My sense of direction is fine to good, and as far as I can establish, it's common to visualise "metaphorically". So I'd visualise a route or 3d model as another might visualise honesty - I know what it is, I can precisely express it, but I can't picture it in technicolour. It seems to work well enough that hobbies over the years have included model engineering - including design, fell walking and geocaching. I never needed a 3d model to "see" a plan, even while drawing it, even though I cannot "see" it. Saying "I just know" seems completely inadequate, but that feels like how it works. I can pick up on potential problems where a) might interfere with b). Language gets difficult for this!
I can juggle a model but again metaphorically. I can do it quite easily and it never occurred to me in 50 years that images were an optional component for others. :)
The only other I've encountered with a similar lack of images among my friends reports just the same ability to do direction, map reading and spatial interrelation just fine, without seeing it. Just knowing seems to be enough to do the rest.
Rumination and regret is perfectly possible too - the feelings, the consequences is plenty enough to get that going. The pictures are better on radio also applies - not a literal picture but the feelings and the metaphorical. :)
Don't people misdiagnose things all the time? Unless not diagnosed, you could just not have it, and e.g. expect something super special/realistic when people talk about "seeing images" in their minds eye, which is not the case, and comparing with that.
E.g. even for us, without aphantasia it's not like what we envision with our "mind's eye" has the same richness, texture, reality etc to it as things we actually see (else, I guess, we'd had trouble knowing if we really did something or just imagined it).
It was only after that news piece I realised literally seeing images was even possible! I always just assumed anyone who spoke of "seeing" was just using a poor visual metaphor to describe something far vaguer. When I speak of visualising there is nothing I could call visual in proceedings, it's a feeling, a concept, a sensation. "I just know", and can sense and explore without seeing.
Like the commenter I replied to, having heard of this thing I had to ask a selection of friends similar questions "so you actually see a ball?". Oh. Wow. Really? So then I wanted to know how vivid, how often, how controllable etc. It also blew my mind somewhat as I just assumed visual was entirely metaphoric.
For me, it's not having a vague or ephemeral image and expecting something special or super realistic. It is being in a basement or coal mine during a power cut. Nothing. The mental cinema screen is firmly off. For all of my life.
I have never once been aware of any visual aspect to any of my imaginings or dreams. Not even a sense of light or dark, colour or even some vague, blurry outline. The sense of 3d and spatial awareness and modelling isn't - for me at least - connected with an ability to create images. I seem able to do the former just fine, and the latter not at all. Yes, it does seem strange to be able to do the spatial without any visual whatsoever, yet it's consistently worked quite easily. Describing it adequately is far, far harder... :)
This opens an interesting can of worms. :)
Whereas aphantasia concerns visual representation inside the mind alone.
If that makes any sense.
The article mentions varying ability to picture things. You may have good spatial reasoning but less visual imagination. I know that when I picture something in my mind it isn't always a clear image, often just a shadow of the thing I'm imagining. I find spatial reasoning has a different quality, it's like sensing the position of your arm but you can apply it to objects that aren't a part of you.
I seem able to do the spatial just fine, and the visualisation not at all.
> it's like sensing the position of your arm
Very good, yes it's exactly like this. I know, but I don't need to see. I can explore the model or plan, and know how the result will be, and still don't need to see!
For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it. Is that just as weird for you as being able to see a ball?
sigh you've got to be kidding me. You can actually replay a sound in your head??
well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(
I've also never been able to sing along with songs. It always blows me away when my wife can just start singing along with a song she's heard a few times.
I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged.
That orchestra conductor probably spent a large part of their life studying music. Part of learning music is ear training: the ability to name/write chords by hearing them, and conversely to "hear" them in one's imagination given the name (or from written music). No different than the way many people "hear" words in their head when reading.
I haven't used it personally, but from what I heard a few years ago it wasn't very accurate.
My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.
I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know.
Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.
But I don't have 'playback' memory for anything else, definitely not for visuals or touch. So if something is said around me and I didn't listen, I can replay the last couple of seconds or so, and that's usually enough. Helps with languages you're not fluent in too. But if I suddenly notice that I'm now touching something that I shouldn't, say, for example with my arm, in a crowded pub, there's just no way I can 'replay' history, not even the last moments, to figure out how that happened. Unless I actually paid attention when it happened. Same with visuals. If I didn't recognize what passed before my eyes there's no way to replay that to take a better look. Unlike with audio, where I can do precisely that.
Do you have verbal thoughts?
> I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged.
You are probably just neuroatypical. You should try to discover if your neuroatypicality gives you an edge over neurotypicals in some areas and exploit it.
You might enjoy reading experiences of someone who is neuroatypical in opposite way. "Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding". By Temple Grandin, Ph.D.
https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
alternate link: http://web.archive.org/web/20170219035332/https://www.grandi...
>Do you have verbal thoughts?
Not the OP, but my mind's ear is deaf just as my mind's eye is blind. I can plan a discussion in my head. I don't really hear it, I just think of what word I'm going to use, in a similar fashion to how I can think of a sphere but not actually see it. I think more about the points I'm going to make sure to make, though, than the actual phrasing. When I'm practicing a speech or something, I can feel my jaw and mouth muscles trying to move, so I think I'm sub-vocalizing it or something. That realization makes me very careful around others when I'm having private thoughts.
When I'm thinking about a solution to a programming problem, or any problem really, I sometimes "disappear" for a while and when I come back I have an idea about how to best proceed. People have commented in the past about my becoming completely still and zoning out for a period of time.
The inside of my head is a pretty quiet place usually. I just noticed that my jaw was making the movements I would use were I to speak the end of that last sentence. Weird.
Can you describe what you experience when recalling something?
For me, (it of course varies by the object of recall) it is most times imagery, although sometimes it can be emotions, sounds, etc. (I use the imagery as an 'address' after which other related memories are linked to and emerge).
It's interesting how different our experiences are. I do not think you are brain damaged, just specialized in a different way.
Unfortunately sometimes they're heavily different with extra or missing depth in certain areas, which makes the generic software that we're trying to install on them struggle to adapt (in various different ways).
It's super interesting how memory works. Like, I can remember the content of songs because they have rhyme and rhythm and pleasantness, but I can't remember anything else word-for-word. I'm the king of paraphrasing jokes and quotes, because I can never remember how they originally went.
edit to add: I'm just kidding about the brain damage thing, but seriously, I very much don't like the idea of presenting this as "aphantasia" as though it is a lack of something. I think it's (probably) just a different system that's optimized for different kinds of behaviors.
I do also suspect that the mental visualization could be learned. I feel like when I played Legos as a kid I was incidentally practicing my visualization, perhaps the only reason I'm good at it now is an aggregate of those kind of coincidences.
hehe sure sounds like it :)
This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.
I have an almost pathological hatred of silence on the outside - because when there is, there's also silence on the inside. Unless I actively think about a tune, or decide to hum or whistle a song, there's no radio. So I'll only hum/whistle or sing a few bars or a chorus and distract to thinking about something else.
So sitting in silence quickly becomes wearing. I have to keep thinking of stuff, and music, to fill it.
Now if I go fell walking or find myself in a forest or on a deserted beach, there's always enough sounds of nature that it doesn't feel silent. Not like a house, class or exam room or office can. It's only that which quickly gets oppressive.
Several times i did listen the sound of instruments as if real, but it happened only before falling into sleep, and just thinking about that would wake me up enough to bring the human voice back.
never. although that sounds like a blessing :)
I see it more as tradeoffs that make us different. For example you may have noticed that you are better than average at folding paper in your head and other spatial tasks. You have your aphantasia to thank for that.
Part of the reason why I didn't realise that others are literal about being able to 'see' with their eyes closed is that I can tell you spatial relationships more precisely than most people I know.
I know and can recall where things are in relation to each other with ease.
E.g if you asked me to sketch rooms in my house, I would be able to reproduce it in a huge amount of detail even though I can't 'see' them,by walking through what is where in relation to what and plot it out.
If I draw from memory rather than from sight or imagination, however, - something I learned as a child without connecting the dots - was that I do tend to draw in a much more 'sanitized' style. Clean lines etc. As if I'm drawing a diagram.
And the closest I get to auditory recall is internally humming the music - I can recall e.g. operatic arias that I have no hope in hell of reproducing with any accuracy out loud, but I can hum them out internally with a lot greater precision, but I can't hear them in any other voice than my own (and I can sense muscles around my mouth twitching as if I'm vocalizing while doing so)
I have enjoyed exploring and comparing my inner experience with other people since I discovered I was aphantasic (my ex was an artist and very visual, and first I thought she was the odd one). Now I usually do a little informal psychometric test session with people when the subject comes up. Asking them to imagine standing outside the house where they grew up, then walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of milk. I have them rate their inner experience on a hand-to-hand scale for: color, sharpness, detail, focus area size, opacity/transparency. It's interesting how much people vary
My inner experience as aphantasic is:
Visuals: - Closing my eyes I generally see black. Sometimes I can see vague, morphing images, blurry and colorless, if I'm falling asleep into a dream. On high doses of marijuana or normal-to-high doses of LSD I get some stronger visuals, but it still seems a far cry from many others sober-state visual imagination
Sound: - This was my next surprise after discovering I had visual aphantasia. That other people apparently hear themselves talking in their head. I have an inner monologue (and dialogues), but there is no real sound quality to it. Same thing if I imagine a song or a melody. I know how it goes, I can sing along in my head. I'm a songwriter, so I also make up melodies all the time, but I don't 'hear' anything in my head. This is a more confusing concept to convey than the abstract spatial awareness.
Taste / Smell: - Again, apparently it's common to be able to imagine eating this or that food, and actually smelling and tasting it. I lack this ability too. I can get an idea of whether something will taste good with something else, but there's no sensation of taste
Dreams: - My dreams are actually very vivid, and after experimenting with lucid dreaming before, my dream recall is generally good too (though dream recall works like other memories, so it's all abstracted into spatial positions, dialogues and knowledge about location and details)
Also agree with some other things that some people have written here:
- I've always found it hard to pursuse long-term goals or imagined futures. I tend to gravitate to what I find most interesting at the moment and follow that impulse
- I find it fairly easy to get over bad experiences
- I don't 'miss' people much, even if I really like it when I spend time with someone close. I imagine getting over a breakup would be a lot harder if you kept having vivid memories of times you spent with them. My memories are a lot more abstract and vague.
- Photos are a memory aid. Should take more of them - I'm bad at recognizing faces, especially if it's someone I don't know well and they've changed their hairstyle, or they look similar to someone else. I easily mix up characters in films/series, or fail to notice that some character is played by [famous actor I know] until the credits roll
- I generally enjoy reading non-fiction much more than fiction. Though I have read a lot of fiction books in my life. Knowing what my experience of reading fiction is, and comparing that with what it can be for people who are not aphantasic, I do feel a bit envious
Since I discovered aphantasia, I've at times felt like I'm lacking something, and missing out on part of the human experience. However, after talking to people at the other end of the scale, I actually appreciate that I can close my eyes and all I see is black, and that silence is actually silence. If you have no control over the images and sounds that appear in your mind, I feel that it could be both exhausting and anxiety-inducing depending on the content and intensity
On the other hand my mind is not graphical. I'm a programmer but I'm utterly useless with graphical/diagram design tools. My mind is actually very visual when I think about program design, it's just different in some way. It's not pictures. It can't be drawn on a piece of paper, or a computer screen.. very hard to explain. But still it feels visual, just in some other kind of dimension.
The graphics bit is interesting. I was into drawing comic strips when I was a kid, and in my teens I got really into making cars for the first Grand Theft Auto game. My early attempts looked terrible, but towards the end of that period, I was rated as one of the best in that little scene. I've worked a bit with graphic design in other periods, and I still enjoy some UI design, though I'm mainly focused on coding (mobile apps/games) now. Now, having worked with some great designers & illustrators, I know they're in a completely different league than I could ever hope to be. Thinking about the creative process is interesting though, as I clearly have some idea of what I want the end result to be, without being able to mentally picture it in any way that would make sense to non-aphantasiacs
Any chance that someone from the old GTA scene is hanging about here btw? :D
Can a mind really focus equally well on the forest and the trees? I have my doubts.
But I will never see the tree - that's for sure. Fortunately I've found beauty in forests.
A suggestion: Add in motion.
I'm decent enough at most of your list, but am almost entirely unable to visualize motion or (I believe related to that) living beings. In your example scenario, I had a point of view but no limbs - my visualization jumped between fridge -> gallon of milk -> poured glass, with almost no fluidity between the steps.
I am not sure if I have any meaningful anecdotes regarding reading fiction. I do not believe I have seen or otherwise visually imagined the events in either fiction or non-fiction most of the time unless reading it made me recall something that I remember. It might be possible if I were actively trying to do that, but I can say that whatever experience I am extracting from reading fiction is not primarily due to being able to see it. If people are really imagining that sort of thing automatically, I feel pretty envious of that myself.
When it comes to sounds though, I am something of a captive in my own mind. For the majority of the period that I am awake and not highly focused, my mind is using approximately 98% of its resources to replay, construct, combine, and modify music. This is usually much more interesting than what I am hearing and what most people have to say to me, and it can require conscious effort to hear the latter. Unlike the images, this sound is of high quality and is not at all consensual. I have been told that this is not quite normal. In hindsight, this could have been a useful trait had I worked with it instead of worked through it.
*Assuming that these memories are not brought on through involuntary means, such as some drugs and trauma-induced flashbacks.
It's terribly easy for me to acquire earworms (aka "stuck song syndrome"), and I have to avoid listening to certain kinds of music too late in the afternoon/evening - otherwise I can't sleep for music turning in my mind.
I actually ripped out the stereo from my car years ago. I don't need it. If I want to listen to some music I just let the head play it. Same thing.
Which leads me to the surprise my wife gave me one day - she told me that the daughter said a strange thing to her, she (my wife) had asked what she was doing - she was just sitting there - and the reply was "I'm listening to music in my mind". That was astonishing for my wife because she didn't know it was possible to replay music in the mind. She had never heard about such a thing. Which sounds awfully like aphantasia for audio - although I think it would be limited to just music. It's hard to imagine not being able to 'hear' a sentence in your mind.
The funny thing is that my wife is an amateur musician, and her ear is very good. Better than mine, I think.
But I have experienced other things as well. Since I was a kid I play this game when I'm bored... let's call it "visualising". But not for images, for other sensory input. For example, I try to imagine really hard the taste and texture of a cake, the smell of coffee or a perfume, touching something fluffy with my hand, feeling hot or cold... It works, although I don't feel it physically in my body per se, it's just like... a very vivid memory of it. As if an invisible limb was experiencing this feeling again.
What if they just define their thoughts differently? When I say "I can't see a ball", I mean that while I can reproduce how it would vaguely feel like to see a ball (like the difference between tasting something and recalling a taste), and kind of trace its outline, I can't have a picture in my mind with a similar accuracy as actually looking at a ball.
Someone else might say "I can see a ball" even if internally they experience the same as me, because they might set their bar lower. Could it be that people with aphantasia are just more demanding for what they count as "seeing"?
It's incredible what friends, family and coworkers have told me they're able to do with visual imagery. A large portion of them could overlay imaginary objects over the real world. My wife, who may be hyperphantasic, can spend hours watching TV shows/cartoons she's created in her head. She has no idea what it's like to think without visualization.
I'm extremely jealous of their abilities to replay memories, old or contemporary, as films in their head. I can tell you basic facts about what happened in my life, I can't re-see those experiences.
Yeah maybe. How could we ever really know though? I guess we have to take them at their word. I would like to be able to visualise my son's face while I'm at work, but I get nothing just black, thank goodness for photos :)
I also wouldn't describe myself as able to let go of things easily. When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
I completely agree with the photo thing though.
I, too, have a good sense of direction and am often relied upon to be the guide on hikes or backpacking trips in places that we've never been before. I know how to read maps and use a compass and orient myself but that is less visualize than it is analytical, IMO.
But! I also have the black hole effect that the GP described. I have an almost uncanny ability to just get beyond trauma and bad experiences and I'm seeing now that that is probably due to this black hole memory effect. I don't carry memories with me the way that other people do, but I've known that about myself for a while. It's caused some strife in my life, and it continues to do so, but I've taken to keeping a physical journal and making frequent notes about things that happen throughout each day. The act of writing this stuff down seems to force these things into my memory. I learned recently that my father operated similarly in his career, using a single sheet of A12 folded into quarters where he'd divide each quarter into an hour of work, with 8 folds in total representing the average day. When he worked 12/16 hour shifts, he'd add additional folds.
And, so... I guess that in light of this, I've always wondered if I'll have dementia or Alzheimer's late in my life. My paternal great grandmother lived well into her 90s, but my paternal grandmother succumbed to dementia in her mid 80s. My maternal family has some folks in their 90s, as well, and everyone there seems to have their memory in tact. But, my father has had his struggles and I've personally noticed that my mother is starting to struggle with conversational memory recall today.
I can still picture things in my head, but with huge gaps and difficulty; when I was a kid, I used to replay a 17km road to my grandparents with exquisite details in my head: the bus, the driver, walking down the isle, seating myself, the initial jolt, watching the road turn, every unique house, porch,bench, tree, telephone wires and so on and all without a conscious efort "what happens next" .
If I try real hard and ask myself questions like "ok, so now picture grandpa's mustache, now his hair, now his neck" then maybe I get a glimpse of his whole face.
My sister and I used to play a game as teenagers: one of us would closd his eyes, the other would narate a scene, it was pretty great.
In the 7th grade I was a 6/10 student at math, then trigonometry came and I was a 10/10 at trigonometry and 6/10 at algebra, because trigonometry made absolute sense because I could draw everything in my head; I needed tutoring with algebra, but never with trigonometry.
I also almost never remember any dreams; my rem and deep sleep are toast anyway, according to fitbit.
As opposed to my childhood when I woke up exactly once per night to drink water from the cup my grandma left beside the bed -- the rest of the night I had great adventures, I'd be chased my demons, fly across the clouds, escape some trap my grandfather told stories about.
Nowadays I get about 1 hour of tossing and turning througout the night, and depending on my anxiety I sometimes get completely wake for 1-2 hours at about 4AM; only about 1h of rem and 1h of deep sleep, the rest is just light sleep according to fitbit.
Just like he says in the article, and other posters are saying, for decades I didn't even realize because I didn't think people were being literal about "seeing pictures" in their head. I thought it was simply a label for remembering.
It was only when doing the course "Learning how to Learn" and getting frustrated with the memory techniques that I found out that people really do see with their mind's eye.
Same with algorithms on data structures- I would imagine a toy data structure and play around with how algorithm would interact with it.
The compulsory first year Math papers on the other hand were impossibly hard to follow, even with a lecturer who happened to specialize in mathematics education I was always lost about 20 mins into a lecture and always struggling to catch up.
I don’t feel like I can picture things as clearly as some people describe in this thread, but it’s not a total blackout either. Something in between.
I have not yet tried journalling as a coping mechanism; I may have to give that a go.
E.g an example I often used is that I remember pieces of code by how they look on screen to the extent that the syntax and formatting is something I'm unusually obsessed with because it affects my recall, and that I remember pages from papers I read 25+ years ago by visual appearance and layout.
But I can't see them, even though I can recall them to the point that I know what they would have looked like had I been able to see them.
That's interesting. I wonder how your mind has learned to compensate. Maps are such visual things, you must be tapping into some other brain areas to store/retrieve this information.
> When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
hmm, interesting. Maybe this part of my personality isn't related to the aphantasia.
Basically, aphantasiacs tend to do just as well at spatial reasoning tasks as people with imagery, but tend to be somewhat slower and do not exhibit the gender gap that has been identified in the broader population.
I'm aphantasiac as well, and can identify with some of the experiences you've mentioned in this thread, and not at all with others. My spatial reasoning is great, and I'm a singer who has no problem at all with singing along to songs - if they're sufficiently regularly structured, even singing along with the chorus the second time it happens in a song I've never heard before. However, like you, I cannot replay sounds in my head. Memories are easily put behind me.
We're clearly very early in understanding what impact aphantasia has on people. It's a fascinating topic, and always interesting to teach people about.
When I look at a map, I rarely try to remember what it looks like (I couldn't visualise it anyway) - I remember directions and distances relative to other places.
Dealing with the trauma has opened up a richness inside my head that I didn’t realize I had. I can visualize almost anything I imagine, and I’ve began drawing. I’ve always had very good spatial reasoning, sense of direction and audible memory.
I’m still working on being fully present, though.
Are you sure? I am not a psych(atr|olog)ist, but that sounds consistent with some sort of dissociation. People can even be impacted by traumas that they do not remember at all.
I think psychiatrologist is my new favourite word.
Edit: Or maybe psycologiatrist.
* shrug * no idea tbh. others with aphantasia don't seem to share the same effect, so maybe it's some kind of other dysfunction.
I've had very few traumatic events in my life, but when I hear people talk about flashbacks or reliving trauma, it confuses me utterly. I understand theoretically how it could happen, now that I finally know about visual memory, but the practical effect is still completely outside my experience.
My wife had long been envious of my "superhuman ability" to stay in the present, neither lingering in the past nor staring off towards the future. Once we realized I was aphantasiac it made more sense, as memory and fantasy simply don't exist for me in remotely compelling or seductive ways. It's all just abstract word-forms (and occasionally sounds).
As a programmer, writer, musician, and occasional photographer/painter, I've long insisted that when making art "There is only implementation."
I still think there's a lot of truth in that, but I do now realize that most people can meaningfully "see" their work before incarnating it.
1.While I do not experience visual images in my mind, I do 'form' what I can only explain as proprioceptive relationships between things. I can mentally rotate objects or my environment, but have no visual experience of it. This is a long-winded way of saying I have very good spacial understanding, direction and concept of how things relate to each other - I'm a hang glider pilot, motorcyclist, loves driving and hiking around, and never get lost.
2. I do relate with having a superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. I don't dwell on the bad for long, and tend to forget the bad experiences pretty quickly. My memory of accidents are also more proprioception and relation to things in my environment than visual.
No 1 I never connected it to this, but yes, I have terrible sense of direction. I do okay if there are physical landmarks (Like lake to the west or hills to the east) and numbered streets help too, but I still regularly make wrong turns and don't realize it in cities I've lived for a long time.
No 2 I don't feel. I ruminate a lot. My memory is weak, but I still manage to ruminate on things.
I can relate to the lack of interest in fiction books others have written on this thread. I struggle to visualise what's going on with the characters/scenes so get bored (and frustrated) very quickly.
Oddly I can relate strongly to your point 2. My father is the same - emotions get switched off and practical mode kicks in. He's working on a solution to one of the problems as a result of whatever's happening around us, be it financial, logistical, or anything which could "help" in his eyes. It's not so much put bad experiences behind me, but rather put them in a mental box (ironically, I can't imagine) and not worrying about it.
So far I've boiled the side effects down to:
1. A complete and utter lack of direction. I literally get lost in suburbs surrounding my home (i'll very often take an extremely sub optimal route home from a store that is just 10 minutes from my home - a bit embarrassing tbh, gives my wife a laugh though). These are streets I've travelled for over 30 years. Apparently quite common with aphantasia.
2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Regarding no.2, photos are super important. There was a period of 10 years or so where I didn't take many photos, and that period feels like a black hole.