But normally, you won't actually see anything with your eyes closed, otherwise it would be a "closed-eye visual" (CEV) which is you only experience when you do hallucinogenic drugs (shrooms, LSD)!
Nonetheless, most people can "visualize" when they imagine objects, people's faces, places from memory — but it is totally not like AR (i.e. actually overlaying images on top of light perception). Nope, it feels more like you see it with some mysterious "mind's eye", disconnected from real eyes. It is very faint and tacit, like you're perceiving a very abstract high-level representation of an object, instead of seeing actual "pixels". And it doesn't require having eyes closed, people often can do it as easily with their eyes open, as it doesn't interfere with the normal vision at all.
I see absolutely nothing. When you say “it” is “faint and tacit”, you are describing an “it” that simply does not exist for me. I see a whole lot of people who don’t have aphantasia get hung up on this. They keep describing an “it” without accepting that for some of us there is no “it”.
The way I’ve usually “tested” it among friends/family/clients is to just ask them to imagine that there is a ball, on a table, and someone pushes the ball so that it rolls off the table onto the floor.
I then ask them to answer, from memory, simple things like what color was the ball, what kind of table was it, what material was the floor, was there a sound when the ball fell to the floor, what else happened, etc.
No one I’ve known with aphantasia (including myself) has answers for any such questions when asked to recall what they just imagined, but almost all can answer such questions “while imagining”.
My imaginary scene clearly had some "spatial sense" though — I saw (but more like "felt") the flat surface of the table, the edges of it, how it is positioned relative to myself, the roundness of the ball rolling, and how it falls off.
Outside of "notable features" for some characters, I have no concept of what they look like. And by feature, I mean Harry Potter has a scar. I couldn't tell you much about its size or orientation. Just generally lightning shaped.
This also helped solidify to me why some folks are so hung up on casting choices.
Note that it's possible to visualize motion of an object without visualizing the object itself. This is me. I can't hold any imagery in my head, but I can easily imagine the movement of a kickflip or a pirouette, or I can see the bouncing of three balls without seeing the balls themselves.
I can attest you, this is wrong. When I close my eyes I do see stuff... At the very least some geometric fractals, usually some sort of boiling visual association soup, where random images emerge from fractal Eigengrau liquid. I, willfully, got little influence on the stuff coming up. It feels like watching my brain do brain things. It's rather annoying/exhausting by the way.
I think this experience is a spectrum. It's not like you have it or you don't.
Surely its a spectrum, but seeing closed eye visuals isn't considered "being in a normal part of the spectrum" though.
Some people see details, some see colors, some see black and white, some see a misty fog, some see nothing.
It sounds to me like you're somewhere towards the aphantasic end of the spectrum, but I couldn't give you the exact percentile.
So yeah, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule about CEVs.
I suspect I had the visual once, thanks to one time as a teenager I tried a magic spell and the explanation of "I'm capable of self-hypnosis" is much more plausible than the spell having had even the slightest effect.
I can easily create intense overrides for sensory experience whenever I like for my sense of which way down is, and mild overrides for the various kinds of touch.
I tend to process a lot of things through sound, and go around the world recognizing people by voice or unwillingly trying to place people's accents when they talk. I think it might be related somehow.
"Picturing" something in your head is the same, just with the sense of vision instead of the sense of hearing.
I don't think it's meant to be in that dark space / visual eye space.
close your eyes, think of a family member, who is it, where are they, what are they wearing, can you see details about the clothing, can you see details in the background, is there motion, if you open your eyes can you still see it
there will be some very strong yeses in there if you sample people in visual professions
By my rough count of Figure 2 tests, where Derek is at 0 to Loren at 6 (ignoring F), I have about 3.5 atypical responses.
My experience with Figure 2:
A) I can flip between cone and weird triangle, saw the cone first
B) I see it as if someone placed identical cat stickers on the drawing. I can intellectually understand the perspective, how the upper-right one is supposed to be bigger, but don't experience it that way.
C) I see that there is an implicit rectangle (to me it looks slightly wider than tall). But the color doesn't "spread" to the middle, it's just like 2A -- a boundary in the surrounding shapes implicitly extends into the empty space to form a rectangle shape.
D) It takes minimal, but non-zero effort to see the vase
E) It's trivial to flip between the two orientations of the cube
F) skipped
G) I don't understand what I'm looking for here. I see clouds, sky, and a silhouette with a tree. Is there a face in it somewhere? I can see the smiley face on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
I believe you’re correct, since I commonly see it presented as a spectrum. https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/
Basically a face staring at the tree from above.
More recently I was thinking about gaming, and more specifically Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, City Skylines (all of which I own but get nowhere with) and other games where you play, you fail, you plan, you repeat. Even Minecraft.
Someone else - I presume - plays, fails, learns, repeats and so gain a step toward mastery of the game. (I accept from reading that mastery of DF isn't happening soon). I presume that players visualise mistakes and visualise workrounds. I cannot do that, I do not know how.
I have thousands of hours in gaming but I cannot recall them visually, so I respond in-game to what is happening in-game. That may not make sense. There will be some learning but in a non-visual way.
Is this aphantasia? I have no idea and I'm not about to be diagnosed.
I do have vivid and lucid dreaming but ask me to close my eyes and visualise an apple and nope, doesn't happen.
Then you change or introduce things "make the sofa 50% smaller" then a bit more "change the colour of it to deep yellow" etc
Or imagine getting on a bus and their is only one seat left.
So on the one hand I can draw an excellent random generic man or a generic face. If you pose for me I'll do an uncanny portrait. But I can't draw my wife of 30 years -- I can't even see her in my mind. I can't draw an actor I've seen 200 times unless I were to sit with photographs and ingrain their face by deliberate practice
To sort of expand: I'm old enough that a diagnosis makes zero difference. But it does explain so much.
When misophonia became a thing it explained so much of my reactions to certain noises, that I was not alone.
Just knowing that others are experiencing the same removes some of that aloneness.
That's definitely aphantasia as I understand (and suffer from) it.
I've never really considered the "visual learning from failure" aspect of it. I know that in, e.g., Minecraft, I have tremendous trouble with building things because I can't visualise them beforehand and thus things get hodgepodged into these hideous homunculi of buildings or redstone contraptions.
I find it mildly annoying that there is nearly no scientific backing to it, and that we are having the same discussions over and over again.
It seems very similar to the RSI craze, back in the 1990s, when almost everyone who went near a computer couldn't work for months because they thought they had it. And then somehow the condition vanished.
Yes, some people actually have RSI, and some people probably have severe aphantasia and actually suffer from it. But I'm afraid there is a large group of people who think they are missing out on brain candy that simply doesn't exist, (edit: or which they may have not successfully developed access to yet.)
It should be trivial to write up a puzzle game such that, much like those color blind tests where you need to find numbers, will very quickly eliminate people who think in different ways while being a piece of cake for others. And yet I don't think I've ever encountered one.
Are there no capabilities that can not be overcome? Would that puzzle game just be terrible entertainment? Why doesn't it exist?
Again, just a conjecture, but it would help to explain why we seem to come out of the woodwork in such circles so regularly.
I don't even understand how you can begin to plan a user interface without the power of visualisation. I suppose you just have to produce drafts? I can just lie there in bed and iterate for hours, imaging how the user will move through processes, etc. It seems a huge disadvantage to only be able to develop such an idea while actually having the interface in front of you. Maybe this is the real reason some developers never want to leave the back end :)
I feel like even planning architectural code is somewhat visual for me, like I have a mental model of the folder structures and how different components of the system relate to each other.
Highly industrialized societies have large populations that can experience, interact and survive their entire lives almost solely through screens. This seems to be an unknowing experiment we're performing on brains.
• Average milk produced per cow in the US: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/6254_global-...
• Visitors to Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/10880_global...
• Popularity of the first name Graham: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/13927_popula...
Even if there was an actual correlation with aphantasia and not just a case of "we weren't looking before", there's a lot of non-causal correlations in this world.
“… for this discovery of [letters, writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
Now that we know what we're looking for we've found evidence from the 1800s for aphantasia. And at rates that look consistent with modern rates. Galton famously asked about this but almost no one follows up on it seriously.
