Yet another Hacker News

People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

79 points giuliomagnifico 10 hours ago 148 comments

ajb 9 hours ago | parent

Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.

Antipode 9 hours ago | parent

That's not really what the article is about: "Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."

IAmBroom 3 hours ago | parent

Knowing a thing exists is not the same as knowing how it interacts with other things.

vidarh 1 hour ago | parent

It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.

There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions

ThrowawayTestr 9 hours ago | parent

What does you mother look like?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

She's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory

nelox 9 hours ago | parent

What does that mean? You can recite a description you’ve read or heard, but what about looking at a photo and describing it?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

After looking at a photo? I have a memory of the "facts" of the photograph. I have no image of it

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

I can describe someone from memory, and I can draw them, but I can't see them unless they're in front of me (or I'm looking at a photo).

smusamashah 9 hours ago | parent

But if you only remember facts, can someone else pretend to be that person you remember with those facts?

Rohansi 9 hours ago | parent

No, memory is not limited to facts. There's just no visualization to go along with the recollection of faces etc. You can absolutely still recognize people correctly when looking at them.

godshatter 9 hours ago | parent

I'm also an aphant. Recognition still happens. I'll see a person I haven't seen in years, know that I know them, then finally remember who they are much later. Even though I can't picture them after seeing them, I'll still remember who they are much later. Usually, anyway.

I get stressed out having to meet someone I haven't seen for a long time in a cafe or something. I have to scan everyone and wait for that ping of recognition to happen.

drcongo 8 hours ago | parent

That's a fascinating question - I'm aphantasic and mildly face blind (I thought the two female leads in Disclosure Day were the same person for most of the movie and that we were jumping back and forth in her timeline). I've always assumed I'm face blind because of the aphantasia, but I know several aphantasics who have no problem recognising faces.

In answer to the question though, no - even as someone with face blindness, the faces of people I've known and loved for a long time are burned in somewhere - I just can't access that part of my brain at will.

tiborsaas 9 hours ago | parent

This is not a memory nor a detail recall issue. The visual part is just not there, but I know how my mother looks like :)

afavour 9 hours ago | parent

Not really how it works. I can describe an apple to you in great detail. I cannot imagine all of those things I described in a coherent image in my head. Personally sometimes I'm able to picture pieces or aspects of it for flashes but I cannot see an apple in my head.

Zealotux 9 hours ago | parent

I have total aphantasia and this is how I usually answer: it's like having a picture of my mother in my head, only for it to be obfuscated by an opaque veil, and there's a system in my mind that can peak behind it and feed me informations. In the end: I can never visualise her, but I can "query" informations, and when I see her I match her immediately with what I know her to look like.

JoshTriplett 9 hours ago | parent

Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file?

If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

I'm a musician, but don't "hear" music in my head. I have an extensive memory of lyrics, and can guess the next notes of a song, but I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it. I can recall the visuals of a movie scene similar to how I can tell you how my office is organized. It is a spatial memory of where things are and aligned with each other. I don't replay the scene in any sense of the word

orta 9 hours ago | parent

To add to this as a follow aphant - I don't have a way to hear sounds unless they are in my voice. So everything from songs, to sirens are simply me speaking it via inner monologue.

cyclopeanutopia 9 hours ago | parent

> I use my inner monologue to sing or hum it in my head, I don't hear it

Wdym? I think that the inner monologue is "hearing it", with a varying degree of vividness between people, of course.

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Some people hear orchestral swells when, say, reading a book that mentions them. I don't have that. I have an inner monologue that can sing. I forget the term but as I understand it there are people who don't have an inner monologue. I think many of those would still be able to have "sound" imagery

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

Some people hear it more like a recording.

cyclopeanutopia 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah, I can do that, but I think it is the same thing on a spectrum, just like the visual imagination.

vidarh 5 hours ago | parent

Hearing your own voice Vs high fidelity musical instruments and other people's voices seems like a very wide spectrum. And indeed, it is wider as some people don't hear anything at all, including no inner monologue (I know someone like that - she's a good writer, and it freaks people out to realise the she can't 'hear' the words before she writes them, which is weird, because my vocalisation of words I wrote noticeably lags my writing)

tekla 9 hours ago | parent

I'm pretty sure this is the default. Who literally hears music when thinking of it.

Kiro 9 hours ago | parent

I do and just asked around among friends. Everyone did.

drcongo 8 hours ago | parent

Most I think, especially among musicians, which makes the GP fascinating to me!

tekla 5 hours ago | parent

I can play the piano, saxaphone, and guitar, and I've never considered being able to think about music to be actually hearing it.

JoshTriplett 7 hours ago | parent

I do. I can "play it back" in my head, with full music/lyrics/chords/etc.

bethekidyouwant 5 hours ago | parent

Can you literally hear music in a dream have you never had an auditorial hallucination?

tekla 5 hours ago | parent

Yes I've had auditorial hallucinations. It was clearly inside my head, I was not "hearing" it

analog31 14 minutes ago | parent

I have music running in my head most of the time, at least in the background unless I’m concentrating deeply on something. I’m also a musician and the best way I can describe it is that the music I’m hearing in my head somehow comes out of my instrument.

logicallee 9 hours ago | parent

It reminds me of a joke. It's better told in person but you get the idea:

A percussionist takes a day off and decides to see one of his orchestra's performances. The next day he's back and talking to one of the other percussionists. "How was it?" the other one asks.

"Unbelievable! You know the part where we go buhm buhm buhm buhm?"

"Yeah?"

"Well guess what the rest of the orchestra is doing?"

hums a spirited rendition of the William Tell Overture!

mirror_neuron 9 hours ago | parent

As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

People's ability to "hear" music ranges from nothing at all to being able to "play back" close to what they heard. For my part, I have aphantasia, I can't hear the sound I heard, but I can "play it back" in my own voice (which is distinctly less pleasing).

As for movie scenes, I rarely tend to remember specific scenes - I tend to remember concepts and dialogue - but when I do remember a scene, I can often describe it in detail, and I can sketch out scenes, be it from movies or real life, that I remember well with a lot of spatial detail.

I suspect I probably do remember less of visuals than people without aphantasia because I don't really get much value from it, but I definitely can.

majiy 9 hours ago | parent

Not the person you asked, but a fellow Aphantast: I cannot imagine visually at all. End-of-Yoga-class imaginary journeys are completely useless for me. I'm also faceblind. But I can imagine music I'm familiar with without any problem, and have a inner monologue (it blew my mind when I learned that some people do not). Also I have visual dreams, but nowhere near to the level of details that I have heard other people describe.

I image a movie scene: There is a man sitting at a table in a cantina. He has dark hair, slightly rugged clothes. Standing next to his table is a little green alien that targets a blaster at him. The person is sitting low, at an angle that prevents the alien from seeing that he has drawn his own blaster below the table. I know all of this, but I have no visual image of it. If I had to draw what I see in my head it would be a blank piece of paper with arrows pointing at certain points, labeled with "Han", "Table" and "Greebo".

vidarh 5 hours ago | parent

Some people have inner dialogues. Some authors are literally writing down what characters are saying in their head, and sometimes what they see them "do" as well.

drcongo 8 hours ago | parent

Aphantasic here - I constantly have music playing in my head to the point of it being slightly annoying. If I really concentrate, I can separate out the parts like stem separation, but generally it's a fairly high fidelity recreation of the most prominent parts. There was a brilliant thread on Mastodon a couple of years ago where people (mostly musicians) were describing their inner-music abilities - mine turned out to be very ordinary. The only time mine ever approach what many of the others described is when I'm very slightly stoned - then my brain starts to compose original music at extremely high fidelity in basically any genre. I just wish I could get it out of there.

jareklupinski 9 hours ago | parent

how is your proprioception? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception

e.g. if you put your hand behind your back and move it up and down randomly, then stop suddenly, can you tell if it's stopped closer to your legs than your neck?

i cant think of a better test for it :( (clinicians?)

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Proprioception is good. I was a fairly accomplished high school and college club athlete in sports that require body parts to move out of visual range

jareklupinski 9 hours ago | parent

interesting! i always have to 'see myself' in my head to answer those kinds of questions

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

For my part (as someone with aphantasia) my proprioception is good, and to go further, my sense of space and my spatial reasoning is well above average.

I can also draw what I can't see pretty well from memory.

jareklupinski 9 hours ago | parent

that's interesting too! i can visualize clearly, but have _terrible_ artistic skills; nothing in my head can make it out unless through CAD :)

vidarh 5 hours ago | parent

My drawing style is different from memory, though. Clearer lines, vs closer to impressionist if I draw from something in front of my eye. The difference is quite stark.

cubefox 9 hours ago | parent

That's an embarrassing question, so no real need to answer it. But... men, ahem, like to imagine sometimes, well, naked ladies. As a substitute. When they don't have a partner and no pornography. But people with aphantasia can't imagine anything. This sounds like a significant practical hurdle. Is it? (Unless one thinks masturbation is bad anyway.)

Edit: this comment is shadowbanned, apparently because of a keyword filter.

logicallee 9 hours ago | parent

Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the question, how do you do it?

ppalata 9 hours ago | parent

I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)

fwlr 9 hours ago | parent

(Also aphantasic)

I think about the axis on which the fold is performed. Because of “square” and “diagonal”, for the two corners to touch, the fold axis must lie on both of the “other two corners”. A reflection about an axis does not change points on the axis, both points are unchanged, so their distance is also unchanged.

logicallee 8 hours ago | parent

Yes that's correct. How do you answer this one: a hollow cube lying with one face on the horizontal like a die on a table has a hollow pyramid inside with the same base horizontal on the bottom like a usual pyramid. Inside the pyramid is as large a sphere as will fit. A horizontal ray is cast from outside of the cube through the entire structure, passing through each surface it would hit. The location of the ray is not specified, only that it is horizontal.

1) State the order of the surfaces it hits/passes through if you choose to cast it at a point where it passes through the maximum number of surfaces in the structure.

2) Is it possible to choose a different point where it would still pass through the cube but would pass through a different number of surfaces? (such as by missing the pyramid or sphere or both). State the distinct counts of how many surfaces it could pass through depending on where you cast it horizontally, like how many different counts exist. (Being tangent does not count as passing through a surface.)

I would answer this question by just picturing it and moving the ray around in my mind. How do you do it?

fwlr 6 hours ago | parent

This is a bit more stream of thought, hopefully that is helpful.

The pyramid can’t take up all the space inside the cube, only another cube could do that. So there must be some points that are “inside cube, outside pyramid” and other points “inside cube, inside pyramid”. The pyramid is given as wholly inside the cube so there are no “outside cube, inside pyramid” points. Same for sphere inside the pyramid. So it’s

    { out-cube | in-cube out-pyramid | in-cube in-pyramid out-sphere | in-cube in-pyramid in-sphere }

I struggle parsing the ray description, “horizontal” must meaningfully constrain the ray somehow (otherwise it wouldn’t have been mentioned), but I don’t know what that changes. Then I think about facts I know about rays - they can be uniquely specified with two points, or one point and one direction - oh, and we are given the direction is always “horizontal”, so we only need one point. The ray goes on forever so every “in” is “enter+exit”, so add 2 for every “in”. So it’s

    { out-cube (=0) | in-cube(2) out-pyramid (=2) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) out-sphere (=4) | in-cube(2) in-pyramid(2) in-sphere(2) (=6 }

1) Maximum, that’s 6, from the last option, so “cube, pyramid, sphere…”, have to exit the innermost first, so “…sphere, pyramid, cube”. I don’t know where this ray is positioned, “halfway” might be a good guess, or maybe pyramid is half of square and circle is half of pyramid so “a quarter way up”.

2) Distinct, that’s `0 2 4 6`. `0` doesn’t count because we want “still passes through the cube”, so 3 counts exist. Thankful that “tangents don’t count” so I don’t have to think about them, because nothing immediately comes to mind on how to handle them.

logicallee 4 hours ago | parent

yes this is correct. Thanks for writing that out, it's really interesting to read how you solved this without picturing it.

It's a bit surprising to me that it was unclear what I meant by horizontal/level, I thought this word is well-known and easy to understand. Here's what I mean by horizontal: For me, it means that with respect to the ground, the ray isn't rising or falling as it travels, i.e. it's level (like a plane flying in level flight with respect to the ground, not rising or falling). This constraint doesn't really matter I guess, except that I said that the cube is also level on the ground on one of its surfaces, so since you have to cast the ray in a horizontal/level way, you can't cast the ray at an angle through one of the corners so it goes through the opposite corner of the cube, since - if you think of the ray like a plane - you can only move the angle of the ray side to side not up and down, it stays in level flight = horizontal, so you can't cast it through both opposite corners if the cube is lying flat on the horizontal on one of its surfaces. As I just wrote this paragraph, I pictured what my description of casting through both corners the would look like and why it's not level with the ground anymore. I guess it's harder to follow my words without picturing it.

You mentioned it's not clear how being horizontal constrains the ray, based on what I wrote and what I meant about it being level, is it now clearer how this constrains some of the rays that can be cast? (Like how you can't cast a ray through the opposite ends of the cube now)? Or is that hard for you to follow? For me I think maybe my words could be written in a bit confusing way but I think someone can understand them if they can picture what I referred to. Without that mental picture it could be difficult though.

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

It kind of becomes a set of math facts, and my brain does this spatial thing where I "feel" like I am doing the task with my hands even though, of course, I am not. I have a really good spatial sense. I can pretty reliably draw floorplans of places I have spent a couple days in, at least in spatial relation if not exact size. I'm very good at identifying potential furniture reconfiguration of rooms. With my wife it is an interesting dynamic - she has such a rich inner visual life that for something like thinking about a new piece of furniture, or a move of existing, she needs me to tape out the new layout. Her visual memory of the space blocks here from imagining the new possibility, or it is so deep that she need to reconfigure everything visually. I just am aware of the alternative

badgersnake 9 hours ago | parent

I’m pretty sure I have this. How did you find out?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

When I learned through my sport career that visualize the race actually meant visualize and not just talk it through with your inner monologue. It was deeply reinforced when my wife first told me she sees an entire movie when she reads books.

cyclopeanutopia 9 hours ago | parent

When you look at something and close your eyes, do you also not "see it" immediately after?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

The image? no - the after image of the light on my retina, yes. But as soon as that fades there is nothing

_ink_ 9 hours ago | parent

I am fully aphant and the only thing were this happens to me is highly stimulating content. I remember after endless counterstrike rounds on LAN parties, when I closed my eyes, I would still see images from the battles. Porn also does this. But normally that doesn't happen. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my lids. And I could never control what I see.

codetiger 9 hours ago | parent

1. Can't remember which way you came from just after a few mins of passing the same street. 2. Can't recollect your mother's face by closing your eye, but can recognize when you see. 3. Don't remember faces unless seen them for many times. 4. Can remember a favorite color. 5. Don't have a consistent handwriting.

Do these symptoms count?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Those don't sound to me like aphantasiac properties. possibly related, but sound like other memory topics. Especially the first one

chaps 9 hours ago | parent

When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Nothing, no

_ink_ 9 hours ago | parent

Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.

boothby 9 hours ago | parent

I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

I have an inner monologue, that is the extent of my inner senses.

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

do you have inner music or just your voice serving as the instrument like me?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

Just inner voice

jibbit 9 hours ago | parent

So you self-diagnosed yourself as unable to do something, based on what you imagine being able to do is like?

misthop 9 hours ago | parent

https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq

jibbit 9 hours ago | parent

seems ironic (and not at all trustworthy)! if you're right, you can't actually imagine what being able to do it would be like

sceptic123 8 hours ago | parent

Are you arguing against the GP having it because you can't imagine what that's like? Is that the irony you're talking about?

vidarh 4 hours ago | parent

The people who question this usually turn out to clearly have aphantasia.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have achieved visualisation during meditation, once.

I also can visualise while dreaming.

I do not visualise while awake other than that one time.

The difference is extremely stark and very obvious.

Gravityloss 27 minutes ago | parent

Hmm turns out I have hyperphantasia?

No wonder it feels it's hard to explain things to people a lot of the time...

cubefox 9 hours ago | parent

I posted a question but apparently it was shdow bnned automatically by HN. Here it is again if anyone cares: https://sharetext.io/j3wjsivi

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

yeah looks like it triggered a keyword filter to mark it as dead to me. Or a few people flagged it.

Either way it seemed relevant enough to me that I vouched for it.

cubefox 6 hours ago | parent

Thanks for vouching, it seems to have helped.

suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent

I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.

ThrowawayTestr 9 hours ago | parent

I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.

izzydata 9 hours ago | parent

I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.

It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

aeonik 9 hours ago | parent

I hesitate to come to this conclusion.

When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.

The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.

E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.

As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.

Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.

So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.

dd8601fn 9 hours ago | parent

I certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great.

I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.

I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.

cheez-whiz 9 hours ago | parent

I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)

Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.

throwuxiytayq 9 hours ago | parent

But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.

suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent

I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.

polytely 9 hours ago | parent

Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf

worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.

throwuxiytayq 8 hours ago | parent

But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.

cheez-whiz 9 hours ago | parent

I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.

As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.

If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.

Izkata 4 hours ago | parent

> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).

While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.

I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.

suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent

Why would I be coping about anything?

hackinthebochs 9 hours ago | parent

It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/

kridsdale1 9 hours ago | parent

And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.

suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent

I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.

hackinthebochs 9 hours ago | parent

Prove is a strong word. But it supports the existence of the condition as it coheres with our scientific models of visual experience. You can always reach for obscure philosophical puzzles about phenomenal experience to try to invalidate the science, but at that point you're just having a different debate than the rest of us.

Jerrrrrrrrry 8 hours ago | parent

I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.

Electricity in the brain is all we are.

Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.

Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.

platos cave, etc

wongarsu 9 hours ago | parent

Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media

fwlr 9 hours ago | parent

Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.

suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent

I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.

fwlr 9 hours ago | parent

A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?”

If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.

IshKebab 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".

I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...

> Why This Matters

Come on guys at least try.

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.

vidarh 9 hours ago | parent

In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.

I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.

I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.

But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.

bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago | parent

Aphantasia is fake. I can “see” when dreaming, ergo the brain simply (adaptively) suppresses the same when awake.

rolisz 9 hours ago | parent

I don't see even when dreaming :)

bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago | parent

You remember your dreams?

rolisz 4 hours ago | parent

Sometimes.

nickthegreek 9 hours ago | parent

The most important thing to remember when discussing this stuff is that how you experience reality can be drastically different from other humans.

chiefgeek 9 hours ago | parent

I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.

pohl 9 hours ago | parent

What’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?

_ink_ 9 hours ago | parent

Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

that made me realize I never once thought of whether I was hearing stuff in my dreams.

vidarh 6 hours ago | parent

Same here. The fact that I see things in my dreams is one of the reasons I feel I can know for certain I don't see things when I "imagine" things.

pohl 3 hours ago | parent

I'm still not sure the real difference isn't just where people draw the line in generalizing what it means to "see" and "hear" things.

My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something.

How can we be sure that we're not just labeling the experience differently?

vidarh 1 hour ago | parent

When I "see something in my head" while dreaming, it is like seeing: There is a clear visual image. I don't see the black behind my eyelids. I can tell colours. I can tell shapes.

When I "imagine" something while I awake, it is not remotely like seeing. There is no image overlaid on the "real world" whether obscuring the black behind my eyelids or anything else when they are open. I can't tell shapes, or colours. If my eyes are closed, I just see the inside of my eyelids, nothing more.

My one experience of seeing something while awake during meditation was like being inside a movie. Everything was as clear as if I had been walking around in that setting for real.

I don't know what it will take to make you sure, but for me, I have experienced three entirely different "modes" of imagining things, ranging from no visuals, to shifting and unclear visual, to crystal clear images, and the distinction is stark and obvious - there's no ambiguity in it.

nhinck3 9 hours ago | parent

I sometimes experience dreams when I go back to sleep repeatedly, but in all normal circumstances it is nothing

godshatter 9 hours ago | parent

I can't visualize at all when awake, but I have been into lucid dreaming in my past and my dreams were visual and more detailed than real life (no bad lenses for the light to go through, I guess). I can also visualize a little bit when on either edge of sleep. I've been noticing that the occasional images that I see in that state are becoming more colorful and detailed. I'm hoping that means actual phantasia in my future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

I should add that the only things I've ever been able to see when fully awake that didn't come through my retinas are auras (I went through a "learn to read auras" phase a long time ago) and ghosts. Or at least things that I'm assuming aren't actually real, like images of a friend who died before I knew about it and a woman who watched me watch TV for a few weeks. So this might mean that I'm not a complete aphant, or it might mean (based on this article) that sometimes those brain regions/processes can still align for me occasionally.

chiefgeek 9 hours ago | parent

I do see images when I dream. It can get pretty immersive. Brains are wild.

pstuart 20 minutes ago | parent

I've had dreams where I was "there" and it felt like being present in a scene in a very real way (for a dream). But ask me to close my eyes and visualize a blue table with a red apple on it and its nothing but phosphenes at best.

_ink_ 9 hours ago | parent

Have you worked mostly as documentary photographer, or did you also do stages setups, like portraying people? I am only a photo enthusiast without any mental images and I struggle with portraits. Since I know about aphantasia I am wondering whether it has something to do with the absence of mental images.

chiefgeek 9 hours ago | parent

Honestly, I’ve done it all. I’ve shot thousands of headshots and portraits and hundreds of events. I’ve not typically been a “conceptual” photographer such as somebody like Art Kane. I started on film and moved to digital in 2003 before I was shooting professionally. I get more of an “idea” in my head, however I don’t “see” a final result. Digital has helped immeasurably to refine my work more quickly. Just as I “know” what a red fire hydrant looks like but I do not “see” an image.

wongarsu 9 hours ago | parent

As somebody who only has closed eye visuals in deep meditation or in dreams, I would maybe describe what you call "knowingness" as "abstract representation"?

As a kid I've always been really good at these "imagine how this shape folds in 3d" kind of tasks, and I would generally say I am above average at imagining how things relate to each other in 3d. I just can't turn it into an image in my mind's eye

chiefgeek 9 hours ago | parent

Yes this. I have, based on a battery of spatial reasoning tests I took years ago, way above average spatial reasoning capabilities. I also notice a lot IRL that others do not, based on anecdotal evidence.

vidarh 6 hours ago | parent

I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips?

Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.

bethekidyouwant 6 hours ago | parent

This makes no sense if you can visualize things when you’re dreaming your brain has no problem visualizing things it’s just correctly suppressed when you are awake

vidarh 4 hours ago | parent

It's not suppressed for the vast majority of people. If you consider that "correct", odds are you too have aphantasia.

antihipocrat 11 minutes ago | parent

This is always a hot topic on HN.

My takeaway from all of the discussions is that the ability to 'see' an imagined visual representation of something exists on a spectrum from absolutely nothing ever, into a minds eye abstract idea of an image (like a melody heard in your mind rather than your ears) toward a full ability to see an image overlay in the visual space. There's a lot of debate as to whether this is a trainable ability.

karmakaze 4 hours ago | parent

I've also had this kind of topological knowingness which I couldn't name. Another comment here says "schematic conceptual" which captures what it feels like for me.

Another good explanation here is that it's all taking place but that last step of creating the visual is suppressed (as intended) while conscious as that would be hallucinating.

pstuart 23 minutes ago | parent

I always assumed that when people say "imagine this image..." that it was about the contextual nature of it. Only several months ago did I learn that aphantasia is a thing and I'm among the ~4% of the population in this group.

With psychedelic journeys I do get visuals but they are indescribable. My pet phrase for it is "swimming with God" (disclaimer: I'm an ardent atheist).

prmph 9 hours ago | parent

This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.

And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.

My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.

Swizec 9 hours ago | parent

For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.

Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.

It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.

Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.

Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.

Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.

The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

> Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.

I guess I have that ability, in that I can relatively easily figure out spatial relations or can map out code mentally. The photorealism I am a 0 on.

Is linear thinking just a stream of conciousness thing where you basically list attributes? If so then I guess I have that too.

But id still describe myself as an aphant.

vidarh 5 hours ago | parent

According to Ed Catmull surveying Pixar staff, there doesn't seem to be much more than a minor correlation between ability to visualise and artistic ability.

_ink_ 9 hours ago | parent

The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

the only internal sense I have is my own voice. I cant even "imagine" music but rather hum it in my own voice at best. Same with others' voices

degamad 9 hours ago | parent

Ditto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...

gilleain 9 hours ago | parent

Interesting. I can replay or simulate other people's voices (real people, obv) and can 'hear' music I know by replaying it in my mind. Of course, not perfectly if I forget the words, it might fill in with some tum-te-tum, or only recall a fragment, but it's usually playing as at source. Makes earworms very annoying, of course.

passive 9 hours ago | parent

I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.

Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.

I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.

Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.

Akronymus 9 hours ago | parent

> Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.

Do you perhaps have a mild form of face blindness?

wdutch 9 hours ago | parent

I would tentatively suggest OP does. I hace aphantasia but meet a lot of people for work and have a very good memory for names once I see a face.

dataviz1000 9 hours ago | parent

A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]

They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.

[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104

wongarsu 9 hours ago | parent

Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics

Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display

nevinera 9 hours ago | parent

I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.

Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).

thrw9876543 9 hours ago | parent

I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.

This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.

It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.

polytely 9 hours ago | parent

Also an Aphantasiac, the quote

> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.

my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.

I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.

Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.

Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.

r0ze-at-hn 9 hours ago | parent

It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.

So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.

And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.

flippingheck 9 hours ago | parent

I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).

If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?

> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.

Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.

Perhaps it is just spatial facts.

IAmBroom 3 hours ago | parent

A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.

Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?

Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.

dudefeliciano 3 hours ago | parent

And how would non visual thinkers solve that?

nitwit005 14 minutes ago | parent

I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.

Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.