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I'm still not entirely convinced the spectrum between aphantasia and hyperphantasia truly exists as distinct existential phenomena. I suppose I would self repor

• FumblingBear 2y ago
  In response to your statement that it's difficult to say definitively that you're experiencing those images in a fundamentally different way from someone with aphantasia, I can share my experience as someone on the complete opposite of the spectrum. I do have imagery when I dream, but in my waking hours, I __cannot__ picture things in my head. I can reason about objects based on experiences I have with them (i.e. describe them), but there is no "illusory" reference image. There's just nothing. It's difficult to articulate my method of internal processing, other than saying I have a constant internal monologue that is used to bring to mind whatever it is I'm trying to imagine, but imagery is completely non-existent. Additionally, I've never heard these described as possible symptoms of aphantasia until this article, but "Aphantasia is associated variably with a reduction in both autobiographical memory and face recognition" really resonates with my experience. I don't have many memories from childhood, my adult memories are often vague and more based on feelings that I have of a period in my life rather than concrete details, and I have a difficult time with recognizing actors even if I've seen them in a lot of films. I also have an exceptionally strong musical memory (borderline encyclopedic). I can quickly memorize music and have near perfect recall even when years go by without listening to it. I'm with you in excitement towards further studies of these phenomena, but just wanted to chip in with my personal experiences with aphantasia! Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
  • quantumwoke 2y ago
    Can you describe your expectation vs reality? What do you think a “normal” person experiences?
    • SirRoderic 2y ago
      My understanding is that most people remember past events in the context of their own experience of those events — when they remember, they recall into their minds some version of what they felt/saw/heard at the time, re-experienced from their own perspective. I've heard some people describe it like replaying a film, and they may even get a portion of the original emotional or sensory experience with it. I have none of that at all.
      • foota 2y ago
        No way... really? I think I fall under aphantasia, but I never realized people could potentially relive memories like that.
        • Kubuxu 2y ago
          Welcome in the SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) club. It is highly correlated with Aphantasia.
        • andrelaszlo 2y ago
          I'm thinking of a happy childhood memory. I'm with my grandmother down by the lake. We're getting into a boat. I can see the way the sunlight reflects on the sand in the shallow water and off the oars in the boat (and what their flaking varnish feels like in my hands). The smell of the reeds, grass, and lake water is very clear to me, as is the voice of my grandmother telling me to be careful to not fall into the water. I can also hear a lawnmower somewhere in the distance, kids splashing around by the beach, and rustling of the reeds as they're caught by the wind. It makes me happy, but also nostalgic. Most of the things from this memory are gone now. I believe the English word that best describes this is "wistful". I know memories are peculiar and that parts of this memory are probably borrowed from other memories, or even made up, but it doesn't make it feel less vivid to me.
• stephen_g 2y ago
  I’m pretty convinced there is a spectrum just on my own experience - apart from having an internal monologue (which I think is just the ability to imagine speech) I can also imagine sounds, different accents and music almost to the same level of perception as hearing them, to the point where even though I love music, I don’t usually listen to it most of the time (in the car, while working etc.) unless there’s something I really want to listen to, because I am just imagining stuff in my head. Yet I usually can’t imagine imagery very well. I can do it (I wouldn’t say it’s to the point of aphantasia), but it feels more abstract and illusory than my auditory imaging. My experience with auditory imagination is definitely different to most people I have talked to about it, and on the other hand many people seem to be able to visualise images far more vividly than I can. If it were all basically the same, why would one be so massively different to me?
  • s_m_t 2y ago
    Sounds to me like you are more trained in one style of thought than another. That doesn't seem so strange to me. Personally I'm not very good with accents or music but I also don't have very much background at all with those things. On the other hand I consciously trained my skills in visualization from a young age.
• kordlessagain 2y ago
  People with Aphantasia don’t see images in mind, typically. The condition is technically that we don’t do willful visualizations and don’t usually see things in mind unless we dream or we are having hypnogogic visuals. That said, some self reported aphants say that they can visualize on psychedelics. Having talked to people about this for almost ten years it’s hard for visualizers to understand what it means to have a lack of what appears to be a common phenomenon.
• thayne 2y ago
  > and it is very difficult to say definitively that I am really experiencing those images in a fundamentally different way from someone with aphantasia The fact that you experience them at all is different than people with aphantasia. I don't have complete aphantasia, but it is extremely difficult for me to visualize anything or have any mental imagery. And even then, such imagery is very vague, and colorless. Mostly my thoughts are just words. Recently someone asked what kind of tree I think of when I see the word tree. This was a very strange question for me, because I when I read or hear the word tree, I don't have any mental picture of a tree, just an idea of what a tree is.
• phaedrus 2y ago
  I would self-report as having hyperphantasia, but I also have face blindness. I looked up the vividness of visual imagery questionnaire (VVIQ) test, and the first few questions involved picturing a person - starting with the head and shoulders! Well fuck me. That part in my mind's eye is somewhere between blurry and Picasso. (The features don't hold still.)
  • s_m_t 2y ago
    This is a complicated topic. To me the ability to hold a coherent (not necessarily still for reasons I won't elaborate on fully to keep this message somewhat short but essentially there is a large kinesthetic component that I suspect a very large percentage of people, myself included, rely on to visualize) 'image' in the minds eye is the measure of hyperphantasia. But 'image' is the wrong word because the 'image' we see in our mind is probably more of a rational reconstruction in our mind spurred by some sort of impression that first formed the memory that the image is reconstructed from. Aristotle wrote about this and more in "On Memory and Reminiscence", I am not correctly conveying the idea. If you could accurately form an image of a realistic face in your mind then barring some sort of motor issue you would I argue by definition be able to draw it on paper by using the image in your mind as a reference (obviously the technical skill of using a pencil to dutifully create lines which entirely match what is attempted might be lacking and it might be a poor picture in a technical sense but I think it would still be recognizable as a realistic face). The difficulty in drawing a realistic face is that you don't actually know what one looks like, or, more accurately, you have the ability to recognize what a realistic face in general should look like (perhaps due to some inbuilt neural circuitry) but you don't have the ability to recall it in all of its detail. Because you can't recall it you can't form that image in your mind. Anyone who can't draw a realistic face doesn't actually know what a realistic face actually looks like, they can only recognize it. I don't think this would be a controversial view among talented artists for instance because many well regarded treatises on the subject of drawing essentially put forward this idea. I guess what I am trying to say is that your ability to visualize a face is probably not much better or worse than your ability to visualize any other object of similar complexity except that you would be much better at recognizing that the face you visualize isn't very accurate. If you weren't able to recognize that it wasn't accurate you wouldn't have critiqued it and if you did you wouldn't have remembered the critique anyways. To close by detracting from everything I have just written: You can also draw a very convincing face by memorizing a complex set of rules that doesn't rely at all on visualizing anything so who is to say that isn't the thing that happens when someone draws a realistic face which puts this whole business of visualization into some doubt
• ajb 2y ago
  This is a classic, because Galton wrote "Statistics of Mental Imagery" in 1880, inventing survey research in the process, precisely because he found that the people he talked to about it strongly resisted believing that the spectrum between aphantasia and hyperphantasia truly exists. The original paper is quite readable: https://galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1880-mind-statistics-mental-imagery.pdf https://galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1880-mind-statist...
  • s_m_t 2y ago
    All this tells me is that people report a wide range of levels of ability pertaining to some skill. You could find similar ranges of abilities in any skill but that doesn't necessarily mean there is anything fundamentally different about the people in that spectrum of ability except insofar as developing that skill has changed them. There could of course be a fundamental difference but I haven't seen anything to convince me of that.
    • ajb 2y ago
      Well, that's a different proposition: I think that if you were to query you'd find that people who experience strong mental imagery have done so as long as they can remember, and don't have the experience of needing to develop it as a skill. It's true that such data isn't in Galton's study; perhaps it's in others, but more simply, we can ask: Anyone reading this who has strong mental imagery (video like): Do you remember ever not having it? consciously or unconsciously, did you ever have to work to develop it?
• ben_w 2y ago
  Do you have the same level of imagination for all sensory modalities? I don't. I can imagine sounds so intensely that it has on at least one occasion become indistinguishable from real. I can also easily do this overriding of real sensation with imagination, with my sense of which way down is. I can't imagine a smell at all, even though I can recognise them upon experience — if I want to decide which herb or spice to add when cooking, I need to open the container and sample some in order to decide.
• blackoil 2y ago
  I have some degree of Aphantasia. One of the definitive property for me is that when visualizing an object, it will only have properties explicitly defined. e.g. if visualizing ball on table, the concept is visualized but ball won't have any color until it is defined.
• dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  I can't visualize colors, outside of dreams, so I'd say our experience is fundamentally different.