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On the good side, we're much less affected by trauma, because we're not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there's that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like "moist", and describing disgusting things that they "see" in their heads, while we're unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
As someone on the opposite end of this spectrum, with highly detailed visualisation, I had never considered that this could be weaponised against me….
Granted moist seems to be a problem for some people more than others. I wonder if that’s due to word associations.
Perhaps word assosciations or just bandwagoning with the trend of 'omg moist gross'. Honestly the only times i really think of things being 'moist' is for cakes/baked goods.
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
That proper made me laugh. Funnily enough I was reading the wiki page earlier for the condition, and remember seeing about an experiment where aphantasics didn't have the same fear response as 'normal' people when reading a scary story. I'm guessing for the reasons you described.
So when Stormy Daniels described Trump as having "yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart" you didn't get a perfect(ly traumatizing) image of that in your mind?
Lol imagine not being able to picture things in your head. Oh wait...
They technically can imagine not imagining anything
Yes, and not interested in changing.
I'm me and I'm happy. I find that the strategies I learned as a kid sometimes allow me to think more clearly and procedurally than others. I'm not haunted by images of the past. I do take extra photos now that I know what's up. All in all, I don't see it as much of a negative. It's far better than some of the other conditions I was thinking I might have, before I learned about aphantasia.
I was fairly active on r/aphantasia for a bit, but I started to back away when they went for this "total aphant" thing, where you weren't really in the club unless you couldn't imagine with any senses at all.
they went for this “total aphant” thing, where you weren’t really in the club unless you couldn’t imagine with any senses at all.
People always have to ruin shit by taking to extremes ey.
Tbh as hard as it is for non-aphantasics to imagine no mental imagery, I find it just as hard to imagine those who have no visual AND no audio mind. Like, how the fuck do they think? Then I reckon, prob the same as me visually... I know what a green triangle is, it's the colour of grass and has 3 equal sides. Just, I can't see it when I shut my eyes
I don't have mental audio, and the best way I can describe it is that I can think of words, but not in words.
I think in concepts that have words attached.
So, if I'm thinking about a dog, I have multiple words that can work for it. Dog and perro (spanish for dog) for example, both point to the same "concept", and it's that concept that I have in my mind when I think of a dog. But I can pull the word dog to mind when needed too. Hence thinking "of" words
Either way, I can't hear any of it
I sometimes wonder if there's not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don't have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it's like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it's like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn't there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that's certainly not my experience (though it's possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don't actually exist in my vision. It's definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there's a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it's sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it's doing, all of the physics and such still work, it's just not ending up on my brain's screen.
This is what I have. basically not aphantasia (we can still manipulate visual imagery in our brains) but it's also not prophantasia which is essentially just seeing, but with thoughts.
I know exactly what you mean. To my, my form of internal visualization has always been more what some people consider to be their "mind's eye", but even that has a wide-ranging definition depending on who you ask. I like your explanation quite a bit more than just "mind's eye" though!
I can't "visualize" a full blown table, the example used in the article I linked, but I can imagine a very abstract form of a table. More like, if you were to take a modeling or 3D drawing program like Microsoft's Vizio and created a table in it, that's more what I can visualize. Or if someone asks me to imagine the sun, I can imagine a clip-art version of the sun, but I can't imagine vibrant brightness with it (another example used in the article).
Anything much more than that, and I'm no longer visually seeing it, but doing something more that you describe. As a random example, if you asked me to visualize a white neutron star, I can't literally see one in front of me - but it does make me recall memories of seeing one in the game "Elite: Dangerous".
I've heard theories (I don't know the accuracy of said theory) that when you're dreaming, your brain can't come up with something that's never existed - so when you see people, even random people, they're just random people you've encountered in your life but don't have any connection to. It's a sound theory for me, because that's how my form of mental imagery works, you could describe some totally fictional dragon as accurately and detailed as possible, but I won't be able to visualize it past a really abstract level. So if someone describes a purple dragon but gets really descriptive, I could visualize a generic animated dragon that is purple - probably would look more like Barney to me but... yeah.
Edit: Although that being said, I've noticed I'm a lot better at visualizing text. When I'm asked "How do you spell $some_word_here" I often find that I'm spelling it out-loud by reading out each individual letter. With programming, I find that when recalling something along the lines of "How do you make a function that does...", I'm using a combination of looking at a block of code I remember, and inferring the missing pieces.
I guess my brain is just weird...
What's the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
Hyperphantasia is the opposite.
Hyperphantasia. A subset of that is prophantasia, where you can physically conjure a mental image in your field of vision, but that case is extremely rare.
These topics are always some of the hardest for me to fully comprehend. There's also always going to be at least 1% of me that suspects you're all lying or just don't realize that you do have the same abilities as everyone else, but that's likely just my brain trying to cope with what I just truly can't understand. It's not even first nature, it's instinctual rooted in me that I hear this voice in my head and see these images and sounds and all sorts of stuff. However I think the closest I can get to relating is when someone recently told me their thoughts and dreams are vividly colored... vividly colored? No sir, my thoughts and dreams are barely colored, sort of more like it's all in sepia color and dull. Almost like old black and white TV, but a bit of color. So now I know I'm missing something I've never had. This became a ramble, I just woke up, sorry!
The voice actress of the Narrator in Baldur's Gate 3 Amelia Tyler said in a recent interview that her aphantasia has helped her in being a better actress, because she thinks of situations and stuff in terms of emotions. So that way she could get really well into the heads of the characters she played.
Was probably in one or both of these videos:
Thanks for sharing this. It's always comforting to see others being highly successful despite a condition. Her BG3 narration is beautifully-unhinged and one of my favourite aspects of the game, she's so talented.
There's a list on the aphantasia wiki page of notable people with the condition, was quite interesting... namely the head of Pixar. Iirc he did a survey and found a decent number of the people doing animation work were also aphantasic!
I've made some really interesting animations to go with ambient music I write, and it was an enjoyable tangent from only music. I never thought I could do anything visual (I can't draw or paint for shit) but tbh although orders of magnitude more complex than audio design, working with stuff like After Effects came really easily after decades using a DAW.
I don't understand what it is. I read a blurb about it, but i don't really get it. I can remember what my house, car, dog, etc. generally look like, but i can't think of a time i tried to imagine a picture or visualize an item. I'm terrible with faces and intruduce myself to the same people repeatedly. Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they're thinking or reading.
Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they’re thinking or reading.
I don't think that's off topic, it sounds as if you don't have an internal voice which is the audio-form of aphantasia. My inner monologue is ever-present, and often takes the voice of whoever I've been talking to recently, especially if I've been bingeing a series or just watched a film. Having Morgan Freeman as my inner narrator was awesome, but as you can prob guess it's a curse as often as it's a blessing. When I get an earworm it can last for days.
It is hard trying to imagine the absence of something that you have. Like trying to think up a new colour.
You really hear a voice? Like it's someone with you? I cannot get my brain around the idea of having a voice inside my head and i just think of old cartoons where there was an angel and a devil on someone's shoulders. It would be crazy to have Morgan Freeman narrating my life - like that funny penguin movie he did. I do frequently get songs stuck in my head that keep me awake. I don't hear them, i just can't stop trying to get all the words in the right order.
It's not a voice in one's head like there's someone else there. It's like you talking aloud to yourself, but in your head.
The voice in my head is me. Sometimes if I watched a movie or talked to someone, the voice might sound different but it's still me. It doesn't talk to me, I talk with it. It's as if I was speaking out loud, but only I can hear it. Look up subvocalization. This voice in your head is so much like talking that you make some larynx movements to match the words.
Visualization, or seeing things with your mind's eye is similar. The closest metaphor I can come up with is if your regular perception was the main monitor of your computer, subvocalization and visualization would be the monitor and speakers on the side. It's doing its own thing without taking away from the main monitor, and you can focus on it (zoning out), and for some people it's higher res or higher quality than others. For you, there is only the main monitor and set of speakers. In this metaphor, there is nothing outside of the monitors and speakers in terms of perception.
Some examples of what my stuff works like: When I remember something I saw, it "plays on the second monitor". Having a song stuck in my head is like having the "second set of speakers" play the song on repeat. If I say "this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman", then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman. If I want to visualize anything, I "turn to my second monitor" and the thing is there. It can be still or animated, black and white, 2d or 3d, I can do it. I can't do 4d or anything like that.
What's it like when you try think through a math problem? Like do you just follow your feelings and intuitively get to the answer?
For me it's definitely a clearly defined voice in my head. "First I do this, add those together..." etc
Not the person you're responding to, but yeah, the voice-in-my-head CAN (but does not always) sound just like actually hearing someone.
I have a caveat there because the "voice" that is "me" (that is to say, I don't perceive it as someone else talking, but me talking/thinking to myself--it does not have the feeling of an outsider or stranger talking to me) does not always hold all the "information" of an actual audio voice.
Like, I don't normally carry the same "pitch" as my real-life voice, it's usually without pitch, but can still contain emotional prosody? It's a shifting mix of soundless but verbal (as opposed to nonverbal) thought and sound-markers that indicate emotion in real life when spoken out loud.
However, I'm also a writer, and when I write dialogue of a character, it usually carries "sound information" much more distinctly in my head, like listening to a radio narrator or watching an actor. Like, a male character will have a lower voice, a female higher. A flamboyant character might pronounce and say things with a lot of drama and theatrics, where a stoic bored character might be closer to a monotone. It's all controlled by me, by the way--it's not schizophrenia where I perceive it as an outside person or force talking to me. But it is very "audible". (But there's still some mental filter where I know it's thought and don't mistake it for real in-the-present sound.)
...I did have musical training as a child which might play into my ability to have strongly imagined sound in my head. When I get songs stuck in my head, I actually do "hear" them. I hear the singer singing, but also the unique tones of the various instruments. So if a song has a guitar I hear that, but if it's a piano I hear a piano playing it in my memory and not a guitar.
...these things don't always have 100% fidelity though, it's not like playing a file on a computer. It's a fuzzy in-and-out-of-focus thing. But when it's "in focus" it's definitely something tagged by my mind as "sound".
Is it called the same thing if you can't visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife's. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child's face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can't remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
Here's an online test to see if you're affected https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
From my amateur independent digging I actually found people fall into three groups on this, not two:
Aphantasia - Not being able to visualize 8at all*
What I consider "regular" visualization, ie a "minds eye" or "back of the mind" sort of thing, that's distinctly different from how you normally see visually with your eyes.
Prophantasia - In which you can visualize things that appear to you how simply looking at something would appear.
I saw someone on reddit apparently go from aphantasia to prophantasia but people were calling BS on them. I'm in group 2 myself and would love to be able to do prophantasia. So I'm curious if anyone has managed it?
This 3-category thing is why you see so many people think they have aphantasia, well above the expected 3%. People in category 2 find out about category 3 and assume that's what most people can do.
My ability to visualize things varies dramatically based on my mood, context, if I'm asleep, and whether or not it's "voluntary". It's never better than a fuzzy, 80-90% transparent image, but sometimes I can "see" color and some finer details, and other times it's just an outline. Involuntary visualization (visualizing something in response to written or spoken statements) is a lot stronger for me than voluntarily visualization. If my involuntary image becomes voluntary (because I try to intentionally maintain it) then it goes away. Additionally, I tend to be better at it if I'm in a good mood than if I'm in a bad mood, and I'm better at it if I'm externally prompted to visualize it ("imagine this if you will...").
The best way I'd describe it is that it's like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. The moment I try to reach out and grab it to get a better look, it goes away. Most of the time the images aren't in front of me, but are "in another dimension". I'm aware that the image is there, I'm aware of what color things are, what their shape is, what texture they are, but I can't actually "feel" or "see" anything.
Except for when I'm asleep.
My dreams tend to be very vivid. Not like a lucid dream (usually), but vivid enough that it's led me to speculate that my seemingly partial-aphantasia might be less about missing neurons and more about a mental block preventing me from directly visualizing anything (I speculate that you're using the same neural pathways when you're dreaming as when you visualize something while awake).
For me personally, I think a lot of practice is going to be about training my "mental fine motor skills" and learning how to "be gentle" with my mental images so that I can interact with them without immediately dispelling them in a puff of smoke.
Something you might try doing is reading short, basic stories (like children's books) without any pictures, with the conscious intent of imagining what you'd see if you were filming them. Don't intentionally imagine things, but keep the idea that you are imagining things in the back of your head. You're creating the belief that you're visualizing something, which may actually help you to visualize it. This is something that people sometimes have to do when they're learning to lucid dream.
One of the main starting points for lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams; but what do you do if you can't remember your dreams? Well, firstly, start a dream journal. Then, once you've got your journal, notepad, text app, etc open, start writing what you think you dreamed about. You're not "making something up", you're "remembering what you think you dreamed". Your brain is either too dumb to know the difference, or smart enough to understand the intent. Either way, your brain will start to get the message that it's supposed to be remembering your dreams and will start retaining them instead of throwing them away.
Doing something similar might help with visualization.
So not exactly the subject, but: when I am about to fall asleep/ extremely tired / just woke up, my «phantasia» ability gets multiplied like by an order of magnitude. I can literally picture any object in perfect details from any angle. It only lasts for about a minute tho, then it fades away, and it all becomes kinda boring and not that exceptionally good.
It's like I have access to a new hardware acceleration for a minute
I have aphantasia. And also extreme crippling insomnia, it has been the last 3 or so years that i learned that other people can actually visualize at all. I always thought it was a metaphor. In my searching about a way to potentially improve it I found this article.
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/
And it absolutely cured my insomnia. I can sleep easily for the first time in my life. Didn’t do a lot for the aphantasia but i did manage to successfully get an image or two a couple of times. Mostly i just love that i can finally sleep without hours of lying in bed beforehand.
I used to think I had aphantasia, but I'm not entirely sure if that's the case. For example, I can't visualize in my mind's eye something as vivid as a dream. My memories are not totally vivid either, but it's not as if I can't remember things visually.
I do wish I could imagine more vividly, but for me it's far from not being able to visualize at all.
As far as tips, I think you have to stop repeating this thought to yourself that you're limited in ability or unable to do something. If you try to do something but say to yourself "I can't do this" then you aren't going to succeed. If you believe you can there's no guarantee that it'll make it happen, or happem immediately, but you'll undoubtedly get better results
I'm more curious what problems it causes!
But i think i have it or at least closer to it than fully visualization. One thing that helps is to sort of mentally apply the first concept related to something that you think of. So for example, if someone says imagine a cabin, if you would say that a stereotypical cabin has a porch, then just go with it. In my mind if i try to think of a cabin there are so many variables (how many floors, windows, material, roughness, porch vs no, chimney or no, etc) that nothing can materialize in my mind. But if i just pick one of any of those that pop in my head then it feels a bit easier to get a glimpse. Idk if that helps at all 😅
Just want to point out there is [email protected] if you are interested.
I have no success on visualizing, but I have read some experimenting with technique called image streaming.
I hadn't known a thing about this until last year.
I was a 0/10 until college, though I have improved quite a bit over the past few decades using tabletop role-playing games. I can now keep several blobs in my head and know the general distances between each.
I'm still flummoxed with colors and definition, but I'm happy with what I have.
How I experience aphantasia is as not being able to maintain an image. However I have good spacial imagination.
Mind sharing the kinda of problems it causes?
Those first 3 traits are all true of me but I can imagine images quite vividly. I don't think those traits are as rare as the condition.
Imagining a pot around a lid is useless because your mental image can scale.
ironically, I think my spatial awareness is impeccable because of my aphantasia. Put me in a small area for ten minutes and I'll instinctively know where its safe to move and where stuff is. Also really know how to gauge effective distances in the video games I play. HOWEVER, ask me to assign a value to all this and I'll completely blank out.
I have aphantasia, typically a big fat 0 on the red star test. The only times I can visualize at all are when I'm really tired or really high. Even then I only get up to about a 3 at most.
This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I've always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I've never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don't understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there's a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It's not that my memory is particularly good but I can "synthesize" shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I'll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it's incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I've never heard before. I can play that enough times to "drive out" the other one but not enough to "light up" the new one and I'm fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven't found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I'm also one of those people that's terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone's name and face within minutes of meeting them. I've started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I'm supposed to know and run through them every night. It's a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I'm one of those people that never forgets a face.
