Aphantasia - the inability to visualise things in your mind

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.

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