Aphantasia - the inability to visualise things in your mind

How do you aphantasiacs remember the past?

Maybe this sounded facetious - what I meant was, there are things I know I've done in the past, that I can recall in just factual, non visual detail, but they don't feel like memories. It seems to me (since I started thinking about this in earnest last night) that unless I have an image of something, albeit indistinct or even from a photo, it might as well have happened to someone else.

So to rephrase the question, if you just have factual, non visual recall, does it feel different from other factual knowledge?

Interesting research. Thanks for the link, Sick!

For me, it's kind of like one of those "can I rotate three-dimensional objects in your mind? what do you mean other people *can't*?" kinda questions. Because nope, I'm one of those super-visualisers. (Didn't get a super high score on the test because I have mild prosopagnosia - faces are the one thing I really can't recognise or recall in any kind of detail. But this means I am more dependent on things like hairstyle, dress sense, gait, voice, for being able to recognise people outsider of their context.) But come on. "Visualise a beach"? What kind of a beach? Tropical beach? Californian beach? Windswept Scottish beach? Cornish beach? What time of year is it? What wildflowers are out? Which direction is the wind coming from? How finely grained is the sand underfoot? How high are the wave caps? Can I draw u a picture? Maybe change the sky, make it an alien beach with a pink sun and an orange sky? Cool.

I think I'm a super-visualiser because I'm just a super-noticer. It's a thing I realised, going for walks with other people, that I just seemed to be taking in ten times as much detail as a friend on the same walk. I just constantly spotting plants, geological features, architectural details, only to have my friend go "what? how did you even spot that?" Which is odd, because I always thought of myself as someone who walked around in an oblivious daze. But taking that fine-grain of detail in, means that when I recall something, I have that much data to work with, when visualising, or describing, or sketching the scene from memory. I get frustrated with writing that isn't detailed *enough* for me to visualise where we are or who the character is talking to.

But, oddly, my memory is really incredibly poor. Maybe that's even because my internal visualisation is so good, it's easier to visualise or imagine a scene afresh, rather than fetch the memory.

Mostly, I'm just amazed at the staggering level of variation in human brains. How many people seem to take it for granted that everyone functions with pretty much the same mental apparatus, and we just don't. (I think it's important to recognise that it's not pathological or wrong, it's just *different*.) Much of the past year has been such a bizarre process of discovering all these things I am supposed to be able to do, but can't ("what do you MEAN, I am supposed to just look at a pair of disembodied eyes, and work out what emotion they are feeling, from a photo? Are you joking, that's sci-fi kinda stuff! I am not a mind-reader!") It's neat to discover other kinds of differences where I do above average, rather than badly. :) And it also helps to explain many, many sources of conflict.

I can read text to myself in the voices of William Burroughs and Werner Herzog, play "Search and Destroy" in my head, actually "hear" the ragged sting of Williamson's guitar.

This is pretty much my experience when I'm awake - realism and detail turned up to max. When I'm dreaming, however, it's like my subconscious is being efficient and only using as much detail as necessary. So a lot of my dreams are in black & white with no or minimal sound. Other times they can be like movies - but it always seems that the extra detail is required for a specific reason. Even if the reason isn't obvious, like a recent dream where I was on a nudist beach populated entirely by octogenarians. Why, subconscious, why?

However, as an artist, I've long struggled with the limitations of my sensory memory and imagination.

Also this. I can come up with bits of riffs and chord progressions, maybe a couple of lines of lyrics. But to do more I need to record instruments into the computer and then listen to them back so I can come up with the next bit, or with lyrics write them down and look at them on the page/screen so that I can juggle the words and lines around. Which is kind of frustrating, as I can sit and hear in my mind the whole of 'Search & Destroy' more or less entirely from start to finish, to the point of either hearing the vinyl version or the awful digitally distorted Iggy remix. Allegedly Mozart was able to hear entire pieces in his mind when he was composing, which seems like a really useful ability to have. Certainly more practical than cranking up a DAW. Bowie was supposedly on a bus in London when he came up with most of 'Life On Mars', and although he had to get off the bus and immediately go back home to work on it any further, it's way more than I can manage.

For me, it's kind of like one of those "can I rotate three-dimensional objects in your mind? what do you mean other people *can't*?" kinda questions

This reminds me of something that happened at a place I used to work a long time ago. One of the guys there was a 'topper', in other words whatever someone could do, he could always do it better. One day we were discussing moving some equipment into an office, and I said something like "oh I can imagine where that would go", just casually. But then this guy went into full 'topper' mode and started saying things like "I can VISUALISE things in MY MIND. I can SEE a THREE DEE CUBE and ROTATE it!". While I stood there thinking 'really?', because it seemed to me to be like someone saying "I can HEAR SOUNDS with MY EARS!".

I don't have anything against octogenarians going to nudist beaches, I just don't understand why I need to visualise every nook and cranny of the backside of an 80 year old man who's spent most of his life tanning himself mahogany.

I am not good at visualising in my mind, although I love visual arts and feel like I could be creative within those fields, and I write a lot, often including visual description (though mostly I write internalist prose). For instance, when I write something like a film script, I know exactly how to create atmosphere with camera angles, props, colour. But those things are more like maps or lists in my brain until they are assembled in the real world (NB sadly I have never made a film, but I have done analogous amateur art things). When I was trying to visualise my friend's face for the test I found that shutting my eyes didn't help at all, and in fact it was easier to have my eyes open and sort of 'catch' the memory of the face out of the corner of my eye. But it could only be conjured visually for a split second before reverting back to theoretical memory. Funnily enough, the questions about the walking gait and the thunderstorm were the only ones I could score greater than 'vague and dim' for, so maybe memory of movement is different to memory of still images?

What is a theoretical memory of someone's face like?

I suffer from this when I try to listen to a basketball game on the radio.

It's like, I know what their hair colour and style is. I just *know* what it is. I know what size and shape their face is. Sometimes I know their eye colour. I know whether they wear makeup or not and what style of makeup they tend to wear, or if they have a beard or stubble. These are facts about this person and I can recite them to you if you ask me to recall that person. I can also use these facts to flash up for a millisecond that visual memory, but not longer, I can't grasp the face, I can't consider it long and hard.

xp

This is so interesting. I think I first realised I was lacking in this when I got a really below average score on a spatial awareness test in school, and my careers guidance teacher was trying to understand it. She was trying to say, "Oh maybe you'd filled the boxes in wrong"(?!) and I knew, no, it was the fact I couldn't visualise shapes or rotate them in my mind.

I can recall this memory, but I can't picture myself, her, or the room we were in at all.

Strangely, I have quite vivid dreams, that are highly visual. I don't understand why I can't do it when I'm awake.

"Catching" the memory of a face out of the corner of your eye is a great way of putting it. As soon as I try and concentrate on it, it's gone.

Very interesting thread topic and posts. Took the test, scored in the middle, of course. There was a time when it used to frustrate me, and once in a while it still does, that I don't have better visual recall of exact images but, as you guys just basically said, if one tries to force it, it usually dissipates and disappears that much faster. Much better to accept the slightly murky view as a sort of a cool visual effect. Instead of trying to bear down and focus on one part of the mental image, I try to remind myself to take a breath and ask myself questions like "who else was in the room that I am not remembering?" Since I'm reasonably good at remembering stuff like: "who was there, where were they sitting? etc., this may be a case of "looking where the light is" but nonetheless it usually bears some kind of fruit.

Was hoping you'd like this thread / discussion, Branwell.

Took the test. Got 29, which is average apparently. Not sure how useful a test like this is, since you can only go by your own experiences. 'As vivid as real life' is a high marker really, since nothing I visualise lets me legitimately reach out and touch it, or smell it.

Yeah 'vivid' seems like a problematic term. It's not like I'm actually seeing anything. 'Accurate' might be less misleading.

faces are the one thing I really can't recognise or recall in any kind of detail

I think I'm the opposite, I'm constantly amazed when people don't recognize faces, to the point of exasperation when they think a photograph of someone is someone else.

Though I suppose that's a different subject.

I'm good at faces IRL, but on film/television I'm so bad that if someone changes their hair or grows a beard, I've no idea who they are.

39 out of 40. Which I guess is unsurprising. My imagination is incredibly vivid. Which is something I've always valued until a relative was recently put on antipsychotics and now I'm kinda more like...whuh oh. I don't know if there's any actual correlation between hypervivid imagination/visualization and actual mental illness, though.

xpost I'm not terribly visually detail oriented IRL (at least not consciously so), so I don't know how much correlation there is there, either.

Took the test. Got 29, which is average apparently. Not sure how useful a test like this is, since you can only go by your own experiences. 'As vivid as real life' is a high marker really, since nothing I visualise lets me legitimately reach out and touch it, or smell it.

― TARANTINO! (dog latin)

yeah, same (i got 30, but close enough). the "vivid as real life" thing bugs me. i wouldn't ever describe remembering or imagining in those terms.

i mean, my dreams are vivid as life. i've had drug trips that eclipse reality. occasionally, while on the verge of sleep, i'll experience a brief auditory hallucination that seems 99.9999999% real. but ordinary, everyday thinking baout things never occurs with a comparable degree of verisimilitude. when i imagine a beach, it's not like I'm suddenly actually THERE.

if i were less uptight about that distinction, though, i would have answered "vivid as real life" for at least a few questions.

I think the distinction I would make is that I can visualize things with the same clarity as the things I see in real life but those visualizations are not at all necessarily representative of the real life things I'm visualizing. The details may be wrong but whatever I may have mentally added or subtracted is clear as crystal.

Can't suppress the thought that this thread must be about yet another Prince side project that I was hitherto unfamiliar with. Perhaps there is a screenname in there, hmm.

I read the BBC bit with the test straight away but I've actually only just read the facebook post - it's really interesting! And although I don't have it anywhere near as bad as Ross I felt exactly the sort of recognition/identification Scik describes while reading it.

One thing that the people who identify with this seem to share (me included) is a level of surprise that we are creative despite it. But actually, on further reflection, it makes absolute sense that we would be creative. Because more than people who can visualise well, we need to move our ideas from the abstract into the concrete. If we don't, we can't contemplate them as thoroughly. Limited visualisation does not mean the scope of my imaginary world is smaller than someone with hyper or normal visualisation, it just means that I approach that imaginary world differently. I also don't think that my limited visualisation has a necessary cause-effect relationship with my preference for conceptual art and metatextuality, though I would say that it would have inevitably had some input.

Update:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37862070

As I posted above, I scored on the extreme hyperphantasia end that test. The experiences these aphantasic people are describing seem quite horrific - not being able to visualise your own children?

i've been thinking about this lately. that test is a bit difficult to do because it relies on your own comparison to "clear." i want to score everything as moderate but that's because i'm just used to how i am. at times i feel like i have a strong mind's eye, especially while reading a novel or something, because if i'm engrossed in it it is almost like watching a movie. but i can't picture the faces of people i see frequently. i'm not sure if it's normal or not. the thing about the effect on memory is interesting; i have an extremely good memory but remembering something is often a spatial feeling for me. i am feeling myself being in a particular place in order to remember something rather than picturing it. i had believed a lot of people experience things this way but naming it made me realize i'm different, possibly.

also this has to be linked to the brain's ability to compare faces seen irl to photographs in an eyewitness identification situation after a crime. people don't realize they are quite bad at it and their confidence in it can be too high.

Yeah, can't visualise my kids, or my wife. Or a horse. Or a beach. Or anything. I'm OK with this.

Also do not get ASMR: new favorite weird shit on the internet: ASMR ROLE PLAY ~ Autonomous sensory meridian response ~

Not even slightly. Wonder if it's linked.

I heard Laurel rather than Yanny if that's related.

Never done hallucinogens. An older friend at uni warned me not to because I seemed 'psychedelic enough already' but now I'm wondering if they'd work on me at all, or if even the smallest dose would shatter my imageless brane.

only one way to find out..

http://thequietus.com/articles/25150-weirdcore-interview-radiohead-aphex-twin-caretaker
thinking is innately, reliably visual. If I asked you to think of your favourite song or some music, it would, generally speaking, be a challenge. It's hard to manifest sound alone in one's thoughts without some manner of visual accompaniment. That’s because the ‘language’ employed by the human brain is primarily one of images. Even if we’re engaging in dense verbal cognition such as preparing a speech, vivid pictures act as the unbidden chaperone of all thought.

nope!

yeah that's pure rubbish

Yeah, that's nonsense. Sounds like someone doesn't realise they've got an inability to hear things in their mind.

“Unbidden chaperone” is a keeper though. Or just a bad band name, once pluralized.

I assumed the revive was for this in the guardian today. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/24/experience-i-cant-picture-things-in-my-mind?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Think of a musical artist. Odds are you’ve conjured up an image in your head rather than a sound or a name.

...no? wtf, who does this

and particularly when so much music is discovered via streaming or downloads where there's no image to conjure... who does this?

i do that i think! i might have an album cover come to mind. i can conjure up sound no problem, but without any prompting images usually come first.

xp yeah saw that guardian thing, complete coincidence! probably covered upthread but it is really hard to discuss this kind of thing, when i 'see' things in my imagination it's not really like actual sight - it's really impossible to describe without using misleading visual metaphors.

It’s more like an idea of an image than an actual picture but I’m a designer so I guess I’m often picturing things that never existed and that’s even stranger to describe.

when i think of modern english "i melt with you" i picture cheeseburgers.
"mmm mmm mmm... mmm mmm mmm mmm"

but they wanted me to, so i guess it worked.

to be fair I have a much better ability to recall/imagine sounds than images. or, rather, it's inconsistent -- I can imagine an image I've seen before, fairly well, but rotating 3D objects I'm hopeless at (which made large swaths of calculus basically a nightmare)

"visualize your childhood bedroom from 20 years ago" = A-OK; "visualize a cross-section of an arbitrary cylinder with a hole in it" = are you fucking serious right now

isn't that a donut? i could think of cruller things to visualize.

which made large swaths of calculus basically a nightmare

My experience with calculus was that the more complex it got the more being able to visualise made it easier for me to understand. So single variable area-under-a-function kind of problems took a bit of remembering of rules etc., solids of rotation shell / disk was the point where I could properly visualise what was going on, and multivariable here's a plane here's a surface described by a function now imagine the space where they intersect mindfuck kind of thing I found 'easy'. Or at least until I had to write equations again because remembering equations I find to be really difficult - they seem particularly hard to visualise.

yeah, that's the more common opinion I gather, but for me it was the exact opposite -- remembering the rules was fine, doing the integrals was relatively fine, but the second you asked me to imagine a solid of rotation and what that would look like I froze up, and when it got to visualizing anything multivariate it just got worse. (I distinctly remember in calculus 3 one of our tests pulling questions from the textbook, one of which was "match these six contour maps to these six 3D graphs." for most people I expect this was probably a gimme, being a matching question and all, but the only way I got anywhere with it was to literally tear that section off the test paper, rotate it so the axes at least aligned, then staple it back at the end. and even then I couldn't visualize it and at best could just trial-and-error plug in points.)

12 year old snoball had real trouble with trig because teachers insisted on getting students to memorise 'sohcahtoa' but I would have had a much easier time if they'd just shown us sin/cos/tan on the unit circle.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/images/unit-circle-sin-cos-tan.svg
I didn't see this diagram until years after I left school, but it would have saved me a lot of wasted effort randomly punching the sin/cos/tan buttons on my Casio FX-82A.

That Quietus piece actually pisses me off.

that’s because the ‘language’ employed by the human brain is primarily one of images. Even if we’re engaging in dense verbal cognition such as preparing a speech, vivid pictures act as the unbidden chaperone of all thought.

This is just not true at all. Anyone who's read a basic Oliver Sacks book could tell you musical cognition/language has a base even more embedded, some think, than visual or spoken. Its why music therapy exists.

Its why whenever anyone says "dont know why" I start mentally singing "stormy weather". Did the person who wrote this just say this bollox to justify talking about AFX's videos?

Did the person who wrote this just say this bollox to justify talking about AFX's videos?

This is more likely to be a case of "At this moment I feel this is true and I am the sine qua non of what makes a human. So, if it seems true about me when I squint at it properly and don't stop to question it, it must be true about people everywhere."

it's one throwaway line in an article about a video producer. Still it's interesting it's sparked such a debate

Ooh, interesting. I'd love to see that exhibition!

I might go at the weekend. Got invited to the opening tomorrow, but kids. If I go I’ll take pictures...

Please do my very scientific facebook poll: https://www.facebook.com/njsouthall/posts/10101282620831604?notif_id=1554802724292934¬if_t=visual_poll_vote_feedback

Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256

(I see it's the same researcher as in your article, so that's good publicity, though no mention of the conference or the exhibition.)

I don't have a Facebook account or I would do your very scientific Facebook poll!

Which is crazy, cos he spoke at the conference!

ed's great, did you meet him?
I don't think I have aphantasia but I've always been crap at being able to put together mental images eg when reading books as a kid I could only 'imagine' versions of things/ places I'd actually seen. so more like visual memories which I kind of patch together

I thought that trying to picture actual faces was notoriously hard... like I can sort of do it but if I try and focus on a particular feature it's often to difficult

https://sickmouthy.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/life-with-aphantasia-not-being-able-to-see-things-in-your-mind/

Didn’t meet him sadly, or go to the conference. Wish I had!

great post. I think I'm similar re reading fiction.
am I missing it or is the quiz not on the first link in this thread any more?

Looks like it’s gone.

I got to thinking the quantified scale for aphantasia is likely bogus, because most people are awful at drawing bikes:
https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definitely-cant/

I ride a bike all the time -- you wouldn't know it! This was my third(!) attempt:
https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/3yrgcb6dkm4.jpeg
It looks nothing like my bike. or any bike.

You'd expect super-visualizers or even moderate visualizers to be able to reproduce a bike -- it'd be like tracing over a picture of one, right?

That's actually a good drawing.

I can barely picture things in my mind but I am decent enough at drawing that I could sketch a bike easily.

Thanks! How would you remember to draw a bike if not from visual memory? Would it be more like muscle memory from drawing bikes before?

way to bury the lede, that bike project is awesome.

to me it makes more sense that there would be some kind of lag or non-communicability between the mind's eye and one's hands. i don't think criticizing the drawings bears much on the mind's visualization. the visualization is the visualization, the drawing you make from it is a whole different mechanism.

For sure how you transcribe from your head to your hands would vary quite a bit in finesse and skill, but even if it's a crude translation, my inclination is that "visualizers" ought to be able to preserve basic things (like a seat post that actually extends down to meet the pedals, which I'd forgotten and was completely unable to conjure up in my head visually).

This guy does seem like a rare example of someone who truly has a vivid visual inner experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrgbDXtt4UQ

Compare that to this artist who has obviously put in a ton of training:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGbvhyTZXfs

Been talking about this this week (there was a conversation taking place on Bluesky) and considered how I can visualise nothing at all (if not half-asleep or on certain drugs) but can play whole albums in my head. This may be more of a metaphor than something tangible, but I feel like there are a number of ways I experience the world, I could rank them like this:

1. Music / sounds
2. Spaces / buildings / rooms
3. Concepts / ideas
4. Smells

And so on. I can't see colours (well, I can a little bit) so suspect that's one reason visuals rank so low.
Is this the same thing, or a different thing, or is this me just overthinking the tedious and I think discredited "learning styles" bollocks we had to do at school?
Yeah I dunno.

I'd bet way more people are more auditory than visually inclined than even they themselves think, just based on how most people can hum a song as a means of recall (compared to drawing a plausible bike!) -- and often people's humming recall of a song is in the correct key, despite not having absolute pitch.

How would you remember to draw a bike if not from visual memory?

Sorry, missed your question before. When drawing I tend to think on paper, putting lines together until they look right somehow based on having seen countless bikes. Muscle memory is also a factor as I naturally have decent eye-to-hand coordination.

That kind of visual recognition seems almost universal e.g. most everyone can tell this is not what the painting should look like, even though all the abstract features are in the right place:

https://external-preview.redd.it/mZCQ0F88md36qFaP5F8FcFblS0YJCGrLhzdTx15TXsY.jpg?auto=webp&s=9d348f9e790ca20d66ae738d74eecb8262acff42

and the idea of orientation (e.g. spaces / buildings / rooms) being somewhat distinct from visual thinking gets me wondering if a good portion of people who claim to be visual thinkers are conflating these visual-adjacent aspects with being able to conjure bona fide fully-formed pixel-perfect images in their heads.

Following my post just above:

Article on aphantasia at the Guardian today

For instance, visualizers might imagine their work before they begin. “Aphantasics, myself included, tend to have a general ‘sense’ or idea of what they want to create,” Ebeyer said. Ebeyer begins working, then edits and refines until he is satisfied. He often hears from other artists with aphantasia when they’re in the process of making art: I know it when I see it. This teaches us that imagination extends beyond mental imagery.

Zeman has written that people with aphantasia may have more of an interest in the visual arts, because their minds are devoid of it.

A new BBC News article on aphantasia and hyperphantasia

Aphantasia sounds like a bad ‘00s R&B album title

aphantasia, hyperphantasia, elephantasia