10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @[email protected] about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
On the good side, we’re much less affected by trauma, because we’re not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there’s that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
As someone on the opposite end of this spectrum, with highly detailed visualisation, I had never considered that this could be weaponised against me….
Granted moist seems to be a problem for some people more than others. I wonder if that’s due to word associations.
Perhaps word assosciations or just bandwagoning with the trend of ‘omg moist gross’. Honestly the only times i really think of things being ‘moist’ is for cakes/baked goods.
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
That proper made me laugh. Funnily enough I was reading the wiki page earlier for the condition, and remember seeing about an experiment where aphantasics didn’t have the same fear response as ‘normal’ people when reading a scary story. I’m guessing for the reasons you described.
So when Stormy Daniels described Trump as having “yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart” you didn’t get a perfect(ly traumatizing) image of that in your mind?
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Don’t you dare. I have this especially bad when someone mentions a medical condition or an operation they underwent. Anything involving cutting, implanting, or anything of the sort makes it feel extremely real to me.
Someone once mentioned off-hand about having a couple of screws in their leg bone and I started to imagine myself in their position on the operating table. It’s not a fun experience.
Lol imagine not being able to picture things in your head. Oh wait…
They technically can imagine not imagining anything
Yes, and not interested in changing.
I’m me and I’m happy. I find that the strategies I learned as a kid sometimes allow me to think more clearly and procedurally than others. I’m not haunted by images of the past. I do take extra photos now that I know what’s up. All in all, I don’t see it as much of a negative. It’s far better than some of the other conditions I was thinking I might have, before I learned about aphantasia.
I was fairly active on r/aphantasia for a bit, but I started to back away when they went for this “total aphant” thing, where you weren’t really in the club unless you couldn’t imagine with any senses at all.
they went for this “total aphant” thing, where you weren’t really in the club unless you couldn’t imagine with any senses at all.
People always have to ruin shit by taking to extremes ey.
Tbh as hard as it is for non-aphantasics to imagine no mental imagery, I find it just as hard to imagine those who have no visual AND no audio mind. Like, how the fuck do they think? Then I reckon, prob the same as me visually… I know what a green triangle is, it’s the colour of grass and has 3 equal sides. Just, I can’t see it when I shut my eyes
I don’t have mental audio, and the best way I can describe it is that I can think of words, but not in words.
I think in concepts that have words attached.
So, if I’m thinking about a dog, I have multiple words that can work for it. Dog and perro (spanish for dog) for example, both point to the same “concept”, and it’s that concept that I have in my mind when I think of a dog. But I can pull the word dog to mind when needed too. Hence thinking “of” words
Either way, I can’t hear any of it
Sorry, are you saying you’re one of the people with no visual or audio inner mind? Interesting if so. Sounds as if you’re thinking in concepts (which is exactly how I ‘think visually’)
Yep, exactly.
I kind of have an inner voice, in so far as I can choose to think of words in a sentence, or I can “translate” the concepts in my mind in to words in real time, but those words have no auditory components. I can’t “hear” them anymore than you can “see” an apple in your mind. I just know that it’s there
(not OP) I’m curious, are you not able to “play back” songs in your head then, for example? This is such a foreign idea to me - sometimes there are melodies playing in my head without me even initiating it, in a way. I’m wondering if there are people this doesn’t happen to.
Isn’t the brain an incredible organ. It creates a rich inner world despite the difficulties we may have with the way our senses connect to it.
I sometimes wonder if there’s not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don’t have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it’s like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it’s like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn’t there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that’s certainly not my experience (though it’s possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don’t actually exist in my vision. It’s definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there’s a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it’s sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it’s doing, all of the physics and such still work, it’s just not ending up on my brain’s screen.
This is what I have. basically not aphantasia (we can still manipulate visual imagery in our brains) but it’s also not prophantasia which is essentially just seeing, but with thoughts.
Thank you for teaching me the word prophantasia.
The way I’ve seen a lot of people try to describe normal mental visualization (phantasia I suppose?) can end up sounding like they’re sort of projecting a mental object into their actual vision, which seems to be more of a prophantasia thing.
I can mentally design an object, have a very clear mental picture of what that object looks like, and I can look around me and I can know what that object would look like if it existed in the same space I’m in, but I cannot actually see that object in the room with me. I can also mentally build a copy of the space I’m in and visualize that, I could put that mental object in that space and mentally look at it, manipulate it etc. but that’s still a different experience than actually seeing it with my eyes.
Right. “prophantasia” is a word used to refer to that “it’s like you’re actually seeing it”, whereas visualization for me isn’t like that and it’s more like what you described, a sort of mental idea, like I can think of and mentally understand imagery, but it’s not like I’m actually looking at it with my eyes (like when I see things or am in a lucid dream).
It seems some people with visualization do this “minds eye” kinda thing, and the some have that “it’s like you’re seeing” type.
I know exactly what you mean. To my, my form of internal visualization has always been more what some people consider to be their “mind’s eye”, but even that has a wide-ranging definition depending on who you ask. I like your explanation quite a bit more than just “mind’s eye” though!
I can’t “visualize” a full blown table, the example used in the article I linked, but I can imagine a very abstract form of a table. More like, if you were to take a modeling or 3D drawing program like Microsoft’s Vizio and created a table in it, that’s more what I can visualize. Or if someone asks me to imagine the sun, I can imagine a clip-art version of the sun, but I can’t imagine vibrant brightness with it (another example used in the article).
Anything much more than that, and I’m no longer visually seeing it, but doing something more that you describe. As a random example, if you asked me to visualize a white neutron star, I can’t literally see one in front of me - but it does make me recall memories of seeing one in the game “Elite: Dangerous”.
I’ve heard theories (I don’t know the accuracy of said theory) that when you’re dreaming, your brain can’t come up with something that’s never existed - so when you see people, even random people, they’re just random people you’ve encountered in your life but don’t have any connection to. It’s a sound theory for me, because that’s how my form of mental imagery works, you could describe some totally fictional dragon as accurately and detailed as possible, but I won’t be able to visualize it past a really abstract level. So if someone describes a purple dragon but gets really descriptive, I could visualize a generic animated dragon that is purple - probably would look more like Barney to me but… yeah.
Edit: Although that being said, I’ve noticed I’m a lot better at visualizing text. When I’m asked “How do you spell $some_word_here” I often find that I’m spelling it out-loud by reading out each individual letter. With programming, I find that when recalling something along the lines of “How do you make a function that does…”, I’m using a combination of looking at a block of code I remember, and inferring the missing pieces.
I guess my brain is just weird…
That sounds a lot like aphantasia. I have friends who can strongly visualise and they claim it’s like an inner TV that they can control & manipulate.
I think that you’re falling into the same trap like many others here. Not saying you don’t have aphantasia, but e.g. the subreddit is full of people deluding themselves into believing they suffer from aphantasia. Because their experience is similar to what Fondots said.
I have the same exact experience. But I can still rotate 3D images, paint scenes, draw maps, watch spaceships or compare color palettes in my mind.
Every questionnaire is kinda based on “do you see it like in real life or nah?”. Depending on your definition of “seeing”, imo people with the same level of visualisation might choose opposite ends of the spectrum.
I think the “mind’s eye” is also partly a “skill” thing.
I remember distinctly as a child doing a great deal of “work” developing my mind’s eye. I didn’t have TV at home, so I read a lot, and that necessitated me being able to take text on paper and make mind’s-eye models of what the things on the page might actually look like (often without any visual references at all)…and I recall the early ones were definitely vague and fuzzy.
As I got older and did this more, and was exposed to more visual images of different things, my ability to visualize (and “hear”) with detail got better, as with any skill.
I suspect folks who have the ability to use their mind’s eye, but who haven’t been pushed into (or interested in) developing it might not realize what a “trained” mind’s eye can do because they haven’t developed that skill.
But I do think there are some people with legit aphantasia who don’t even have the weak, untrained mind’s eye that most people start out with.
Sorry I’m well late replying to this! For some reason I didn’t get the notification.
I’ve been trying really hard to boost my visualisation skills. The best I can do is a vague suggestion of an image, it’s like made out of mist and dissipates instantly.
I think there’s probably like you said, a lot of people who think not being able to conjure a distinct internal image = aphantasia. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m aphantasic as I score extremely poorly on any tasks that require mental image projection (eg manipulation of 3D objects, spatial reasoning etc). Iirc last time I did an IQ test which broke down IQ into various regions, I scored 17% on that part. And there’s practically nothing there when I shut my eyes and concentrate.
I would wager that without having done halucinogens a number of times, that score / my ability would be even lower.
Since how I’m describing things seems to be ringing at least partially true to you, I feel like that kind of reinforces my point, because I would absolutely not say that I have aphantasia. I think we may be having very similar experiences, and we’re just finding very different ways to describe it because the right words to describe it don’t really exist, at least not in English at the level we’re able to converse at (maybe there are better words that are in common use in psychological or neurological circles, but to most of us would just be meaningless jargon.)
The inner TV thing is not a bad way of putting how I experience it(personally I tend to think of it as more of a 3d animation program, because I have far more freedom to move things around, change “camera” angles, sizes, shapes, etc.) but it’s also not not totally accurate to what I experience either. I could describe it as a full-on audio, video, smell, taste, touch, temperature, etc. experience happenening in my head, but it’s also different sort of experience than actually experiencing those sensory inputs in the real world. It happens in parallel to my real world experience, and is equivalent, occasionally even overlaps with it, but is still a separate and different experience.
I think of it sort of like how hot (temperature) food and hot (spicy) food activate very similar sorts of pain receptors in your brain but are still very distinct sensations. I’m pretty confident that if you found people who have absolutely no experience or knowledge of hot peppers and fed them a habanero, then asked them to describe the sensation of eating it, that most of them would probably come up with descriptors like “hot” or “burning,” and we can all understand that, there is something in common between those two sensations that is hard to describe, but they’re not exactly the same, you’re not going to eat a ghost pepper and think that your tongue is actually on fire.
For me, the relationship between visualizing something in your mind and actually seeing something with your eyes is a lot like that, and probably even more similar.
And if someone lands on different words to describe spicy food, like maybe “tingling” or “itching” they’re not wrong, even if we disagree with their word choice, nor are they experiencing something totally different than we are, their personal experiences have just led them to choosing different words to describe the same thing. What I’m describing as seeing or visualizing, or as an inner TV or 3D modeling program, you might might be experiencing the exact same thing but finding different words to describe, and we’re both using our words in ways that don’t make sense to each other.
There may also be sort of a skill component, some people have a knack for visualizing, and others have to actually develop that skill in some way, and maybe not everyone has the right opportunities or desire/motivation to develop that skill. You say you’ve somehow built yourself up from a 0 to a 2, so who’s to say you haven’t been doing it sort of subconsciously your whole life and you’ve just grown to have more conscious control and/or awareness of it? And maybe with the right training (and I don’t know what sort of training that would be) you could continue to develop that.
And even with that increased skill, you may still find different words to describe how you’re experiencing it.
Mental images are how I spot typos and misspellings. The way a word is spelled on a page looks wrong to me because it contradicts the visual memory I have for that word. I recently saw spicy misspelled as “spicey” and I knew it was wrong because it looks different than my mental image of the word spelled correctly.
What’s the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
Hyperphantasia is the opposite.
Hyperphantasia. A subset of that is prophantasia, where you can physically conjure a mental image in your field of vision, but that case is extremely rare.
Sounds like schizoaffective disorder to me.
Prophantasia is voluntary, and people not only control it, but as other comments point out, it feels like ‘self’. My brother, a PhD psychologist, has developed an interest in aphantasia. Aphantasics rarely hallucinate. So, from talking with him, we have a pretty good working hypothesis that schizoaffective disorder affects the same brain pathways as prophantasia, i.e. hallucinations that are not under voluntary or conscious control. (As an interesting side note, in highly-individualistic cultures, the voices and images more often feel malevolent and ‘other’ to sufferers, in contrast to people in collectivist cultures, who experience them more often as friendly and familial. It’s not necessarily maladaptive.)
Interesting stuff. My response was a half-joke, but I appreciate the additional information!
I can’t “picture” things in my mind, but I get pretty strong “feelings” about relative volumes, lengths, shapes, etc. As a result I can eyeball measurements pretty accurately.
When it comes to physically organizing things in space, I literally have to guess and test, and just rearrange things until they work… But, I do still get that “feeling” about how it might work.
It’s the same with empathy. If I see someone about to injur themselves, I don’t “see” it, but it definitely get a flash of feeling and I’ll wince and feel the thing.
Is that aphantasia? I didn’t even know this was a thing, but… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I can’t see things in my head, but i love Tetris and I’m excellent at fitting a lot of suitcases in the trunk of a car.
One of the reasons I smoke marijuana is so that my dreams chill out. When I’m not smoking I can wake up still feeling tired because my dreams were too intense.
These topics are always some of the hardest for me to fully comprehend. There’s also always going to be at least 1% of me that suspects you’re all lying or just don’t realize that you do have the same abilities as everyone else, but that’s likely just my brain trying to cope with what I just truly can’t understand. It’s not even first nature, it’s instinctual rooted in me that I hear this voice in my head and see these images and sounds and all sorts of stuff. However I think the closest I can get to relating is when someone recently told me their thoughts and dreams are vividly colored… vividly colored? No sir, my thoughts and dreams are barely colored, sort of more like it’s all in sepia color and dull. Almost like old black and white TV, but a bit of color. So now I know I’m missing something I’ve never had. This became a ramble, I just woke up, sorry!
Sounds as well??? Well ffs. Other than my internal voice which I don’t hear so much as know it’s there, I can’t imagine sounds. I’m a fairly capable instrument player but I wouldn’t consider myself a musician. I can’t imagine sounds though. Like I’m trying to imagine a kick snare but there’s no sound, I just know what they sound like.
I can’t even picture my child’s face if I shut my eyes and try to conjure it up. If I shut my eyes hard enough I get like grey # kinda vision, but pretty sure that’s just pressure on my eyes.
Oh man that’s awful, I can definitely imagine sounds vividly, I can create a scene and hear everything in my head. Now I feel like it would be miserable to suddenly lose this. For some reason my mind jumped to a war zone and now I’m picturing guns and explosions and I can definitely hear them in my head.
Man, I couldve written that, I understand you so much
I wonder why your dreams are not vividly colored?
I used to try for lucid dreaming. Had some successful attempts. One thing that always woke me up from them was doing something too far outside my physical experiences. I could never fly like superman. But I could kind of float like I was in water sometimes. I tried to breathe underwater during these dreams a few times. It always woke me up. Until I got scuba certified. Now that I had had experience breathing underwater in real life, all the sudden that was fair game for the lucid dreams.
So my guess is your perception and processing of the world is somehow dull. I wonder if like those glasses that help some color blind people experience color would help shift that, or maybe time in a hyper saturated VR experience.
Also, one theory I have had is that it has a little to do with what I watched as a kid. I read somewhere that before color TV, many people dreamed in black and white. While I didn’t grow up in that time period, I DID watch a ton of shows from that time period with my grandma as a kid, stuff like I Love Lucy, The Munsters, etc. The way those shows looked is kind of how my dreams look and I think it’s why. The fact I also mixed in cartoons here and there is probably why I have any color to my dreams at all.
I didn’t want to dive too much into dreams because it’s a whole separate bee hive, but since you brought it up: I’m not in control of my dreams. At least not the ones when I’m sleeping. When I’m sleeping my dreams are like a movie reel that I watch, 99% of the time in first person, but I’ve had a couple where I watch myself as well. My day dreaming and imagining is completely in my control, but when I’m asleep I’ve never had any amount of control, or even realization that I am in fact dreaming. It’s just watching a movie without any play/pause/rewind/fast forward.
The voice actress of the Narrator in Baldur’s Gate 3 Amelia Tyler said in a recent interview that her aphantasia has helped her in being a better actress, because she thinks of situations and stuff in terms of emotions. So that way she could get really well into the heads of the characters she played.
Was probably in one or both of these videos:
You attacked someone, only the guards are allowed to do that.
As this one is about to demonstrate.
Thanks for sharing this. It’s always comforting to see others being highly successful despite a condition. Her BG3 narration is beautifully-unhinged and one of my favourite aspects of the game, she’s so talented.
There’s a list on the aphantasia wiki page of notable people with the condition, was quite interesting… namely the head of Pixar. Iirc he did a survey and found a decent number of the people doing animation work were also aphantasic!
I’ve made some really interesting animations to go with ambient music I write, and it was an enjoyable tangent from only music. I never thought I could do anything visual (I can’t draw or paint for shit) but tbh although orders of magnitude more complex than audio design, working with stuff like After Effects came really easily after decades using a DAW.
I don’t understand what it is. I read a blurb about it, but i don’t really get it. I can remember what my house, car, dog, etc. generally look like, but i can’t think of a time i tried to imagine a picture or visualize an item. I’m terrible with faces and intruduce myself to the same people repeatedly. Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they’re thinking or reading.
Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they’re thinking or reading.
I don’t think that’s off topic, it sounds as if you don’t have an internal voice which is the audio-form of aphantasia. My inner monologue is ever-present, and often takes the voice of whoever I’ve been talking to recently, especially if I’ve been bingeing a series or just watched a film. Having Morgan Freeman as my inner narrator was awesome, but as you can prob guess it’s a curse as often as it’s a blessing. When I get an earworm it can last for days.
It is hard trying to imagine the absence of something that you have. Like trying to think up a new colour.
You really hear a voice? Like it’s someone with you? I cannot get my brain around the idea of having a voice inside my head and i just think of old cartoons where there was an angel and a devil on someone’s shoulders. It would be crazy to have Morgan Freeman narrating my life - like that funny penguin movie he did. I do frequently get songs stuck in my head that keep me awake. I don’t hear them, i just can’t stop trying to get all the words in the right order.
It’s not a voice in one’s head like there’s someone else there. It’s like you talking aloud to yourself, but in your head.
The voice in my head is me. Sometimes if I watched a movie or talked to someone, the voice might sound different but it’s still me. It doesn’t talk to me, I talk with it. It’s as if I was speaking out loud, but only I can hear it. Look up subvocalization. This voice in your head is so much like talking that you make some larynx movements to match the words.
Visualization, or seeing things with your mind’s eye is similar. The closest metaphor I can come up with is if your regular perception was the main monitor of your computer, subvocalization and visualization would be the monitor and speakers on the side. It’s doing its own thing without taking away from the main monitor, and you can focus on it (zoning out), and for some people it’s higher res or higher quality than others. For you, there is only the main monitor and set of speakers. In this metaphor, there is nothing outside of the monitors and speakers in terms of perception.
Some examples of what my stuff works like: When I remember something I saw, it “plays on the second monitor”. Having a song stuck in my head is like having the “second set of speakers” play the song on repeat. If I say “this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman”, then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman. If I want to visualize anything, I “turn to my second monitor” and the thing is there. It can be still or animated, black and white, 2d or 3d, I can do it. I can’t do 4d or anything like that.
f I say “this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman”, then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman
After that sentence, I read the rest of your comment in his voice, always a win when the inner narrator switches to such a velvety-rich voice.
What’s it like when you try think through a math problem? Like do you just follow your feelings and intuitively get to the answer?
For me it’s definitely a clearly defined voice in my head. “First I do this, add those together…” etc
I don’t know. I just think about the idea of it i guess? If i want to build a flower bed and I need to know the area, I just measure and multiply.
That’s super interesting, thanks. Figure describing thoughts is pretty hard haha
Not the person you’re responding to, but yeah, the voice-in-my-head CAN (but does not always) sound just like actually hearing someone.
I have a caveat there because the “voice” that is “me” (that is to say, I don’t perceive it as someone else talking, but me talking/thinking to myself–it does not have the feeling of an outsider or stranger talking to me) does not always hold all the “information” of an actual audio voice.
Like, I don’t normally carry the same “pitch” as my real-life voice, it’s usually without pitch, but can still contain emotional prosody? It’s a shifting mix of soundless but verbal (as opposed to nonverbal) thought and sound-markers that indicate emotion in real life when spoken out loud.
However, I’m also a writer, and when I write dialogue of a character, it usually carries “sound information” much more distinctly in my head, like listening to a radio narrator or watching an actor. Like, a male character will have a lower voice, a female higher. A flamboyant character might pronounce and say things with a lot of drama and theatrics, where a stoic bored character might be closer to a monotone. It’s all controlled by me, by the way–it’s not schizophrenia where I perceive it as an outside person or force talking to me. But it is very “audible”. (But there’s still some mental filter where I know it’s thought and don’t mistake it for real in-the-present sound.)
…I did have musical training as a child which might play into my ability to have strongly imagined sound in my head. When I get songs stuck in my head, I actually do “hear” them. I hear the singer singing, but also the unique tones of the various instruments. So if a song has a guitar I hear that, but if it’s a piano I hear a piano playing it in my memory and not a guitar.
…these things don’t always have 100% fidelity though, it’s not like playing a file on a computer. It’s a fuzzy in-and-out-of-focus thing. But when it’s “in focus” it’s definitely something tagged by my mind as “sound”.
It’s pretty wild how we never think about other people having different methods of thought. When i learned that some people can hear in their heads i googled a bit and found some interesting articles about thinking in words, pictures, and patterns. There’s a Temple Grandin book about it - haven’t read it yet.
I have really strong audio imagination (if that’s a sensible term) and if i’m in a quiet area and relax sufficiently i can literally play music in my mind like an mp3 file, it’s precisely as wild to experience as you’d think it is. Obviously i’m probably not actually remembering all the details of the audio but to my subjective experience it’s like 95% identical to just listening to a pair of headphones.
But when i’m not relaxing and in a noisy environment it’s much less extreme, i definitely hear what i imagine but it’s like… in the background and on a separate channel so there’s no way i’d think i’m actually hearing it with my ears, and it’s significantly lower fidelity, more like how those AI tools tended to spit out things that are sensible on a surface level but when you look at the detail it’s nonsense.
I can totally make morgan freeman narrate my life so long as i remember what his voice sounds like, so if it’s been a while i’ll need to look it up online first to refresh.
And for reference i think? i have visual aphantasia, and my visual imagination works the same except that it’s like 20% as vivid unless i’m just about to fall asleep, and when i dream it’s fully vivid like real life.
Here is a well-done podcast about this: https://www.20k.org/episodes/voiceinside.
Not the person you responded to, but yeah, I hear a voice as an inner monologue. It’s just my voice though… or rather, how I hear my voice when I talk. I don’t have other voices in my head as a general monologue.
Like, I can think of other voices and what they sound like, but it’s very much not ‘me’, if that makes sense.
Hard to describe but I’ll try. Not sure if you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s a lot like that; announcing things other people are doing, commenting on what I’m doing, or sometimes a choice phrase that my brain seemed to find amusing might repeat a few times. Sometimes it creates a full-on musical number, like a song from American Dad, based around some fairly-banal incident. I’ve spent around 30 years writing various types of music so not sure if it’s the chicken or the egg there.
I would think I’m insane if I hadn’t been assured by many people (and a psychologist) that having an internal narrator is perfectly normal. It’s when the voice starts talking directly to you and issuing commands that it becomes a problem, which fortunately I’ve never had. My stepbro is schizophrenic and from what he describes it’s nothing like my inner voice, his is quite malevolent and conspiratorial when he’s off the meds.
Is that how you write songs - by hearing then in your head first? I’ve wondered how musicians, artists, etc. produce art. I’ve started asking people if they have voice or images and most have the same reaction of shock that other people do or don’t.
AFAIK whilst some creatives do fully conceptualise the work in their heads then set out to externally reproduce it, the more normal approach is to have a less complete notion and then create something via the process. IE, a musician might have a melody in their head but then they will play it on the instrument and experiment with different variations and accompaniments to see what sounds good and build on it that way, rather than sit and think of an entire piece based on that, then play it out loud.
If you neither hear nor see the words in your head, how do you experience them to reorder them?
Reorder them?
i just can’t stop trying to get all the words in the right order
Oh, with a song. I dunno, i just think of the words and try to get the verses right and feel like i want to sing it. What’s it like when you get a song stuck?
Yes but my question is that if you say you neither hear nor see the words, what experience does “I just think of the words” mean?
For me if I think of the words in a song I experience that as an auditory thought that may have some more abstract or emotional types of thinking attached to those words (ie, if I’m think of the word “cold” I might hear the word cold in my head and also feel the idea of coldness, or if I think of the word “angry” I’ll hear the word angry in my head and angry associations will come up. Note, this hearing of sounds inside the mind is not the same as experiencing an auditory halicination where you perceive you have heard an external noise with your ears.)
My inner voice doesn’t usually change but when it does it’s a bit creepy. There’s few occurences when I have had my co-workers voice as my inner voice. It seems like it came out of nowhere (well, I was also drunk and tired) and after a while I thought I’ve had enough of his voice but it didn’t go away until much later.
Is it called the same thing if you can’t visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife’s. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child’s face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can’t remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
Look up face blindness. I have that and some level of aphantasia too.
I lost my mom recently and it makes me sad that i can’t see her in my head. I ‘meet’ the same people repeatedly. I’m worried that i won’t recognize my family one day.
I think I have this.
It’s hard for me to communicate online to my coworkers who do not have a profile picture. And then when I do meet them in person, I don’t recognise them straight away the next time I pass by them (or worse, in a social function).
The ways I remember people by are their mannerisms and everything else about them, except for their physical appearance. But because people change styles and environments change, it’s hard to instantly recognise them on the third or more times I see them.
Wait. So when you look in a mirror it’s a surprise every time? Im also unable to draw myself, but that’s more of a drawingskill issue than anything else I guess…
Man, they let that bum in here… Again…
Yes, in fact if I look in the mirror and close my eyes, I forget what I look like in about a second, or two… maybe much quicker. Timing the brain is hard to do on yourself.
Yeah, it’s not a skill issue. I am not super great at drawing, but I can get a rough sketch of someone in front of me or a picture. But I could never realistically draw myself without a picture or image, nor could I draw anyone else without that or them being right in front of me.
This happens to me too, but isn’t it normal?
Drawing or mirror? Drawing might be, but not knowing what you or others look like without viewing them is not “normal”
That’s really interesting. I don’t have this condition but I wear glasses all of the time I can’t see without them, but if I were to think about what I looked like I don’t actually include the glasses.
But in my case it’s more that they’re just not part of my mental image of myself than the fact that they don’t know what I look like.
I think it’s really cool you can see yourself in your mind. I was blown away when I found out thats normal. If I want to try to picture myself I kind of have to build the image, and it comes out like a shoddy police sketch of myself than anything close to a mental image.
So I can have glasses or not, because I am not viewing, I am creating. It’s kind of like learning how to sketch for basics. First you make a generic face, then I add the facial features I know I have, and then come up with a generalization. But it’s different every time I do it, and looks far more like a generic man, then it looks like myself.
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Yeah like when I “imagine” something I think about it more like a list of things about it kinda like what you said. Some people I talk to talk about actually seeing stuff when they visualize while others have said they don’t really “see” it and it’s something different. I’m starting to feel like maybe it’s one of those things like trying to describe colors to a blind person that just can’t really be done without already having a frame of reference about it.
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That’s how I describe my aphantasia, only the wireframe is metaphorical.
The biggest indicator to me is if I see something gory or otherwise visually disturbing it doesn’t haunt me in my mind, as soon as it’s no longer there it’s gone. People who can visualize do run the risk of seeing it later (although some don’t get random imagery).
Huh. I never knew before for sure that I didn’t have aphantasia. Thanks for confirming. My fear of the dark strengthens my memory of horrifying images I’ve seen, so. Fun.
I’ve always been so curious what it’s like for aphantasic people to read fiction. If you don’t see everything playing out in your head like a movie, how do you follow along with the story? How do you remember what happened a paragraph ago if you can’t see it?
I also wonder about this same thing with people who have no inner monologue. Do they not hear the books that their eyeballs are reading to them? Do the words just go into some dark void and become a silent kind of “knowing.” How does that work? I don’t understand.
I mean, I just know the story because I’ve just read it. It’s hard to describe. I don’t see color in my head but I know what the color red is, same thing with shades. Possibly more relatable is smell/taste - most people can’t recreate smell or taste in their head but they innately know what a smell or taste is after some exposure to it.
Interesting. I think I know what you mean about taste and smell. BUT for me, just like when I see something or read something traumatizing and keep randomly seeing the images over and over in a fairly obtrusive way, if I smell something absolutely awful, I will get sort of “smell flashbacks” for a few days or even weeks.
The worst one that ever happened was when I was a massage therapist, working on an old man. He had these blackheads on his back the size of pencil erasers and when I put any pressure on his skin they would poop themselves out and the further out they came the worse they smelled, like rotting pork, but mixed with poorly cleaned dentures. I drove myself crazy cleaning my equipment, studio and self because I kept smelling it no matter what I did for weeks. I started carrying a bottle of lavender essential oil to sniff when it got bad.
Since then I tell all my male friends to start getting back facials by the time they’re 40 and keep doing it at least annually until they die.
The only stuff that’s obtrusive for me is sounds, and even then it’s usually only sounds that have rhythm. For the most part once I am no longer actively observing something and shift my attention elsewhere it stops existing for me. It makes forming attachments hard to say the least.
Opposite for me - I don’t understand how people have sounds and pictures inside their heads.
Yeah I don’t think I get the wire-frame model type thing at all. What shape it is is just part of that list of attributes for me I think.
I’m kinda the same way but at times I feel like I can think up of something completely random that I’ve never seen and can imagine it in perfect detail
From my amateur independent digging I actually found people fall into three groups on this, not two:
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Aphantasia - Not being able to visualize 8at all*
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What I consider “regular” visualization, ie a “minds eye” or “back of the mind” sort of thing, that’s distinctly different from how you normally see visually with your eyes.
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Prophantasia - In which you can visualize things that appear to you how simply looking at something would appear.
I saw someone on reddit apparently go from aphantasia to prophantasia but people were calling BS on them. I’m in group 2 myself and would love to be able to do prophantasia. So I’m curious if anyone has managed it?
This 3-category thing is why you see so many people think they have aphantasia, well above the expected 3%. People in category 2 find out about category 3 and assume that’s what most people can do.
yup. I thought I had aphantasia for a while because of this. Turns out, no. People with aphantasia can’t even do that #2 type. They’re just completely incapable of handling images or 3d scenes in their mind at all.
Very interesting, I’d never heard of prophantasia before. I have a friend who definitely has that (or at least, claims to and I see no reason why he’d lie, he’s quite brusque and ‘painfully honest’ in all other areas and happy to admit other deficiences). He says it’s really useful when he’s designing circuitry / LED devices to be able to move things around in 3D.
Both 2 and 3 can mentally manipulate objects in 3D. I have type 2 as I mentioned, but I can do full 3d rotations and such. It’s just a “minds eye” kinda thing and not like i’m actually seeing it with my eyes. That makes it kinda difficult to line up my minds eye comprehension with the actual world I see in front of me. whereas people with prophantasia or that third type, should have no issues lining up their visualization with their actual vision.
Okay wait.
My time spent in a custom job shop wondering why people are such morons may have just clicked into place. I spent a few years of my life drawing things in CAD software for clients–most of the software I used created solids in a default bland grey. And some variation of the following conversation would always happen.
“Here’s what I got.”
“It’s not going to be grey, is it?”
“…No, I’m going to build it out of wood, it’ll look like wood.”
“But it doesn’t look like wood, it’s grey.”
“That’s the computer model, I was focused on the shapes and dimensions.”
“I can’t see it unless it’s brown like wood.”
I spent the whole time thinking the world was just full of retrotards who went to business school for so long they literally can’t imagine “This, but brown.” You’re telling me this is congenital?
No, being an idiot is different.
I was an aerospace machinist in a past life and I’m aphantasic. Never was it a hindrance in me making parts. You were just having a conversation with an idiot, which makes sense because shops seem to hire a lot of them.
There’s a difference between understanding “this isn’t going to be what it looks like, it’ll look like wood” and actually being able to visualize and “see” the wood version in your head prior to completion.
So looking at your grey version, someone with aphantasia (who isn’t a moron) might be like “I can’t visualize/imagine it as wood, could I see what that looks like?”, as in they understand it will be wood, but may have no clue what that actually looks like until it’s in front of them.
What you’re describing just sounds like a run of the mill idiot who also may have aphantasia.
I’m mostly group 2, but I can ‘see’ simple things if I want to, although they’re somewhat ghostly in appearance. I found that drawing was a good way to start. Begin by drawing simple objects accurately, really focus on their shape and texture. That level of observation help you learn to really see things, rather than just looking at them. With that level of mental model it becomes easier to overlay or insert it into your perception of reality. With practice you get better at it.
Bear in mind that this is just my experience and I don’t have much to base it on except what’s worked for me.
So I’m firmly in type 2. I can close my eyes and just see black/the back of my eyelids. No matter how hard I try I will never be able to “override” my actual vision. Instead, I have a sort of “mental” model in my brain which can handle imagery and 3d scenes and such, but it’s very different in experience than my actual vision. The two don’t overlap at all for me.
“ghostly” is how I’d describe it, but it’s really a different set of qualia altogether, not a “faint” version of my vision.
But yeah as you mention a few comments here kinda makes it sound like it’s just a matter of practicing visualization (trying to create objects within my actual field of vision, as well as “emphasize” or “focus” on my #2 visualization). I’ll have to spend time seeing if I can practice it…
I’m curious about what 2 is like, cause I’m pretty sure I’m 1 but not entirely sure so would be interested to know how it works for people who know they’re 2.
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Here’s an online test to see if you’re affected https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
Sweet, I passed, thanks.
My ability to visualize things varies dramatically based on my mood, context, if I’m asleep, and whether or not it’s “voluntary”. It’s never better than a fuzzy, 80-90% transparent image, but sometimes I can “see” color and some finer details, and other times it’s just an outline. Involuntary visualization (visualizing something in response to written or spoken statements) is a lot stronger for me than voluntarily visualization. If my involuntary image becomes voluntary (because I try to intentionally maintain it) then it goes away. Additionally, I tend to be better at it if I’m in a good mood than if I’m in a bad mood, and I’m better at it if I’m externally prompted to visualize it (“imagine this if you will…”).
The best way I’d describe it is that it’s like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. The moment I try to reach out and grab it to get a better look, it goes away. Most of the time the images aren’t in front of me, but are “in another dimension”. I’m aware that the image is there, I’m aware of what color things are, what their shape is, what texture they are, but I can’t actually “feel” or “see” anything.
Except for when I’m asleep.
My dreams tend to be very vivid. Not like a lucid dream (usually), but vivid enough that it’s led me to speculate that my seemingly partial-aphantasia might be less about missing neurons and more about a mental block preventing me from directly visualizing anything (I speculate that you’re using the same neural pathways when you’re dreaming as when you visualize something while awake).
For me personally, I think a lot of practice is going to be about training my “mental fine motor skills” and learning how to “be gentle” with my mental images so that I can interact with them without immediately dispelling them in a puff of smoke.
Something you might try doing is reading short, basic stories (like children’s books) without any pictures, with the conscious intent of imagining what you’d see if you were filming them. Don’t intentionally imagine things, but keep the idea that you are imagining things in the back of your head. You’re creating the belief that you’re visualizing something, which may actually help you to visualize it. This is something that people sometimes have to do when they’re learning to lucid dream.
One of the main starting points for lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams; but what do you do if you can’t remember your dreams? Well, firstly, start a dream journal. Then, once you’ve got your journal, notepad, text app, etc open, start writing what you think you dreamed about. You’re not “making something up”, you’re “remembering what you think you dreamed”. Your brain is either too dumb to know the difference, or smart enough to understand the intent. Either way, your brain will start to get the message that it’s supposed to be remembering your dreams and will start retaining them instead of throwing them away.
Doing something similar might help with visualization.
The best way I’d describe it is that it’s like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. The moment I try to reach out and grab it to get a better look, it goes away.
That’s an excellent way to describe it.
One of the main starting points for lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams
And that right there is why I never got into lucid dreaming, luckily on a normal wake I don’t remember much of my dreams… when I started writing them down and remembering them I realised how often I’m having horrible dreams. Like, I’ve died in my dreams multiple times, though I always come back as something else (like the time a demon chopped me up and boiled me, and I came back as crisps, or the time I fell off a cliff then came back as a big red bird).
Thanks for these tips, will give me a good excuse to read to my niece next time I visit :)
So not exactly the subject, but: when I am about to fall asleep/ extremely tired / just woke up, my «phantasia» ability gets multiplied like by an order of magnitude. I can literally picture any object in perfect details from any angle. It only lasts for about a minute tho, then it fades away, and it all becomes kinda boring and not that exceptionally good.
It’s like I have access to a new hardware acceleration for a minute
I have this!
And sometimes when I am in that mode, I can close my eyes and still see the room perfectly (including correct rotation/translation as I’m sat up in bed with my eyes closed and moving me head around like an idiot)
It’s great fun, I wish it could always be like this
I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy “place” so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that “room”. That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.
I’ve had this too but in music. I have no training or ability to write and can barely play easy piano music. But just on the edge of sleep, I feel like I can compose piano pieces that are beautiful and complex. The tune swirls in my head as I add a harmony to go with the melody.
Of course, having no way to write them down, even the tune is quickly lost. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing and it was just nonsense sounds. Who knows?
I definitely have had this exact thing happen to me several times as well.
I have aphantasia. And also extreme crippling insomnia, it has been the last 3 or so years that i learned that other people can actually visualize at all. I always thought it was a metaphor. In my searching about a way to potentially improve it I found this article.
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/
And it absolutely cured my insomnia. I can sleep easily for the first time in my life. Didn’t do a lot for the aphantasia but i did manage to successfully get an image or two a couple of times. Mostly i just love that i can finally sleep without hours of lying in bed beforehand.
I also have severe insomnia since childhood, so your comment is REALLY interesting to me, thanks for responding. This is the kind of stuff I was hoping to come across, some sort of common experience linking the condition. Very interested to hear from other aphantasic people to see if they also experience insomnia.
I mentioned image streaming below to someone else. Tried it briefly but got frustrated and stopped. 100% going to give it a concerted effort because I’d gladly swap my left nut for the ability to sleep like a normal person, cheers for this info.
Can I ask, do you remember any of those ‘24 backup techniques’? Unfortunately the important links are now dead
I’m sorry i don’t, i just did the eye rubbing thing.
I managed to find some additional info from the reference Dr, seems the info is now in an expensive book and therefore not public. Found a wordpress doc from him with 5 additional techniques though which I’ve added to the main post
Not who you replied to, but you can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine (archive.org) to view an older snapshot of the site
Thanks, I did try that. Unfortunately the links themselves were still dead when I put them into wayback machine
