Aphantasia - the inability to visualise things in your mind

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

Bump; being interviewed later today for the local news website about this. Emil.y I'm going to nick your "we need to move our creativity from the abstract to the concrete" idea, because that's amazing! Totally sums up how I feel about my own creativity.

I saw people talking about this on Twitter the other day and someone mentioned the thing of counting sheep to get to sleep, which I never could understand, the sheep are not there! So that explained that particular mystery.

Psychedelics really did work for me, maybe a little too well, felt like that bit of my brain is a locked cupboard and that's the only key.

Oh, the counting sheep thing is literally the first example in the link at the top if the thread, sorry!

One odd thing is that I am 100% cannot visualise anything, except places I've been to, on a sort of architectural level I can take myself on a tour around them and usually they pop up uninvited when I listen to music that I associate with them, is this a normal thing?

It's not normal to me! But who knows. I think they key takeaway for me from all this is just how different people's brains, and therefore experiences of the world, are.

I never got the counting sheep thing either but I don't know if that's because I couldn't visualise them well or just because I had a very over-literal approach and felt like I couldn't just imagine some sheep until someone told me where they were and what they should be doing and what task I should imagine myself completing by counting them, or something.

Like I have trouble ~picturing a beach~ and similar find-yr-happy-place ideas, but maybe mainly because I get hung up on, OK, what does my beach need? What is it for? Do I need to have been there? Hm, maybe actual real life memories of British beaches in the drizzle aren't particularly cosy or relaxing; what generic tropical postcard can my brain conjure up? Does that count if it doesn't feel real or me-related at all?

Then after that I worry about the haziness of the image and the gaps in it and so on. So it feels very forced both visually and conceptually.

The key for me is picturing an apple in front of me, I close my eyes and no matter how relaxed I am about the task, there's nothing but blackness there, I get the panic-related version for sure, but even without that happening there seems to be nothing.

Bump; being interviewed later today for the local news website about this.

I forgot to say earlier that this is cool, so, that's cool! How did it go?

Just a phoner that she’s writing up. Should go online Friday, so I’ll link to it. Went fine I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImYecp2Udi0

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