't rotate complete architectural diagrams etc.
That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.
For me this is the other way round. When I was a student (physics) I had a very, for a lack of a better word, "practical" visualization in my head - what I needed to understand what I was studying. There was a lot of maths too, visualized.
Today, 30 years later, I have vivid representations of calligraphy or art, especially when I fall asleep. I fall asleep within at worst minutes so I cannot really take full pleasure of watching these ilages and during the day I am too surrounded by sources of sound, images etc. to meaningfully repeat the exercise.
The _absence_ of visual imagery is binary: you cannot see images at all or, to whatever extent, you can. Those who do have any mental imagery at all, however, fall on a scale. There are numerous studies of certain real downsides to aphantasia, notably tied to episodic memory, which don't seem to be present in those simply with diminished visual imagery.
> I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible.
Is that because it’s hereditary or instead something that was missing in early childhood? Like as a toddler you were never given one of those games where you fit shapes into different sized holes for example?
The question of origin is still pretty unclear. There seems to be a tension between things that are more developmental (if you have mental imagery, for example, you seem to be able to get better or worse) and those that are likely genetic (research does suggest a connection between aphantasia and autism spectrum etc).
As someone said below, I suggested figuring it out early is best because of a lot of things that just work differently, especially in learning. There seems to be a real selection bias that most people who learned they were aphantasic reading a New Yorker article, say, by definition figured out how to make it work somewhere along the line. Aphantasia isn’t at all a learning disability in a real sense, but you definitely have to approach things differently.
I think it’s because you can find supports to help you learn.
I’ve been teaching math for almost 18 years at this point, and only a couple years ago learned that I lean towards aphantasia. Back in high school, geometry was HARD. Calc 3 was HARD. It was presented as visualize and imagine, and I tried my best.
It just turns out other people could do that, and the fuzzy thing thing (or, more commonly, the ‘bulleted list of information’ that make up my imagination) was not “normal.”
If I’d known this (and my teachers were in a position to also know this), then maybe we’d spend more time with external visual models (what Geogebra now does for us, for example) to help me out.
Now that I teach future high school math teachers, it’s definitely something I talk about to normalize “not everyone can see in their mind.”
Do you have any advice for an experienced engineer who is considering changing careers to teaching high school math? I hear horror stories about teaching kids nowadays, with most having smartphones in class and AI use being rampant. Do you think there’s truth to that, or is it overblown?
"Others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes" - This sucks as a child, where you see a gymnasium floor open up beneath you.
So you run to safety, just to be punished for what was an appropriate response.
Some children don't see any differentiation between their imagination and reality, so it's a matter of paying attention to how others' behave to know what to do.
Because you can't trust that the reality that you're in is shared by the people around you.
I’ve interrogated people about this but can never get a straight answer.
——
“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”
Yeah!
“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”
Yeah, you don’t have that?
“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“
Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.
——
…and around we go.
Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes.
I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.
For me it is like a different "space" for mental vs real images. It is not the same neurons, I would guess.
The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously, you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels" (not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very early embryonic development). The better I know the object the better this internal concept-image, but far from what looking at the real thing is like.
I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague without details unless I concentrate on them specifically, and it is very dark in there.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones. Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for fantastical landscapes and architecture.
The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even though I read the books long before those movies were made. People like me need graphically talented people around, or my mental images will be very much limited to drastically reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to all graphical artists).
It's the same for me, in terms of it being dark and fuzzy unless concentrated on.
but I really do notice this sort of ability when it comes to memory. When I am looking for something, I can often visualize a scene of where I saw it last. This is not always helpful for actually finding the object, but it can be! When trying to recall a meeting, I can recall materials I saw (bits of text on slides, images, etc).
I'm fairly good at remembering faces, and if they're next to a name when I see them, I can even associate the name! The flip side, of course, is that if I don't see the name, I won't remember it.
I find it implausible that people really have extreme, detailed imagery. Not that they can't do it on demand, if desired. But if every time they imagined something, it instantly appeared with all possible detail - that's just tremendously inefficient.
I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response viz".
It can be highly variable. For example in the morning or right after a nap I can visualize in extreme detail, but when I'm awake and at my most alert it will become a lot more basic.
What about people who can look at something and then draw it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
Do they have to recall specific areas, or do they perceive the entire thing as a fully instantiated mental image.
Glad that you used this exact example! This guy doesn’t have a photorealistic memory. At least it’s far from as good as it’s claimed to be. He’s an artist proficient in a particular style - better than most, but not superhuman.
When he’s not drawing from a direct reference, he’s simply making up details based on assumptions, not on photorealistic memory. Here’s a good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyPqQIHkasI
He looks at a city and then draws a picture of it. It’s very detailed, so we assume he remembered all of it and recreated it accurately.
But if you compare any part of it it to the actual photo of the city he saw, you’ll see that he only recreated it roughly — some landmarks, the general shape of the coastline. He probably got the number of bridges right.
But you couldn’t use this as a map. If you were trying to find a particular building that isn’t among the top 15 most memorable ones, it’s probably not in his drawing, with a completely random building taking its place instead. Every part of that drawing is filled with mistakes and assumptions that would never be made by someone who could actually see the landscape in their mind like a photo.
And it’s the same with every other claim of photorealistic memory - it’s always some kind of trick where people have a decent but realistic level of memory. And then they fill the gaps with tons of generated detail that we either can’t check, or wouldn't bother to check.
This is called building your 'catalogue' in art, especially concept art. In order to draw something (well) from imagination, you should draw it from reference many times. Then when you draw from imagination, your brain will pull from what it knows. And since you studied the subjects, the textures, the shapes, etc, so well, you will have that stored away and will be able to do so.
Yeah, it resembles what you'd get when using gpt 4o for image editing. Of the parts that should have been unaltered, the broad lines are correct, but the exact details are made up. A modern white chair is replaced by some other white chair. A book is replaced by some other book. Etc, etc.
Both brains and gpt appear to be doing lossy compression based on preexisting world knowledge.
Not exactly. I can imagine (hehe) that robust imagination is useful for practical thinking. It allows to reason about the world without having to interact with it by simply simulating complex scenarios in your head.
It's like, if you want to make weather forecast, then you'll use as detailed models as possible, right?
I'd describe it as like having a second monitor in your desktop. It's not inherently "over" what I already see or anywhere physical, it's like in a different space. Sometimes it can feel like it's "behind" what I am seeing indeed (i.e. kind of over), but it can vary and I suspect that's just a learned position (I just tried and I can shift the position images 'feel where they are').
I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.
It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.
I have three different ways that vision seems to work with me.
1. Actually seeing something like in a dream.
2. A mental scratch pad I can draw on and use spatial awareness to navigate. (I see the code of applications as flying over a landscape or walking through a forest.)
3. Imagination, which uses whatever data vision gets turned into.
I'm not sure how common 2 is. A lot of my brain has broken parts and this scratchpad is used in place of logic. This works fine until I need to work on linear list of similar tokens and keep them in order, like math and some functional programming languages.
Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse, someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise: Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it. And so on.
For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.
That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".
I can _remember_ the properties of an apple - approximate size, weight (my hand does not instantly drop to the floor due to its weight), etc.
I can't _imagine_ an apple in my hand if you defined the colour, size or weight (for example, purple, 50cm diameter and 100Kg).
In my mind I am recalling a _memory_ of holding an apple in my hand - not imagining the one according to your specifications.
One example I can give is being tasked with rearranging desks in an office. I can't for the life of me _imagine_ what the desks would look like ahead of physically moving them into place.
I can make an educated guess based on their length/width but certainly not "picture" how they would look arranged without physically moving them.
It's like my brain BSODs when computing the image!
The same applies to people - I can only recall a memory of someone - not imagine them sitting on a bench in front of me. I might remember a memory of the person on _a_ bench but certainly not the one in front of me.
Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn movie that you make in your own mind.
I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch, smell, visuals.
And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it. Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and going to chat with women.
I have so many questions to ask people with aphantasia related to sex, but it would get uncomfortably personal, so maybe best not to.
The best I can do: do people with aphantasia only get aroused if the stimulus is present? Can't they not get horny just imagining things, like I imagine most people can?
Does steamy literature do anything for them? I imagine it doesn't, since if you cannot imagine things then words on a page just have no power.
In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".
Good erotic literature does not only describe images, but also desires, emotions and sensations, all of which I think have different channels of imagination/recall.
I didn't mean it describes images, I meant it elicits them. If you cannot imagine what's happening, you cannot get aroused. Words are just words, they must conjure an image.
Aphantasiacs often cannot imagine sensations either (at least, my friend doesn't. He cannot imagine the smell of coffee either).
> In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".
The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.
Hmm, no? The words must elicit images and sensations, otherwise they wouldn't work as erotica. Words are just words. If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.
> If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.
This is your thesis. In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed. I would furthermore claim that it calls this assumption into question. If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image. If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
> In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed
Everything we are discussing in this comments section must be understood in an informal way. I obviously did not "prove" anything; I don't think anything can be proven about this anyway. Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".
It's a figure of speech: "this cannot be so!", "it must be like this other thing", etc. It's informal conversation.
> If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image.
Maybe straightforward, but as with anything related to the phenomenon of closure (as in Scott McCloud's closure), drawing an image closes doors. If you describe but don't draw an image, the reader is free to conjure their own image. Maybe they visualize a more attractive person than the artist would have drawn, or simply the kind of person they would be more attracted to.
Have you never seen a movie adaptation after reading the book and thought "wait, this wasn't how I imagined this character"?
> If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.
That's such a mechanistic description! Words don't work like this. Sometimes describing less is better, because the human brain fills in the gaps. You don't simply list physical attributes in an analytical way, you instead conjure sensory stimulus for the reader.
(If talking about sex and adjacent activities makes anybody nervous, simply replace this with literature about food. In order to make somebody's mouth water you cannot simply list ingredients; you must evoke imagery and taste. Then again, some people -- aphantasiacs -- simply cannot "taste" the food in textual descriptions!).
For me visualization by itself is mostly useless, it is more of a concept of something arousing happening and vague visual flashes of something similar I have seen. It somewhat works, but nowhere near as effective as real pictures.
What works for me - is imagining sensations, they could enhance both real and vague pictures, and I feel them directly in the body which makes them very effective.
I don't have any trouble following your path of increased detail, but if someone says "imagine an apple", I get a vaguely apple-shaped, generally redish object (I like cosmic crisp), which only becomes detailed if I "navigate my mental eye" closer.
I think that is pretty normal while dreaming, daydreaming, or awake if you don't have aphantasia. Someone skilled in neural-linguistic programming can guide someone into developing greater and greater details.
Psychedelics and certain meditative practices can enhance this effect. There are also specific practices that allow imagined object to take a life of its own.
That's in the private imaginative mindspace. There are other mindspaces. There was one particular dream where I can tell, it was procedurally generated on-demand. When I deliberately took an unusual turn, the entire realm stuttered as whole new areas got procedurally generated. There were other spaces where it was not like that.
For me the default is typically an instant view of whatever is described, first an apple, then when I read "sliced" now it's suddenly in slices. But if I want to image motion I can easily do that also, like of a knife cutting down through an apple and the two halves falling to either side, just like a video but with a generic background and other simplifications, like the knife suddenly disappears when the cut is complete.
It's like hearing a song in your head, you can listen to it and maybe keep time roughly but if someone asks you what instruments there are you might not be able to get all of them, or might not remember the drums or the baseline. It's all much more vague. If you asked me to remember my childhood home I can visualise 'all of it' in my head, but maybe not what the type of bricks are like, or where all of the windows were.
This actually highlights to me what may be different about mental images for other people. Because I can much more clearly hear music in my head than I can see images in my head. So if it's much more vague for others, that must be kind of what images are like for me.
Not quite. I have had a lot of musical training and have a very good musical memory. I can write down songs from my head or hear a song and write it down later, depending on how complicated it is, usually with only 1-2 listens, or play it back, etc. I can visualize things in my head but it is a lot more abstract, or rather, harder to explain.
I think the person you're replying to didn't describe it exactly. It's not really about how good your memory is, I think. It's that no matter what, "replaying" the song in your head isn't going to bring about the same reaction as actually physically hearing music. It's like a simulation, a higher-order perception, thinking of yourself hearing it rather than willing yourself to really hear it in the same way as usual.
It might be easier to describe as an eye that is only opened manually, and can only focus on highly specific things. This is my superpower - I can see things vividly in my mind, spin them around, zoom in/out, and more.
When I'm looking at it, the only thing I can see is whatever object is being imagined. However, yes - it's similar to the sensation of seeing with your own actual eyes. The reason it seems so foreign is because our real eyes can see more than one thing at a time. Our mind's eye can only see exactly one subject at a time (though I should mention that when I navigate cities, I do so by imagining a birds-eye view, so there are many objects IN the map, but I cannot see anything other than the map, and it becomes extremely blurry outside of the section I'm focusing on).
For me, it's a little more like you describe these days. It is images, but fuzzier and more impressionistic than it used to be. I have to concentrate harder to have a full-on image of a scene, and can't so much when multitasking.
In college, especially when I was studying Japanese and had to memorize a lot of shapes, I could look at a poster filled with characters and recall it hours later to translate those characters. Your mind is a muscle and it gets better with exercise, and grows weaker when lazy.
I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see - things. Like, when I close my eyes, I see the inside of my eye lids, the blackness. When I then try to imagine a candle for example there is no candle appearing in the darkness, I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar characteristics. I see nothing.
> I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar characteristics
If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?
I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can see the yellow light it casts.
It’s nothing like seeing with my eyes, and it’s nothing like dreaming.
When I “see” it is abstract. There are impressions and sensations. I can recall the qualities of something - even the visual qualities - but it doesn’t feel like sight.
Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty much exactly like the sensation I have when I "see" stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close my eyes while awake — I can continue where I left off, and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.
But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the physical act of seeing with your eyes.
I think I am aphantasic or mostly so. I don't see visualizations but have vague echoes of their derived properties like spatial structures. It is almost like proprioception if I were some amorphous being that could spread out my countless limbs to feel the shape of the scene.
But, I do have vivid, sometimes lucid, dreams. I would say they are exactly like seeing and being in terms of qualia. It feels like my eyes, and I can blink, cover my face, etc. It's like a nearly ideal, first-person VR experience.
They are unlike reality in that I can be aware it is a dream and have a kind of detachment about it. And the details can be unstable or break down as the dream progresses.
Common visual problems are that I cannot read or operate computers. I try, but the symbolic content shifts and blurs and will not remain coherent.
Motor problems include that I lose my balance or my legs stop working or gravity stops working and I start dragging myself along by my arms or swimming through the air, trying to continue the story.
If I've been playing video games recently, I can even have a weird second-order experience like I am fumbling to find the keyboard and mouse controls to pilot myself through the dream! That is a particularly weird feeling when I become aware of it.
I feel like I have recurring dreams in the same fictional places, but they can have unreal aspects that lead me to get lost. Not like MC Escher drawings, but doorways and junctions that seem to be unreliable or spaces that don't make sense like the Tardis.
> Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.
Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not with most other foods so I think it's more mouth preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov saliva before feeding reaction.
yes I think you come close to describing how I imagine things. Seeing is just fundamentally the wrong word, at least in my case. When I for example imagine a road I rode on with my bike the other day and do this with my eyes open, there is nothing popping up in front of my eyes, mixed with what i actually see atm, it's more like abstractions popping up in the back of my head. Very simple drawings maybe, just the contours of how it really looks.
Perhaps it is a mental process you can train and get better at. I understand the 'back of the head', location for imagination. And now - for me - it's at the front with some specific training. Drawing (and specific techniques within) have been the cause of the biggest shifts to 'where/how' my imagination is.
Can you describe what you mean by "seeing"? To me, imagination isn't like actual sight. The best way I can describe it is that it's a kind of meta-perception, I'm envisioning the thought, the impression of something. I can visualize the exact details and properties of the candle, but it's not like I'm actually seeing it, I'm just thinking of seeing it. The way you describe your imagination is that it's as if the candle is superimposed on your actual vision, like putting on a mixed-reality headset that's drawing in stuff in your real field of view, representing the same kind of sight as "real sight". Is that what that's like for you?
It's like a photograph is an indirection of the thing that was photographed: not the real thing, but a good visual approximation.
It's like watching a movie; the people are not there, but you still see them.
The cinema is in my mind. People here describe it as "thinking of seeing", but to me that's nonsense. It's definitely a visual thing, I bet it's activating some of the same regions in the brain. Seeing is thinking anyway, in the sense the brain is interpreting signals from the optic nerve.
It's never an hallucination in the sense of being confused about what's real and what's not.
I can also anticipate the taste of something I like, feel it in my mouth, and start salivating. Is it tasting or "thinking of tasting"?
It's more like it's in a different plane, you can see it but it's from another source, like how I can hear things but it doesn't effect my site. If I imagine a candle I "see" a candle in front of a black background, with a flickering flame and a bit of wax dripping down the side. Like how you can have a song in your head but still listen to people
I can prove I can remember the shape, because I can draw it.
I think you're putting too much importance on the ability to visualize it. I can have a high-resolution image of a candle, but it's not useful for understanding that there's a candle in the picture - for that, you need to have parsed the image and understood what it contains. The visualization is just the source material. Similarly, when you read a book, you're not remembering what entire pages look like with all the words on them.
The problem with these kinds of things is that so much happens unconsciously that we're not aware of. You think remembering the image is important because you're unaware of all the processing that allows you to understand the image.
Back when I was on some medication to help me sleep, it came with the side effect of having vivid dreams... and if I didn't fall asleep fast enough after taking it, I'd get hallucinations while my eyes were closed. I knew I wasn't seeing what I thought I was seeing, but I wasn't really in control of the imagery. In one case, I thought there was a suit of armor standing over me and mumbling. In another, I was laying in bed, but I was seeing the living room from a few feet outside of my bedroom.
My - and what I presume is "normal" - mental imagery isn't any different than those hallucinations, with the exception of I am willing what I imagine, and therefore control what I "see" in my mind. The colors, contours, lighting, shading, and so on are all like what you would see with your eyes, though the actual level of detail is less.
I'm also the same, but I do believe others can vividly see creations in their mind's eye. Nikola Tesla was one who could tinker in his imagination.
Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand, like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual information, it's far more topologically structural than bound to 3D physicality.
I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2 vividness.
But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.
What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.
So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.
> I am the same and I am not convinced people can really - see - things
My experience of seeing images in my mind is significantly different than when I am not seeing images, and also different from just remembering the details of an object like an apple vs visualizing it.
Regarding closing your eyes: I don't typically close my eyes when I create mental imagery, I'm turning it off and on right now as I type this, now there's an apple I can see in my mind, now there is nothing but the generic slightly darkish background that the apple was sitting in front of. Now the apple is there again but it's green not red, etc.
Some people can see images while they are conscious just like you see them in your dreams. Perhaps even better, depending on their ability to visualize. Maybe you just never developed the conscious ability to visualize.
I can visualize things in a lucid dream, and it's identical to seeing for me. But I can only control it for a short time before I wake up.
When awake, I have a "mind's eye," but it's more like what you're describing. As I fall asleep, I can actually begin to see things. I wonder if some people can do that when awake.
Can you remember seeing? I use my imagination to get a very grainy image but it's usually my interpretation of it and what I'm using it for.
Like when in school I'd imagine graphs lines before drawn or best example is a cad test and from reading the directions I could get an idea of what I was about to draw in cad
Man made computers in our image, it use to be a job title.
> Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes.
That's classic complete aphantasia. I have it too.
The "kind of different. I’m not really seeing it" would apply just as well to dream images. If you're interrogating people, you might try asking them whether it's similar to that.
What's funny is, I have complete aphantasia, but I can imagine a ball, I just can't see it. If you ask me what color it is, I would say white, because I imagined a baseball. But I can't see it, I'm just thinking about it.
I wouldn't say "hear", but I do have an inner monologue. When I read, I have an experience of the words in my mind. But similarly, when I look at the world, I have an experience of what I'm looking at, while I'm looking.
The difference comes when I close my eyes vs. block my ears. When I close my eyes, I don't see images, I can't voluntarily make images appear. But with my eyes and ears blocked, I can still think words - my inner monologue - which I experience in much the same way as I do when I'm reading. I can't conjure other sounds though, which is why I don't really consider that equivalent to "hearing" - it's not sound, it's the concept of words. I don't have any analogue of that for images.
Ordinary aphantasia doesn't imply anything about lack of inner monologue. Some people apparently do lack an inner monologue, and if they're also aphantasic, that's been described by some authors as "deep aphantasia". But there's no evidence that the two conditions are related, except in a kind of conceptual sense.
As I was reading your post and imagining, when I got to the color question it was a plastic spotted ball, white background with various colored spots. As I continued reading I switched to a red rubber ball.
“Yes — I can imagine it. A simple sphere, maybe sitting in a soft pool of light.”
“I’m picturing it as a bright red ball, glossy and catching a bit of light on one side.”
Great, huh? Except that’s what ChatGPT said when I asked it those two questions. It certainly isn’t picturing anything. If a robot which only ‘thinks’ in terms of chain-of-thought of abstract tokens can act as if it truly sees things, what makes you think this test has any validity at all?
I went from frequent lucid dreams as a child and teen, to no (remembered) dreams, back to vivid (but very rarely lucid) dreams. Ask while having aphantasia, I wish I could get even approximately close to dream images while awake.
Have you tried a dream journal? We forget most of our dreams because we might have them at 2 am and wake up at 7 am. If you wake yourself up in the middle of the night one or two times, you're more likely to have been in the middle of a dream, and it's still up there in your brain enough to write down. The more you do this, the easier it becomes.
Personally I strongly do not want to get better at remembering dreams. At the moment I very rarely remember anything about dreaming, and on the very rare occasion that some fragment of memory from a dream pops into my head it is super confusing until I identify "oh, that must have been from a dream". I prefer to keep my memory uncontaminated with random garbage :)
I remember my dreams quite well. Years ago, I did a dream journal to up that even further. At the time, I discussed doing so with a friend, and she expressed a similar sentiment to yours. In our discussion, she explained not wanting to "carry emotional baggage" from a dream into her day, being distracted by it, and so forth.
That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with me, because together we realized that people can relate to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments after I wake.
Not for me, never remembered them at any point, I asked my mum once if she remembered me dreaming when I was a kid and she couldn't remember it either, no dreams/no nightmares.
I have an active imagination and I read a lot of fiction and I don't think I have aphantasia, I just go to sleep, wake up and never remember a thing in between.
Pretend you're talking about photos and cameras. You mean you can see the image? even though the camera isn't pointed at it now? Like it's really seeing it?
Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg instead of a live feed.
When I'm fully awake, the mental images are more like someone attached a new camera with a field of view that ends at the edges of the object/scene I try to generate.
The details get better or near photorealistic when I'm about to doze off.
When I wide awake, parts of the image are "gone" when I'm not focusing them.
Also, the sensation of seeing in my mind does feel different. It's like there is some different place where that image is showing up.
Even if I imagine the mental image to overlay with my real vision, it feels like it's "added" somewhere between my conscious mind and the outside/real world.
I’ve got a hollow log from an apple tree in front of my parked car. I know the contractor put a bucket upside down on it, I could walk out my front door with my eyes closed and kick it (I know exactly where it is)
But is the bucket at an angle to the left or right? I don’t have a picture I can reference. I know that I don’t know because I’d have to have noticed and remembered.
Does your photograph allow you to faithfully recall details you didn’t notice at the time or is it a simulation of an image?
There is really a fundamental difference as many studies now have shown---and I can attest from personal experience. Honestly, if you have to ask the question there's a pretty high chance you are: everyone at some level believes that their own inner experience generalizes to the rest of humanity, but it's those with aphantasia who thereby believe that everyone else's description is just a manner of speaking ("they, like me, surely don't really think in pictures").
I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple" less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?
The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look up the references if you're interested.
When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a large study found. Probably there are critiques of his methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for trying to figure out how exactly you think.
No, certainly not. I was trying to pose a thought experiment that draws one's attention to the how of their thinking more than "think of an apple." Even if you can't figure out the person's eye color, did you bring to mind a blurred workplace image that just didn't have enough detail in the right place? For an aphantasic, especially if you don't even know this person's name, it's really a sort of experience of an empty thought in the way that thinking about an apple isn't.
Weak mental imagery and no visual imagery are distinct.
The connection of aphantasia to strongly deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) is well-attested now. You can find numerous clinical studies on the matter.
YMMV, but for me, the image on en.Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia> made it easy for me to understand. That and having a frank conversation with someone close to me: "Wait, you just think of something and see it, like a picture or real life?" "Wait, you actually see anything?"
Okay, so, if you think people are only metaphorically referring to their "minds eye", then you probably have aphantasia. If the idea of people "counting sheep" to go to sleep confuses you, thinking that perhaps you could not go to sleep if you just lay there counting to yourself (hint: that's not what they mean), welcome to club aphantasia.
I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't have aphantasia.
It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access data/information about things that the brain is presumably constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not very strong": none.
Throwing in my anecdote: I acquired aphantasia after a viral infection as a child. This also slightly impacted my speech. There can definitely be a fundamental difference.
In my case, I can distinctly remember my experiences from before the infection, and recall a clear difference in visualization capabilities before and after.
"where" the mind's eye is also variable. And may be moveable.
For a time, my mind's eye was 'on the floor, sideways, behind "my driver seat"'. With some effort, it is now 'in front' of me, closer than where my vision is, occupying some space between where my vision is, and where I perceive my sense of self to be.
The efforts were a combination of trataka flame training, training to remain conscious through the process of falling asleep (for lucid dreaming), and drawing (seeing an image, quickly memorizing it, and drawing it from the mind's eye projection {as in, literally trying to see the image on the blank page without access to the reference image}).
It's quite funny, for myself, if I concentrate I can so strongly visualize something that I stop seeing through my physical eyes and kind of go "blind," only perceiving with my eyes once I decide to again or once some large visual stimulus surprises me.
Same for me. It has led to some awkward moments in public where it looks like I'm staring at someone from across the room, but I'm just thinking/visualizing and am only vaguely aware of what my eyes are looking at.
I can basically do a Google Street View of places I’ve been before, seeing what I’d be seeing if I was there. It’s not as clear as being there and having my eyes open, and th animation is jerky, but it’s in color, and I have the same spatial sense of where things are relative to where I am mentally standing.
For the most part, I can’t “think” about things except maybe mental math. I see things, and I talk to myself in my head.
I have the same thing, I can "walk" through my childhood home. I see how the living room was set up, I can walk from there to my bedroom and "see" everything. Honestly if I had good art skills I feel like I could draw it out pretty well. However I would in no way describe it as looking like I'm there at the real thing or looking at photograph, not even close really. It's kinda just a hazy construct in my mind.
I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.
My understanding of it has been that aphantasiacs can only imagine in terms of verbal descriptions, not images. If that's the case, it seems like visual analogy would be a good differentiator.
For example: without any internal monologue, think of the Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it resembles.
Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
(Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)
It might be easier to think in terms of what you can actually achieve with your visualization.
I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I have to write down in full every intermediate step because I can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two steps in the future.
Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.
Relatedly, I'm not sure I really believe people who say they think in code and can't be bothered to render their ideas in design or decision documents with actual reasoning. I can't even tell if something is a real thought I'm having /in my own head/ until I've written it down or otherwise recorded it somewhere in the consensus reality. Very often, I /think/ I've got some problem or idea all fleshed out in my mind, but the process of writing it down (in code or prose) reveals that this was all just a kind of illusion. Or maybe I really did have it all figured out but something got lost in the process of writing it down? Seems literally impossible to say.
But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the same species had radically different methods of cognition, since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the broadest possible sense, is not radically different, and neither is our thinking hardware.
I think its far more likely that they're just bad at writing or drawing. Tons of people can picture a scene in their head but are absolutely terrible at drawing it, and can only render much more boring imagery in text.
I agree, writing code is writing. I added a parenthetical above that hopefully clears that up. I guess my overall point is that I can't confidently say I've even had an actual idea, until I prove it to myself by voicing it, or writing it in code or prose, or drawing a diagram, or whatever. Thinking is hard, but it feels good to have thunk, so the mind is incentivized to give itself the illusion of having done so, if it can.
It's nothing like that at all. First, when you are awake you still see whatever is literally in front of you, even if it's your eyelids. Second, when you fail to recall something in detail, it isn't a sketch or child's drawing, it's just... incomplete sensation. We don't imagine things the way a painter paints a picture bit by bit (unless you are an experienced painter!)
I have aphantasia. I know what something looks like, I just can’t see it.
It’s not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no internal voice so that wouldn’t make sense. It’s just like the concept of what I’m thinking of is right there in all its detail. Its extremely spatial - I’m thinking in 3D even if I’m not visualising it.
On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is very hard, especially faces.
Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a second and can’t be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of thinking isn’t visual.
No. I’m remembering the Eiffel Tower as a very specific moment when I saw it the last time I went to Paris, but it’s more like a description of the scene.
Not really a description though, that seems… slow? The elements are all there just not in visual form.
A simple test I've seen mentioned is, ask someone this: “imagine a car, a fast car, zipping through a windy road… ok? (pause) now, what color was the car you saw?”
If you even need to think about it, you hadn't seen it.
As a non-aphantasia person, this just seems like a really, really bad "test".
Famously, there's a psychology experiment where a person in a gorilla costume walks through the middle of a scene and beats their chest before walking off the other side of the screen, but people who've been given a challenge of tracking a ball being passed around will completely miss the gorilla. They'll laugh in shock on watching the same video a second time, amazed that they didn't "see" the gorilla on first viewing when their attention was on the ball.
In your simple test, focus is going to be drawn to other components - "fast", "zipping" and "windy" make me pay attention to the curves of the road, the wheels, the trees or cliffs causing the road to wind. The color of the car is irrelevant, so I don't pay attention to it.
I can't tell you what color the car was, but when I watched the gorilla video (without knowing in advance about it) I didn't know a gorilla had walked through the video either.
I believe both that aphantasia may be a real thing, and that the vast majority of discussion about it online is plagued by so much imprecision and variety in use of language that it can be hard to say how many people who think they may have it, actually do.
Consider attempts in this very thread to compare conscious visualization to visualization in dreaming. Someone who isn't in a critical frame of mind or doesn't know about the limitations of vision in dreams and how our brains trick us about dream-sight (or the fairly different limitations of real vision and how our brains also trick us about that, as you mention) may follow a train of thought like, "well, I 'see' just fine in dreams, and my conscious 'mind's eye' is very similar to that, so sure, by the transitive property, I can 'see' about as well when I visualize as I actually see things with my real eyes"
Me, I go "well dream vision for approximately everyone is total shit but with a layer of trickery on top, and my 'inner eye' is similar to that except with the trickery dialed way down so I can tell where the seams are and if I try I can be aware of when I've just invented some detail that was 'always there' but actually wasn't a moment earlier and I can tell that I'm not actually seeing with my eyes (unlike a dream, where I think I'm 'seeing'), so yeah those two are pretty close for me, and the ways in which they differ are basically just how much my brain's lying to me so arguably aren't 'real' differences anyway, but both are entirely unlike actually seeing, so no, I don't 'see' when I visualize the same way as I 'see' with my eyes, though it is close to how I 'see' in a dream except I'm less-fooled about how bad it is"
... and I propose that these two responses could come from people with identical actual capacity for mental visualization.
When one of the former meet the latter, it might end in the latter thinking they have aphantasia or at least lean farther that direction, without any difference in their actual experience of or capacity for visualization.
....
I've seen a supposed set of autism test questions (I don't know if they're really used in autism diagnostics) that include something like "would you rather go to a party, or stay home and read a book?" and supposedly the "autistic" indicator is asking follow up questions or excessive hesitation. Meanwhile I'm very sure you could find people who instantly answered "go to a party" but actually choose that far less often when presented with the real choice involving those two things (necessarily with a lot more details and context filled in). I don't think they're lying or deceiving themselves! I think they're regarding the question very differently from how some others do. I think something similar is going on here, with two "tribes" with different perspectives on the question itself trying to communicate and talking right past one another, leading to much confusion.
(Meanwhile, I do think it's entirely possible aphantasia is real, I just also strongly suspect a lot of the people who've been led, by online discussion, to believe they're far from the median in this regard, actually aren't)
As mentioned elsewhere, researchers have done brain scans while asking people to imagine something, and for the majority of people the visual cortex lights up, but for a small number of people the visual parts of the brain are not so active.
This is very much a real thing, but largely goes unnoticed because it doesn’t really affect anything, except for people going about their lives thinking that the word ‘visualise’ is a metaphor.
That does not match my experience. I can imagine things, but details are limited to properties i intentionally think that the imagined object should have.
it reminds me a bit of the debate in psychology back in the day of propositional vs. analogical representation.
there was a long running debate in the literature about how mental information (like images) were represented: a bunch of discrete language-like symbols OR a more continuous image-like format.
two very different philosophies about how the information was stored and processed, but the tricky thing is that they were completely indistinguishable experimentally -- any effect you observe and try to attribute to one scheme could be accommodated in the other.
with respect to the afantasia debate, it could be that everybody has the exact same mental experience but one camp describes it in a propositional (non-image based) framework the other group describes it in an analogical (imge-based) framework
A guy was talking to me about designing some robot legs. He was just getting started and was new to mechanical design. The more questions I asked him the more I realized he couldn’t internally visualize what he was designing. When I’m putting something together in my head it’s like a mental CAD where I can place objects down, constrain them to each other, and see how they move in relation to each other. For this guy I recommended simply diagramming on paper to work out how it should function.
I have a fuzzy mental stage for these things. It’s like my mind’s second monitor. It mostly goes ignored but I can focus on it if I want to. Shapes and colors are weak but are definitely there. But still a useful tool.
Close your eyes and try to visualize an apple. Do this for 30 seconds or so. Try to visualize the skin, the reflection, the texture, the stem, the depth, etc. Try to hold a stable mental picture of that apple.
After the 30 seconds, rate your ability to picture the apple from 1 to 5, where 1 is complete inability and 5 is as if you were looking at a picture of an apple for those 30 seconds. 1 is aphantasia.
Another idea is to recall a vivid dream you had. I think most people would describe it as being part of a movie or reality. While awake, are you able to recreate scenes in vivid detail as if you were dreaming? 5 for complete parity and 1 for not at all. 1 is aphantasia.
But what does it mean "visualize" ? I can "think" of an apple and all it's detail, but I wouldn't describe any visual sensation. If I had to draw the apple I could draw it detail, right down the the variation in colors on it's skin. But no sense of this experience feels like a visual sensation. It feels like "thinking". To me, the act of closing my eyes emphasizes that this isn't a visual sensation for me, because with my eyes closed, I see darkness.
Bring a picture of an apple up on your computer screen and look at it for 30 seconds. There is a fidelity to that image that includes the color, texture, stem, shape, reflection, etc.
Now close your eyes and try to picture an apple for 30 seconds. Is the same experience as if having that picture in front of you? As in, can you picture, in your minds eye, an image of an apple as if you were looking at on your computer screen? On a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is complete parity as if you were looking at it from your computer screen and 1 for no visualization possible, what is your ability to do so?
It sounds like you're a 1, as in you have aphantasia.
I know it sounds crazy but I think there really are people who can visualize that apple.
Note that inability to visualize doesn't mean you can't recognize or differentiate one apple from another. It doesn't mean you can't draw that apple from memory, in perfect detail. It doesn't mean you can't describe or recreate that image of an apple. It mean that you cannot literally have an image in your minds eye of that apple.
I prefer this test: "Imagine a ball resting on a table. A person walks up to the table and pushes the ball". Question for the test subject: "What will happen?"
Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground. But then ask them" "What was the color of the ball? What was the size of the ball? What was the gender of the person pushing the ball, what clothes were they wearing?"
People with aphantasia are usually stunned by the follow up questions. People who don't have aphantasia really have seen the table, the material its made of, imagined a ball of certain size/type color (e.g. multicolor beach ball, or basketball or what ever), and they saw an actual person pushing the ball, they saw the ball rolling on the table an falling to the ground and can answer details about their vision.
> Everyone answers correctly the ball will roll of the table and fall to the ground.
For me the ball kept rolling off the table and rolling through air but not falling to the ground, even while realizing I should be causing it to fall to the ground, but rolling straight just "felt" natural at that moment because it's in make-believe land it can do whatever.
Are you really saying you can see an apple in the same way you see an apple with eyes opened? The exact same way? So if you close your eyes, imagine an apple and then look at an apple that someone holds in front of your eye, the apple looks exactly the same? As if you could look through your closed eye lids?
I'm not saying that at all. I think I have aphantasia. For me the score is 1 or 2 to picture that apple.
I was shocked to realize that when people said "imagine in your minds eye", they meant it literally. This seems to be a common experience for people with aphantasia [0].
Note that when I'm close to sleep or dreaming, then yes, my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity. While awake, its almost completely non-existent.
I don't feel like I know better what other people experience talking about it here. :)
Just now, what you wrote for example.
> my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.
What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of your head?
When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not "seeing".
Yes, I often don't realize I'm asleep and dreaming while I dream. It's a common experience for me to dream and think I'm experiencing reality while I'm asleep. Are you saying you have never had a visual dream?
Sometimes when I'm close to sleep or when I'm lucid dreaming, I can visualize things with good fidelity. While I'm awake, I'm almost completely unable to.
I experience visual dreams the same way I described imagining the environment when I read. It's a completely different experience than seeing with my eyes open.
Interesting. So it sounds like you don't even dream visually.
I think for many people, even people with aphantasia, dreaming is akin to watching a movie or actually experiencing the event (myself included). I know the experience is immersive because it's the same feeling as watching a movie, but I can't recall it visually the same way after the fact, while I'm awake.
Some people can project the image of an apple into the real world. As in, they are able to imagine an apple on the table that they see with their eyes. They 'see' it, but see that it's a projection. It's a lot like when you have two very similar images (except one change), and you cross your eyes such that they overlap to highlight the change (it's ghostly, as it's only seen in one eye). Same Idea, only instead of the other eye, that projection is coming from your brain.
Try the crossed eyes 'find the difference' technique. Which is crossing your eyes such that a third image (a blending of the two images: one from each eye) appears between those two images.
You can easily understand where the difference is because the data is different between the eyes. The difference appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's eye is different from data from the physical eyes when those two 'streams of data' are blended.
Yes I can do this. I can see the image in the middle the same way as I see each individual image. (But not both at the same time, the outside images get blurry when I focus on the one in the middle).
Anyways, this is nothing like what I experience when I imagine something.
That's what it's like to 'overlay' imagination onto your vision.
But that requires - like the eyes focusing correctly - for the 'imagination vision' and the physical vision to 'line up'
your imagination is more like it's in the the back of the head, yeah?
What helped me 'move' where my imagination was (to the front and center), was to do the flame meditation. Which is to focus on a flame in a dark room for a few seconds, close your eyes, and try to retain the phosphene afterglow in the flame shape. and repeating that until you are able to retain image of the flame while your eyes are closed.
Similarly: 'drawing from memory' - particularly from recent short term memory - was another method that had a profound impact on my ability to visualize.
Both of these take time and commitment, but they have worked for me. They may work for you.
I can visualize an apple, somewhat vaguely, but I've never been able to hold a stable mental picture of anything for longer that a split-second. It just blinks out of existence the moment I "see" it, which makes it rather dysfunctional...
Not at all the case with sounds though, I can play back some of the music tracks I listened a lot to, flawed of course but still recognizable. My brain even starts doing it on its own at night, not letting me fall asleep.
I also am often kept awake by my brain playing songs, wishing my brain would stop.
A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I never quite landed on an understanding of how much a person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is (assumed to be) innate or genetic.
Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not been trained for years in music.
In the right circumstances and frame of mind, symphonies or sometimes brass band tunes play in my head, multilayered and everything. They've even got enough persistence that I can "rewind" them a few seconds (probably within some kind of working-memory window), even isolate parts of them and usually know exactly what instrument is playing it, and so on, then let them continue. The course of them is automatic, I don't control them, though.
If I had the first clue how to record them, perhaps I'd have a career as a composer, LOL. The actual invention of them would be no work whatsoever, though the writing it down would be, and I'm sure there'd be a good deal of editing and arranging afterwards to fix them up (plus, who's to say if they'd be any good, or wouldn't all sound kinda the same, to a trained ear?)
I'm only barely familiar with the body of "classical" music, and even less familiar with big-band or brass band music, is the oddest part, but those couple narrow sorts of instrumental music are all I get without having to put effort into it (and I mean none, it just "plays" when I'm in the right head-space and surroundings, and no I don't mean "on drugs", and actually it can be really fucking annoying if I'm trying to sleep). I wouldn't be surprised if I actually lost that ability (such as it is) if I tried to train up enough to write the tunes down.
... maybe I should look into humming-to-MIDI software, hahaha.
This is similar to how I'd describe it for me. I can mold the apple into what I want it to be, adding a sheen or showing the bottom or the top, but any "visualization" that I do disappears basically immediately.
For me, even if I drop into "mental space" completely and stop seeing(or being aware of) real world while thinking about something I saw/did recently, vividness of this mental image will depend on how close I am to dream state, but even so I think I can never see this image with a lot of details, I think even in my dreams I never see very detailed image.
It is like seeing with peripheral vision, I know that is there and sometimes see it with quick glances, but details only appear if I focus on some part of it and disappear quickly when focus shifts.
For me it's a gradient, depending on how tired I am. I can go from fairly vivid mental image to full on seeing things with my eyes closed. It's that window when falling asleep that is the most impactful visually and very close to lucid dreaming.
So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in your "minds eye".
If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's imagery but from a different place.
I didn’t even try to imagine anything. Apples are just conceptually red by default. I can also tell you that it was tart, and crisp. I didn’t imagine those sensations either, they were just the first words that came to my mind when thinking about apples. The table is brown. I didn’t try to imagine anything table either, but the table in my kitchen, where there might be apples, is brown.
My guess is you are affected. You remind me of myself before I realised just how big the difference really is.
People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.
You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.
I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.
I'm in the exact same boat. I think I have aphantasia, because when I close my eyes all I see is black, and it is easier to conjure up images with eyes open, and I absolutely would never, ever, confuse what I "see" in my mind with reality.
Yet I am very good at recognizing faces, have okay memory of past events (not outstanding, but acceptable) and can describe places and people with reasonable accuracy.
I didn’t know people see things in the real world, like an imaginary cat until I had a dream where I could imagine something purposefully. I woke up immediately, thrown out from the dream image.
I told my wife proudly that I could see something in my dream I wanted to. She told me she can imagine ANYTHING ANYWHERE ANYTIME (painter)
My question is: can you see the cat on the table? If not, sorry pal.
I have aphantasia in the sense that I have no sense of there being an image, but several years ago, I posted a comment hypothesising that the interpretation of the experience as an image might be the distinguishing factor.
The response to that suggestion was unexpectedly strong, People really didn't like the notion of doubt of their experience. Some said I was accusing them of lying.
It was quite odd, I thought it was an uncontroversial notion that what we feel we are experiencing can differ from reality.
I think, perhaps, it was received as me saying "This is the truth, you're the one who is wrong."
I was thinking the same! At first, I thought I was firmly in the “can clearly visualize” camp, but the more I read and hear people describe how they form (or don't) mental images, the less sure I am.
It’s actually even worse than that. Not only am I unconvinced that aphantasia is real or merely a difference in the way people describe the same experience (either because of how they use language, or because of how their mental images are connected to their speech processing), but even if it were an experimentally verified phenomenon, people still talk about it like it’s a /thing you have/ instead of a /skill you failed to develop/.
I lack the ability to produce realistic images using sticks of charcoal, but I don’t consider this to be ‘acarbographism’ or something, I recognise that other people have put more effort into learning that skill than I have.
Most people are extraordinarily dim to the point that they have zero introspective capacity. For instance, if they had more than a third grade vocabulary, would they be using the word "see" to describe this talent they think they have? I seriously suspect that if you could somehow educate everyone up to some minimal level, this disparity would disappear entirely.
Anyone over the age of 40 or so grew up with the meme bouncing around (globally?) that people think "in language" to the point that one of askreddit's favorite questions til a few years ago was "people who grew up speaking another language, do you still think in X" or some variant. It was a plot point of a Clint Eastwood movie with a stolen telepathic Russian fighter jet.
It's not that you have aphantasia so much that everyone else imagines they have X-Men superpowers.
I think an interesting different way to talk about aphantasia is not, "Can you see an apple when you close your eyes" but more along the linked of, "Can you mentally edit the visual reality you see?"
A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.
It's not literally overriding my vision, it's almost like a thin layer, less than transparent, over reality. But specifically, it's entirely in my mind. I would never confuse that imagery with reality...
Having said that, I think that is related to the way our brains process visual information. I've had an experience when I'm driving that, when I recognize where I am, coming from a new location in not familiar with, I feel like suddenly my vision expands in my peripheral vision. I think this is because my brain offloads processing to a faster mental model of the road because I'm familiar with it. I wonder if that extra "vision" is actually as ephemeral as my imagined skateboarder.
> A common exercise while being in the back seat of a car while I was young was to imagine someone in a skateboard riding along the power lines on the side of the road, keeping pace with our car.
Oh, I've done this! I think many kids have. I remember a moment in my childhood when it was ninja turtles riding on those hoverboards, while I was bored watching outside the window of the back seat. Riding along the power lines, and occasionally katana-cutting something in the way.
As someone who has aphantasia I did the same thing, but with motes of dust on the window. I’d stare at a single bit of dust or dirt and move my head up and down to make the dirt move with the landscape. It’s funny to read these stories because it solidifies my assumption that I have aphantasia. I did the same thing as a child just without the imagery.
This is super interesting to me. A lot of threads about aphantasia devolve into both sides being mildly incredulous that the other exists, I think partially because it's _hard_ for us to imagine experiences outside of our own.
But here, I feel like we have a clear delineation of the differences between experiences, in a non-abstract way... and that feels more valuable to me, somehow.
omg! That was every trip to my grandparents house my entire childhood. I couldn’t “actually see” the skateboarder, but it was enough to serve as entertainment.
Mine was usually some sort of superhero who did flips over things and picked them up and whatnot.
I can’t imagine if you could “actually see” the skateboarder how much less boring those rides would be.
I have no real basis for this, but I always suspected that the majority of differences in ability to picture things is actually just a difference in semantics about terms like "visualizing", "picturing", etc. I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination. On the other end, I don't think anybody is actually unable to "think of" what a thing looks like. But it's really difficult to objectively describe what it's like to picture something in your head - so difficult, in fact, that I can see some people calling it "literally summoning an image" and others calling it "not seeing anything at all", while both talking about the exact same thing.
Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.
As a person with aphantasia, I can see actual images when I'm on the edge of sleep, and I can see actual images when I'm dreaming, but I can't get anything like that to show up when I try to "picture" something. Just black with static.
It is difficult to describe, but so many people talk about it as if they are seeing something and I never have - I've always assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind to visualize something.
I can’t generally “literally see” my mental images. But on a few rare occasions in my life, I did. I don’t know why, and it was brief, but at least I can easily believe now that some people do it all the time.
When it happened to me the few times it was an otherwise very mundane day and it felt very natural. It was overlayed onto whatever else I was looking at and could persist with eyes closed.
Honestly the experience kind of cheapened art for me to an extent since you either have that cheat code or you don’t.
It's not a confusion of terms. I can easily conjure up picture-quality images in my head, whether my eyes are open or closed. Compare that to my wife who says she can't even see my face in her head, at all, and has a hard time recognizing faces to the point where she asked my not to do anything about the red dot on my face (broken capillaries) because that's one way she recognizes that it's me. She can't see images in her head. She can't recall visual memories in her head, she sometimes struggles to remember which shelf the cups go when emptying the dishwasher. Perfectly normal and smart and capable. Not arguing that it's binary, but there are distinct ends of the spectrum. It might also be stronger for me because I tend to 'think' in pictures when the problem calls for it and it's a 'style of thinking' I'm used to.
No, but it wouldn't be surprising if they might be somewhat correlated?
I can recognize my wife easily now, but the first few months as we dated I was always scared that I wouldn't see her because I don't know what she looks like, I just recognize her and everyone else when I see them.
To the degree I have any day to day mental imagery it only works as a very very brief "overlay" when my eyes are open and I only see certain pictures:
a passport image of my Mom that I have in a photo book
a picture of my wife before we married that is my phone background and that I therefore have seen many times
the wedding photo of my parents from the hallway as a kid (even though I meet them a few times a year and often see other pictures of them)
And these images are faint, overlayed on other images and disappear in milliseconds.
>I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination
I think it's basically exactly like a hallucination for some people, except it's mentally tagged as originating "internally" instead of "externally" (which is what freaks people out about having a hallucination). I think it's basically the same thing with internal monologue vs. auditory hallucinations.
(for the record I have neither internal monologue nor visualization)
No, I've talked about this with a friend with aphantasia, and that's not it.
While I'm willing to concede there's probably different degrees of visualization (which in my mind also explains why some people are able to draw "from memory" and others are less apt), there's also people who absolutely cannot visualize at all.
My friend:
- Cannot visualize AT ALL. If you ask him to picture a red circle, he cannot do it. He cannot visualize the color red.
- If you ask him to picture the face of his mother, he cannot do it. All he sees is darkness. (We've wondered about this, how can he tell it's his mother when he sees her? He has no difficulty identifying faces, he just cannot visualize them at all if they are not in front of him. Not "not close enough" -- AT ALL).
- He cannot mentally reproduce music, no matter how imperfectly. I can "hear" the opening soundtrack of Star Wars (with reasonable fidelity), he cannot.
- He cannot taste in anticipation something he enjoys, like flavorful coffee. I can anticipate drinking a good coffee, and get some sort of sensorial stimulation/anticipation even before I get the coffee. He cannot, at all. And he does enjoy good coffee.
It's not about a difference in terminology, he really cannot visualize/mentally experience anything if it's not actually happening.
----
Finally:
> I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination
I am. It's not exactly a hallucination because there's no confusion about what's real and what's not, but "hallucination" is pretty close to what actually happens in my mind. I can visualize pretty much anything I've experienced, and some things I haven't too, like green elves dancing on my keyboard. I've always been a visual person.
I can draw things "from memory" and it's pretty much putting into paper what I'm seeing in my mind.
I might not be the most representative example (I seem to use visual and spatial more than most people for abstract reasoning), but here goes an attempt to convey one data point...
If I imagine a particular model of car, for example, I can instantly visualize much of what the entire car looks like. I can also move my attention around parts of the visualization, to see more detail. It's more than facts, and more than feelings.
This visualization is different than seeing with eyes, and is not confused with that, but seems to be using some of the same machinery.
I could sketch a detailed drawing from what I'm visualizing, a bit like the car was physically there, and I could keep looking back to it for references. But when it's in my head, I don't have to take my eyes off the drawing, and I can kinda merge my drawing and the reference in my head.
In contrast, if I try to imagine the scent of tire rubber, or of cooking, or any other scent, I cannot. Not even the tiniest bit. There's just nothing there.
As a point of reference for comparison, that's pretty dramatic and binary.
Of course, when I smell a familiar scent, I often identify it instantly. And while I am physically perceiving it, I can experience it, and move my attention around it, and introspect on its character, and have other reactions to it (e.g., good, bad, etc.), etc. But immediately after I stop physically perceiving it, I again can't imagine it. I can only recall previously registered facts about it: that vanilla smells good, kinda sweet(?), and maybe creamy(?). I could know more facts if I was a baker or cook, and I guess reason about how to use vanilla, but I still doubt I could imagine perceiving the scent of vanilla in my head.
And some scents will quickly surface related memories of previous times I perceived the scent, even decades ago. And those non-scent memories will remain activated and linger after the physical scent is removed. (Any rare accompanying wow deja vu sense is brief.)
I can picture the visual appearance of various glass and plastic bottles of vanilla flavoring I've seen over the decades, and how some vanilla flavoring looks in a particular stainless steel teaspoon with ambient light reflecting through it, etc. I can also visualize in detail the visual appearance of things that come to mind when I try to think about things I've seen that have vanilla flavoring. I just can't imagine what they smell or taste like.
I agree with this. I thought I had aphantasia the last time I read about it here.
Then I started interrogating all of the people who claimed to “visualise” things and it turned out we were all doing the same thing - conceptualising in our “mind’s eye”.
For example, anyone I’ve asked to visualise something with their eyes closed can also “visualise” the same thing with their eyes open. It’s happening “somewhere else” and not in your vision.
So I think the term “visualise” leads to a lot of the confusion.
I’m friends with a Disney animator. I asked him, when you draw are you seeing the image in your mind? He was confused and said of course, he sees it very clearly, and his drawings are just laying down that image. He didn’t understand what it would be like to not visualize.
Yeah, when I first heard this I tried to picture an elephant. And I thought, huh. I can't. But I realised there's a vague, hazy representation of it in my mind. That idea of needing to see things with picture clarity really threw me at first.
Yep. I can picture things all right, even details such as surface texture, and if I'm eg. planning a route I'm certainly doing it in a visual way (imagining a map), but the sensation is much more "ghostly" and transient than real imagery. The same goes for other modalities like sound or smell or touch.
I think this is a typical response for someone with aphantasia.
To see why your take might be false, many people dreams have a fidelity of images that is comparable to reality, even for people with aphantasia. Do you dream with this fidelity? Can you recreate that fidelity while awake?
There are also testable differences that support the claim that people can actually visualize, in photographic detail, images while awake [0].
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