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An aphantasia "beginner's guide" for those who aren't familiar or just want to learn more: https://aphantasia.com/guide/ https://aphantasia.com/guide/

card_zero 1y ago
I feel in my gut that this is fad-driven internet bullshit, and I would like to learn less, if it were possible. > Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurologist from Exeter, receives a patient who can no longer imagine — known as patient MX. MX goes blind in his mind’s eye after undergoing surgery. > Media outlets like the New York Times report the findings. This leads to an outpouring of new discoverers. Hmm
- cnity 1y ago
  My gut feel has always been that it is just a language thing where some people think that when others imagine things that they literally see it right in front of them _the same way_ they see real things. Like, when I imagine a scene or object in my head, I am not literally seeing it. It's like some vague in-between thing. And that people who claim to have aphantasia just have a higher bar for what it means to "see" something. Though I'm open to being corrected if there's some concrete experiment that can be performed that shows definitively that some people can not imagine things _at all_.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Patient MX there is quite persuasive. Lots of neuroscience discoveries start with somebody having some brain damage and losing a facility of some kind. However, most of the people claiming aphantasia, or the extreme opposite, are not brain damaged. At least not literally. It would also be more valuable information if some area was damaged that was known to cause the effect.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    The parent article has brain scans showing different activations in control brains vs aphantasia vs hyperphantasia. Also when people self report that their experience has qualitatively changed that seems like a pretty strong indicator that’s at least a range.
    - suddenlybananas 1y ago
      The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.
      - roxolotl 1y ago
        So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?
        suddenlybananas 1y ago
        Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.
        roxolotl 1y ago
        That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.
        card_zero 1y ago
        But people who do dmt are also liable to say "oh shit I can see the machine elves, I totally get what people mean now". Which is not to say that their reports are unreliable, just inscrutable.
        vidarh 1y ago
        I have aphantasia, but I have had one experience of seeing clear imagery while awake (and it was not on drugs) They are not remotely similar.
  - eitland 1y ago
    Maybe you have aphantasia as well. I had without knowing it. Some observations: Someone told me to close my eyes and think about "an apple at a table". Then I was told to open my eyes and tell what color the apple was. The question didn't make sense to me: I only thought about about the concept of "an apple on a table". When my eyes are closed it is black. Absolutely black. Blacker than a Norwegian winter night with cloud cover and no moon. There is nothing. Until then I thought all this talk about seing things was just a metaphor for what I had also done. But when I talk to others they will often immediately say it was green or red. Because they saw it. Two extra observations: Sometimes just before I fall asleep I can sometimes think images of stuff that doesn't exist: think 3d modeling with simple shapes. And just after waking up I can sometimes manage to see relatively detailed images of actual physical things. Both these only last for a few seconds to a few minutes. Does this help?
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Are you trying to help them believe?
      - eitland 1y ago
        Yes. Or maybe rather understand. For me it was a lightbulb moment just like my realisation of exactly how bad my colourblindness was: what is next to impossible for me to see (red drawings on woods in maps) was chosen by someone who thought it stood out. I'm at least pointing out that I now know personally that there are multiple levels of visualisation, from me just "feeling" what it would mean to rotate a 3d object (it works, I can absolutely determine if it will fit but it is absolutely not visual) up to some close friends of mine that see vivid pictures of faces and can combine them with eyes closed. For me who cannot see images except what I physically see it certainly is interesting to hear people describe remembering peoples phone numbers as text that they can see (I remember the feeling of myself saying it, not the sound) or memorising my name by mentally putting the image of ne next to their image of their brother who has the same name as me (!) It really is funny, because I can draw. For example the famous "draw a bike" thing seems weird to me because I can't see myself making any of the mistakes from any of the drawings. Not because I can see a bike, but because I know it.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    My gut feel is that people's experiences can be quite different. V.S. Ramachandran's books have nudged me to take these things more seriously. I think visual imagination is also related to spatial rotation abilities. For example can you imagine yourself in your hometown, then imagine an "animation" as you (from a first-person perspective) fly up vertically, then turn in various directions and sort of feel where the landmarks are in the mind's eye? Or does that sound nonsense to you? Would you agree that being faster at certain tasks (that require a visual scratchpad - e.g. imagining a tabletop and being told what happens e.g. add a triangle on the left, add a square halfway overlapping the triangle etc) indicates that someone has more vivid imagination?
  - vidarh 1y ago
    I have aphantasia. I do not normally see things in my inner eye at all, but I still "imagine" things. I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them. But I do see images while dreaming. It's very distinct from imagining things while awake and unable to see them. And I have had one waking experience where I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake, in a dark room, with my eyes closed during meditation. It was very different from when I'm dreaming. This is not a "language thing". Until the experience mentioned above, I had gone ~40 years with no idea seeing things in your minds eye while awake was a thing at all.
    - cnity 1y ago
      > I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them. This is what I mean though. What do you mean by "see" exactly, if not imagine? You can imagine something so clearly that you are able to replicate it on paper, yet that is not the minds eye? I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things. > I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
      - tekla 1y ago
        It's super interesting to read these accounts. I have my doubts that Aphatasia is real for 99% of people who claim to have it and its a language issue. What is imagination if not seeing the thing in your head. Do people think others LITERALLY see an object like photons are hitting their neurons directly?
        vidarh 1y ago
        Some people do report seeing things as clear as if photos are hitting their eyes. Most people report more diffuse views. I see nothing, but I have seen once, and when I did, I did "literally" see an object as clear as if I was looking straight at it, or to be more precisely a I saw a whole scene.
        1y ago
  - HK-NC 1y ago
    Personally I can imagine something with such detail and depth that my eyes are effectively blacked out despite being open. I can also imagine a grayscale 2D apple fine too, so Im not completely fucked if I have an abstract thought driving a car.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  I also lost the ability to think in images after a series of surgeries at 13. I went from being a very imaginative kid with dream like states while awake to purely lexical. I stopped enjoying playing pretend with my sister basically overnight, I just couldn't see it any more. I still do have visual dreams though they are rare, I can no longer conjure any sense of an object while awake. I have a couple images from before this (my mother's face before she died) that I can kind of almost see, idk, or I have the feeling like I'm seeing them. Call it whatever you like, maybe there is a natural distribution, I always thought of it as the cost I paid to stay alive, my own personal brain damage even though my surgeries were all cardiovascular.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    I respect you, fellowniusmonk, but all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. People want me to be nice about this and acknowledge that the thing exists because they all say it does. The best I can offer is acknowledgement that you all say it does. On the other hand, you have a special claim to plausibility because of the surgery. Oh wait cardiovascular surgery? So, are we saying anaesthetic side effects? Or brain damage from reduced blood flow maybe. I'll note that a lot of people's impressions and feelings about ... what it's like to be alive, generally ... undergo a radical transformation at about age 13, because hormones.
    - graeme 1y ago
      >all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. Is there any other way to get information on what people see internally? The idea that great artists, for example, don't have dramatically different visualization than people who report not seeing sharp images or images at all seems like the theory in need of proof. You can't just say the evidence is subjective so you're right. The evidence only ever could be subjective.
      - card_zero 1y ago
        Did I say I'm right? I assume we're all wrong in ways yet to be discovered, that's my default position on everything. And I've modified my viewpoint slightly just now: I accept that there are loose groups of people who experience imagination differently. So I'm being decently open-minded here, what do you want, blood?
- perrygeo 1y ago
  Aphantasia makes a number of testable hypotheses and can/has/continues to be dealt with as a serious scientific question. But instead of taking the time to do even the bare minimum of research, you trust your gut to tell you that it's bullshit. Classy.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    You didn't really say anything here yourself other than that you're awed by it. Also that I'm the one who has to do all the work apparently.
    - perrygeo 1y ago
      If you're gonna come out and say "trust my gut, this is bullshit" - yes, you do need to do all the work.
      - card_zero 1y ago
        Why's that, then? I'm digging around in the Wikipedia article on "burden of proof", quick, head me off at the pass before I quote it. Heh, it mentions "burden tennis". It all devolves to who's got the status quo on their side and who's making the extraordinary claim, or not. I can see why fistfights are a popular way to resolve disagreements.
        perrygeo 1y ago
        Google scholar has 5000+ hits on the term, I'd suggest starting there. Once you've completely your meta-analysis proving that it's all "bullshit", let us know. That's how science works. You think your 10 minutes scrolling wikipedia substitutes for decades of research? Surely, since you and your gut feel so strongly about it, the evidence should speak for itself.
        card_zero 1y ago
        You can tell me what the testable hypothesis is.
- haswell 1y ago
  What are you trying to imply with the “hmm”? I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place. So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept. Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense. I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like. And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical. And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream. It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real. But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike. And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.
- khazhoux 1y ago
  Are you saying you think everyone can see basically the same amount of imagery? I’m quite convinced it’s a real distinction. I have nearly zero visualization. The main thing for me is that I may get a fleeting glimpse of part of an image if I focus, but it evaporates instantly. I can’t hold it for any amount of time whatsoever. On the other hand, I have very strong internal audio. I can play back music I haven’t heard for years or even decades. I hear the different instruments come in, the timbres, etc. It’s obviously not the same as music hitting my eardrums, but it is full, detailed audio which I can pause at will, rewind and pick apart. I’m told there are people that can’t hear any sound in their heads at all...
- jpfromlondon 1y ago
  it is, it's unfalsifiable nonsense because nobody actually "sees" things in their "minds eye", when someone imagines something it's just a generic default instantiation of whatever, the properties might list "red" and "cube" but the individual doesn't "see" the red cube. It's just another way for attention seekers to feel special.
cassianoleal 1y ago
I read much of that guide. I was initially led to believe that I have aphantasia. I certainly don't see things that don't exist - that would be an hallucination. I can imagine and describe it in vivid detail if I want, but it's not there - I don't see it in the same way I see the physical reflection of light on surfaces. Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres. Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though. Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia. Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D
- amenhotep 1y ago
  It leaves you with not having aphantasia! I rather suspect quite a lot of people who believe they have it simply differ on the level of literalism they're willing to use to describe their imagination than those who've led them to believe they have it.
  - cassianoleal 1y ago
    > It leaves you with not having aphantasia! That's what I always assumed from reading about it in the past, where it was mostly "I can't imagine things in my mind". Well, I can certainly imagine things. Now, the guide in the top comment talks about actually seeing things. I don't. As in, really not at all, for any interpretation of "seeing" I can think of. I wouldn't even describe it as fuzzy - it's just not an image at all, it's more abstract thought and abstract perception. Hence my confusion.
- asdff 1y ago
  Can you sit back and picture something at all? Like if I said "imagine the exterior of your house" would you actually imagine that or would you just be unable to do that at all?

card_zero 1y ago

I feel in my gut that this is fad-driven internet bullshit, and I would like to learn less, if it were possible. > Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurologist from Exeter, receives a patient who can no longer imagine — known as patient MX. MX goes blind in his mind’s eye after undergoing surgery. > Media outlets like the New York Times report the findings. This leads to an outpouring of new discoverers. Hmm

cnity 1y ago
My gut feel has always been that it is just a language thing where some people think that when others imagine things that they literally see it right in front of them _the same way_ they see real things. Like, when I imagine a scene or object in my head, I am not literally seeing it. It's like some vague in-between thing. And that people who claim to have aphantasia just have a higher bar for what it means to "see" something. Though I'm open to being corrected if there's some concrete experiment that can be performed that shows definitively that some people can not imagine things _at all_.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Patient MX there is quite persuasive. Lots of neuroscience discoveries start with somebody having some brain damage and losing a facility of some kind. However, most of the people claiming aphantasia, or the extreme opposite, are not brain damaged. At least not literally. It would also be more valuable information if some area was damaged that was known to cause the effect.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  The parent article has brain scans showing different activations in control brains vs aphantasia vs hyperphantasia. Also when people self report that their experience has qualitatively changed that seems like a pretty strong indicator that’s at least a range.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.
    - roxolotl 1y ago
      So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?
      - suddenlybananas 1y ago
        Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.
        roxolotl 1y ago
        That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.
        card_zero 1y ago
        But people who do dmt are also liable to say "oh shit I can see the machine elves, I totally get what people mean now". Which is not to say that their reports are unreliable, just inscrutable.
        vidarh 1y ago
        I have aphantasia, but I have had one experience of seeing clear imagery while awake (and it was not on drugs) They are not remotely similar.
- eitland 1y ago
  Maybe you have aphantasia as well. I had without knowing it. Some observations: Someone told me to close my eyes and think about "an apple at a table". Then I was told to open my eyes and tell what color the apple was. The question didn't make sense to me: I only thought about about the concept of "an apple on a table". When my eyes are closed it is black. Absolutely black. Blacker than a Norwegian winter night with cloud cover and no moon. There is nothing. Until then I thought all this talk about seing things was just a metaphor for what I had also done. But when I talk to others they will often immediately say it was green or red. Because they saw it. Two extra observations: Sometimes just before I fall asleep I can sometimes think images of stuff that doesn't exist: think 3d modeling with simple shapes. And just after waking up I can sometimes manage to see relatively detailed images of actual physical things. Both these only last for a few seconds to a few minutes. Does this help?
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Are you trying to help them believe?
    - eitland 1y ago
      Yes. Or maybe rather understand. For me it was a lightbulb moment just like my realisation of exactly how bad my colourblindness was: what is next to impossible for me to see (red drawings on woods in maps) was chosen by someone who thought it stood out. I'm at least pointing out that I now know personally that there are multiple levels of visualisation, from me just "feeling" what it would mean to rotate a 3d object (it works, I can absolutely determine if it will fit but it is absolutely not visual) up to some close friends of mine that see vivid pictures of faces and can combine them with eyes closed. For me who cannot see images except what I physically see it certainly is interesting to hear people describe remembering peoples phone numbers as text that they can see (I remember the feeling of myself saying it, not the sound) or memorising my name by mentally putting the image of ne next to their image of their brother who has the same name as me (!) It really is funny, because I can draw. For example the famous "draw a bike" thing seems weird to me because I can't see myself making any of the mistakes from any of the drawings. Not because I can see a bike, but because I know it.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  My gut feel is that people's experiences can be quite different. V.S. Ramachandran's books have nudged me to take these things more seriously. I think visual imagination is also related to spatial rotation abilities. For example can you imagine yourself in your hometown, then imagine an "animation" as you (from a first-person perspective) fly up vertically, then turn in various directions and sort of feel where the landmarks are in the mind's eye? Or does that sound nonsense to you? Would you agree that being faster at certain tasks (that require a visual scratchpad - e.g. imagining a tabletop and being told what happens e.g. add a triangle on the left, add a square halfway overlapping the triangle etc) indicates that someone has more vivid imagination?
- vidarh 1y ago
  I have aphantasia. I do not normally see things in my inner eye at all, but I still "imagine" things. I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them. But I do see images while dreaming. It's very distinct from imagining things while awake and unable to see them. And I have had one waking experience where I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake, in a dark room, with my eyes closed during meditation. It was very different from when I'm dreaming. This is not a "language thing". Until the experience mentioned above, I had gone ~40 years with no idea seeing things in your minds eye while awake was a thing at all.
  - cnity 1y ago
    > I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them. This is what I mean though. What do you mean by "see" exactly, if not imagine? You can imagine something so clearly that you are able to replicate it on paper, yet that is not the minds eye? I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things. > I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
    - tekla 1y ago
      It's super interesting to read these accounts. I have my doubts that Aphatasia is real for 99% of people who claim to have it and its a language issue. What is imagination if not seeing the thing in your head. Do people think others LITERALLY see an object like photons are hitting their neurons directly?
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Some people do report seeing things as clear as if photos are hitting their eyes. Most people report more diffuse views. I see nothing, but I have seen once, and when I did, I did "literally" see an object as clear as if I was looking straight at it, or to be more precisely a I saw a whole scene.
      - 1y ago
- HK-NC 1y ago
  Personally I can imagine something with such detail and depth that my eyes are effectively blacked out despite being open. I can also imagine a grayscale 2D apple fine too, so Im not completely fucked if I have an abstract thought driving a car.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
I also lost the ability to think in images after a series of surgeries at 13. I went from being a very imaginative kid with dream like states while awake to purely lexical. I stopped enjoying playing pretend with my sister basically overnight, I just couldn't see it any more. I still do have visual dreams though they are rare, I can no longer conjure any sense of an object while awake. I have a couple images from before this (my mother's face before she died) that I can kind of almost see, idk, or I have the feeling like I'm seeing them. Call it whatever you like, maybe there is a natural distribution, I always thought of it as the cost I paid to stay alive, my own personal brain damage even though my surgeries were all cardiovascular.
- card_zero 1y ago
  I respect you, fellowniusmonk, but all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. People want me to be nice about this and acknowledge that the thing exists because they all say it does. The best I can offer is acknowledgement that you all say it does. On the other hand, you have a special claim to plausibility because of the surgery. Oh wait cardiovascular surgery? So, are we saying anaesthetic side effects? Or brain damage from reduced blood flow maybe. I'll note that a lot of people's impressions and feelings about ... what it's like to be alive, generally ... undergo a radical transformation at about age 13, because hormones.
  - graeme 1y ago
    >all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. Is there any other way to get information on what people see internally? The idea that great artists, for example, don't have dramatically different visualization than people who report not seeing sharp images or images at all seems like the theory in need of proof. You can't just say the evidence is subjective so you're right. The evidence only ever could be subjective.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Did I say I'm right? I assume we're all wrong in ways yet to be discovered, that's my default position on everything. And I've modified my viewpoint slightly just now: I accept that there are loose groups of people who experience imagination differently. So I'm being decently open-minded here, what do you want, blood?
perrygeo 1y ago
Aphantasia makes a number of testable hypotheses and can/has/continues to be dealt with as a serious scientific question. But instead of taking the time to do even the bare minimum of research, you trust your gut to tell you that it's bullshit. Classy.
- card_zero 1y ago
  You didn't really say anything here yourself other than that you're awed by it. Also that I'm the one who has to do all the work apparently.
  - perrygeo 1y ago
    If you're gonna come out and say "trust my gut, this is bullshit" - yes, you do need to do all the work.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Why's that, then? I'm digging around in the Wikipedia article on "burden of proof", quick, head me off at the pass before I quote it. Heh, it mentions "burden tennis". It all devolves to who's got the status quo on their side and who's making the extraordinary claim, or not. I can see why fistfights are a popular way to resolve disagreements.
      - perrygeo 1y ago
        Google scholar has 5000+ hits on the term, I'd suggest starting there. Once you've completely your meta-analysis proving that it's all "bullshit", let us know. That's how science works. You think your 10 minutes scrolling wikipedia substitutes for decades of research? Surely, since you and your gut feel so strongly about it, the evidence should speak for itself.
        card_zero 1y ago
        You can tell me what the testable hypothesis is.
haswell 1y ago
What are you trying to imply with the “hmm”? I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place. So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept. Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense. I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like. And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical. And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream. It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real. But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike. And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.
khazhoux 1y ago
Are you saying you think everyone can see basically the same amount of imagery? I’m quite convinced it’s a real distinction. I have nearly zero visualization. The main thing for me is that I may get a fleeting glimpse of part of an image if I focus, but it evaporates instantly. I can’t hold it for any amount of time whatsoever. On the other hand, I have very strong internal audio. I can play back music I haven’t heard for years or even decades. I hear the different instruments come in, the timbres, etc. It’s obviously not the same as music hitting my eardrums, but it is full, detailed audio which I can pause at will, rewind and pick apart. I’m told there are people that can’t hear any sound in their heads at all...
jpfromlondon 1y ago
it is, it's unfalsifiable nonsense because nobody actually "sees" things in their "minds eye", when someone imagines something it's just a generic default instantiation of whatever, the properties might list "red" and "cube" but the individual doesn't "see" the red cube. It's just another way for attention seekers to feel special.

cassianoleal 1y ago

I read much of that guide. I was initially led to believe that I have aphantasia. I certainly don't see things that don't exist - that would be an hallucination. I can imagine and describe it in vivid detail if I want, but it's not there - I don't see it in the same way I see the physical reflection of light on surfaces. Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres. Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though. Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia. Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D

amenhotep 1y ago
It leaves you with not having aphantasia! I rather suspect quite a lot of people who believe they have it simply differ on the level of literalism they're willing to use to describe their imagination than those who've led them to believe they have it.
- cassianoleal 1y ago
  > It leaves you with not having aphantasia! That's what I always assumed from reading about it in the past, where it was mostly "I can't imagine things in my mind". Well, I can certainly imagine things. Now, the guide in the top comment talks about actually seeing things. I don't. As in, really not at all, for any interpretation of "seeing" I can think of. I wouldn't even describe it as fuzzy - it's just not an image at all, it's more abstract thought and abstract perception. Hence my confusion.
asdff 1y ago
Can you sit back and picture something at all? Like if I said "imagine the exterior of your house" would you actually imagine that or would you just be unable to do that at all?