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- Hacker News
- Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.by ajb
- Knowing a thing exists is not the same as knowing how it interacts with other things.by IAmBroom
- 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.
by vidarh - 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."by Antipode
- Mnemotechnics is an art of memorizing by linking visual images. A book I have gives these criteria for a proper image:
you can roughly draw the object from memory
you can name its main parts
you can name its main colors
you can describe its spatial orientation
The image shouldn't be as clear as a hallucination, and it should be a memory of a specific object, not a generic one. Meeting these criteria is already enough to link another image to it, for example by piercing it with another object, though there's also the question of imagining it at a large enough size.
Aphants, do these hold for you? Take Doge, the popular meme dog: not a generic Shiba Inu, but that exact picture. Could you sketch it, name its parts and colors, and say which way it's facing? And could you imagine, say, a pencil piercing it?
by vitalnodo - This is btw. a very important consideration when you are teaching literally anything.
Telling people to imagine a cone, then a plane, then rotating the other slightly and slice through the cone without touching the base, and then looking at a normal angle at the 2D shape of the resulting intersecting surface is a really good way to explain ellipses.
IF the person you're talking to can do all these steps. Turns out some people can rotate a cow in their head and some can't. If you cannot, a drawing or animation can help a lot to get the point across. Now I haven't gotten a problem with imagination at all, but I can only imagine how hard some subjects might be if you can't do that in your head.
by atoav - 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.by _ink_
- 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' voicesby Akronymus
- 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.
by thrw9876543 - I haven't tried mushrooms, but had some medical trouble and with very high fever + medications there was times of rathr vivid visualisation while awake which I never experience otherwise - full blackness as well.
Wouldn't recommend getting sepsis just for that though.. mushrooms seem safer
by nodoodles - Same but in reverse, a certain psychiatric medication turned on an internal monologue I've never had before and it drove me absolutely, literally insane until it wore off. Never again. The most inane, moronic commentary about my day to day life as it happened, like Barney speaking through me. I normally experience the world wordlessly, mostly visually, and construct ideas and actions that way (thinking about, say, getting a glass of water, I'll picture the process), so having internal speech suddenly thrust upon me was awful.by jaggederest
- 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.
by nitwit005 - I built a house recently, I'm not sure how much fun that would've been if I couldn't visualize things before building certain features, yes I built it off plans but they're not 3d so being able to draw a 3d image in my head is extremely helpful.by bamboozled
- I, for one, find it very practical.
I do a lot of thinking by visualizing relationships between concepts in a kind of graph. When I draw, I visualize the scene first. When I build widgets in my wood shop, I visualize the result and all intermediate states. When I was writing 3d renderers (a long time ago), it was immensely helpful to visualize the points and triangles in my head.
by buttercraft - When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.by maroonblazer
- You are hopefully aware though that this is not the norm. Many (if not all) artists tend to visualise their work before and while they are doing it.by King-Aaron
- It's funny, when I heard the idea that some people can't visualize things I was unbelievably jealous. Until my mid-30s I had extreme hemophobia and if I just glanced at a cut, a surgery scar, or even walked into a hospital my mind would fill with visual memories or imagined images of wounds, blood, and who knows what else. Then I'd pass out. Even looking at an ultrasound would make me very woozy.by shoobiedoo
- I keep reading about people with aphantasia in threads like these, and I never hear from who don’t have it explain what do they see and how vivid it is.
Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?
by sph - On an article about left-handedness, would you expect the comments to be full of people talking about how they're right-handed?
- I don’t have ADHD¹, there. But anyway, while I have aphantasia, almost everyone I talk to reports being able to see images, most being able to manipulate them. From my incredibly small sample size of ~20, my sister was the only one with possibly mild aphantasia, 1 guy online and a girl I know possibly have hyperphantasia (very realistic images coming into their mind’s eye unbidden), and everyone else were confused about me not being able to imagine/see anything.
¹: Though I do (likely) have auditory processing disorder which wikipedia called ADHD for the ears, so maybe it fits.
by Semaphor - I would like to know especially what is the perceived difference between normal imagination and hallucination. The way people with mental visualization explain it it sounds basically exactly what I always imagined hallucinations to be like. And e.g. closed-eye visuals on psychedelics. Why is it so special to have closed-eye visuals when most people have closed-eye visuals anyway?by bondarchuk
- 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.
by r0ze-at-hn - High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.
"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.
I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.
by jaggederest - Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...
by red369 - 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.
by dataviz1000 - 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
by wongarsu - 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”.by chiefgeek
- What’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?by pohl
- 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).
by pstuart - 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.by _ink_