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 @Gwaer@lemm.ee 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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 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 used to think I had aphantasia, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case. For example, I can’t visualize in my mind’s eye something as vivid as a dream. My memories are not totally vivid either, but it’s not as if I can’t remember things visually.
I do wish I could imagine more vividly, but for me it’s far from not being able to visualize at all.
As far as tips, I think you have to stop repeating this thought to yourself that you’re limited in ability or unable to do something. If you try to do something but say to yourself “I can’t do this” then you aren’t going to succeed. If you believe you can there’s no guarantee that it’ll make it happen, or happem immediately, but you’ll undoubtedly get better results
As far as tips, I think you have to stop repeating this thought to yourself that you’re limited in ability or unable to do something.
This is very key and thanks for mentioning it. I’m constantly fascinated by the subject of placebo (and the related nocebo effect). Our brains seem to be able to control far more than we realise; apparently, even when told they are taking a placebo, a placebo can still be effective!
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?
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.
No, being an idiot is different.
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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This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.
It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
Ahhh finally I have met someone who understands the curse of an eidetic memory for sounds. Earworms can be absolutely maddening when your brain is playing the Cheeky Girls song on a loop for days.
Very interesting that you have a good visual mind but still struggle to remember names and faces. Have you ever tried using mnemonic techniques for memory, eg linking a name to something amusing, or a memory palace? Can’t remember the whole string anymore but about a decade ago I memorised the 8-digit alphanumeric code for my train ticket to prove a point. BG96 is all I have these days (big goat with 9 horns and 6 legs). Apparently the sillier the story, the easier it is to remember (something to do with brain responding to novelty).
Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades
I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.
I hadn’t known a thing about this until last year.
I was a 0/10 until college, though I have improved quite a bit over the past few decades using tabletop role-playing games. I can now keep several blobs in my head and know the general distances between each.
I’m still flummoxed with colors and definition, but I’m happy with what I have.
Hey, blobs is infinitely better than the back of your eyelids. Good job!
I’m aphantasic for sure, I think I’m even entirely mind-blind so to speak, I can’t imagine smells, tastes, sounds, images, or textures.
I can still dream and I can even recall the details vividly the morning of, but I suspect myself of being on the autism spectrum as I’ve always been super obsessed with finer details. Besides those recollections aren’t in a mental image, it’s more so concepts.
When I think of an apple I know the physiology of an apple and thus I can discern the details onto paper (albeit crudely as I’m not artist) but I’ve always suffered with geometry since rotating a shape in my head is impossible, algebraic translations, flips, etc across the x or y axis are also super difficult for me to grasp. But I can deal with arithmetic easier.
In terms of getting better at it? I’m not really in an environment or situation where I could safely test out hallucinogens, but with my ADHD on top of suspected autism, I really don’t think I want to see images in my head. In 2019 I had my deepest dive into depression, and while I was having a 2am panic attack (the peak of my depression I’d say) where I had endless racing thoughts just coming at me from all directions. The “noise” of my own thoughts overpowered everything. If I could imagine sound (and by extension, voices) beyond my own I might have actually gone farther than a 2 second peak of “I want to die”.
flips, etc across the x or y axis are also super difficult for me to grasp
Very familiar with this. It doesn’t matter how many times I use a vertical / horizontal flip in programs like photoshop / after effects, I rarely pick the right one first go.
The “noise” of my own thoughts overpowered everything. If I could imagine sound (and by extension, voices) beyond my own I might have actually gone farther than a 2 second peak of “I want to die”
That’s the negative side (everlasting earworms are another for me, as I have eidetic memory for sounds). I use inner sound to help me sleep, as I can’t visualise numbers as suggested. Instead I try my hardest to visualise them and make a boring computer voice in my head say the number out loud. Also having Morgan Freeman as a temporary internal narrator was pretty cool while it lasted!
im going pray for you 🙏
There’s probably more productive ways you can help people in the real world. Soup kitchens & charity shops are almost always looking for volunteers!
