I've always had a similar experience to this and also don't believe it is the same thing as either aphantasia or prosopagnosia.

I can consciously imagine things (and people and places) that I'm not seeing right now. I'm not super-great at it, but I can certainly do it. I can also easily and reliably recognize individual people.

But the idea of describing any individual detail of people's appearance even while looking at them (let alone from memory) seems extraordinarily difficult for me, and has since childhood. My stepmother was an artist and would sometimes try to question me about this, suggesting that I could learn to do it but hadn't.

I think I agree with other comments in this thread that conscious awareness of visual details in a scene is a separate skill from any form of recognition or recall -- especially, or most dramatically, for faces, but really for any visual percept as well. Maybe for any sensory perception: for example, I could imagine someone who can recognize individual voices, or musical instruments in a performance in which several different instruments are present, but who can't describe what makes one different from another (perhaps not even at the level of which instrument or voice has a higher-pitched fundamental tone than another's?).

I think I rely a ton on my visual system's chunking and abstraction and usually have little to no conscious awareness of any individual visual detail (especially for faces, but really for anything), unless I make some active effort to bring visual details to consciousness. I remember telling a friend in high school that I usually experienced visual scenes in a kind of wireframe summary by default (although this is just a metaphor, since I don't mean to deny that I noticed colors or textures), which she also found surprising and unfamiliar.

Edit: Like another commenter in this thread, my stepmother often recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, so maybe I should work through it and try to develop my ability to notice visual features without interpreting them. :-)

I very much feel this way as well. I've never quite articulated it as well as you have and it has given me some insight into my own behaviors.

I think this is why I'm what is described as a "power gamer". When I play video games I'm always looking for optimal strategies, the most powerful combinations of items and skills, etc. While I definitely can at times enjoy the scenery and graphical beauty of video games, I often feel as if I'm "staring through" the game as presented right into the game as actuality when playing, hardly processing the graphics at all past being some kind of representation of the game itself.

I couldn’t describe this any better. Especially the visual chunking and abstraction.

+1

I can really relate to this. Thnx.

I don't know whether your experience is similar to mine, but I can't visualize faces at all, even of someone I have just been looking at. I have no issues recognizing people or visualizing things other than faces, so neither aphantasia nor prosopagnosia match.

I can’t visualize anything really. It’s like I just think about its shape in an abstract since but I don’t actually visualize anything it’s all words and thoughts in my head, no images.

I heard this very often and am always quite curious about it, as I cant relate. Whenever I imagine something it's a mix of abstract, foggy stuff and vivid clear images. I don't "see" them, I think/dream them like replaying a visual input without involving the eyes.

Can you close your eyes and visualize a red, three dimensional star rotating?

Nope I just think about a star and it rotating but there is no visualization or images involved

What is a 3 dimensional star? A star is a 2D shape, so this statement is ambiguous

Yes until I also visualized a derpy dog orbiting it whose tongue was hanging out.

There was an article about this here on hn some time ago. People who don’t have a mind’s eye.

Aphantasia is a spectrum.

This comment describes me perfectly.

I think that's fairly typical for people who aren't used breaking down images into their constituent parts. In the language of computer vision, it would be like saying that our visual cortexes don't need to know how to segment a face into detailed descriptions of eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc., in the same way as it is necessary to be able to segment a wolf from a forest scene.

But it can also be trained. See, e.g., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.

Thank you for the book recommendation. My internal visual system is impaired unless I’m on certain drugs. I’m super excited to hear it can be trained.

Perhaps the artists are trained to ask questions of witnesses that reveal details you wouldn't be able to give up unprompted?

I remember a podcast (I think it was Every Little Thing) where someone described being a police sketch artist and it very much involved a lot of question asking, a lot of experience with identifying specific traits that stand out, and refining it over time.

Draw a nose, was the bridge wider or thiner? With a lot of experience they seem to be able to get the "right" details close-enough that it can identify say, a large handful of people for whom those that might report them can feel more confident in say, calling the FBI before reporting their uncle.

This casts a wider net than say, directly identifying them, but it helps isolate the possible suspects well enough to be worth doing when you've got nothing else.

I’ve had this exercise with my wife and I couldn’t even describe her nose, mouth, forehead or ears even though I see her everyday.

That’s fascinating to me. How would you describe your dreams (as in rem sleep dreams)?

Not a disorder. Totally normal. This is why cognitive models distinguish between visual and verbal processing.

I have literally had this thought yesterday for the first time. If I had to describe someone's face to police... I couldn't.

I mean, they've got 2 eyes, a nose, lips, that's the best I could do :D

This isn't an activity many people have to do often (verbally classifying facial features), so it isn't that surprising to me that untrained people have difficulty with it. Obviously I don't know your specific experience, but I'd think your experience is the norm rather than the exception.

In my mind, it's similar to musicians training solfege or chemists training in verbally classifying a smell: it aids both their understanding and their skill. It absolutely blew my mind to have a perfumist friend of mine describe smells to me as we were walking through the city. I'd never have guessed the depth and complexity of olfactory sensations that us humans are capable of with the right training.

Have a search for "aphantasia" and see if your experience matches.

Unfortunately, "aphantasia" is now labeled as "the inability to voluntarily create a mental picture in your head". That's from Google.

The primary problem with this label is that this could include some people who see involuntary imagery (like people), but don't do what is essentially creative visualization. For those people, they "know" the experience of seeing things in mind.

Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all. For the people I've found with this ability I would say none of them could hear things internally either. Not everyone has the ability to "rehear" things.

I spent a lot of years asking people about how they saw things internally and it just got weirder the more I asked. Eventually, I just decided that everyone thinks differently, with various "side models" that allow them to see, hear, think and even smell things that aren't real.

> Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all.

What about remembering things that you have already seen? Let's say I ask you to watch, for example, the Star Trek TNG opening sequence. Can you "rewatch" it?

I can. I can also sort of picture 'creative' images, to an extent.

However, conjuring up faces of people I've met is pretty difficult. Even my dog, which I find easier than people, can still take different shapes that are not real and I can't 'fix' it until I look at her again. If it is a person that I've only seldom met, I won't be able to recall the face at all, even if I can still recognize the person. It doesn't matter that I met the person a minute ago - if I don't make a very conscious effort to remember, I probably won't recognize them at all (and will definitely not recall the image). If I am under stress, that's even worse.

I've always chalked that up to 'being bad with faces', but there maybe something more at play, it seems.

I've some sort of stock graphics library in my mind.

For example, I cannot visualize the apple I have in my hand, even if I consciously study it for a few minutes and note out the shape and colouration before closing my eyes. However, I can visualize "an apple", I even get a choice between clipart version or realistic stock photo version of a red delicious or an granny smith. I cannot conjure up the faces of people I know, or even my own face, but I can bring up "young adult asian male" "elderly white female" etc.

When I looked up aphantasia, one of the test was "can you visualize waves hitting the beach" and I was wondering if the Toei logo because I can rewatch that anytime I want, but I can't visualize a generic beach with waves.

I've found it challenging to pin down someone about whether they see stuff internally or not. It's as if people who do aren't quite aware of what they are doing is happening, but if they think about it (like breathing) then they are like "oh yeah, I see it!"

Anything "built up" from a mental concept, and seen as an image, would be exactly what I don't do.

Yeah, the answer is always "no I don't see it". That is because I don't build side models in my mind, from thinking mind. While awake, I build ONE model in mind, from what my sensors feed it. When the sensors go dark, I see darkness and hear nothing.

While falling asleep I'm able to have hypnagogic visualizations. I do dream (but can't re-see the dreams) and psychedelics haven't produced anything much in the way of imagery. Maybe sounds and some slight alteration of the model, like movement or some slight color enhancement.

For me, the visualization is a mix of still frames, caricatures and abstractions.

I’d say it sounds more like prosopagnosia.

I doubt it’s either of those. I can recognize a person at a distance but ask me to describe if their nose bridge is wider or narrower and I literally wouldn’t be able to tell you unless it’s significantly exaggerated.

The question should be, if shown an example nose drawing could you say whether the bridge should be wider or narrower?

Or if shown two noses with different width bridges, can you point to the one that is closer to being right?

Police sketch artist scenes in movies and TV shows are incredibly abbreviated compared to reality, which often features a lot more iteration and discarded sketches precisely because a lot of people are in the "I'll know it when I see it" group.

That explains it. Yeah, I'd be able to point to something that's closer to what I saw.

i have partial aphantasia (I think) and I am quite good at recognizing faces, but I couldn't necessarily visualize one to describe it if not looking at the face

Part of the sketch artist's job is to work with people who aren't familiar describing images.

I feel the same way. I know there are purported to be disorders that affect the ability to recognize different faces, but I have to ask myself whether or not I’m much worse than the average, or if everyone is bad at it and I’m just more aware of that. Study after study since the 1960s has all but proven that humans just aren’t good at this and eyewitness testimony is very often wrong, yet we still insist that we “know what we saw.”

I took think id be terrible at this. I doubt I'd describe my own face to a sketch artist well, let alone a fleeting meeting with a stranger..

Sounds like you have asphantasia. (I also have it)