Aphantasia - the inability to visualise things in your mind

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifNus1qMZN8
AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-phantasia

Pretty typical local news fodder: https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/dad-cant-picture-what-children-2716422

I'm the human interest hook for the exhibition.

I'm surprised having this doesn't upset me. Maybe because I don't really know what I'm missing?

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.