6 ms·

Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors?

105 points by negativelambda 2y ago

scotty79 2y ago
When I saw the title I thought it's about current state of AI. That's what currently AI is missing. Imagination.
markx2 2y ago
Some months, maybe a couple of years ago I realised that I have no "mind's eye". For example I know I have grandchildren but I cannot visualise them. I cannot visualise a neighbour, or food, or a location. That this happens is odd but I can live with it. More recently I was thinking about gaming, and more specifically Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, City Skylines (all of which I own but get nowhere with) and other games where you play, you fail, you plan, you repeat. Even Minecraft. Someone else - I presume - plays, fails, learns, repeats and so gain a step toward mastery of the game. (I accept from reading that mastery of DF isn't happening soon). I presume that players visualise mistakes and visualise workrounds. I cannot do that, I do not know how. I have thousands of hours in gaming but I cannot recall them visually, so I respond in-game to what is happening in-game. That may not make sense. There will be some learning but in a non-visual way. Is this aphantasia? I have no idea and I'm not about to be diagnosed. I do have vivid and lucid dreaming but ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen. That's definitely aphantasia as I understand (and suffer from) it. I've never really considered the "visual learning from failure" aspect of it. I know that in, e.g., Minecraft, I have tremendous trouble with building things because I can't visualise them beforehand and thus things get hodgepodged into these hideous homunculi of buildings or redstone contraptions.
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  One way that scientists test is to use modality agnostic language. For example something like "imagine going to a store to shop for a new sofa. You find one and imagine where it would go in your room." Then you change or introduce things "make the sofa 50% smaller" then a bit more "change the colour of it to deep yellow" etc Or imagine getting on a bus and their is only one seat left.
- dynisor 2y ago
  I am definitely not a doctor. However, I have a friend diagnosed with aphantasia and this is almost exactly how she described it to me.
- lairv 2y ago
  Not exactly the same but recently I realised that I can visualize the face of most of the people I know, my parents, my family, my friends, however I'm unable to visualize my own face
- Buttons840 2y ago
  Can you draw things without a reference? What happens if you try to play pictionary?
  - markx2 2y ago
    If I cannot see - with my eyes there and then - a scribble happens. To sort of expand: I'm old enough that a diagnosis makes zero difference. But it does explain so much. When misophonia became a thing it explained so much of my reactions to certain noises, that I was not alone. Just knowing that others are experiencing the same removes some of that aloneness.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    I'm aphantasic but I've drawn my whole life. In Pictionary I show off and draw exactly the thing being described, meanwhile others struggle with their stick figures. It's hilarious. So on the one hand I can draw an excellent random generic man or a generic face. If you pose for me I'll do an uncanny portrait. But I can't draw my wife of 30 years -- I can't even see her in my mind. I can't draw an actor I've seen 200 times unless I were to sit with photographs and ingrain their face by deliberate practice
- AQuantized 2y ago
  Using Prison Architect as an example, when playing can you 'remember' the dimensions of the different rooms you've built? Or would you have to zoom out to plan an extension of your prison? It definitely sounds like aphantasia.
  - markx2 2y ago
    I would have to zoom out / pan around. I am unable to have any sort of vision of what I want/need.
orta 2y ago
Cool! I think I'd be classed as deep Aphant like Loren (one of the paper's authors) but I also have an internal monologue.
japoco 2y ago
I was pretty intrigued by Aphantasia a while ago, as I can’t picture anything at all with my eyes closed. Then I asked all my friends and none of them could either, apparently. So I’m wondering what “picturing” means in the definition of aphantasia? With my eyes closed all I see is pitch black, but I can “imagine” myself seeing a red apple even with my eyes open, I don’t actually see anything though.
- t-3 2y ago
  Actually seeing with your eyes would (I think) be a form of synesthesia. Being able to imagine a red apple is "normal". Not being able to imagine a red apple is aphantasia ("imagine" in the sense of a "visual" imagination, not in the sense of being able to conjecture the existence of an apple with particular qualities).
  - dataflow 2y ago
    Does it follow that people with aphantasia (edit: "aphantasics", per the article) would be unable to draw a realistic-looking apple from scratch? If not, then how do scientists show someone has aphantasia? Is it falsifiable?
    - t-3 2y ago
      Not at all - you can still see the paper and know what an apple is supposed to look like. Describing a face or drawing a scene from memory is very hard though.
      - dataflow 2y ago
        That doesn't really make sense to me. What does it mean to "know what an apple looks like" without being unable to imagine it? How would that be any different from knowing what a face looks like without being able to imagine it? Do note I said realistic apple [1], not just a cartoonish drawing, so I don't just mean "a squished circle"... [1] Example: https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic-apple.jpg https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic...
asveikau 2y ago
I slowly realized I have aphantasia by reading an HN comment about it last December. That day I started asking my daughter questions about visualizing things and daydreams and she ended up giving me a perfect description of aphantasia with minimal prompting. It's very interesting to have gone through life not realizing I have this difference. A few people I asked the same questions of who do not seem to have aphantasia thought the topic was a little crazy, as if it's weird to perceive this way. I tend to process a lot of things through sound, and go around the world recognizing people by voice or unwillingly trying to place people's accents when they talk. I think it might be related somehow.
- mbivert 2y ago
  I remember reading once somewhere on the Internet someone baffled to learn that people weren't in control when dreaming. It's amusing how inner-experiences can unknowingly be so wildly different from person to person.
smokel 2y ago
Why does aphantasia come up so often on Hacker News? I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again. It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished. Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)
- smrq 2y ago
  I have a conjecture that aphantasia may be overrepresented in software disciplines. It seems sensible to me that a field which is almost wholly abstract would select a higher proportion of aphantasic people than average, as it would be of no hindrance. (I would expect the same from mathematics and maybe some sciences, but I'm not a member of any such community so I wouldn't know firsthand.) Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.
  - mdswanson 2y ago
    There's research that people with aphantasia are over-represented in STEM fields: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are-more-likely-to-work-in-a-stem-field/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are...
    - smokel 2y ago
      Thanks for sharing that link. It's risky business to infer anything from job preferences though. Consider that (as far as I know) an extraordinarily large proportion of professional programmers are male -- obviously a cultural phenomenon. We certainly cannot infer that a talent for programming is located on the y-chromosome. Edit after reading the paper associated with that link: > Our aphantasic and hyperphantasic samples were opportunistic, in the sense that our participants had approached us spontaneously following publicity triggered by our original publication This suggests that many of the participants actually read scientific publications (or reporting thereof). That's an obviously biased set of people who indeed are way more likely to work in STEM (and have an abundance of time to spend browsing the web), rather than as hairdressers.
mdswanson 2y ago
A good introduction to aphantasia (I'm a total, multi-sensory aphant): https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/
kneel 2y ago
The mass recoginition of Aphantasia and the rise of screentime seems somewhat correlated. They might be reinforcing one another, multiple avenues of cognition could be warping in unprecedented ways. Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  Nope. Not even remotely. Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Isn’t this essentially the same concern that Socrates had about writing according to Plato: “… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
- ben_w 2y ago
  Screen time correlates with: • Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3_correlates-with_average-milk-produced-per-cow-in-the-us https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-... • Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3_correlates-with_visitors-to-universal-orlandos-islands-of-adventure https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global... • Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popularity-of-the-first-name-graham_correlates-with_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3 https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula... Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.
xpl 2y ago
There is a sort of confusion when people read about aphantasia, they tend to imagine (pun intended) that most people have vivid pictures when they close their eyes, coming to conclusion that they must have aphantasia, because it isn't what happens with them. But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)! Nonetheless, most people can "visualize" when they imagine objects, people's faces, places from memory — but it is totally not like AR (i.e. actually overlaying images on top of light perception). Nope, it feels more like you see it with some mysterious "mind's eye", disconnected from real eyes. It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels". And it doesn't require having eyes closed, people often can do it as easily with their eyes open, as it doesn't interfere with the normal vision at all.
- temp0826 2y ago
  IME with ayahuasca (but probably other psychedelics too), there are different types of visions you might have. I've clearly experienced the typical CEVs but also have stark images coming through my mind's eye (much more akin to normal life visualizing). My tolerance is pretty high, it takes me an absurd amount to have the full-on technicolor visions, but I do seem to get a lot of color through my mind's eye still (usually related to the master plant diets and their spirits). There is another type of vision I've experienced that is somewhere in between that I have a lot of trouble describing, it pops out in a different way on top of normal vision.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ergonaught 2y ago
  Most of my family actually see things. One or two of them would qualify as hyperphantasiac, presumably. I see absolutely nothing. When you say “it” is “faint and tacit”, you are describing an “it” that simply does not exist for me. I see a whole lot of people who don’t have aphantasia get hung up on this. They keep describing an “it” without accepting that for some of us there is no “it”. The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor. I then ask them to answer, from memory, simple things like what color was the ball, what kind of table was it, what material was the floor, was there a sound when the ball fell to the floor, what else happened, etc. No one I’ve known with aphantasia (including myself) has answers for any such questions when asked to recall what they just imagined, but almost all can answer such questions “while imagining”.
carver 2y ago
It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either. By my rough count of Figure 2 tests, where Derek is at 0 to Loren at 6 (ignoring F), I have about 3.5 atypical responses. My experience with Figure 2: A) I can flip between cone and weird triangle, saw the cone first B) I see it as if someone placed identical cat stickers on the drawing. I can intellectually understand the perspective, how the upper-right one is supposed to be bigger, but don't experience it that way. C) I see that there is an implicit rectangle (to me it looks slightly wider than tall). But the color doesn't "spread" to the middle, it's just like 2A -- a boundary in the surrounding shapes implicitly extends into the empty space to form a rectangle shape. D) It takes minimal, but non-zero effort to see the vase E) It's trivial to flip between the two orientations of the cube F) skipped G) I don't understand what I'm looking for here. I see clouds, sky, and a silhouette with a tree. Is there a face in it somewhere? I can see the smiley face on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either. I believe you’re correct, since I commonly see it presented as a spectrum. https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/
- stoniejohnson 2y ago
  For G) I'm seeing something akin to the Moon falling in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Basically a face staring at the tree from above.
  - carver 2y ago
    Fascinating. Thanks for the clue. It's the most complete blank for me of all the tests. I looked up the reference image, but still cannot see it in figure 2G. I can't even guess at where the eyes/nose/mouth are in the clouds.
    - stoniejohnson 2y ago
treme 2y ago
plugging https://www.reddit.com/r/cureaphantasia https://www.reddit.com/r/cureaphantasia , started by a dev who claims to have cured his aphantasia
harel 2y ago
I also have no visual at all, no inner monologue and I don't have ability to hear sounds or music or bring up tastes or smells. I've accepted that about me, but there are two dishes my grandmothers used to make that I'm desperately trying to hang on to a memory of their taste profile,but I only remember it as an abstract description of the taste or as my reaction to eating it. I know I'll recognize it if eaten again but I can't bring that taste back otherwise.

When I saw the title I thought it's about current state of AI. That's what currently AI is missing. Imagination.

Some months, maybe a couple of years ago I realised that I have no "mind's eye". For example I know I have grandchildren but I cannot visualise them. I cannot visualise a neighbour, or food, or a location. That this happens is odd but I can live with it. More recently I was thinking about gaming, and more specifically Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, City Skylines (all of which I own but get nowhere with) and other games where you play, you fail, you plan, you repeat. Even Minecraft. Someone else - I presume - plays, fails, learns, repeats and so gain a step toward mastery of the game. (I accept from reading that mastery of DF isn't happening soon). I presume that players visualise mistakes and visualise workrounds. I cannot do that, I do not know how. I have thousands of hours in gaming but I cannot recall them visually, so I respond in-game to what is happening in-game. That may not make sense. There will be some learning but in a non-visual way. Is this aphantasia? I have no idea and I'm not about to be diagnosed. I do have vivid and lucid dreaming but ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen. That's definitely aphantasia as I understand (and suffer from) it. I've never really considered the "visual learning from failure" aspect of it. I know that in, e.g., Minecraft, I have tremendous trouble with building things because I can't visualise them beforehand and thus things get hodgepodged into these hideous homunculi of buildings or redstone contraptions.
thinkingemote 2y ago
One way that scientists test is to use modality agnostic language. For example something like "imagine going to a store to shop for a new sofa. You find one and imagine where it would go in your room." Then you change or introduce things "make the sofa 50% smaller" then a bit more "change the colour of it to deep yellow" etc Or imagine getting on a bus and their is only one seat left.
dynisor 2y ago
I am definitely not a doctor. However, I have a friend diagnosed with aphantasia and this is almost exactly how she described it to me.
lairv 2y ago
Not exactly the same but recently I realised that I can visualize the face of most of the people I know, my parents, my family, my friends, however I'm unable to visualize my own face
Buttons840 2y ago
Can you draw things without a reference? What happens if you try to play pictionary?
- markx2 2y ago
  If I cannot see - with my eyes there and then - a scribble happens. To sort of expand: I'm old enough that a diagnosis makes zero difference. But it does explain so much. When misophonia became a thing it explained so much of my reactions to certain noises, that I was not alone. Just knowing that others are experiencing the same removes some of that aloneness.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- khazhoux 2y ago
  I'm aphantasic but I've drawn my whole life. In Pictionary I show off and draw exactly the thing being described, meanwhile others struggle with their stick figures. It's hilarious. So on the one hand I can draw an excellent random generic man or a generic face. If you pose for me I'll do an uncanny portrait. But I can't draw my wife of 30 years -- I can't even see her in my mind. I can't draw an actor I've seen 200 times unless I were to sit with photographs and ingrain their face by deliberate practice
AQuantized 2y ago
Using Prison Architect as an example, when playing can you 'remember' the dimensions of the different rooms you've built? Or would you have to zoom out to plan an extension of your prison? It definitely sounds like aphantasia.
- markx2 2y ago
  I would have to zoom out / pan around. I am unable to have any sort of vision of what I want/need.

orta 2y ago

Cool! I think I'd be classed as deep Aphant like Loren (one of the paper's authors) but I also have an internal monologue.

japoco 2y ago

I was pretty intrigued by Aphantasia a while ago, as I can’t picture anything at all with my eyes closed. Then I asked all my friends and none of them could either, apparently. So I’m wondering what “picturing” means in the definition of aphantasia? With my eyes closed all I see is pitch black, but I can “imagine” myself seeing a red apple even with my eyes open, I don’t actually see anything though.

t-3 2y ago
Actually seeing with your eyes would (I think) be a form of synesthesia. Being able to imagine a red apple is "normal". Not being able to imagine a red apple is aphantasia ("imagine" in the sense of a "visual" imagination, not in the sense of being able to conjecture the existence of an apple with particular qualities).
- dataflow 2y ago
  Does it follow that people with aphantasia (edit: "aphantasics", per the article) would be unable to draw a realistic-looking apple from scratch? If not, then how do scientists show someone has aphantasia? Is it falsifiable?
  - t-3 2y ago
    Not at all - you can still see the paper and know what an apple is supposed to look like. Describing a face or drawing a scene from memory is very hard though.
    - dataflow 2y ago
      That doesn't really make sense to me. What does it mean to "know what an apple looks like" without being unable to imagine it? How would that be any different from knowing what a face looks like without being able to imagine it? Do note I said realistic apple [1], not just a cartoonish drawing, so I don't just mean "a squished circle"... [1] Example: https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic-apple.jpg https://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/hyperrealistic...

asveikau 2y ago

I slowly realized I have aphantasia by reading an HN comment about it last December. That day I started asking my daughter questions about visualizing things and daydreams and she ended up giving me a perfect description of aphantasia with minimal prompting. It's very interesting to have gone through life not realizing I have this difference. A few people I asked the same questions of who do not seem to have aphantasia thought the topic was a little crazy, as if it's weird to perceive this way. I tend to process a lot of things through sound, and go around the world recognizing people by voice or unwillingly trying to place people's accents when they talk. I think it might be related somehow.

mbivert 2y ago
I remember reading once somewhere on the Internet someone baffled to learn that people weren't in control when dreaming. It's amusing how inner-experiences can unknowingly be so wildly different from person to person.

smokel 2y ago

Why does aphantasia come up so often on Hacker News? I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again. It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished. Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)

smrq 2y ago
I have a conjecture that aphantasia may be overrepresented in software disciplines. It seems sensible to me that a field which is almost wholly abstract would select a higher proportion of aphantasic people than average, as it would be of no hindrance. (I would expect the same from mathematics and maybe some sciences, but I'm not a member of any such community so I wouldn't know firsthand.) Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.
- mdswanson 2y ago
  There's research that people with aphantasia are over-represented in STEM fields: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are-more-likely-to-work-in-a-stem-field/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/people-with-aphantasia-are...
  - smokel 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing that link. It's risky business to infer anything from job preferences though. Consider that (as far as I know) an extraordinarily large proportion of professional programmers are male -- obviously a cultural phenomenon. We certainly cannot infer that a talent for programming is located on the y-chromosome. Edit after reading the paper associated with that link: > Our aphantasic and hyperphantasic samples were opportunistic, in the sense that our participants had approached us spontaneously following publicity triggered by our original publication This suggests that many of the participants actually read scientific publications (or reporting thereof). That's an obviously biased set of people who indeed are way more likely to work in STEM (and have an abundance of time to spend browsing the web), rather than as hairdressers.

mdswanson 2y ago

A good introduction to aphantasia (I'm a total, multi-sensory aphant): https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/

kneel 2y ago

The mass recoginition of Aphantasia and the rise of screentime seems somewhat correlated. They might be reinforcing one another, multiple avenues of cognition could be warping in unprecedented ways. Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.

light_hue_1 2y ago
Nope. Not even remotely. Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.
pavlov 2y ago
Isn’t this essentially the same concern that Socrates had about writing according to Plato: “… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
ben_w 2y ago
Screen time correlates with: • Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3_correlates-with_average-milk-produced-per-cow-in-the-us https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-... • Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3_correlates-with_visitors-to-universal-orlandos-islands-of-adventure https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global... • Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popularity-of-the-first-name-graham_correlates-with_global-apple-iphone-sales-in-q3 https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula... Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.

xpl 2y ago

There is a sort of confusion when people read about aphantasia, they tend to imagine (pun intended) that most people have vivid pictures when they close their eyes, coming to conclusion that they must have aphantasia, because it isn't what happens with them. But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)! Nonetheless, most people can "visualize" when they imagine objects, people's faces, places from memory — but it is totally not like AR (i.e. actually overlaying images on top of light perception). Nope, it feels more like you see it with some mysterious "mind's eye", disconnected from real eyes. It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels". And it doesn't require having eyes closed, people often can do it as easily with their eyes open, as it doesn't interfere with the normal vision at all.

temp0826 2y ago
IME with ayahuasca (but probably other psychedelics too), there are different types of visions you might have. I've clearly experienced the typical CEVs but also have stark images coming through my mind's eye (much more akin to normal life visualizing). My tolerance is pretty high, it takes me an absurd amount to have the full-on technicolor visions, but I do seem to get a lot of color through my mind's eye still (usually related to the master plant diets and their spirits). There is another type of vision I've experienced that is somewhere in between that I have a lot of trouble describing, it pops out in a different way on top of normal vision.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ergonaught 2y ago
Most of my family actually see things. One or two of them would qualify as hyperphantasiac, presumably. I see absolutely nothing. When you say “it” is “faint and tacit”, you are describing an “it” that simply does not exist for me. I see a whole lot of people who don’t have aphantasia get hung up on this. They keep describing an “it” without accepting that for some of us there is no “it”. The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor. I then ask them to answer, from memory, simple things like what color was the ball, what kind of table was it, what material was the floor, was there a sound when the ball fell to the floor, what else happened, etc. No one I’ve known with aphantasia (including myself) has answers for any such questions when asked to recall what they just imagined, but almost all can answer such questions “while imagining”.

carver 2y ago

It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either. By my rough count of Figure 2 tests, where Derek is at 0 to Loren at 6 (ignoring F), I have about 3.5 atypical responses. My experience with Figure 2: A) I can flip between cone and weird triangle, saw the cone first B) I see it as if someone placed identical cat stickers on the drawing. I can intellectually understand the perspective, how the upper-right one is supposed to be bigger, but don't experience it that way. C) I see that there is an implicit rectangle (to me it looks slightly wider than tall). But the color doesn't "spread" to the middle, it's just like 2A -- a boundary in the surrounding shapes implicitly extends into the empty space to form a rectangle shape. D) It takes minimal, but non-zero effort to see the vase E) It's trivial to flip between the two orientations of the cube F) skipped G) I don't understand what I'm looking for here. I see clouds, sky, and a silhouette with a tree. Is there a face in it somewhere? I can see the smiley face on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

CharlesW 2y ago
> It seems that Aphantasia does not globally bin into two groups, since I don't fit in either. I believe you’re correct, since I commonly see it presented as a spectrum. https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/ https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/
stoniejohnson 2y ago
For G) I'm seeing something akin to the Moon falling in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Basically a face staring at the tree from above.
- carver 2y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks for the clue. It's the most complete blank for me of all the tests. I looked up the reference image, but still cannot see it in figure 2G. I can't even guess at where the eyes/nose/mouth are in the clouds.
  - stoniejohnson 2y ago

treme 2y ago

plugging https://www.reddit.com/r/cureaphantasia https://www.reddit.com/r/cureaphantasia , started by a dev who claims to have cured his aphantasia

harel 2y ago

I also have no visual at all, no inner monologue and I don't have ability to hear sounds or music or bring up tastes or smells. I've accepted that about me, but there are two dishes my grandmothers used to make that I'm desperately trying to hang on to a memory of their taste profile,but I only remember it as an abstract description of the taste or as my reaction to eating it. I know I'll recognize it if eaten again but I can't bring that taste back otherwise.