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.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

"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}).

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.

Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.

No? Thanks for stopping by. :)

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.)

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.

The Aphantasia Network has several interesting studies and a self-assessment test[2] that you can take.

[1] https://aphantasia.com

[2] https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq

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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Seems like a good test?

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

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.

So, I'm not sure.

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.

The test is this:

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.

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 can _kind_ of do it, but it's not something that really comes naturally to me. And only fairly simple shapes, generally.

Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.

(I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is something that some/most people do.)

Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just assuming is normal?!

If you have something to describe "in your mind's eye" then you don't have aphantasia. We can't "see" anything in our mind.

Describe how you see green and I’ll tell you if it’s the same as everyone else I know.

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.

There's no diagnostic test for it. So is it real?

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.

The way I understood it was the apple on a table test:

I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.

if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.

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then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.

For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.

For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.

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.

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.

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.

Mine was a guy running next to us jumping over any shadows on the road. He'd stumble a bit and then be able to sprint to catch up.

It always blows my mind how universal this experience was for people around my age. Mine was a bouncing ball...

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.

Mine was a little 4-wheeled buggy riding along the guardrails as we drove. Really cool to see other people had similar imaginations!

That's what i used to do too!!

> 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 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.

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.

>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)

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.

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.

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].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/

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.

Instead of the whole image, you just visualize the main aspects as vectors?

After coming down from the shock of learning there are people like you I was even more amazed that one of the founding engineers of Pixar, and a giant in computer graphics, also has this condition. He even did a survey that found his artists where more likely to be on the aphantasia spectrum than managers. Dunno, maybe some people are so driven to create what they cannot think or see.

Have you seen the Aphantasia Apples?

https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of with what kind of fidelity you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it?

I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several different numbers.

I also have it I’m in my late forties and only found out last year. It blew my mind people saw, heard and smelled things in there mind.

I barely ever dream.

Guided meditation has never worked for me.

I have a crazy good sense of direction. My girlfriend doesn’t understand how that works if I can’t see it in my mind.

I do have vivid recall of what things look like but I don’t see them at all.

It all made so much more sense when I figured this out.

Well, I have another question further down to another guy about how he imagines sex, I guess you can answer that as well.

But also, how do you solve math problems? Often the you need to draw a graph and look at some crossing points. For me, I can conjure up a video in my mind similar to 3B1B, and I use that to think about the problem. It can even get complicated enough that it would take me a while to draw on paper. How do you solve such problems?

What is it like to read fiction? Tolkien’s writing comes to mind as a good example: many passages of Lord of the Rings are detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape. Are these types of works just not enjoyable?

When you're standing in front of a mirror, can you ask yourself a question and then answer it without saying anything out loud?

I am also aphantasic and have no internal monologue. I never had them as far as I know. When I heard that kids could have "imaginary friends" I thought it sounded totally absurd. I equated it with my schizophrenic relative who hallucinates and suffers delusions.

Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except for some spatial or topological feeling.

I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel a subset of recognition features are present or there is something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct triggering on the recognizable features.

I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective. I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger was a very disturbing perspective shift.

I'm a bit tired of people trying to explain it away.

I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe because I have experienced and sometimes still experience seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time it is absolutely impossible.

There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started researching this topic was because a person who had very clear visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his description got this thing started.

I've had mixed results with this method, especially for folks in category 5 because they grew up in a world where people casually talked about [actual] visualization and they've associated [not actually visualization] with the word (thinking it is a metaphor for something else). As someone who cannot visualize at all when faced with this question I feel like my answer wants to be.. "null" / "the premise of this question doesn't make sense" and not "5"

A variant that I've found helpful for teasing out this case: 1. Ask the test subject to visualize an Apple 2. Ask them for a few very specific details about the apple they are currently visualizing (what color is it? does it have a leaf or a bite out of it?, etc)

In many cases aphantastics will not object to the activity in step 1, but they won't be doing the same thing as the folks who are actually visualizing. They'll just do what they do when people talk about "visualizing".

When you get to step 2 someone who is actually visualizing can immediately answer the questions and don't think they are strange, they are just reporting what they are visualizing in front of them.

An aphantastic in step 2 is often confused. They aren't actually visualizing any specific apple so there isn't a reference to answer the questions. You'll get a response like.. well what kind of Apple is it? How should I know if it has a bite out of it? You first have to either provide more context or reword the question to something like: What is a color an Apple could be? or What color is your favorite Apple?

From the comments here I'm almost getting the impression aphantasia is more common than not, which is wild to me. I'm quite sure I'd place myself on one. I can imagine an apple, and it will vividly appear. I can transform it, see reflections on it or imagine the feel and sound from slicing it. However, I do not experience the apple as part of an overlay, as some others have described it. Rather, it's as if I use a different set of eyes, ears or a another skin. The more vividly imagine the apple, the less aware I become of my actual senses. I can of course also imagine how the apple would interact with the environment around me, but the combined environment is still distinct from reality. I also have very precise memories of faces I've seen. I've always wondered if there's an inverted correlation with my number memory, which is much more diffuse.

I have sometimes wondered whether there is a personality or cognitive trait that makes one unable to respond to tests measuring personality or cognitive traits.

Every personality test I have ever taken, on many of the questions I've felt that I could answer almost anything and still be truthful.

When I see this apple scale, I simultaneously feel that both 1 and 5 apply to how I visualize an apple. It's hard for me to describe what's going on in my brain, and I don't think language or images are very helpful at illuminating it.

If such a meta-trait were to exist, which would have more to do with the narratives and metaphors we use to describe our mental processes than the processes themselves, it would be funny if that's actually a good deal of what was being measured all along.

(Or maybe it just means I'm a 5)

I'm definitely in category 4 by default, though I can do category 2 with concentration. But I don't really feel like it's a problem? If things have colors and surfaces then your view of one object can block your view of another object which seems like it makes visualizing complex scenes or devices much less convenient.

I think I'm a 3? I don't see a real apple, more like the concept of an apple, but the harder I try, the more characteristics I can conjure -- although it would be a stretch to say I "see" them.

I think this test is bad at accounting for subjectivity. A literal image you see with your eyes doesn't map exactly to an image you "see" with your mind.

I have no frame of reference for what a 1 is even like so I don't know how to judge myself on it

Do 1's see it as clearly as if it was through regular eyesight?

I am fascinated by the extent to which people can mentalize their different senses. I can visualize most of my primary senses. Sight would probably be my weakest one. I am definitely not aphantasic, but the images seem much more ephemeral than what other people experience. I can conjure up an image at will but if I focus too much it will become fuzzier.

Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of what is missing, but which it is not.

None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are somehow so bland yet over spiced.

I also wonder how much of our differences are often our inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient manner.

Maybe that are two different thing? Some may experience what is in their head the same or very similar way to how they would experience it if they would actually see it, but I think that doesn't mean that what is in their head must be static or photo-realistic. I suspect these are important factors, too, in a reference image you use for drawing.

To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams. But it does not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling stuff.

For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial elements.

I was about to write something almost exactly this. However I can "hear something" if I try but definitely not picture something in the literal sense.

Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are related. Do you have the same?

Do you see them in dreams? I normally struggle to visualize things but when I'm half asleep my imagination suddenly has color and detail that normally doesn't happen when I try to picture stuff

I still struggle to believe that some can't. There's just always been an abstract 'canvas' separate from the one signals from my eyes end up on and I can 'draw' on it by thinking about visual stimulus, and it's hazy but perceptibly there, the same way I 'hear' a song when I think about it. When this subject comes up I also always want to ask if people with aphantasia can hear sounds or music in their head. Or a taste or smell, etc..

I don't find it so surprising, because I can recollect sounds, voices, songs. The same thing, another sense.

So it's probably like hearing "inner" sounds, just with motion pictures.

I wonder if there are also sound aphantasts, but it's highly likely.

Different to the case described at the beginning of the article I have lots of memories. But they are stories of what happened, not movies.

This is the fundamental question about experience.

You may be "right". What you consider to be "seeing" things in one's head may be not what's happening in that person's mind. What they call "seeing" may be something else.

The best way I can describe it is essentially generating a memory. If I were instructed to picture an apple in my mind, I could imagine a hand holding up an bog standard Red Delicious. I can imagine it free-floating. And it would be much like when I remember what happened yesterday for instance. Of course, we get into whether or not we "see" the memory or not.

So, if you are saying you do not consider yourself to have mental images, what, to your best ability to describe it, do you do when you remember an event?

So, if you watch a poor person begging for food on the street, how do you process that in the future? Do you rely on the remembered feeling and literal observation in words? How do you not remember what you saw?

These passages about reading were interesting to me as well, particularly the preceding one:

    > 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.

'If you could see a photographic-quality image in your mind, you could answer questions about it the way you’d answer questions about a photograph in front of you'

...yes. I wouldn't describe it as photograph-quality, for me it's fuzzier and lower fidelity than that, but yes.

that was what i was wondering. if i showed someone a strange sort of asymmetrical 3d object and told them to tell me what it would look like if there were looking at it from the back, it seems like it would be almost impossible to do.

I can no longer rotate or even imagine 3d objects.

My lexical memory is very high, and I have long running echoic memory so I can post process audio but a 0.1 second visual flash?

Unless my brain picked it up and had time to parse out the numbers into lexical storage I would not be able to go back and recall it at all.

I don't have congenital aphantasia and it's clear to me that there are certain kinds of background processing still occurring in my subconscious, it's like a unidirectional connection between parts of my brain that was once bidirectional.

> I also don't have a inner dialogue...

I wonder if some people grow to develop an inner monologue, but also immediately start developing an ability to silence it, to the point they don't have to try.

Mine is basically always on, and it can be problematic.

One of the "big" things I've come to understand is that there really are very different ways to think, but yet it seems that they all have more or less the same "expressive power", up to some natural variance in how good people are at specific tasks like navigation.

It's possible that in some configurations of aphantasia the brain is still doing some sort of processing that is made available via a subconscious process.

So you can't visualize an occluded surface in an active way but your brain still prevents you from running your rear bumper into another car.

Many people with aphantasia still dream at night.

Congenital aphantasia and emergent aphantasia may effect brain structures differently, perhaps some forms just disconnect the pipeline that feeds the brains computed data back into our visual centers for further visual analysis.

It's very interesting, in running down these differences we would probably learn a lot about the brain.

There is a related set of experiences that articles like this tend to conflate.

* presence of internal monologue

* ability for visualization

* ability for audiation

* affective memory (remembering feelings)

* SDAM (weak autobiographical memory)

It speaks to the larger questions around the human experience, and that we are only now discovering the many ways it differs for each individual.

I've seen some sections discussing memory, but not necessarily internal monologue.

I think it might be. I'm pretty sure I don't have an internal monologue the way people describe it, and I definitely can't conjure up actual images in my mind. I can however imagine sounds or music.

Yeah, aphantasia is talked about a lot but similarly whether people have an internal monologue, and to what degree, varies a lot. But they're not necessarily highly correlated, if at all.

I don't think so.

Anecdotally I know someone with aphantasia and they report having an internal monologue.

Just to elaborate on the "fast-facts"/post-it-note point I made: it seems there's actually a lot of "facts" ("conclusions") stored in a readily available manor in my brain. All the references/data that lead to these conclusions are stored in some deeper "archive" section though, and aren't readily available.

I guess you could compare them as if they are API's to different LLM's, and my "consciousness" is the web-browser. So it's like;

  - `fast_facts.llm` is a micro model with good breadth and fast response times, but it has little depth. So it's API can be fetch'd without worrying about it blocking the main-thread/browser.  
  - `all_data.llm` is a full size model, but it's slow to respond, and "costs" more to run. So in the browser, it is only lazily-loaded (ie, not always used), and it has to be called async style because you have to wait for the results to slowly "stream in".

Thank you for sharing your experience.

So, for you at least, there is/was a significant difference between "seeing things in your mind" and not being able to. Have you ever gone under any studies or tests to compare your brain activity to others?

There are several levels of this. There are people who can do things as though they see but have no conscious access to the interpreted visual information. Or they can do something that requires vision with one hand but not the other.

You can think of it like a bunch of different subsystems responsible for different kinds of tasks and some of them can be broken so the connections between them don't work.

Read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks for a lot of case studies.

The last point is very interesting. I would say I have minimal, nearly nonexistent ability to visualize mentally, unless I am in a lucid dreaming state in which case it does feel like a magic power.

I never thought about it until you brought it up, but my ability to manipulate images in my head is nonetheless top notch, I can solve visual puzzles that seem difficult for most people with hardly any effort at all. And my ability to draw/paint is not something people would pay me for but is still well above average, and that also requires “holding” an image in your mind. So either these skills are unrelated to being able to “see” your imagination or we are really failing to communicate about it.

Regardless of the actual internal experience, it would be interesting that most people are quite certain they can "visualize" things, and a significant number of people are quite certain they cannot. This, in my opinion, would be worth discussing even if it was entirely down to the unreliability of people's self-descriptions.

However, the article mentions evidence that there is an actual physical difference here: fMRIs, and contraction of the pupil when imagining a bright light. Clearly something is happening.

There was a study published by the University of Exeter in 2021 that showed the following:

rsfMRI revealed stronger connectivity between the visual–occipital network and several prefrontal regions (BAs 9, 10, 11) in the hyperphantasic group when compared with the aphantasic group

Here is a link to the paper: https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab035/626...

So there does appear to be a way to potentially test for aphantasia that requires no self-reporting, just an attempt to visualize.

> I understand this will be downvoted by people who have their self-image tied up in this, or synesthesia, or any number of untestable hypothetical mental states that are painted as mysterious superpowers.

FYI, I don't have any part of my self image related to any of this sort of thing (I never think about it except when it comes up in discussions like this, during which I briefly find it a bit interesting and then forget about it again), and I downvoted you because I think you're being confident to the point of cockiness yet talking absolute rubbish.

So please don't assume there's some biased reason behind every downvote you get for that comment, at least some of us just think you're completely wrong.