8 ms·

I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? When I was in second grade, our teacher aske

• D-Machine 20d ago
  This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.
  • inigyou 20d ago
    When I took psychedelics they were still in effect when I went to sleep and I experienced unusually vivid and strange mental imagery. They call it closed-eye hallucinations, as opposed to mis-seeing the world around you while your eyes are open, which I also experienced.
  • t-3 20d ago
    I've never experienced visualization under the effect of hallucinogens, but I have once when I took very strong opiates.
• ludicrousdispla 20d ago
  A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.
  • jawns 20d ago
    I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
    • jacobsimon 20d ago
      Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.
      • t-3 20d ago
        No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).
• scruple 20d ago
  I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
• jstanley 20d ago
  I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes. If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.
  • frant-hartm 20d ago
    Ugh no. Even if the thing is right in front of me, I might not be able to draw the right proportions. It might be because I am no artist though, but my point is seeing with my own eyes is not strictly better. At some point the image in my head becomes better than what I see, e.g due to distance or lack of light.
  • cdelsolar 20d ago
    Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it? If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
  • inigyou 20d ago
    It is definitely different from seeing something. I'd guess it activates a subset of the semantic level neurons that activate when you see a thing. There are no actual pixels. I also guess that something similar happens in dreaming. When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.
• ozten 20d ago
  I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc. I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound. Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.
  • soupfordummies 20d ago
    can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?
    • ozten 20d ago
      Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.
    • ozten 20d ago
      If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.
  • mcmcmc 20d ago
    Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
    • ozten 20d ago
      I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
• basscomm 20d ago
  > but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying. If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
  • jawns 20d ago
    In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize. So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story. I'm not saying that all people who experience aphantasia are "just doing it wrong." But I can assert that in at least some cases it is a skill issue, because one of those cases was my own case.
    • antonvs 20d ago
      Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t. Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”. Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia. The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
      • jawns 20d ago
        Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane. So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.
• axegon_ 20d ago
  So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.
  • BobbyTables2 20d ago
    I’ve always wondered if some people can “draw on a whiteboard” in their mind. I certainly never could…
• nkrisc 20d ago
  It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes. I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight. It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.
  • mcmcmc 20d ago
    Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me
    • nkrisc 20d ago
      Easier to focus, perhaps, but for me it doesn’t really make any difference. Perhaps I’m the odd one then. It’s certainly a difficult topic to discuss with other people.
      • inigyou 20d ago
        I think for me it reduces distraction but otherwise has nothing to do with it.
  • cdelsolar 20d ago
    Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
• lampiaio 20d ago
  One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?
  • 0xfaded 20d ago
    It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it. Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p
  • 1135813fib 20d ago
    i've always used this image [1] as an example; it's there, but there's no "seeing" attached, just the conceptual understanding. [1] https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq51.jpg?auto=webp&s=4ce3b30879b8fb7139fd53deb1a8fc085ade630b https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq...
    • inigyou 20d ago
      Can you post a second source for those of us whom Reddit blocks?
      • tinkertrain 20d ago
        The article has a similar one (horse instead of elephant https://aphantasia.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.aphantasia.com%2Fimages%2Fimagine-horse-concept.png&w=2048&q=75 https://aphantasia.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.a...)
  • caturopath 20d ago
    Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
• feoren 20d ago
  I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be. A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something. So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.
  • y1n0 20d ago
    This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one. With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata: For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea. I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.
    • saltcured 20d ago
      I'm aphantasic, but I can relate to almost going blind with inattention. Not like I now have a black visual field, but just losing awareness of what is actually in it, like it is some sort of matte painting put up during intermission. But there remains some lower-level processing, because I may reflexively kick back into full seeing due to some unexpected change. For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall. Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
• citadel_melon 20d ago
  I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too. It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way. People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process. Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe. Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
• throwawaythekey 20d ago
  My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language. Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction. Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual). I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.
• inigyou 20d ago
  This makes me think of how everyone is born with the muscle to wiggle their ears, but if they don't discover it as an infant, it atrophies.
• Marciplan 20d ago
  it’s ok to just sympathize instead of running to those conclusions
• slv77 20d ago
  This is a blog post from someone who had aphantasia and was able to develop a minds eye. https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/ https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra... Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”. I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response. I would love to know what that is called.
• saghm 19d ago
  At best, what you're describing seems like a skill issue with the people describing it. Using multiple different metaphors that imply the thing you're saying is unrelated (mind'seye, visualization, image, etc) is just bad communication. I'm not making any argument for or against your hypothesis that everyone can actually do it but might just struggle. I just find it pretty confusing to even understand what anyone is talking about with this sort of thing to the point where I genuinely have no clue of I can do it or not. It seems like there are so many descriptions that to me seem conflicting that I don't know if I'm doing the same thing or if I'm just doing some crude approximation because that's all I'm capable of.
  • ethbr1 19d ago
    At the end of the day, it's the "Is your green my green?" question and is unknowable. You cannot describe something that someone lacks or has a substantially different subjective experience with, truly. The best we can do is show that the effects of your seeing green are the same as mine (biologically, behaviorally, etc). If you're curious about the broader subject, would highly recommend reading An Anthropologist on Mars.
    • vinceguidry 19d ago
      Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing. Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared. We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.
      • ethbr1 19d ago
        It's not the question of if objective physical green pigment is objective physical green pigment, but rather if what I see when I look at it is what you see (and not in the color blind sense, assuming neither of us are).