What Happens in a Mind That Can't 'See' Mental Images

I've never understood how people talk so objectively and confidently about this. There are subjective things we'll never able to compare, like whether your experience of red and green is the same as mine or swapped. Then there are other things like face blindness that have testable effects in the real world. When one person says they see 80% clear mental pictures and another person says 10%, how can we be so sure they aren't just describing the same experience differently? I have no idea how I could accurately report my experience of the apple test. I could say I see it clearly or not at all depending on what you mean by seeing.

EDIT: It also reminds me of the "inner monologue". I'm skeptical when people confidently claim they have no inner monologue, as if it's as easy to verify as being right-handed or left-handed. In the context of meditation, it's common for people to confuse "having no thoughts" with "thinking nonstop" -- it's not an easy thing to understand about yourself, let alone claim how it relates to other people's subjective experience.

I have aphantasia and similarly didn't realize it until a few years ago, at 22, when someone asked me that "Apple" test.

Since then, I've noticed a few interesting things:

1) I remember things by association. I'm great with maps, physics, economics, and topics where things are inter-related, but terrible at memorization and obviously can't visualize anything.

2) I'm relatively unburdened by trauma. A lot of my friends will have a visual memory of things that have happened to them, but for me, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. It's sort of sad to not remember all the good times, though.

3) It's not really related to taste (I think my taste visually is better than most of my friends and they ask me for fashion advice), but I have to see something to know how it will look and make a decision. Basically near impossible to be an artist or designer.

I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's estimated to be 1-4% of the population.

I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.

When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.

It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.

Has anyone compared how people with and without aphantasia play chess?

When most people who play chess need to look a few ply ahead they do so by visualizing the board and pieces and them moving those visualized pieces around on that visualized board. They pretty much do with the visualized board what they would do if they had access to a physical or computer analysis board that they could actually move pieces around on.

I once wondered if top players do it that way too, or if maybe the see the position in some more abstract way like a graph with pieces as vertices and colored directed edges encoding relationships such as "The rook is attacking that night" and "that knight is defended by that bishop" and moves are then operations that shift edges.

I asked GM Nakamura about it on an AMA he did on Reddit, and he said he sees the board just like nearly everybody else does.

I've always struggled with descriptions of aphantasia and I don't know if I have it myself because I don't know what's "normal". This article also didn't clarify it.

When imagining an object, do people literally see it as if they were physically looking at it with their eyes (as if a physical image appeared on the inside of their eyelids)? When I imagine something, there's nothing visual/optical involved. It's like a dim picture that originates in my brain--I can kind of put something together, but it lacks any detail or clarity. My actual vision stays completely black.

I don't actually "see" mental images, but I "feel" them. For example, I can remember a friend's or a celebrity's face — clearly recalling the "feel" of that face — the exact qualia I experience if I actually saw it — but there is no "overlay image", my eyes see pitch black that moment! It is a very high level qualia, totally decoupled from visual perception. But I swear it is the same as if I actually saw a certain face. It is so strange.

Is that aphantasia? Not sure. I feel that the confusion lies in inability to properly describe what it is, when you recall something. People's descriptions don't match, just because it is hard to describe... not necessarily because someone has less or more imagination than others.

> No matter how nascent the research is into these imaging extremes, the scientists all agree on one thing: Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the spectrum don’t have problems navigating the world.

I don't know about hyperphantasia, but aphantasia absolutely is a disorder. I have a whole stack of things to hang on my office wall, and I can't even begin to do it because I can't lay them out mentally. They've been sitting in a pile for years because I have nowhere to even begin. I can't just start hanging things because I'm going to end up unhappy about where everything is placed. Decorating things in general is very difficult. Or any sort of arranging or laying out where I don't have a representation I can physically (or digitally) manipulate to explore ideas.

I also have really poor dreaming. For most of my life I'd say I didn't even have dreams. When I do have dreams, the visual quality is shockingly bad and largely abstract and indistinct.

I also have very little autobiographical memory, which I previously didn't think was connected to aphantasia until reading this article. I do know that looking at photos of the past helps with recall, very frequently when my wife tries to describe something to me I'll have no memory of it until I can see a photo.

The funny thing is I'm actually fairly visual-driven otherwise. I learn better when I can see things. Although maybe that's actually a consequence as well, maybe other people construct mental images when listening or reading?

I have aphantasia, and so does my brother. Neither of our parents do.

Both of us are really good at three dimensional thinking, but have no “visual” aspect to said thoughts.

The best way for me to describe it, is that, when imagining an object (apple, barn, etc.) my mind thinks about the physical structure of the object. I can’t “rotate” it because there’s nothing to “rotate” however I can describe it in 3D space using my hands.

Again, there’s nothing “visual” about the way this works. My mind just prefers spatial thinking over visual thinking.

I have ~no inner imagery. I have no inner voice.

First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.

With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.

- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.

- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)

- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.

- When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus

- I can't mind palace really much at all.

- I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.

Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio.

Interested in other people's experiences.

I haven't tried it but this person claims to have a technique you can practice as an aphantasic and learn to visualise: https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...

No article on this topic is complete without mentioning Galton, who described the phenomenon in 1880: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

(By the way there appears to be a similar continuum in how people experience their thoughts (or "internal monologue"), ranging from almust fully auditory complete with specific voice characteristics, through linguistic-but-not-auditory, to fully abstract)

Discussion pages like this one are constantly filled with people saying "Aphantasia doesn't exist, it's just differences in how people describe the same thing," when the science in this paper and others is clear.

Yes, it's hard to imagine not seeing mental images if you can see them, and it's hard to imagine seeing them if you can't. Having a hard time imagining others are different doesn't mean we are all the same, it just means it's hard to imagine being different.

I'm not sure I picture an apple if someone asks me to imagine one. I'm not sure it has a particular color neither.

If someone asks me to imagine a color for the apple, or to focus on the color, then yes, I will picture a color. This will be a conscious process.

So, I can picture colored stuff, but I apparently don't by default.

I'm not even sure there are colors in my dreams unless they happen to play an important role, it's like I dream directly in the abstraction of what I see, I don't even notice almost by definition.

I don't know what to make of this. Trying to picture stuff in my mind works, so it's there, but it will be minimal if it's not conscious. I guess I'm lazy xD. It is hard to picture something detailed, maybe it would come with training.

Maybe I should start asking myself what is the colors of things to try guessing I'm dreaming xD

I cannot see mental images and it never occurred to me until my late 30s that things like "mental palace", "imagine yourself on a beach", even kind of Feynman ball mean literal picture that people kind of see in front of their eyes.

I was trying really hard to do mental imaginary techniques to remember things in games (e.g. "imagine ikea shelf and put number when the next item respawns in corresponding box") until I realized that there is something wrong with me and the entire premise.

For everyday life, I think that this is has some weight in the fact that the docs that I'm writing usually text heavy and don't have many illustrations/diagrams and I was/am solving spatial puzzles kind of "analytically" in my head.

I don't have aphantasia, my mind's eye is composited onto my senses. Obviously I'm aware of what I'm consciously imagining, but I've recently realized that I can't actually tell the difference between imaginary and real sensory inputs. I'm experiencing them the same way.

I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

As someone with recently diagnosed aphantasia - it’s surreal that 99% population sees things that aren’t there / literally halucinates, and that it’s considered normal!

>Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

I suppose I have limited mental imagery because when people say they "see" things, I want to say "with what?"

To me, "seeing" has to involve an operation of the eyes, but if your eyes aren't taking in any light, what are you seeing?

I can imagine things and have vague visual imagery appear in my head, but I can't see them as "floating like holograms".

I wish I could borrow someone's mind for a minute and understand more.

Just curious, doesn't it happen to everyone for certain abstractions? When we study maths, our teachers encourage us to "see" examples or geometric representations or simply some abstract representations in our mind. Some people couldn't do so at high-school level, some people couldn't do so at college level. Those who can no matter what have a high chance of becoming an accomplished mathematician or scientists, but even for them they can't "see" mental images for every concepts no matter how hard they try.

Similarly, someone couldn't see mental images for the things they wanted to draw, and they were miserable in their arts class. I certainly felt so.

I don't think only 1% or even 1% to 4% of the population has this.

Most people do not know they are supposed to 'see' something when imagining something. Same goes for hearing.

I can't do both and discovered this when I was 45.

Like many others I do dream in full colour with sound and I never forget a face.

When doing a quick round at work asking people about it, because I was amazed, I've learned two things.

1. About 50% of the persons asked, confirmed they objectively only see black when closing their eyes and imagining something.

2. Most do not care at all about this subject and are not interested to explore this further.

Can someone explain to me how someone with aphantasia can draw a picture at all? How can you draw a picture of a dog if you can't mentally picture what a dog looks like? Seems impossible.

Best I can tell is that I think I have this. Or at least some amount of it.

But I find it really hard to understand what people exactly mean when they describe their visualization experience.

Like I definitely don't feel like I see anything if I close my eyes and try to think of specific objects.

If I close my eyes and rub them I can see sorts of blobs and sparkles that are usually white or a bit yellowish even though my eyes are closed.

I only recently realized that my mind's eye really isn't. Just now I made the connection maybe why I can't stand descriptive prose. I remember having to read the Scarlett Letter (think that was the one) and there were pages and pages of words painting a picture that did nothing for me, and I was just waiting for it to get on with telling the story. Out of context but "I'm drowning here and you're describing the water." sums it up for me.

Another thing that makes sense now is how I could never learn facts and stories in school. I'm guessing that I just couldn't form a conceptual model for me to store it. If I studied a field deeply I could probably be able to connect all the dots and it would make sense. OTOH math and science was super easy as they were all formulas and relationships that touched on each other and naturally all fit into place relative to each other, once I could get a thing to click I wouldn't have to remember it because I'd just know.

I truly believe some of this is just a misunderstanding, yes I can see the apple in my minds eye in all of its glory and color, but yes it’s still black “behind my eyes”, it all depends on where I am focusing, on my eyes or on the apple.

Some percentage of this has to be people simply not agreeing on the way to describe what they are experiencing even if they are experiencing the same thing.

For me, if I try to visualize something context-less, my visual is very faint and smeared. My mind naturally starts to contextualize it, and when it finds one it becomes clearer, although it’s less that I’m visualizing something and more that I’m re-experiencing a memory… what I was doing, how I felt, etc.

As a result, I don’t tend to think of an apple. I think of the apples in the fruit drawer that I just looked at, or the apples we turned into cider when I was a child. I don’t see what my mom looks like in my mind so much as remember, and as I’m trying to hold her in my mind to describe her I see a dozen memories of her face that all sort of blend together.

I think when I was younger, it was more vivid and simpler. The murky, dark, and fleeting memory/visualization thing has increased over time, and that kind of scares me.

People who don't have aphantasia see objects in their visual field, occluding reality? That sounds like hallucination, and very unsafe unless you have a high degree of control over it. An imaginary horse pops into your visual field while you're making a tricky maneuver on the highway...

Also, presumably ADHD is widespread. But people who don't have aphantasia (most people) can reliably persist accurate imaginary objects in the visual field? Your attention is fragmented and jumping from thing to thing but the horse in your visual field persists there for you to visit and revisit? Highly doubtful.

The actual experience is that people don't see stuff pop up in their visual field; the imaginary objects are seen in a separate field, and yes they are "seen" in a visual way, but not in the visual field; the imaginary objects are fleeting and morphing. The degree to which you can persist an imaginary object is highly dependent on the ability to focus attention.

This ability varies with our health and exhaustion. A year or two ago I had less control of conjuring images like these by choice. Only a week or two ago I regained more control of depth, not that it wasn’t 3d before, but making it really pop makes a big difference. The key has been long distance cycling, cardio is important for a clear mind.

> “It is, I think, as close to an honest-to-goodness revelation as I will ever live in the flesh,” Ross wrote in a 2016 Facebook post about his personal discovery. All his life, he had thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor.

It's NOT a metaphor?? People are actually imagining sheep??

Anyway I've suspected before that I have some form of this.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the rumble of the hordes of people rushing to post "I have this".

A couple of things I noticed while teaching drawing to students (who were quite good) and i was a bit obsessed by Aphantasia..

It's always easy to distinguish a drawing done from life, a drawing done from a photograph, and a drawing done from imagination. i.e. drawings from photographs have an identifiable characteristic that isn’t present in drawings from imagination.

This distinction holds regardless of where students perceive themselves on the spectrum of ability to visualize. Students who describe themselves as having excellent visualization skills are often "better" at drawing from imagination (for a conventional idea of 'better'), but not any more able to draw like they could from life/photo than anyone else.

I used to ask people about this a lot because I was curious about a related hypothesis: that aphantasia correlated with being good at mental math.

Specifically, people who can imagine images will often do math in their head by imagining doing it on a sheet of paper. And I'm pretty sure that is bad and doesn't work well. I think the difference is that the visual brain is somewhat dyslexic about numbers, like it just isn't very accurate at computation. (Personally I use my verbal brain to do math, not any sort of imagery.)

Curious for other data points (although back in the day I must have polled ~100 people so I'm pretty sure of it).

For those who cannot visualize things: try the same experience with your eyes open. I can't visualize anything with my eyes closed - maybe black-and-white shadowy outlines if that - but with my eyes open I can visualize things kind of up above my head outside my visual field.

(There's an irony for me in that I had, until I got older, perfect experiential recall of short clips of time, including the feeling of motion, sound, etc. That faded to nothing in my forties. Enjoy being young, the worst part of aging is the very things that are you start to become threadbare.)

It may be worth investigating aphantasia from the perspective that space is a latent sequence [1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132023

I recently learned that people are on a spectrum of thoughts visualization - not everyone _thinks_ the same. If you want to check your personal mix of “visualization” characteristics this questionnaire by Uni of Wisconsin-Madison is useful (you also get your position on the distribution curve):

https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...

Aphantasia might occur with other senses too. I'm almost certain I have aphantasia in taste and smells. I simply cannot conjure any in my head, even for extremely common ones like taste of apple or sun dried sheets. When people ask me about my opinion of food I just had, I'm simply recalling facts from my assessment made during the meal. It's very different from how I do it if I had to recall something visual like a painting, because I do have a vivid mental image.

What I find interesting is that people with aphantasia still dream like everyone else but can't voluntarily evoke images in their mind.

I have this, as does my wife. We both thought it was normal up until about a year ago, until our kids informed us that they actually see the things they imagine.

I have very good autobiographical memory and my dreams are so real I sometimes can't tell if I was asleep or not. But I can't visualize something when awake. I can think about it, and I can visualize how things will fit into a space and then make it happen. In fact I'm really good at looking at a room and figuring out how to rearrange the furniture to fit better, for example. Or an entire backyard (I designed all of our landscaping just by looking and imagining).

But yeah, no mind's eye.

I saw one study that said having no mind's eye was correlated with higher intelligence. Not sure how strong the evidence for that actually is, but I like to think it's accurate. :)

This may not be for everyone, but I found it interesting:

https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/sex-and-aphantasia/

(mild nsfw warning)

How vivid is the normal level of visualization? I can barely imagine a red apple, but not detailed or vivid really, certainly don't see it in front of me, can barely imagine it. Would vitamin B12 help?

I struggle with the idea you can choose your eyes and "see" things.

Close my eyes and it's just just black (well, technically eigengrau but everyone calls it black)

I'd very much like to have that ability. It sounds like cheating!

Anecdotally (can't remember the old book references), this had been observed in "new age" and "spiritual" groups in the 1960s, with the conclusion that people could be trained out of it.

I wonder how this related to the phenomenon where people forget faces or don't realise that it is possible to remeber faces

Why do I sense there are higher percentage of people with aphantasia in Tech Industry?

This is a comment out of ignorance but wouldn’t the only people who suffer of aphantasia be blind? How can someone say they don’t remember seeing something?

However if I think it about it deeper are there people who actually see see their thoughts like a dream?

This reminds me of something that might be related. Someone recently told me that if you look at any object, you can imagine what it feels like to put your tongue on it. (With all kinds of subsequent hilarious and disgusting suggestions.)

And for me, it seems pretty true. But I wonder if that holds true for most?

.. and then, of course, there's "able to visualize an object when rotated in three dimensions."

I think the percentage of people who can't do that is way higher than 1%. I'm not great at it myself.

Yeah I have this. I also can’t hear voices or sounds in my mind. Poor autobiographical memory tracks too, major things stick but a lot just fades pretty quickly.

E

Was really interested in taking VVIQ. My results: "You have a fairly vivid visual imagination known as phantasia. This indicates an average ability to visualize mental images. When you try to picture something in your mind, you can "see it" with a reasonable level of clarity and detail."