How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc.
What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?
I think most people and journalists who speak about aphantasia are exaggerating or misleading others. If you actually are able to imagine an picture with your eyes open and have it cover the real world, that's called hallucinating. Some people can visualise things stronger than others, some cannot at all, but let's not pretend like actual visualisation (hallucinating) is the norm or that more than a few people on earth can do it.
I never heard of aphantasia before but having read a bit about it, doesn't seem to be the same thing. When I "see" things mentally it's not like it "takes over" my visual input, nor it has weight in the real world. The image seems to be "nowhere", like when dreaming.
Closing my eyes doesn't really make the image clearer by itself, it's more like there's no visual input to interrupt my visualization and that's what makes it "clearer".
If I mentally listen to music it's clearly not coming from my ears (in fact the whole concept of sound direction doesn't seem to exist when I imagine sound. No stereo separation either.)
I find this whole stuff fascinating though. I wish there was some way to measure and/or capture those images/sounds and make them physical data, even if once captured it turns out to be a lot less detailed than what it seems. It'd be a security nightmare though!
Yeah, it's like some sort of internal framebuffer. I'd kinda equate it to some sort of SVG-like format where you define a series of objects and your mind "displays" it as best as it can, with more processing on whatever you are focusing currently.
I can't close my eyes and imprint a picture over my closed eyelids as if i was watching a movie. If you could imprint an image over your closed eyes, logic dictates you would be able to do the same in a dark room since light is the only difference between open and closed eyes. But I don't think people are having vivid and realistic hallucinations in the dark.
Regardless, the way journalists talk about aphantasia, or more specifically, the opposite of aphantasia, has led a lot of people to believe this is possible (at least, I believed it based on what people have said they can do).
Maybe I am just exaggerating then, but i think this whole topic has got a lot of people worried that they are not normal. I don't think it's good for the mental health of hypochondriacs.
Yes, closing your eyes and being in a dark room has the same effect (to me at least). As I mentioned in another reply I think it's simply because there's no visual input to process so your mind can focus on images better/more efficiently.
After all a decent amount of processing comes from visual input, I figure that's what makes stuff like a Rorschach test or cloudgazing to be a thing, or certain optical illusions. You are parsing what you see and the brain takes some licenses for speed at times.
It's clear everyone is hardwired to see stuff like faces in something as simple as ":)", I feel it's related, but it's not my field, I can only wonder.
Is there any science done on this particular topic? It sure is super interesting but all I see about it is anecdote or very surface level stuff. It's clear some people do it better than others (my anecdata seems to indicate creative types might tap into it better?), but since most people is also affected by certain optical effects or tricks, the ability has to be present in everyone to a degree. Might be a thing that needs to be exploited consciously to make it "vivid".
It could also be a matter of priorities in perception. Like some people remembers lyrics better than songs, or numbers better than images. Maybe we are just taking our vision of the world in the way that's the most comfortable, and for some people it's images/sounds and for others "plaintext" information.
I know I really got a thing for visual information, as I can tell stuff like typos not from reading a word, but from noticing its shape is "off", like I'm remembering a printout of the word instead of the word character-by-character. (note that difference in typesetting does not affect the "shape" to throw me off. Unless it's very weird handwritten text, but that throws everyone off)
I'm talking about literally seeing the image, not being able to better internally visualise the image in the dark. If you are able to literally see images in the dark as if light was bouncing off of them, that's hallucinating and I don't think we're talking about the same thing then. If you are actually able to hallucinate on command I'd be very surprised.
That would be like lucid dreaming while awake and I'd imagine it would be more well documented considering half of this thread claims to be able to do it. Actually, why are so many people trying to lucid dream at all if this level of visualisation is so common?
As far as I can tell, you're the only one moving the goalpost from "internally visualize" to "actually see the object manifested in front of you".
I don't think anyone is claiming that the latter is widespread, and I also don't think you're acknowledging that there are many people who can't do the former at all (myself included).
If you ask me to imagine something, there is no visual component to that at all for me. Internally, externally, nowhere.
I probably was moving goalposts, but it's just one of those issues where it's hard to communicate with each other. I guess i'm not very good at visualising other people's experiences :p
I guess I should clarify that I don't think you were arguing in bad-faith ("moving the goalposts" is a bit a of a charged phrase in the current political climate). I appreciate the conversation!
Moving the goalposts is bad arguing. Bad arguing is often due to bad-faith arguing; but good arguing is hard, so it's also often accidental. Yet, people equate pointing out flaws in an argument with accusations of intellectual dishonesty: it's been politicised.
So we have a meta-problem of different abilities to visualize or imagine the concepts of visualization :)
Sorry, but this is too funny. There's some sort of fundamental difficulty when humans are trying to compare their varying (or not?) qualia.
Like those stoner-philosphy questions. ("Is the 'red' I see the same hue as the 'red' you see? How would we ever know??")
There's an element of that unsolvable problem here; of knowing whether the other person is describing their internal mental state using the same definitions as you are.
I've read plenty of folks who claim they can watch a movie on the inside of their eyelids, an experience they claim is indistinguishable from watching it on a TV.
Oh then definitely not. As I replied earlier there's no real weight to any image I might be thinking about.
I had a case of sleep paralysis or whatever it's called once and hallucinated someone standing at my door, and even thought it was persistent and made sense it faded over time until I was just left with a "what was that?". It's nothing like that at all.
Even if you can think of an object, even complex ones, and determine through a visual method its properties, shapes and colors, it's "nowhere" relative to real life visuals. You could be spinning in place or blind and you can still visualize the image. I could think of a scene with a very bright light but I'm really thinking of a white color or a gradient, it's obviously not going to blind me because it's now flowing through my optic nerves. I mean I can do something like divide a screen in two regions with an imaginary line, but it's not some sort of futuristic HUD.
That's kinda why I think there's some relation between our ability to mentally visualize an image and the ability to recognize a face or find shapes in stuff like Rorschach tests. In other words I think everyone has the ability to visualize images mentally, they just don't exploit it because maybe they put more weight on other details. Where I can remember and play with images and sounds mentally with no effort, other people can remember huge amounts of text, or do complex math instead. It might be a matter of specialization, perhaps?
Think of what you see (with you eyes) as a stage, space, or, in computing terms, a buffer or something like that. What I imagine in my head does not compete for space in this buffer that much -- it's like in a different stage, a different space. I know something I imagine lies in imagination-space not in eye-vision-space. Those two spaces are probably merged somewhere[0] so they can use similar recognition and abstraction engines in the brain, but this information of what comes from which one is maintained (like you can distinguish between senses, between the auditory stage and the visual stage without thinking).
[0]: I believe this explains how, while I can do all this visualization, it's difficult to simultaneously "grasp" both spaces -- it's like both are there, but when I switch to mind space the visual one goes to the background and I can't process it too much.
It's incredibly easy to "typical mind" and expect that the normal inner experience of being human is the same for everyone else as it is for you.
There's a wide variance in visual imagery. I know people who can vividly imagine things with their eyes open, find it easy, almost automatic, others who have to try, and some who can't at all.
Similarly there are wide variances in how people think: some think very visually, some have an internal monologue (or multiple), some have an inner experience with neither.
I used to be nearly aphantasic - having only brief flashes of vision except on the edge of sleep - but have been slowly training the skill after finding out it's possible, and normal, to do more.
Focusing on spending time around the edge of sleep on thinking about things -> sometimes seeing flashes of them -> eventually can do it on demand more? Now focusing on those -> trying to imagine more intricate details.
Afraid it's hard to explain, and if I'd been fully aphantasic to start (including when nearly asleep) would not have been able to make any progress.
Same type of issue as trying to explain how to move a specific muscle or unfocus your eyes
A good test for me was this: ask someone to close their eyes and visualize an apple. Ask them what they experience. Some only 'see' the concept. Some only outlines. Some see black and white. Some see colors. Some see very specific things, like the brand. Some experience an entire scene, with smells and all.
I can draw you a dog, but if you ask me to picture a ball on a table, i do not picture anything specific. It is just the abstract idea of a ball on the table. It does not have colour, substance, space, nothing.
Same, at first, but if I try I can conjure a vague / unspecific mental image (the harder I mentally try, the clearer the image gets, but it never gets anywhere near perfectly clear). For example:
Are you able to take a table in your house and then imagine a soccer ball on it? Or do you still come up blank with just the concept and absolutely no mental imagery?
For me - I can draw as much as I can visualize. That is, I know that a face is bisected sphere with some extra lines on the bottom for the chin. I can't hold this image clearly, but I can hold it for a fraction of a second - enough to know what to put on paper. I think drawing and visualization are pretty closely tied.
My dreams are very spatial, contain movement, indistinct dialogue, and sometimes an "emphatic" sensation of feelings of the characters present.
There's pretty much no color, no exact shape, clothing detail etc. No surface has any pattern, really. But I know extremely clearly how 3 people in my dream were positioned relative to each other and the room.
I definitely don't "see a number" in front of me. There is some sort of shortcut memory that says 7 * 6=42, of course.
For massaging an equation into the desired form, I see its "shape" (abstract from the numbers, like we had to in school with variables) and know what changes of shape are desirable. More complex math, let's say, 700 * 13, I do in my head pretty much like those equations; shuffle it to be 7 * (10+3) * 100, (7 * 10 + 7 * 3) * 100, etc. In no part of that do I see the figure of the number seven; there's a "slot" that's a concept of seven, but it's not the shape of the drawn number.
As someone with the opposite of aphantasia (I can daydream very vividly) who's also worked as a pro illustrator I don't really imagine things as I draw. Drawing is more mechanical than people think, and while coming up with a concept requires imagination, and composition requires a level of spatial intelligence you don't really need to visualise things as you draw them. You just do.
There's an aphantasia subreddit I checked out once. There was a discussion where people mentioned that they could hear a song in their head and play it back, and they could recall a voice or speak in their head, but it had never occurred to them that people could do something like that with images. I asked someone if they could visualize red versus blue in their head and they said they could not, they could only think of the words red and blue and not imagine what the colors looked like without actually looking at something red or blue. One person told me they had absolutely no imagination at all and could not, for instance, recall the sound of someone's voice or imagine warm sand between their toes.
If there is sound (e.g. someone says something) and I'm not actively listening to it, but suddenly I have to focus on what was said then I can replay the last few seconds and catch up. I guess this is common to some level at least - it's hard to see how it's possible to communicate otherwise. After all we kind of have to keep a full sentence in our heads in order to understand it.
What I definitely can't do is replaying something that visually happened if I'm focusing on something else, or not paying attention. The same goes for other physical stimulation like touch etc. If I'm not conscious about it I can't tell what happened before the moment I focused. So, if I suddenly find myself in a slightly embarrassing position relative to someone else in a crowded pub, for example, and I didn't pay attention, I couldn't tell if it was because the way I was moving or if it was because of someone else. But if someone said something I'll just replay it. Works nicely for listening to a language I don't know that well too, I just replay it and translate it. But in a conversation there's no time to do that, so I'm stuck.
(I'm not talking about creating or remembering a sequence of events and playing that in my head as a movie - that's not a problem. But there seems to be an always-on "cache memory" for audio while there's none for visual or other stimuli. For me, at least. What I'm wondering is - do other people have "cache memory" for visual or other input interfaces?)
Yeah, as one of the more extreme cases Im honestly pretty jealous. All my memories are essentially abstract ideas/connections. Memories of places for example is mostly how they're spatially connected, rough dimensions, how it was constructed, how it operates, and sometimes how it made me feel the first or last time I saw it. I can't conjure the face or voice of any loved one nor the feeling of walking into a cold lake for example only an abstract description like if you were writing in a journal. When music triggers a memory, what is recalled is the feeling or train of thought when that memory was formed.
I honestly don't know if it can be tested unless it's determined to happen in some area of the brain, that can be monitored externally for increased activity.
When I paint myself I usually compose a scene in my mind. When drawing characters, I mostly follow whatever my mental image is, then as I trace the lines I can visualize how they connect. When drawing characters that aren't mine I make a point of not using a reference picture.
Basically I can "see" the whole result as soon as I have the eyes drawn, then I just draw single lines until it's "traced", undoing if it doesn't fit the shape I need. Only problem is that at times I don't close lines so using a fill tool is always a pain.
When painting proper I just make a quick color base and I add the rest until it fits whatever is in my head, then I add minor detailing to complete the piece in a more mechanical manner like "this gravel can use more texturing" or "add some grating in this robot's armor for cooling".
My speed when drawing characters is very high, I at times like to speed-doodle stuff for friends and each piece takes about 5 minutes once I decide on an angle/pose, so the process doesn't seem to interfere with agility.
I can also doodle stuff while not conjuring any mental image (such as idle doodling on a notebook or such), however, it just has weird proportions or so. My point being that it's not something necessary at all as you can still paint/draw/write without doing it. Doesn't seem to be a necessity or provide any significant advantage over plain "logic" (as logic as creative stuff can be, but stuff like light usually works in rigid ways)
When doing things like coding I plan the structure in advance, but it doesn't resemble the process for visual arts at all. There's no mental image there, just something like "okay now loop here and call this function".
There are some studies that suggest there are brain activity differences, at least when asked to imagine something the self reported vividness of that imagery was correlated with greater activity in visual cortex while imagining.
There also was a recent paper suggesting that increased baseline visual cortex excitability can lead to decreased imagery ability (perhaps due to a "saturation" type effect).
But there is not a ton of research out there on these topics yet, so it's all very preliminary.
Let's say you are shopping for a new sofa. Often people will imagine their room and how imagine how the new sofa would look in the room. Usually people will visualise that imagination process.
Now re-read the above and consider that I've asked you to imagine yourself imagining something!
There's a difference between "imagining" and "doing" (for me, anyway).
I can't picture a dog. I can (very, very crudely) draw a dog. Just like I don't "hear" words or songs in my head, but I can sing a song. I can't visualize someone's face, but I don't have any trouble recognizing them if I see them.
I know the "facts" that describe a generic dog, and I have a spatial awareness of how those parts relate to each other.
What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask them to draw a dog they come out blank?