In the ensuing discussion (and Google searches) I learned about the word aphantasia and about the phenomenon where people do actually (claim to) visualize things in their head. Until that moment I assumed that language was just figurative.
I still have some doubts that people actually do visualize things. One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately. I tend to think that I have a better understanding, I know my brain doesn't create visuals. When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things.
Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that.
If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing.
If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy.
I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week.
Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try.
A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen.
The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig...
Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is.
For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.
https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
This part is untrue. I'm not a great artist, but despite aphantasia I can draw from memory just fine, and usually with more precision than if I have an object in front of me, though if I draw from something in front of me it will look more "life-like" - my drawings from memory tends to be more abstract and stylised.
But here's also an article about aphantasia at Pixar[1] that talks about how Ed Catmull realised how vastly different the ability to visualise was between members of staff, including among artists who ranged from not able to visualise at all to being able to move backwards and forwards "in a movie".
I'm not good at drawing and I have been suffering(?) from some degree of Aphantasia but I can assure you that none of the bicycles in that art project would be mine because I know my objects.
I can still probably disassemble and assemble my rifle blindfolded. I can draw it but if I try to visualize it in my head I only get a very vague picture of my room at boot camp and I feel it more than I see it.
Actually the images I can reproduce to so degree are the ones I've seen unusually often:
- my driveway
- my kitchen
- but most of all photos from my albums.
I don't dream much either but this summer I did some experiments, trying to sleep as much as possible each night (ended up with an average of 7 or something) and during that time I dreamt and also felt I was able to visualize slightly better.
People with aphantasia can recognize things visually still.
People have different levels of “visual imagination” my GF claims to be able to visualize objects as an overlay of the real world which to me is pretty freaky. It’s not that I don’t believe her I just can’t related to that at all.
Can you accurately draw something while looking at a photo of it? Most people can't. Seeing something and drawing it are obviously different skills.
What you may not understand about other people's mental visualizations is that they're somewhat fuzzy and unstable. It's very difficult to zoom in and out or to focus on the details. The better you know something, the better you can visualize it. There are also degrees of the ability -- some people are very good, and some aren't.
> Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
I know someone with aphantasia, and he was confused about whether or not he had it for a long time. I think this makes sense: you can't imagine being 100% certain you see something in your mind because it's a "sense" that you don't possess, so you assume other people aren't certain.
I assure you that you're absolutely wrong. I am absolutely certain I see things in my mind and that it's common for people to be able to do so (with varying degrees of stability, accuracy, clarity, etc.). Especially faces, I can see them very clearly. It is somewhat a function of memory.
I think people that dont visualize much or at all get the wrong impression on the fidelity and stability of the ability to visualize.
I remember being utterly astonished when I learned that other people had a seemingly magical ability to instantly recognise people - especially over time - which I lacked. Discovering I had developmental prosopagnosia was both a revelation and a relief!
For two reasons.
One. They actually have the wrong mental model of the machines and really imagine them incorrectly. Basically, they've never paid attention to the details, so they get them wrong mentally, but because they aren't sure anyway so they never notice a discrepancy. If they had to rebuild the machine, that's the mess they would probably build unless they stopped to really think about it.
Two. They don't know how to draw. One aspect of learning to draw from memory is to learn how to focus on specific detailed areas and then build out. You need to train this skill before you can do it well.
> When I draw a simplified bicycle I know it's because I only remember things like "two wheels, pedals and handlebars". Other people think they have a visualization but do not.
As you learn to draw, if you have a good imagination, you begin to learn how to interrogate your mental images systematically. To rotate the drawing, focus in on specific details, etc.
Unless you're a bike mechanic, or unusually attentive, you probably don't really know what a bike looks like or how it works. You have some of the basic ideas but not enough to wire it together. So, when people draw a bicycle from memory what they draw doesn't really make sense from a mechanical perspective. The bikes they draw couldn't work. It's not about being good or bad at drawing, it's a question of "are you poorly drawing a workable bike, or are you poorly drawing a nonsense contraption?"
If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct. As you cannot you just draw the same abstractions that I might. e.g. I know there are handlebars, pedals, wheels, connected together by metal poles. The fact that your drawing would be very different if you had a photo of the bike in front of you when you were drawing, no matter the objective quality, tells me that you probably don't have a picture of the bike available to you in your mind.
Regarding your one eyed friend, the solution is pretty simple. Demonstrate what you can do with binocular vision that he cannot with ocular vision. I assume you could estimate distances better, throw more accurately, similarly describe three-d visuals as someone else, etc. If you couldn't actually do anything to differentiate your binocular vision from your friend's vision then I'd say he has a point.
Same argument applies to aphantasia. If phantasia people really do have a mind's eye, I'd expect them to have some ability that aphantasia people lack. As is, I doubt that it's a real phenomenon.
1 - https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.
This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that people's mental models succumb to a sort of cartographic compression. Your mind doesn't remember detail which seem unimportant at the time, which makes them impossible to draw later. If your visualization was complete, certainly you could draw the parts, even if you couldn't draw them accurately.
E.g., I can hear music pretty much perfectly in my head. I can stop it, rewind it, separate the parts... and I can transcribe it into my music software, with pretty reasonable accuracy. That's the aural equivalent of drawing an accurate helicopter from memory.
Are you visualizing a weird looking helicopter or do you think you're visualizing while actually not?
"Oh neat, you can mentally generate warmth and we can measure with a thermometer!"
"No, no. It's mental warmth only."
"Okay, so you never get cold?"
"Well, no, true cold overwhelms my mental warmth, I get cold as easily as anyone else."
"But, you could make yourself sweat on demand, right?"
"No, sweating is a response to actual warmth..."
That's what it's like in this thread. People claim to have an ability that produces no actual difference. Elsewhere in this thread we see that mental imagery folks aren't better at shape rotation (they're worse), they can't draw from their images the way the could from real images, their mental imagery is vague, low resolution, and imprecise.
A blind person easily discovers the sighted can do things they cannot. Read text, spot distant objects, etc. A person with aphantasia discovers there is nothing the visualizer can do that they cannot. How could this be so?
I think you're just confused about which of us the blind one is.
I can't imagine not visualizing things. My undergrad was in mechanical engg, so it was kinda central to our field.
Imagining a 2d machine drawing as a 3d figure, imagining the interactions between various moving parts or system of joints and levers is expected of you.
The way I think reflects the visualization itself. Usually, it takes quite long to 'load' a complex system in your head and visualize it. But after it is done, I can describe intricate details of it. I also get irrationally irritated when someone interrupts me in the 'loading' phase, cuz I have to start all over again.
For a similar reason, I have a very natural affinity to graphs = undirected-trees and flow charts as they serve as a visual representation of what is a symbolic relationship. I am also completely unable to recall language or isolated-facts perfectly, but can do the same for visual systems.
I am famously 'the whiteboard guy' at what is now an ML job, so I can believe that not everyone thinks of these systems visually. But, visual intuition in some form is and has always been core to how to how I understand stuff.
> Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines?
In my case, the key points of interaction are visualized clearly. (eg: point of contact for gears, or a joint, or multi head attention on a single node). The rest is invisible in an out of focus sort of way, like things in our peripheral vision are out of focus and practically invisible, but you're still seeing them.
> I tend to think that I have a better understanding,
I maintain that vision is a crutch. It helps develop an easy to grok intuition, that works within the realm of visible way you'd think of interacting with the system. True intuition of things requires moving away from the visual intuition, and one that is grounded purely in the key axioms of that idea itself.
An example would be us thinking of differentiation as slope of a curve. The visual grounding is helpful but a more axiomatic understanding would allow you to grok concepts like [1], where the slop method falls short.
I guess can visualize the abstract aspects of it, if it makes any sense? Kinda like I'd imagine having a Daredevil-like radar sense would feel, or Toph's sense in Avatar. I can kind of have a feeling for shapes, movement, position without the sight itself.
In any case, at least some people do have visualizations. There are artists that can look at something and then draw it from memory. For myself-- and I'm a fairly talented amateur-- I can see nothing in my head as I also have aphantasia. I can draw nothing from memory. When I draw something from scratch I'm having to build it on the paper and I can never repeat a drawing.
Aside from my anecdata there's another key piece here that the article mentions: people with aphantasia lack voluntary visualizations: they can still have them involuntarily, such as when they dream. I know I get pictures in my head when I dream. It's an experience that's quite distinct from the normal day to day blackness in my mind's eye.
But still, I can see a short column of numbers and add them, move the carry, etc. But it never seemed like the visualizers could.
Visualization and ability to draw are separate. The latter can be trained, and I imagine that if I learned to draw better I would probably visualize more accurately, but I am convinced that the limiting factor in my ability to draw a bicycle is my lack of ability to draw and not my lack of visualization.
I've asked someone to visualize a house then asked them how many windows it has. They didn't have a answer. This isn't any different from what I'd say. I can try to imagine an apple. I know it's red. I know there's a stem and a green leaf on the stem. I know the shape of a Macintosh, with the wide top narrowing at the base. But the serrations and veins of the leaf, I'm not sure of. And I'm fairly confident that most people who claim to be able to visualize couldn't describe the leaf well enough to distinguish it as an apple leaf and not some idealized idea of a leaf. Could they describe it well enough that an artist could draw it?
You’re conflating memory and visualisation. You think that a visualisation of an imperfect memory isn’t a visualisation. Nobody’s claiming it’s a superpower, or really any different a way to live in the main, but I find your denial of people’s lived experience slightly odd.
So answering the question “how many windows” changes from moment to moment.
I’m not saying everyone is this way, but I am.
I'm not sure asking someone to draw "a helicopter" or "a bicycle" (inherently an abstraction) is a good way to get non-nonsense simplifications. It's like asking for "a face" and expecting something that isn't cartoonish? Also, I doubt all non-aphantasiacs can draw tolerably. That said, I do sort of assume it's a spectrum, and that there's a similar-ish 1-10% of people on the far end who visualize very well.
Perhaps if you ask them to describe their first bike in as much detail as they can?
That is not a task that requires the ability to visualize.
When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting.
I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually “seeing” it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger.
Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They can’t visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper.
In the industrialized west we simply call that "doing drugs".
It gets difficult to do more than simple calculus and algebra problems purely in my head, so I start offloading parts of my virtual workspace to a meatspace page.
1. Dreams. I have "after-images" of dreams for brief moments after I wake up, but then rapidly fade, as do memories of what happened in the dreams unless I quickly make sure to fix memories of specific details in memory by thinking about them after I wake up. And so I have memories of having the dreams and seeing images in them, though I can't recall the dreams themselves.
2. I've meditated for years, and once I had an experience where I suddenly could see clearly, as if I was on a movie-set. Everything was clear. I could turn around and see what was around me. I was lucid - I could have fallen asleep for a moment, it's possible, but I was controlling the "camera", and I was fully aware it was not real, which sets it apart from most dreams for me. It was also a far clearer image than I recall from dreams. I call it a "movie set" because it was clear to me it was not real and it felt like a "replay" of events happening around me that I was not taking part in, which also does not match how dreams feel to me.
3. I occasionally see very brief, fuzzy flashes. E.g. in writing #1 above, I for a fraction of a second saw a flash of my grandparents cabin, which was the subject of a weird recurring nightmare I used to have where on one side of the cabin it was sunny, while on the other side there was a torrential downpour that eventually became a wall of green water. I can describe the cabin in great detail, but I can only see that very brief flash of an image, even that inconsistently.
So, I know my brain can create visuals of different fidelity under different circumstances.
At the same time, when I "visualise" things, the "visualisations" are entirely spatial, not visual, and I can reproduce abstract drawings with a level of precision that I can't copy if I sit down in front of something and try to draw it. I remember a particular time in school (as I type that, I can recall the layout of the class-room, down to where I sat, how we were seated in groups of four, what the desks and chairs looked like, but I can't see it) where we were given the task of doing two drawings of our shoes: For one we were to draw purely from memory. For the other we were to put a shoe in front of us and copy it.
My drawing from memory was very precise. I remembered almost exactly what my shoe looked like, and drew a stylised and precise representation of the concept of that shoe that incorporated most details of it. My drawing from having it front of me was far more fuzzy and impressionist, with lots of imprecision and imperfections that were not there in the stylised drawing from memory. But it looked more like the real-life shoe.
My point being that I see no reason for you to assume that how people draw things are linked to their ability to visualise the thing. I can draw things I can't visualise in ways that are many ways better than how I can draw things sitting on my desk in front of me, but in some ways worse. I think it is in part because the lack of visual recall forces me to compensate by learning the details of something.
E.g. another comment asked about number of windows in their house. Well, I can't see my house, but I can "spatially walk around it" and count, but if I do I quickly realise that if I could visualise the house it'd likely be fuzzy in parts because I need to think about certain rooms because I mostly see the house from the inside and in some rooms the curtains towards the road are usually drawn shut. I see no reason why someone would accurately be able to recall or visualise most objects, because most of the time we don't really look at objects properly. People superficially pay attention to just some details and never bother to actually fully take in enough detail to ever remember an object the way it actually looks.
So when you say other people think they have a visualisation but do not, I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion: People don't have an accurate memory, as you point out. And whether or not it is limited that way for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that visualisation is limited by recall and imagination, and that you can't "test" whether or not people can produce visualisations by judging their ability to recall an object precisely.
I must say, the truth of the matter is much more interesting than my incorrect speculation.
Why can‘t we draw perfect helicopters from mind?
The same reason most can’t draw a perfect helicopter when having one in front of them.
In another comment I likened it to reading a book. When I read a book that voice is just enunciating the stream of text instead of my thoughts (except when I get distracted and the internal voice starts narrating my thoughts again).
Now I can make full corporeal models that move in time and walk around them.
Learn.
And people don't visualize things the way I learned. They "see" the same spotty attention-point cloud they move around in in real life, one spot at a time. Plus many didn't learn to draw. Also learn.
Once the penny finally dropped it was mind-melting. It's been three or four years now since I realized my experience is unusual, and I'm _still_ discovering ways it impacts how I experience life differently than most.
A memorable moment was telling a friend who already knew I was aphantasiac that I struggle with mental arithmetic, and being completely lost when he replied, "oh, right, because you can't make the numbers dance in your head."
I said, "what?"
After a minute of confusion, he was finally able to get across that when he does mental math, he actually writes the problem in his mind's eye and does it on virtual paper.
I think that was the day I first realized that it really is a handicap in many ways.
OTOH, an upside is that I've never had to wish for "brain bleach". I didn't understand that phrase at all until the past year or three. I occasionally think that aphantasiacs should be preferentially chosen for high-trauma-exposure jobs, like EMT - we simply can't retain those horrible moments.
I'm not on HN super-regularly, but I'd be happy to take a few minutes to answer questions the next time I check in.
No way. I would say most of the math students I've taught at the university level could do it to some extent.
It's not all that helpful. The problem is that your visual scratch pad is quite limited. If you're forced to always rely on it you won't get far without having to unlearn bad habits.
This happens to people with amazing memories too. I can't name a single colleague at my top 10 university that has an eidetic memory. The people I've met with amazing memories have systematically had a lot of issues because of their memory. It's too easy to rely on remembering things and then you never build good heuristics and don't generalize well.
My wife always loses things, and when she is looking I just virtually walk around my house to figure out where it is. I'm not sure I see every detail, but I see most of the home. Same for if I am talking about where something is for driving, I just virtually drive there in my head and explain the major turns to them as I go. I can also picture math and programming in my head; the former usually as geometric shapes forming to solve a problem and the latter as flow charts.
I'm not the smartest person, so I'm pretty sure it's just practice that allows me to do this, as I've always been a sort of loner and had to picture books and worlds in my head to entertain myself.
Recently I learned to read words backwards in my mind.
It's a skill.
What was the point at which it "clicked" for you? For me it was an AskReddit thread a few years back with a prompt of "When you hear a 'three X walk into a bar' joke, what does the bar look like?" It had just never occurred to me that people can actually visualize a bar when they hear that joke.
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...
I read that and went "huh. I guess I'm weirder than I thought."
Try this neat trick I just discovered: Try to visualize colors. Close your eyes, and just try to picture a red, then a green, then a blue. I never realized I could do this, and it actually requires a good bit of concentration. But it's super satisfying, especially given my aphantasia. I really can "see" the color like it's right there.
How's your "inner ear"? Can you hear music perfectly? I can.
Thanks for the idea, though!
My inner ear is nothing compared to a good composer's, but it's waaaaay better than my mind's eye, I think mostly due to years of heavy musical practice routines.
There was one memorable occasion when I was able to page through a set of flute/clarinet duets and actually hear in my head how they sounded based on sightreading the scores mentally.
I was playing a lot back then and doubt I could do it now. Two monophonic instruments also helped - I can recall individual voices or instruments fairly well, but whole arrangements much at all.
I was concentrating very hard, trying to visualize _anything_ and suddenly managed to imagine a green blob. I can occasionally visualize purple as well. It's so incredibly vivid though... It makes me genuinely sad to realize most people can do that (and so much more) at will.
I don't "hear" any more than I "see" in my brain.
I'm also an aphantasiac, as it were, and I've got some considerable trauma behind me that doesn't phase me the way that people who learn of it think that it ought to. I've never seen that expressed before but I understand what you mean. Thanks for sharing.
Oddly, I can visualize things very well in specific circumstances. For example: if I spend a lot of time playing a new game, I can recall images from it and manipulate them with ease. There are times where I listen to podcasts while playing a game and images from the game pop up when I recall anything related to what was in the podcast.
That is the best description of mental arithmetic I’ve heard, I love it.
Thinking about it, I guess I solve problems by moving numbers into certain positions relative to each other based on the operations then watch them split apart/combine, grow/shrink, etc. I always assumed it was a weakness in my math skills but the dance metaphor is a profound reframing, thanks!
[0]: I suspect that's just code for pumping him with an overdose of opiates so he would die quicker and with less spasms and no pain, but I can't be sure. I kind of think it's an open secret in medicine that they do this, though not sure, and I appreciate her service in helping us all be more comfortable in that room with her action that day.
I've dabbled a bit with that kind of work and I find my mind's eye to be critical for it and I would have no idea how to undertake it if I couldn't visualize something.
I was not any good at it.
I did slowly improve, but never got to where I could make anything genuinely visually compelling.
I got to be okay at working in traditional 2D media, as long as I was working from a reference photo.
I'd not heard of an early childhood trauma angle before. Thanks for mentioning it.
What I get is occasional flashes of specific images. E.g., if you tell me to think of a beach what I'll get is a flashbulb photo of a specific beach I have been to. That image then quickly fades and I'm left with something more like a tactile representation, as if you 3D-modeled the beach and printed it in monochrome grey resin and I were running my hands over it to get the shape.
Is it like that for anybody else?
But the strange part is I experience above-average visual recognition memory. It's like I can take those "chalk drawings" and pattern match them ridiculously fast against real stimulus. I can recognize faces and street corners from decades ago - but only if I see them again in real life. I can't conjure the image up in my head without the corresponding stimulus no matter how hard I try.
Personally, I find it strange that non-aphantasic people can effectively hallucinate on demand. It's the equivalent of hearing voices in your head - a disconnect between sensation and perception that, honestly, reduces my trust in their judgement. I know people who are strong visualizers (can play movies on demand behind their eyelids) and find they tend to have a terrible ability to accurately convey a story - presumably they've visualized their fantasy scenario so much they're unable to differentiate it from reality? My narrative + chalk drawing memories are consistently more reliable, if not more sparse.
An interesting note: taking bupropion (or, I assume, any similar stimulant) at bedtime drastically improves both the frequency and visual imagery of my dreams. Moreover, while taking it, should a dream turn lucid, my subjective experience in the dream is one of suddenly being unable to fixate on specific details of objects or direct my gaze (as if my visual field is entirely peripheral), rather than the 3D-modeled resin.
My brain is definitely capable of generating mental imagery, and I'll get flashbulb imagery as an automatic response to cues, but something interferes with the ability to visualize things while I'm awake.
After about 30 hours in I was getting really wild enhancements to my dreams and some changes to my “mind’s eye”. Almost like mono vs stereo or black and white vs colour, but it was more like what I thought was 3d was actually 2d and I only found out after it smacked me in the face.
I've had tactile hallucinations for many years now, sometimes when I'm in bed with my eyes closed (but nowhere near asleep) it feels like something is grabbing or poking at my face, or at times that sometimes is under the bed and breathing but at a different rate to my own breathing. Especially the tactile hallucinations on the face, these feel incredibly real, to the point that I usually open my eyes at least once just to confirm.
However, thats clearly nothing I can control. The ability to be able to control that seems amazing to me
For example if I think of a relative's home that I haven't been too for a while, I'll see one or more quick images like post card snapshots. When those fade, I'm left with a spatial map that I can mentally walk around in and touch. Or if it's of a beach, I can run an imaginary hand down the curve of the land. I don't see it. Or really, feel if it I "touch" it. It's just a sort of knowledge of filled and empty 3D space.
Those hallucinations sound freaky! I'm glad you've adjusted to them.
I usually describe what you refer to as a sense of space on a monochrome model as being as if I've loaded a JSON file listing out all of the points on a 3D model, but there's no renderer to view it with.
> A blind [astral] projector gave me the following explanation regarding his perceptions during dreams and OBEs. Being blind since birth and being a successful projector is a fairly unusual combination, to say the least. Over the years, my investigations in this area have unearthed many important clues concerning the nature of perception. These provided me with further clues as to the nature and dynamics of other aspects of OBE. In the out-of-body environment, perception is absolutely everything. Therefore, understanding the nature of perception is paramount to understanding the dynamics of OBE and the entire range of related phenomena.
> My question to CB was "Could you please expound on your nonsighted condition and how you perceive things during your OBEs?"
> C.B.: I've been blind since birth. My optic nerves didn't develop while I was in the womb, but I still have vivid OBEs and dreams. It's hard to explain just how I sense things and get around while I'm out of my body, but I'll give it a try. I experience no real difference between my OBE and dream perceptions. When I have a dream or OBE, I am very aware of what is around me, but everything is always three-dimensional. I can't perceive anything as two-dimensional, such as what's on the surface of a picture, but can perceive the canvas and frame as a whole very clearly. The area around me is extremely vivid in my mind, in all directions, and is very detailed. This awareness is much stronger than my normal awake perceptions are in my own home. When I project it's like I can feel everything around me, as if I am continually touching everything with my fingers, with my mind, with my senses reaching out and touching everything around me all at once. My senses extend a long way, much further than usual, and I can feel into the distance around me in probably much the same way as sighted people do with their eyes. I get around fine when I'm out of my body, with no hesitation or doubt about my surroundings at all. I never worry about bumping into things and can sense exactly what is ahead of me and around me at all times. If I meet people during an OBE or dream, I can instantly tell what they look like and what they are wearing, just as if I were running my hands all over them. This isn't really sight, as I have no idea of what color or light is, but my dream and OBE perceptions are about as close to sight as it gets for me.
From page 42 of https://ia902904.us.archive.org/28/items/AstralDynamicsANEWA...
My question about that has always been where the dividing line is between the people that can supposedly accurately describe places they haven't physically been and whatnot, and the mental blueprint of the brain going brrt :P
It's arguably half-tangentially related to what you describe, mostly because of the reference to hands.
It also reminds me of some descriptions I hear of zanshin, the zen state of total awareness.
Is anyone able to make the imaginary imagery appear in the primary context, right before their very eyes, replacing whatever the current input may be?
This is how I went from not being aware "picture yourself on a beach" was more than a figure of speech to being able to decompose mechanisms and take measurements all in my mind.
This is exactly how you do it.
Your eyes have nothing to do with it. Your brain fakes your eyes seeing stuff for you, and it can fake other things for you if you ask it.
I never have trouble imagining things as they do clearly 'render'—I can picture scenes, shapes, faces, motion, the styling of text I remember, basically anything—but it doesn't result in true visual output where I can see things as if I have my eyes open. If the latter is something that people can truly do, then I guess I do have some form of aphantasia.
Focus on a point. Move that focus around.
Get to two points. Spread them apart, move them closer together.
Advance to tracing letters. One after the other, into a word.
Movement is key. Try reading that backwards.
And so on.
Myself, it took about six months from nothing to colored triangle.
An example: I was always amazed and somewhat confused how police photo-fit artists could create such a perfect likeness of someone. I thought they must have been endowed with magical drawing skills. What I couldn’t comprehend was that other people would be able to _describe_ someone they’d seen in that level of detail.
Even if I think of my wife and kids I can only see the faintest fleeting flicker of their faces in my mind’s eye, and even that is in very murky black and white.
I'm an aphant and police sketch artists seemed like sorcerors of the Dark Arts to me up until the day I realized most people can visualize.
Did you realise after finding out you had any coping strategies?
I realised it’s why I loved using a computer - photoshop can be my mind’s eye. I even studied graphic design. I’m not a ‘natural’ designer that just instantly creates great designs, but I can put stuff in there and just move it around until I like it!
Hmmm. Supposing that problem were to be applied at a subconscious level to the mechanism that recalls faces, perhaps poor connectivity between visualization and (that area) is one potential reason/mechanism why people have face blindness?
I’m also terrible at finding things. I’ll be looking for, say, the butter in the fridge and it’ll be right there in my field of vision. And then when I find it I think “ooooh, that’s what that looks like!”. This brand of butter I’ve used for years and I couldn’t even remember what colour it was.
My first thought was "wait...not everyone does that?"
When I am describing a mechanical device the description builds in my vision...to the point where if I focus on it I can nearly block what I am actually seeing with what I am visualizing. My hand gestures are actually me mentally manipulating the device as I describe it. And immediately when I stop...my vision restores and the "real world" is back.
When I was a child I was a "daydreamer"...constantly looking out the window. Now that I am older I realize this is why. Not everyone is like this...that was something I had no concept of...I have always been this way.
I am not an exceptional artist...but I have a near photographic memory for things I read and conversations I have had. On the flip side though...I am for the most part totally face blind. I have trouble finding people in a crowd...especially if they change clothes, difficulty placing where I know someone from (but once they say "you know...at that one party"...I can remember the entire conversation we had).
My suspicion is the mind typically balances these things and somehow I am "off balance". It is very much a gift and a curse.
I just do all this visualisation without seeing anything, but I describe myself as a visual thinker.
I describe aphantasia as not being able to literally see things with my mind's eye, but still having the feeling of seeing them. Like running a headless browser.
I am also unusually obsessive about what my code looks like, because even though I can't see it, my recall is very much linked to an idea of what it looks like. I can navigate code by remembering what the right part of a piece of code looks like on screen. Just writing that made me recall the visual structure (without seeing it) of parts of the text editor I use and develop, as well as the appearance of a page of a paper I read 25 years ago.
I can also visualize real things to a degree, but it's kind of like when you see something in the corner of your eye, the brain has some visual info that makes it to your experience, but it isn't super legible. I can visualize pretty much whatever to that extent. But it is the other stuff, what you were describing, that made me totally sure I couldn't possibly have aphantasia. That's the visualizing I'm actually really good at.
Edit: Also, what is the difference between mentally seeing something and having the feeling of having mentally seen it? How are these not the same thing?
I was blanker than you describe it. Nothing moving, nothing seen, nothing.
Now I can light subjects, take measurements, walk around things with moving parts, roll them forward and backward through time.
I went on a hunch that it just doesn't fit. Has to be learnable.
And it was.
Sometimes I sleep deprevate on purpose if I need an extra kick of creativity…
I had to quickly open the post and search for a word 'dream' and found your comment.
Btw. for me visual imagination during pre-sleep even when very sleep deprived is same as when being wide awake. Dreams themselfs are a little more vivid perhaps, I'm not completely sure. Which reminds me a phrase 'lucid dreaming'.. a supposed state where can you volountarily control your dream to utilize it as some kind of matrix/construct.
If I try to conjure an image in my mind's eye, I get zilch. Just a scramble of shapes that won't hold still, not for one moment.
So ask me to draw Obama, whose face I've seen a thousand times, and it'll be a miserable failure. Ask me to draw a hand, and (because I know how to "construct" it) and it will be expressive and fluid.
But at the same time, I have excellent musical memory. I can recall music from 20 years ago, and pick out the exact synth line that comes in at the 2-minute mark. I can easily separate the winds and the strings and the brass in my head from whatever symphonies I'm familiar with. And I hear them back as near-perfect recordings. Only thing is: I can't play back the lyrics accurately. They'll be muddy usually and mostly indiscernible.
The brain, huh?
From point, to colored points, to simple shapes, to textured surfaces, to lit and moving mechanisms?
I learned. You can too.
That aside, I do believe I have some form of aphantasia. I was talking to an artist colleague about his process, and he said that essentially he just visualises something on the paper and more or less just traces the outline of the mental image that he projects.
At the time, I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like. Then one day while I was half asleep, I suddenly was able to picture simple geometric shapes and even human faces on the white wall next to my bed. Like black and white holograms, they were seemingly "right there", floating just above the surface of the wall. I reached out and I could trace the outlines with my finger.
I haven't been able to reproduce that, and it only happened a few times during the period of a few weeks.
Ah well, I guess I'll never be an artist...
I have been learning how to draw over the last 2.5 years, since discovering both that I also have aphantasia and that some of the best animators in the world do, too. I always thought it was unapproachable for the same reasons. I started with the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."
The artist I was referring to didn't draw "iteratively", like most people. He didn't start with a pencil sketch outline that he refined progressively until it looked like the subject. Instead, he'd pick up a pen, put it on the paper, and then he just traced a single continuous outline, moving the pen inwards to fill in details. All in one movement, without picking up the pen.
I saw him draw a "dwarf with a hammer" character like this, complete with clothes down to the buttons. A detailed beard and expressive face. Boots with the tops turned down. Wrinkles in the pants. A belt with a buckle. Detail upon detail. But he just... traced it. From the outside in. You couldn't even tell what he was going to draw until a couple of minutes.
PS: I've also met a guy who could do the same kind of thing with programming. Most people build up code iteratively, "sketching" the structure using interfaces or function definitions, building them up and refining them one piece at a time. Not this guy. He'd just stare off into space, and then start typing. Left-to-right, top-to-bottom, non-stop. I saw him open seven consecutive brackets and the close the last one a page and a half later.
He did this for a couple of hours at a fast typing rate, then hit compile. There were 3 typos due to a sticky shift key. He fixed those, and then the code compiled, ran, and successfully completed the (very complex!) problem.
These were some of the freakiest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Some people's brains just work differently to mine, and I won't ever be able to "think like them".
I have once imagined music strongly enough it was the same subjective experience as if it was real (except for the conscious awareness it was internal, but that was literally the only difference).
I can alter my sense of which way down is on a whim.
I can’t imagine tastes or smells at all, merely recognise them when I experience them.
I imagine thermoception more strongly than pain, but nowhere near as strongly as sound or gravity.
I can imagine non-painful touch stimuli almost, but not quite, as strongly as gravity.
I can imagine false proprioception with middling strength, including the perception of having a differently configured body.
If you quiet it down and ask yourself "What am I afraid of happening?" you'll get an answer. It will usually be something you need to urgently attend to, or you'll regret it.
It's like an inverse conscience.
Maybe the quiz should first ask me to imagine that person in a specific circumstance, where those details are predetermined by my memory of that circumstance? Even then I still don't understand what the quiz really means by half these answers. What does it mean for an image to be "lively"? That it's moving around? Am I meant to be imagining a still image or a moving image? Depending on how I interpret these questions and answers, I could get completely different outcomes from this quiz.
Are there any areas that are negatively or positively affected? Are there workarounds that these people do?
I read someone with Aphantasia say that they do math differently in that they don't picture the computations in their head, like it would be done in paper, but that they just use their verbal memory to keep track of intermediate values.
That's like "depression". There is no one kind. How depressed are you? Very? Not so much?
How would you even know?
So, good portion of my life my dreams were black and white and they look like room with under the strobe light. Only rarely I could see horizon in "outdoor dreams" or colors in my dreams. But, from time to time I have vivid color dreams, and even fewer of those, look like a reality.
So, when I started practicing meditation coupled with imagination and visualization of objects phantasia improved a bit, but dreams improved ten fold. But, soon as it improved a bit I stop practicing, I did not know why.
So, few weeks ago I started again, and few days I had a extremely sharp dream in which I saw viper snake attacking me, it was so vivid that I jumped out of bad. And while opening eyes, that image was still there, "snake" in the dark, on my bed.
So, my question is what if subconscious mind is doing it in order to protect us? Basically shutting down parts that feel unbearable for emotions to handle. Has anyone else had similar experience?
Additionally, when I have gimps during visual streaming (practice designed to improve visual imagination) objects are too complex and moving to fast, it is like video is streamed into my mind and I cannot control it. Last thing I remember is seeing some kind of very complex puzzle, element that was reshaping in breathing very rapid motion. Also those streams look more like AI generated visuals, they kind of looks as something but you cannot recognize anything.
Something like: https://twitter.com/revrart/status/1463518351498563585 and "Name one thing on this image" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/455/Scr...
So, I guess if I would have those all the time, my sanity would be in question, so I suppose "slow conciseness" in order to sustain itself needs to "shut down" certain brain function, or optimize skills we used the most on expense of others, for instance I am good with imagining abstract things and logic.
I would like to know how to invoke those visualisations on demand, but it seem they just happen.
What I also find strange is that people who can vividly imagine, cannot recollect people faces. On the other hand, I cannot describe any face, not even my closest love ones, but I can recognize them. I could not describe anything to let say a police photo robot how crime suspect looks like, but I could pick it from the line among thousand of faces.
I am finding that very strange, it is like having one directional mind, in the sense you can understand foreign language (read/listen) but you cannot create your own sentences, write or speak.
If you don't notice the relationships of parts, don't break things down – you can't do it.
Don't be afraid of your dreams. They are part of you. Part of your mind, consequently brain, which is a body part.
When dreaming you can do much more than visualize. Dreaming is a different skill.
You can learn dreaming too.
A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge-all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. [...] With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.
I absolutely cannot for the life of me visualize any* of the characters I can easily read and write. However, there is a trick I can do for the ones I can write: I can trace the strokes in my head in the correct direction, order, and proportion. And I have to do it by imagining the muscle movements I would use. Although I can't visualize the result, it's the closest thing I can get to seeing anything in my mind's eye.
*Almost true; exceptions exist like 十，人，个，大. But something as easy as 车 is too complicated for me to visualize, but very easy to mentally trace.
Did you try advancing past that though? Trace a word letter by letter, read it backwards? Take two points, move them apart? Make one green, one blue?
It took me months to get from points to a spinning pyramid with colored sides.
I'd be curious what happens when a person with aphantasia tries to learn chess. Would they simply not progress, or would they develop the ability to visualise?
It feels a lot more like proprioception than visualization.
A solution would be to practice the formless/objectless/mindfulnessy/vipassany type meditation.
I would start with 3-4 minutes of boxed breathing back when I learned visualisation. Nothing would happen if my mind was doing the monkey thing, grasping at this, then at that, then at something else.
-Take a piece of A4 paper
-A real one in the 3D world, with grain and texture.
-The 1000 first digits of pi have been written on it in black Arial 12.
(How many lines are there ?). (Read back the third line) (Read back the fourth line from right to left)
-Wrap the paper page into a cylinder so that the first digit of the line of the over-wrap match with the first digit of Pi by transparency.
-After the over-wrap, let the page go straight and not in a cylinder such that the wrapped paper look like a manuscript o.
-Now take a red laser, and shine it through the the paper such that you highlight the same number through the 3 folds of paper. (What is the highlighted digit ?)
-Color this digit green for all instances on the page. Unwrap the page, (on what line is there the most green numbers).
-Change the font size to 20 and do the same exercise, but color the number blue while still keeping the previous colors.
-Change the font size to 32 and do the same exercise, but color the number red while still keeping the previous colors.
-The password is the first four consecutive red-green-blue-black, what is the password ?
I never realized I was “missing” something because I have a very strong sense of internal spatial mathematics and can keep track of geometric folds, twists, transforms, etc in my head very well. But once I read this I realized most people have color. My internal world is all black.
I can feel colors and shapes. But I can’t see them.
If I'm imagining a machine I'm not imagining it in front of me, instead I'm holding it abstractley in my mind. The one exception is if I'm looking at something being tweaked I'll apply chances onto top of that thing.
Someone mentioned their artist friend will imagine the drawing or subject they want is already on the paper then draw it. I've always tried to imagine the real thing in my mind and then translate it on the fly.
A vr game I played recently has you move and manipulate a 3d puzzle hovering in space in front of you.
I think approaching visualization as happening on top of the real world could be really helpful for me.
This makes it really hard to perform the test of how vividly can you imagine something in your head (an apple is the usual one), because if I try to imagine it, at best it comes off as very poorly formed and hard to get a good focus on. But I know and remember much more clear scenes from times where I've been focussing more so on the scene than trying to imagine the scene, if that makes any sense.
I believe myself to be hyperphantasic.
I believe that reading books is much more enjoyable for me. I can quickly visualize stuff that others cannot.
I actually see stuff in vivid details on my head.
This has benifits in many areas.
https://player.fm/series/wow-in-the-world/adventures-through...
Not spooked by Halloween ghost stories? You may have aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29049356 - Oct 2021 (10 comments)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997320 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588905 - June 2021 (1 comment)
Seeing things a different way; simple test for aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532946 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
Picture This? Some Just Can’t (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800815 - April 2020 (103 comments)
Aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267445 - June 2019 (72 comments)
Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927 - April 2019 (422 comments)
Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19612122 - April 2019 (2 comments)
The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799550 - Jan 2019 (100 comments)
What it’s like to be unable to visualize anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730505 - May 2016 (11 comments)
Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 - April 2016 (202 comments)
Aphantasia: A life without mental images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 - Aug 2015 (73 comments)
Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10121678 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)
When it comes to visualization or a mind's eye I don't (and as far back as I can remember) have any form of that ability. When my eyes are open I see what is in my field of view, but I am unable to create new visual input, nor can I edit what I can see in any way. When my eyes are closed there isn't any colors, images, flashes of images, shapes, smoke, text, numbers or anything. It is just a darkened void.
Unlike some I am not face-blind. I recognize people I know when I see them, either in person or in physical/digital pictures. If I had to describe someone I know well and see every day, but they are not in front of me at the time, I couldn't do it adequately. Estimated height, weight, and size compared to me, doable. Same for hair color and whether or not they wear glasses. Anything else I couldn't say. I simply do not possess that information. If tried to describe someone I know well that I haven't seen in six months the best I could do would be their height and size compared to me.
At a certain point if I don't see them again it is like they just disappeared. The same applies to memorable conversations we had, places we went, and things we did. Over time it all just fades away. It really depends upon how strong of a connection there was. Even after 24 years I remember my high school sweetheart's name, how many years we were together, and where we went for both vacations we had. To this day I can recite her parent's telephone number and address from memory. I'm over 500 miles from there right now and I could hop in my vehicle and drive straight there without directions. I don't even need to remember their address to know how to get to their road and exact house from here and I haven't been there since 2003. Absolutely any other information about her and her family? That's all gone.
Like my lack of a mind's eye I seem to also have a lack of a mind's ear. Unlike what some others have posted I am unable to imagine music nor can I compose it in my head (or in person) either. If I want to listen to music I have to queue up YouTube or my local music player. I do one or the other daily as the music provides some respite from tinnitus.
As an aside: I played trumpet, trombone, and tuba throughout high school even though I can not read sheet music. I for some reason didn't or couldn't learn sheet music so my music teacher translated the notes into numbers for me. Those I understood. For the trumpet it would go something like: 13, 1, 12, 123, etc. Tuba was similar and trombone was based on distance the slider was from full back.
As to whether or not I have an inner voice. That too is a negative ghost-rider. If I'm thinking or reading I do not hear any voice, mine or otherwise. If I am making a grocery list something does happen because I remember it, but when I am thinking it I don't hear the words I think nor do I visualize them in my mind's eye. They are stored as data to be retrieved when I next go to the grocer.
Dreams are also absent from my life. When I wake up it is as if I had just laid down. I have no memory of anything happening between those two events.
Since learning of aphantasia I have made some changes in my life. Now when I go places I want to be able to experience again after I've left I take lots of pictures and video. I try and do the same with my friends. Pictures, videos, and audio so that if they pass before me I'll still be able to see and/or hear them again. Hopefully from now on I'll be able to say more than "I spent a month in Key West, Florida in 1997" or "I went to Mountain View, Arkansas for two weeks in 2005".
Overall I do not find aphantasia a negative. Up until I learned about it, it wasn't a thing so my experiences were just like everyone else. Now that I know about it and have learned more about myself I have made some small changes to my life to compensate. My current approach is to experience life as it happens and let the pictures, videos, and audio do the long-term backups.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
Global aphantasic, dyslexic, problems with recall at times, hard to traverse memory and also in process of being diagnosed with ADHD. When I’m deeply interested in something I don't read forums and join community's as it spoils the fun of working things out, and helps in leaving out mistakes of others. Once I've rinsed the topic, created my construct and can find no new worthy vein to mine, then I will compare with the consensus. So what I have to contribute is only from my own half finished ideas, there may be errors, in fact and terminology, I'm still playing with my toy.
I'm annoyed I didn't work out I had aphantasia before reading about it, but I was close, from a young age. As many mention, counting sheep to sleep was a riddle, I discussed this with my sister about 8, I revisited that conversation after the revelation. She can not create visuals but can recall what she has seen. I can do neither. Many hints I was given, Henry Miller for one said I do not have much of a visual memory, Dracula and LOTR were too descriptive for me to appreciate fully.
There's so many nuances with this topic, I have no sensory memory, touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing but I can remember feelings. No sense of taste is the most common in the people Ive talked to. To recall experience everyone has, to create new experiences everyone has. I dislike the name aphantastic, without imagination, as I have an uncontrollable imagination and is separate, it throws more confusion onto an already confusing subject.
I have trouble recognising people, some aphants don't, I think this is due to my poor recall. I'm not sure if I believe in a subconscious as others do, that's another rabbit hole, but to be brief, my subconscious has access to that look up table that my consciousness dosnt.
You can have hyper Aphantastics who have beyond 4k abilities. You program yourself with I (not AI), but the memory bus might be differently wired restricting read write permission’s, a hardware limitation because it is not something you can learn.
A screen, a speaker are all only interfaces, we are all unique machines crafted by the universe, each one of a kind, and maybe, just maybe, for a specific purpose, that we have been blessed with I is astounding, I love playing with tech, my mate had a NES, I had a Master System, the enjoyable conversations we had describing our experiences would never have happened if we both had both.
Its funny that I is the one thing we cannot fathom, in philosophy, maths, physics. What troubles me is why has it been such a secret, why have Ya all so quite about your visual imagination, sounds like your all watching stuff you don't want to to tell anyone about :-) and if it is a gift are they going to be happy with what your doing on their hardware.
And finally, IMO, if you have a screen, you it you know, if your unsure you probably are.