As he moved through the large world of the server he would repeatedly encounter people who asked him if he was a seer (Sehender, in German). For a while he thought that this is some trait or role that you can have in the game.

Turned out, though, that being a seer means that your eyes work as they do for most people in the world. And that was less common on this server to have than not. Many people with impared vision played there, using screen readers.

Hence, instead of talking of blind people, this place shifted to talking about seers, while visual impairment was normal :) And I do believe that this majority of players had a much better visual image of the world they're playing in than those staring at a wall of ASCII.

Unfortunately, I don't know what server that was. But I assume that MUDs gain some of their continued popularity from there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD A MUD (/mʌd/; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain)[1][2] is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.

I have normal vision, and have played on MUDs only for a few years, in my late teens / early twenties.

On another note, does anyone know if screenreaders read advertisements? I got so upset the other day when I realized that blind people might have to deal with screenreaders narrating advertisements.

I'm not sure if I have aphantasia or if I'm just being overly-pedantic about what people mean when they say they "see" something in their head. I guess maybe this could be measured by seeing if the visual cortex is active when imaging an elephant; I'd be curious to see how I compare to others in a test like that.

Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.

It seems to me that many people describe it that way. That's why I think it may have more to do with the language people are using to describe the experience than the experience itself. Like you, I can describe (and probably draw pretty accurately) the layout of my house or a Counter-Strike level.

If I close my eyes and try to picture what my bedroom looks like, I still only see black/darkness… but I can still describe the features of the room in very much detail. I definitely can’t conjure up a vivid image in my head, I would describe it more as a feeling rather than a strictly visual experience. Same with recalling what someone’s voice sounds like… I can imagine what someone’s voice sounds like, but definitely can’t hear their voice in any meaningful level of detail, yet I’m still able to describe the voice - it’s more of a feeling than a literal audio/visual experience.

I definitely wouldn’t describe my own experience as anything close to a visual hallucination because I only see black/darkness… (I think) it’s uncommon to literally see things with extreme clarity as someone hallucinating would. Or maybe seeing black/darkness when visualizing things is abnormal?

When I was young I was into ray-tracing with POV-Ray. The exercise of positioning a camera in a scene using a text file got me thinking about what it would look like if my eyes were up in _that corner_ of my bedroom. I would sit at my desk and imagine what it would look like and I would be "seeing" a picture in my head of what it would look like (given what information I had about things like whether the top of the half-open door was painted or not, whether the top of the ceiling fan was dusty, that kind of thing).

Right now I can mentally picture the inside of my refrigerator and pantry, and that's pretty much how I keep track of whether I'm running out of various things (which might explain why I'm so terrible at doing so, it's only as good as my mental image). It's not like I have one of those eidetic memories; these mental images are flawed and only somewhat accurately represent reality, with more familiar things being represented more accurately.

It kind of doesn't matter whether my eyes are open or not, but it's a bit easier if they're closed. If they're open, my eyes naturally just go unfocused while I'm doing it (my parents called it "staring off into space").

I see them more as 3d objects, but not from the perspective of a camera, but just the model all at once. And it's always a simplification, only the concept of a tree, no tree with actual detail of a real tree. Many things only have shapes, no visual colors, no visual anything, only the shapes, as though it were a different sense.

I want to say that some won't work, since I know there are some that rely on design flaws in our eyeballs (placement of the optic nerve). I'm thinking specifically about the ones where you are directed to look at some part of the figure and notice that some other part has vanished.

However, I have trouble visualizing faces in great detail, or even much. When I try to recall a face, the harder I try to recall it, the more blurry it becomes.

Aphantasia seems... hard to imagine. But evidently it's real. I imagine closing my eyes and being unable to summon a mental image of objects or persons. It's almost like being blind, but only when one's eyes are closed, and that's very weird.

The most interesting question about aphantasia, for me, would be just how much it affects one's ability to deal with concepts, especially visual concepts. It's a question one might have about visual impairment as well. But it's clear that it doesn't seem to matter much. I know brilliant blind people -- it doesn't seem to slow them much if at all, and even seems to help them to some degree. The effect on conceptualization must be very subtle indeed -- a testament to the neuroplasticity of our brains.

It's not a hallucination because that would imply it interferes with your eye vision. It's like a third eye, independent of the other two, so it doesn't interfere.

I actually have a thing where I can't process math without seeing geometry in my head. But I was never naturally good at perfectly visualizing real world objects. Instead of math and code, which came naturally, I pursued art college because I considered it a weak spot for me. And indeed, I wasn't very good at it... but years of classes and practice made me better, and strengthened my visualization skill. I think it can be learned and exercised, like any other part of the brain. Just like musical recognition can be learned, if not perfect pitch.

This. It is a mashup of both. I can clearly visualize many 3D objects in my mind, as well as zoom, pan, scale, rotate, recolor, animate, distort them, etc. But it is not purely visual, because I often "see" opposite side of a cube momentarily, which I should not be able to from this perspective.

So, it is not a rendering engine. It is not physically, spatially and temporally stable. Stability is lost especially as your focus shifts (e.g. "seeing" behind objects as your attention slips there)

The best way I know to describe this is by old and new Tesla FSD predictions which are sampled here: https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=3768

Improved version is how people talk about visualization, but the old unstable version is how (at least for me) it mostly is.

One test I have performed on myself in the past is to decide I will visually remember a specific moment. (I have done this several times). I could bring up that image in my head, and remember certain specific things (eg the color and shape of someone's hat). Like other visual memories it only has partial detail. I can still remember these instances, but most of the detail has now faded (~10 years ago). This seems to work similarly to how I bring up a visual such as the elephant or apple in the article.

I'm pretty sure not everyone would describe their own experience of visual memory the same way, but maybe that's descriptive enough to understand if there is a difference.

However some sort of abstract higher dimensional thing that doesn't have a physical analog I can't imagine at all. If there's really a difference in how people perceive these things than I imagine for OP there is no difference between visualizing any object but for others there is.

That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.

When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to sketching and ordering.

(environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-... )

Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who would arrange for a delivery the next day.

I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put them together. After running it through the fax machine to get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was probably the best place for me.)

The majority of installers in the field could do this, though some were certainly better at it than others. Most would start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight out.

I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head was the anomaly.

I can do this too, but it is not literally a visual experience, it is just engaging the higher levels of visual perception, not visual sensation in the way that a hallucination does.

Meaning like, if I picture something in my head, with my eyes open, it's not as though it could block my view of something in my literal vision. Which is what some people are making this sound like, which is why it's so confusing to talk about.

I don't know how best to express it, but it's extremely visual. It's not just that I am recalling and describing - I am viewing and describing.

Ironically, I am terrible at drawing things because I can't see past the "big picture."

I'm terrible at drawing, but could describe any scene I'm imagining have a near-perfect idea of how it should look if someone drew for me.

But I can identify most closely with the other commenters here who describe their experience as more proprioceptive or spatial than visual per se.

I'm an aphant with low spatial skills.

Though, FWIW, it sounds like you have more internal visuals than I do.

I can rotate things in my head, but I get a very low framerate - roughly 1fps. Its easy for me to imagine the keyframes, but the interpolation between them is much harder.

I also tend to have a small rendering resolution - ex. I can render keyframes of details, but holding the entire image in my head simultaneously is difficult

Not everyone can. That's the difference people are talking about.

> That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space

I cannot do this whatsoever, and noticed other people in my class could. I started life in mechanical eng school, and quit shortly after specifically because of this. We were constantly tasked with not only drawing 3d shapes, but rotating them at certain angles and redrawing, things like this. I found myself unable to do so and it absolutely flustered my brain to the point of switching majors.

In woodworking, I can perform operations in my head and visualize the result to the board, sometimes catching errors before they happen in the real world.

If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination:

* I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery.

* The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part.

* The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail.

* There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update.

It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation.

It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.

ok wtf wtf wtf I don't think anything like that has ever happened to me. Wow.

How typical is that kind of vividness? Is there any kind of research on that?

These kinds of descriptions of what it's like to visualize things are much more helpful to me than typical descriptions of aphantasia, but I wonder if the liveliness of your mental images is extreme

That’s not to say that I don’t ever have visual images come to mind unbidden.

I never felt like missing something and those images dont add much to my life now when they show up. They dont add that much to drawing either at my level. Imo, hacker news makes absurdly big deal about "aphantasia" and it pops up here absurdly often.

I don't know whether it is more normal to have visual images in your head or whether it is more normal to not have them. But from my experience, visualization is learnable. I dont know whether it is function of drawing in general or was related to specific exercises I did. Btw, there were other improvements I noticed too - I became better at estimating relative sizes of things and much better at noticing properties of objects around me.

Discovering, perhaps for the first time, that other people authentically go about the process of thinking in a different way is fucking wild. It also draws a big response from people that discover that what they thought was a turn of phrase was a literal description or command. It isn't hard to see why people would find that stimulating.

Thus I share the parent's frustration about the sound-and-fury (imaginable or otherwise!) associated with this topic.

Even when people do try to have a productive discussion about it, half of it is nailing down a test to distinguish whether you're "really seeing" an image or just speaking metaphorically. That, or an article (like this one) casually assumes away this measurement problem and goes into a diatribe about how trippy aphantasia is.

(Before you start guessing, I don't think I have aphantasia, based on its descriptions. I can imagine pictures, or at least I think I can, though not necessarily the crystal clear images others seem to see. I do poorly on "draw this complex image from memory" challenges, although I think I'm still drawing from my mind's "eye" when I do it.)

Now, if we want to talk about observables believed to be associated with aphantasia, that would definitely be interesting. But most discussions are light on that too, or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition.

Basically, I'm not convinced we have a rigorous enough way to talk about this question for it to be worthwhile, so I usually feel like discussions of it are mostly a waste.

This is more like skill. The more you draw and deal with visual, the more your visual imagination and memory develops.

It is also completely irrelevant skill to day to day life, which would explain why bulk of population happily does not care about it at all.

> or casually assume all kinds of things are implications of the condition

Imo, it is also completely absurd to frame it as condition too. The impact of ability to imagine pictures or not is completely irrelevant to life. Maybe except if you attempt to be an artist, but then again doing art itself seem to train this ability.

Oh sure, that too. I was just going for brevity in that part. As per my first paragraph, I'm not convinced that aphantasia is a natural category, which would be necessary for framing it as a condition.

(Although I'd maybe say I'm more "on the fence" than "convinced its absurd" -- I'm open to the possibility someone can come up with a clear test, I just don't see it and don't expect anyone to.)

I don't see general interest in psychology or other people's thinking here. And I know of no other place then HN that would care about aphantasia this way either.

Do you have another example that is so stark and readily apparent? If you did I'm sure we could find people eager to explore it damn near anywhere. It doesn't really require a specialized interested in psychology to find a topic like that fascinating.

Never though that this was different of anyone else.

Also, when i read this article and i tried visualising things i realised that apparently i can have this image only for about halve a second, then it's gone. Guess that different of other people aswell.

Maybe i just found out why i was so very bad in art class, despite trying.

It's depressing in a totally different sense, because I can never capture on paper the things that I visualize -- I just don't have the knack for art.

Ok, that was clarifying for me. When I ‘visualize’ a tiger, it doesn't have any particular number of stripes. When I read your comment I said ‘oh, wtf!’ out loud

If asked to imagine a person or object or scene it always starts off fuzzy for me until more details are prompted for (by myself or by the questioner). Someone kept bringing up Tony the Tiger in one of the recent discussions on this. For me, he starts as an image of the logo or just the face/head on the cereal box. If I continue to think of it, or am asked a question about it, more details will come to mind. I may even recall and imagine Tony walking around a scene, like from a commercial.

Well, I did have a strange experience couple of nights ago. I was falling asleep and I saw something similar to a "movie" in my vision. It was a highly sped up simulator game I played, but it was quite vivid for me.

My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.

I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape.

It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself.

The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.

Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.

I very rarely dream. And even if I do I forget about it within 5 min. But I do know most of my dreams lack any colour, thinking about this now as I type I may be used to at least dream about something with faint blue and red when I was a child or teen, now it is basically black and white. And even in my dreams I dont see any people's face either. They will all be "faceless" ( at least as far as I remember it ). The only person who ever had a face in my dream was my ex-girlfriend.

When I was still a teenage boy doing IQ test or something similar, i quickly found out I couldn't visualise and do any 3D Cube questions. I just couldn't put those together in my head. May be part of the reason why I dont "get" Minecraft ?

And the voice / thoughts in your head. I dont have it either.

For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.

How do you put your pants on without words? Serious question. It's like that.

My friends do notice my sometimes weird behaviour of me mumbling something. Which is actually me thinking in my head without me realising I was actually saying it out.

If so, that is truly fascinating. What happens when you try to speak a sentence in your head?

Are you consciously thinking about every word you say before you say it?

When I think, it’s a mixture of 1) hearing my voice and 2) thinking in purely abstract concepts and relationships without putting English to it.

When I want to think in English, I can hear it plain as day, as if I’m saying the words aloud, with their exact cadence and accent. I can also “speak” with someone else’s voice and hear them say anything as clearly as if they were speaking in front of me.

Thinking in English can help me find the holes and gaps in my abstract thoughts, because I’m forced to formalize each logical leap and conclusion.

Zero. Zip. Dead Silence.

It may be fascinating but at the same time I felt I am sort of having some disability. Quite depressing now I know many people can do it.

> For me, This is a shocking! And slightly depressing.

FWIW from what I understand people who do have a mental narrative voice think "slower". It certainly seems harder for me to piece together a structured argument on the fly than it did for my wife, though I never asked her whether she had a mental narrative voice.

Oh I so wish I could have a mental narrative voice.

> Like many subjective experiences, I'm not sure if I'm experiencing things differently or just describing them in different terms.

Curious: can you experience anything like consulting or focusing attention on an image in your head in order to describe it, the way I explained above?

I expect that the clarity of this sense varies on a spectrum, with some people low enough that they don't have it at all, and others kind of having it but not very clear. I expect that the latter group are the ones commenting things like "I'm not sure if I count or not." But from what I can tell, I'm toward the higher end of clarity, and the sense is by no means uncertain.

I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't matter either way :)

The test from the linked article seems to assume people can visualize an actual image more than fleetingly, but that's not me. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is very good at visualization (I certainly can when I'm dreaming), but it's not a conscious thing for me, and the very act that the test asks for - think of a scene - is what causes any half-images to disappear.

What about having read a textbook, can you sometimes remember roughly where on the page a particular graph or equation or whatever was?

I think the answers to these questions might help me at least to figure out whether we think differently, or it's just a different description.

I am 100% sure I cannot visualize things. I have been able, with _lot_ of concentration, "visualize" a blob of color. I was unable to control the shape or size, but could (kind of) control the color (between the choices of red, green, and purple). It was incredibly vivid, and I'm convinced that's what "visualizing means, and that people can do it with actual objects and scenes.

But I can make myself visualize it at different levels, I can do a quick command visualize in which I have sort of a flash of what is meant but it isn't a continuing image in my mind. Right now when I did the visualize Elephant thing I got a bit of an image that looked like the center elephant off the cover to Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=841&lang=fr

If I do a much longer close my eyes and visualize I can make that image I flashed on more concrete in my head.

As a general rule I do not consider myself a visual thinking but a language oriented thinker. I understand things better by reading than I do by looking at images.

I found the test difficult.

Another data point: If I need to remember a spelling (often I don't, as it's just in muscle memory - but say I was asked to spell something by saying the letters out loud), then I will visualise the word in my head, and then read it out. Not quite like reading from paper, but very similar.

I use the word "see" because it's the best word to describe what is happening in my head. It's not literally seeing, but... it's very close, it's not just me remembering details about what something looks like, it's "visualizing".

I'm sorry, I don't know how to put into words the difference between the vision happening in my eyeball and the vision happening inside my head. There are differences, but they are very hard to articulate and there are fewer differences than there are similarities. The mental and eyeball "vision" are definitely at least running many of the same subroutines.

My feeling is that when someone says that they think words like "picture" or "see" are just social conventions, I suspect they're having a different experience than me. I would probably have settled on a phrase like "picture something in my head" even if no one else used that phrase, I can literally mentally trace out the outlines of the thing I'm imagining in the head. It's not just a list of attributes or descriptions, it's a thing that I am... again, for lack of a better word, "seeing", even though I'm not literally seeing it via my eyes in front of me.

What sticks out to me is that I literally can't think of any word that could be closer to what's happening then the words "vision", "seeing", "picture". Calling it a description is less accurate, it captures less of the experience than the word "seeing" does. Phrases like "replaying a scene in my mind", "remembering a sound", "an image popping into your head", etc... those are not rough poetic analogies, those are descriptions that are extremely close to what is literally going on inside my head.

> I don't have any visual experience at all. It doesn't even make sense to me

I am not going to try and diagnose anyone over the Internet, I'm not an expert on anything, but yeah, if you're curious about it that sounds to me a lot like aphantasia, at least as far as I understand aphantasia. You say the concept of comparing what's going on in your head to a picture doesn't make any sense at all to you? At that point I suspect it's not a difference in language; I'm not talking about being able to draw something or describe attributes about what it looks like, I'm talking about being able to... see it.

I don't know for certain, but I feel like picturing something in your head is (again, while not literally exactly the same as seeing something in real life) still not an analogy I would need to explain to someone who didn't have aphantasia.

----

Articles like this are so fascinating to me, there are a couple of different parts of my experiences (ADHD, asexuality) that I always assumed were completely universal and then later in my life found out weren't. Whenever stuff like that happens to me it's always a surprising experience, and for some weird reason I'm always excited when I see it. Once you realize that certain things that you think are unique about you aren't, and that certain things that you think are universal aren't, and more than that you realize how easy it is to be in a situation where you'd never discover that -- for me it makes me feel like the world and the people around me are more interesting, and it makes me want to learn more about them.

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if someone has aphantasia, it doesn't mean their life is going to get turned upside down. But I think sometimes it's just fun to learn about things and to think about how experiences shape people.

I can play back very long and complex pieces of music in my mind. I can recreate tastes and smells from years ago. But nothing visually. Even my dreams are missing the visual element.

I'm blind in one eye (since birth) so I don't see in true 3D. I thought it was because of this--and my long term memory issues--that I have a hell of a time remembering peoples faces (or names). I am not the guy prosecutors want as a, "he saw the perp's face" witness to a crime... I don't have prosopagnosia (true face blindness) but a whole heck of a lot of people look the same enough to me that I have difficulty telling them apart without hearing their voices (I'm fantastic with voice ID; probably comes naturally when you have trouble with faces haha). Yet I've met people who were also born blind in one eye that are absolutely fantastic at remembering people's faces (and names, obviously).

So what I'm getting at is that even though I don't have prosopagnosia I have difficulty with faces. There's got to be a spectrum as with most cognitive measurements. Psychiatrists don't have yes/no charts when they test you for things; It's pretty much all scales from 0-10 (or 200-799 for some reason haha).

Just curious (if you read this far): How hard (for you) is a question like this? https://www.123test.com/content/question5.jpeg

Interesting. This question is not hard to solve for me, but I can't solve it by visualizing the cube rotating despite having no trouble visualizing the cube in its initial position. More specifically, when I try to rotate the cube in my mind's eye, to get it "started" rotating, I have to anchor my focus on one particular side of the cube, which I can then rotate correctly. However, this causes me to lose focus on the other sides of the cube, and I can no longer simply look back at them to see how their numbers are oriented after the rotation completes.

When you do it, do you keep all sides "in view" at all times? Can you "focus on" one specific side during the rotation then look back at the others and see that they are still correct?

I visualize the entire flat object and fold it (all at once) in my head, paying attention to where all sides end up. I can then rotate it around in any direction (some are easier than others though; not sure why). Basically I visualize animating the flat object so that it folds into a 3D object at the edges. Just as if you were to do it with something like Blender.

I have a very easy time turning the flat object into a 3D object (accurately) but remembering which markers/colors were on which side is where my visualization often falls apart, haha.

I am the same way. I'm also highly myopic (I got glasses at age 4). There are times I've failed to recognize old friends until they started speaking to me (they did look a little different from the last time I'd seen them).

I always assumed that not seeing very well as a little kid is part of why I sometimes have visual recognition problems, too.

My last job was 100% remote, and I started a week before one of the twice-yearly retreats where everybody gets together in person. Knowing that I'm poor at recognizing faces and poor at remembering names, I threw together https://github.com/philsnow/slanki and was able to put a name to about 50% of the 250 faces I met at that retreat, which felt absolutely like a superpower to me at the time.

...but then it took me more than a minute to figure out why the test wasn't responding no matter how many times I clicked on the answer, and then other answers, and then even other buttons on the form.

There's definitely many different spectra of perception out there! :D

What about you?

For reference, that particular cube folding question is easier than others because you can take the "shortcut" and just pay attention to the orientation of the numbers. The ones that I have to stop and think about the most are the ones with nothing but colors or (minor) shading. For whatever reason I find sides with shapes the easiest to visualize... Even if the shape is the same no matter the orientation (e.g. a circle).

Interesting tidbit: I love 3D puzzles and I always try to visualize what it looks like inside (if it's the type where you can't see the inner workings) while I'm figuring it out. I'm almost always way off with what I thought the inside would look like. Different kind of visualization I think. Probably has something to do with the ability to turn physical sensations (i.e. "what you feel") into a mental image.

I can't see images in my head. But at least I can try to fold it within my imagination. I can at least rotate it like in 3D computer program. But void is all I "see" in my imagination.

But could you describe your wife's features?

And if so, do you think it's because you're reciting a list of memorized facts ("she has brown hair" etc) or because you're drawing on your memory, even if not visually?

Could you describe (at all) any major pieces of art, such as the pose of the Mona Lisa?

And as I read that over, I realize it's a terrible explanation. I have no clue how to respond usefully.

I recognize people just fine, but if you sat me down with a sketch artist (or indeed the sketch-artist sub game in Police Quest II), I'm at a loss to say whether someone's eyes are wider or narrower-spaced, whether their mouth is higher or lower, etc. Sometimes I do notice people's noses in the abstract and I may have a describable memory of that, and I think I remember most people's hair shape if not the color. But "A face with a small nose and long hair" is not really much to go on.

Smells, too. I smell just fine, and sometimes smells evoke instant memories, but I can't name a smell that I'm smelling. I'm absolutely at a loss to figure out what herbs are missing from food I'm making, or what I've added too much of. I can't describe tastes or smells beyond a very basic level.

There are standard "algorithms" how to draw people. You kind of draw standard shapes and then make differences against "standard". Proportions of peoples heads, eyes, noses and other features are surprisingly similar among people.

Sketch artists basically learned very well how to draw peoples faces specifically and what are important features people notice.

I think I can kind of imagine what it's like not to be able to picture images in my head but I always have a very hard time imagining what people without internal narrative feel like (as I assume it must be to imagine what it's like to have one when you don't)

When I realized many people actually can recall a snapshot of things, I realized (part of) how they manage to be so much better at drawing than I am.

Truly hard to walk a mile in anyone else's shoes.

So maybe what I consider "seeing" in my mind doesn't really count as "seeing" for some because that isn't 100% what it is like?

Maybe I'm just so locked into "seeing" things in my mind that I can't imagine how it would work if I didn't.

My mental images are nowhere near this clear, but they are a kind of “darksight” a seeing and a not seeing, ephemeral but also real and useful for visualization and problem solving.

I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice.

One test for aphantasia goes something like this:

> Imagine a ball sitting on a table. You reach forward and push the ball and it rolls off the table. Now without changing the scene, what colour was the ball? What about the table?

For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin to stainless steel. My wife will describe a colourful beach ball on a wooden table with lighting and shadow and describe the room it's in in detail. My scene was in a void as no room was mentioned.

> I don't dream very much, though a few times a year I will have a very vivid dream (basically like a video in my head with lots of detail). This makes it very apparent that my normal imagination is lacking detail. It feels a bit like it's a different area of the brain that I don't typically use, and makes me wonder if I could use it more with practice.

Interesting! I relate quite heavily to first part; I also can visualize abstract things but have a lot of trouble with faces. I'm sometimes not able to recognize whether two photos are of the same person or different people, and I always seem to think that other people don't look similar when others do think they do, and think people look similar that no one else seems to. However, I dream _very_ vividly almost every night, and I find it so engrossing that it interferes with my ability to get up in the morning sometimes because in my half-awake state I'm convinced that the "story" in my dream is interesting enough that I need to see where it goes. By the time I'm fully awake, it generally turns out that the dream didn't make much sense, but often it contained enough absurdity that telling my friends or family about it is entertaining for them.

So that is interesting. I struggle with that test, I couldn't tell you after reading that what color the ball was or what material the table was, but I did still feel that I was picturing it, I wasn't just registering the color or filling it in.

I will say that if you did this test with me in real life with a real ball I also might not pass it; I struggle a lot with not registering certain visual details unless I'm trying very hard to pay attention to them. I can work next to someone for a month, and then if you ask me off-the-cuff what their hair looks like or whether they wear glasses, I won't be able to tell you. But it's not that I can't see details, it's just not necessarily something that happens by default.

If anything, I thought the fuzziness of how I'm picturing things in my head as further evidence against aphantasia, because the way I'm picturing the ball in my head is very similar to the way I would see it in real life. I can't tell you the color of the ball or the table, but I can tell you about what sound it made while rolling, I can tell you about the speed it rolled and how far it rolled, I can tell you how big the ball was roughly (about palm-sized), I can tell you it was a solid ball, not squishy. My room was also a void.

But that's very, very similar to what would happen in real life; if you brought me into a room and showed me that scene and then later asked me to describe the room, I wouldn't have noticed that part of it unless something stuck out. And it's not that I can't picture the ball with color or imagine the table being wooden or something, it's just like with normal vision, it doesn't register until I think about it and I can't go back and just remember it, I need to re-visualize it with colors/context.

:shrug: Very cool if there are people who default to picking up on and imagine more exact/precise details than that.

Yeah, the more I think about it, what I "saw" looked really like a blackboard drawing of ball and table, including the shading on the ball and everything being from the "default isometric angle".

Weird.

But for the usual "imagine a beach" aphantasia test, I do imagine real beach with sand-colored sand, trees, people, sea, sound of waves and screeching of seagulls. Which makes me think two things - some aphantasia might be learned by teaching people abstract thinking, and that the artificialness of the example might be biasing.

I can imagine the things you describe in a beach scene, and on the surface I feel like it's an accurate depiction of the scene. But if I try to describe it in detail it starts to fall apart and the description would be vague compared to my wife.

> For me the ball is smooth an white. The table is something akin to stainless steel.

my scene was similar but opposite: Steel/metallic ball on smooth white table, ball falls into a colorless void. The table doesn't even have dimensions really, just has an edge the ball can fall off.

I must read more on aphantasia. If you don't mind me asking: did you decide that this is your condition through learning about it, or were you "diagnosed" somehow?

For me the ball test is equally meaningless... I don't understand the premise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

I have found differences between myself and others, though. When I need to meet someone I don't see very often in a restaurant, I get stressed. For most people it's no big deal, but I can't picture what the person looks like, I can only thing in general terms of build, hair color, age, etc. I have to look at everyone, and hope that a spark of recognition happens. Similarly, when driving to a place I haven't been very often (if I'm not relying on digital navigation) I have to hope to recognize certain buildings or intersections. I only remember them as "look for the house with large rocks along the edge, then it's three farther down". I'll even "disappear" when I'm thinking deeply enough about a problem occasionally, only coming back with an answer and no idea if I was thinking visually, verbally, or in some other abstract manner. I can almost never tell you what someone I saw intermittently throughout the day was wearing unless I make a special note about it.

It is really difficult to put into words, especially since the vocabulary is against those with aphantasia. "Picture a sunset". For me it's more like: describe a sunset. It's not a complete binary, either. I can close my eyes and "picture" a wireframe cube in front of me. In no way do I actually "see" it, but I can tell you it's there, and I can rotate it around an axis. All I'm doing though is thinking about where the corners would be if I could see it and where they would be if it rotated. When I talk to people about this, they adamantly tell me they "see" something.

So ironically I share your apprehension about needing to meet and recognize someone in a restaurant, but for the opposite reason!

The comparison extends to driving as well. Instead of worrying about recognizing a building or intersection, I have the opposite problem: I have often gotten lost when something changed about the street I needed to turn down. Sometimes I can't even pin down what it is but some details are wrong and I get an extreme jamais vu telling me "THIS IS NOT IT". So I drive past and get lost, turn back looking and again my brain tells me "THIS IS NOT IT".

When by elimination I realize no this really must be the correct street, the entire rest of the trip I have this Twilight Zone kind of feeling that makes me physically ill in my stomach because nothing looks "right" anymore and consciously overriding it is something akin to forcing yourself up a ladder with vertigo.

But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned.

I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.

I've never been called upon to remember a criminal for the police or in a court room, but I do occasionally describe someone to myself mentally if I see something suspicious. Something along the lines of "tall, long coat, black hair, square face, just standing there watching things". It helps me to remember in case it's important later.

And to throw another wrench in things, I don't have much of an inner monologue either. I can't hear myself speak in my mind, but if I'm working out how to phrase something I'll feel my vocal chords make small movements as I think of the phrasing. It's another one of those things that is hard to describe. I think of the word as if I'm saying it internally, but I don't actually hear it. I've heard my name called on the edge of sleep before, so I know what that is like. I don't have that kind of experience otherwise.

My mind is a dark, quiet place :)

I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while.

Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer.

Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.

I majored in math, and when working with equations, I will literally hear in my head things like "eff of ex equals two ex squared plus ex plus five". If I'm multiplying 36 by 7 in my head, I will hear "seven times six is forty-two, hold the two, carry the four, seven times three plus four is twenty-five, the answer is two fifty two."

If that sounds like a difficult way to mentally calculate, I'll note that I'm not a good mental calculator. :) Abstract algebra and logic are much easier for me to grasp than fields requiring more visual intuition like geometry and topology.

Remembering things from a textbook, I usually just remember the content, although there are also cases too where I'll remember I got it from the textbook with the bicycle on the cover or some detail like that, not because I visually remember the bicycle, but rather because I've textually committed that book in my mind as "the book with the bicycle on the cover". If you asked me what color the bicycle is, I won't remember because I didn't note that in my mental description.

I doubled majored in math and cs in school, and I found that the 400-level math courses were easier for me than others and I think it's because most people were trying to visualize things that were hard to visualize. For me, it was just another equation to work with.

It's probably all the same in the end. After all, the only paper shortage that our world seems to be prone to is the persistent and reoccurring problem with toilet tissue. It's funny how all the different ways of doing the same thing average out in the end, but I suppose that's evolutionary inevitable - if one way of going about it was better than any other, we'd all be descendant from someone who had those genes.

(To say nothing about the other meaning of the word "complex", i.e. complex numbers. Getting a good grasp of Fourier or Laplacians without a complex and/or s-plane in my head is fruitless. I admire anyone who just "gets it" without visual aids... real or imagined ones, because that pun was also too good to pass up).

You know how some people can't wink? If one eyelid was picturing an equation, and the other was interpreting it by what it meant, well, you see where the analogy is going, people with bad imaginations would be people with an eyepatch, who happen to all be perfect at winking.

I mentioned the s-plane earlier: We talk about poles and zeros in the s-plane, because they form poles and zeroes visualized in an actual plane, a 2-dimensional plate with protrusions into the 3rd dimension. The poles pulling the plane upwards into infinity, the zeroes tacking it down to the "floor". In the z-plane, we talk about getting the spectrum of a signal or filter by tracing the unit circle, because you can imagine tracing a literal circle in the plane. We "shift" signals up, down, left, right, we "flip" spectrums, we "cross" the origin.

To know whether a z domain transfer function is stable, I don't read "the complex roots of the denominator have to have a magnitude < 1" past some initial textbook definitions, it's just "the poles have to be inside the unit circle". In the s-plane, we instead talk about the poles being on the left half.

And yet the subject matter, signals and filters, has nothing to do with "visual objects" per se (like geometry would, for example). Even if the signal is a video signal, what we are manipulating here has nothing directly to do with what the video signal shows. And the signal might be an audio signal or just some nondescript digital data to begin with.

It just amazes me that someone can grasp such a complex subject without working with its ubiquitous visualization, so pervasive that its objects were named accordingly. It's true that I can build enough intuition to say things like "okay, if I put a capacitor there I'll have another pole" and not think about the actual plane for that instant, but as soon as it's something more complex that I don't immediately "know", I have to resort to my visualization again. I probably speak out of envy, because this also means I can never fully have the feeling of "grasping" higher dimensional problems for example, especially when familiar properties that are true for n<=4 break down there. I always only feel my understanding is working with a "shadow" of what's actually happening, to use another visual metaphor.

As for higher dimensions, yes, when you can barely visualize R3, R4 doesn't seem much harder, but that's hardly a superpower, it's just a pair of equal inabilities. I find it easy to accept the principles of noneuclidian geometry, but that comes with the side effect that if I was told they applied to euclidian space, that'd come "naturally" too.

I also wonder if this is a trainable skill. Some people think being able to roll their Rs is genetic, or being able to curl their tongue, however there is no genetic component to these, they're both trainable.

When I close my eyes and imagine something visually, I'm shutting off the attention to the blackness my closed eyes are seeing. I ignore that input pathway into my brain. It feels like my center of consciousness moves up/above my eyes, or recedes behind my eyes, into my brain, and this is where I'm able to craft visual images. Do folks with aphantasia over focus on the blackness / input from their eyes, trying to make something appear in that visual pathway, and it's a matter of training?

I think what's difficult for me is that the ability to visualize something feels like an inherent part of how the mind works. I'm skeptical that people are "wired differently" outside of genetic disorders, injuries and schizophrenia. We all have brains with the same number of lobes, we all have a limbic system, hormones, consciousness. There's certainly variations in degrees of experience, and the core wiring is the same.

I don't think I fully have it personally as I swear there's sometimes I van visualise something, but it's for like literally a second and it's gone - I only ever remember that happening before I slept.

Occasionally I do have dreams (that I remember) that are very vivid too.

I think "positive" demonstration of such abilities would be difficult to pin on the difference between individuals being just a "failure of language to compare experience." HOWEVER - I share your skepticism on the lack of demonstrability of the "negative" side of that equation in subjective experience. Let me explain:

I don't feel I have an inner monologue. Subjectively my mental process feels entirely nonverbal. Without other people around and a need to communicate with them, I only think in pictures and pure concepts. I can pull up a voice in my imagination, but it's much more like replaying a tape recorded message (complete with whatever environmental noise) than a narrative associated in some special way with my train of thought.

So I can understand aphantasia by analogy to how I myself once thought "the voice in your head" was a figure of speech. (And I did and still do think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is BULLshit.) But I should also be skeptical as to whether my conscious experience is actually totally nonverbal, or if I am just discounting things that are actually there or describe it differently.

How do you explain the perceptual priming, cortical excitability, and skin conductance differences mentioned in that article?

Do you think that everyone is wired the same? That would seem to be very unlikey to me. Aside from the fact that people react wildly differently to the same circumstances, consider how varied people's physical attributes are. It would be weird if we varied so much physical but were mentally all the same. Especially as a large part of mentality is almost certainly dependent on the brain, and the brain is a physical organ just like the rest of our bodies.

I do have a mind's ear and mind's sense of touch, but I was blind until I was 4 so I have some neurological/visual issues. If I had to guess, some early wires got crossed and the visual sense didn't develop in my imagination and for some reason the drug fixes that.

It's VERY distracting.

https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601121.html says that

> Tizanidine is used to relieve the spasms and increased muscle tone caused by multiple sclerosis (MS, a disease in which the nerves do not function properly and patients may experience weakness, numbness, loss of muscle coordination and problems with vision, speech, and bladder control), stroke, or brain or spinal injury. Tizanidine is in a class of medications called skeletal muscle relaxants. It works by slowing action in the brain and nervous system to allow the muscles to relax.

> ...

> This medication is sometimes prescribed for other uses; ask your doctor or pharmacist for more information.

I'm very curious about the diagnostic path that got you to the point of giving this a try - it sounds very interesting to follow/copy bits of it :)

I ask because of bog-standard autism, which in later years I've been able to partially outgrow to a helpful level, but which naturally proves to be difficult to out-think in terms of subconscious knee-jerk reactions and low-level assocations between things (easiest correlation would be "first programming language" type stuff (oversimplifying the world then needing to unlearn that later, etc), except at a very subtle subconscious level). I wonder if this might influence vaguely similar pathways in my favor. I'm always curious if there are things I can try (that are physically sustainable and with reasonable intrinsic safety margins, unlike eg recreational options) to shake up the status quo and maybe help give me a bit of a boost to helping me reset stuff.

One side effect of tizanidine at higher doses is hallucinations, so it would seem to do SOMETHING with your visualization center, but idk what.

For your autistic difficulties, I'm curious if finding resources for people that have gone blind/deaf might help. I know it sounds weird, but as a visually impaired person, we thought I had Asperger's for a while because I literally couldn't see body language well enough to read social cues, and I found it really helpful to look up information on how to 'read' that information elsewhere. Likewise, if somebody goes deaf, I'm sure there are lessons on how to do things like read more into body language. It just might help explain a lot of things that neurotypical people take for granted.

Also biology: I find it really helps me to remember that humans are sacks of hormones and that sometimes when they're silly it's not me being wrong. They might just have gotten a surge of adrenaline and had a knee jerk reaction, or they might be overstimulated. I know I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies will allow.

"I tend to forget humans are embodied and expect more logic out of them than their bodies will allow."

Thanks for today's smile.

The consideration to consider blindness/deafness as a source of insight to reading social cues is definitely not something I would've thought of anytime soon. I think I might just follow up on that.

Regarding the "actually-relevant implementation detail" perspective of (neuro?)biology, I echo the sentiment of the other comment :) - I also find it all too easy to lose sight of the bounds of the bounding box and forget how important it can be to correct for them.

It reverts when I don't take the drug, but I can visualize a little bit whereas I used to not be able to 'see' in my mind at all. Like right now there's none in my system so I can vaguely imagine an apple as a red, roundish object, but not more than that. I read to fall asleep, and I noticed when I started 'seeing' stuff in my head in addition to 'hearing' it.

I do wonder if it's connected to the fact that one of the side effects at high doses is hallucinations, which I do also experience.

I can imagine the apple, but I can't literally see it. Nothing I "see" has any colour or obvious shape. It's more like a memory of having seen it. I can still describe it, but only the features that I can remember. Is this aphantasia? Is it possible that everyone has "aphantasia" but some people confuse remembering having seen something with actually seeing it? Or is aphantasia actually the inability to even imagine the apple?

So FWIW, the way I would describe how I "see" things in my mind is exactly how I'd describe remembering images. I'm not sure if that means I have aphantasia or not.

Like, when people ask "try to see an apple and describe how vivid it is", that question almost doesn't make sense to me, or at least feels like a hopelessly vague and subjective question. I do feel like I "see" an apple, but I have no idea how to describe the vividness of the apple. I would describe it more like: the apple itself is 100% vivid, but my "memory" of seeing this vivid apple may be strong, as if it just happened, or weak.

But I can "see" things in this way I've never literally seen IRL. I can do mental math by imagining numbers on paper, e.g. But the way I'd describe the experience of seeing those numbers is almost exactly what it'd be had I seen them IRL and was now remembering it.

I think if you aphantasia, then you wouldn't be able to remember images at all.

Memory doesn't necessarily play a part. I can close my eyes and watch imaginary movies, imagine cartoons, artwork, or really any kind of scene I can think of, and it's just like watching a video except that it takes some mental effort to maintain the scene and draw up the details.

I think it's interesting that the author of the article suggested that aphantasia might be a strength for thinking about highly abstract things. I've found that I can work well with software because I can visualize it like an engine or a system of pipes and machines, but I cannot for the life of me do algebra. I recently was trying to go through an algebra II book when I realized I was constantly trying to visualize the equations and failing. That constant "failing to start" of my visual imagination was both distracting and tiring, and led me to quickly give up. For this reason I think there are definitely advantages for both types of thinking.

I'm the same way. Really good at the work I do. Reinventing an existing algorithm? Nope. I can just barely read math notation, but I have to write everything on paper. It requires an amount of logical state I can't achieve without externalizing everything.

No. Visualizing gives you access to data you weren't consciously aware of and also allows you to make accurate predictions. For example, in the elephant portion of the article I thought about the sight of a bull elephant turning and charging directly at the viewpoint. I was surprised at how significantly the flared ears affected my perception of the size and power of the elephant, and I wondered if they flare their ears specifically for that purpose and if so why I've never heard of that. I googled it and yes, that is the case.

The most notable difference is that there's no "visual" encoding of color in my "mind's eye"--all that's there is "this thing is filled with color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0"--and when I look at a color palette with my physical eye, I can tell you if that shade is "color 3df76346cdcad147dcf0efc07e347bd0" or not, but if it isn't, I'd struggle to tell you what needs to be done to match the color. It really does seem to be some sort of one-way hash function in encoding color; I can "visualize" a red square or a green square, but something like a color gradient just makes my "mind's eye" go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[1] I think the general idea to convey is that details can be very flexible. For example, as I wrote this, someone turned on their car (remote start, I presume), got into it, backed out of their parking space, and drove away, and I only know about this through hearing it. I can visualize all that in my mind's eye without having to decide if the car is a sedan, an SUV, a minivan, a convertible--knowing that it's a car is sufficient detail, and the mental imagery doesn't give it any more detail. Then I can decide that it's an SUV, one of those that has some piping in front of the metal grill, and make a pretty detailed image of that front of the car. But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.

In the case of the red-green gradient, I'm not exactly computing the colors intentionally; I've just seen quads with interpolated coloring often enough that those memories feed my mind's eye. I can fairly easily visualize a blue-purple or orange-teal gradient, too, but I can't attest to their accuracy.

> But the mind's eye usually doesn't bother doing anything beyond a very low level of detail unless prompted.

That's my experience, too. Reading your description of somebody driving away in their car, I was able to easily reconstruct an imagined scene in my mind's eye, but I naturally filled in the missing details with a kind of "default" -- camera position and angle, whether the parking is covered, the car is like the one Dexter's dad drives in Dexter's Laboratory (but not a cartoon), etc. The details are... there-ish, if I care to query them, but for a simple replay of the scene, my imagination doesn't bother rendering them to any significant fidelity unless I intend to.

If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what?

I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count?

When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?

Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in front of them, that would be a hallucination.

From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism.

A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.

The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or different facial expressions she makes.

If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up with something vague. I remember he was wearing large earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at his face, there are parts that simply won't come into focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way).

So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction between visualizing things clearly and not.

It was in response to the complaint that the "Vividness of Visual Imagery" test is ambiguous, because people can't decide whether their visualization is clear or not. I'm saying that, for a person with a good ability at visualizing, the distinction is fairly clear.

And it's not just fuzzy memory, the fuzzy memory causes a non-clear picture. But I can't transfer my phenomenological experience to you, so you'll either have to accept that some people can have both clear or non-clear imagery, or not.

In answer to your question, I can certainly produce a mental image of an imagined barista. I can imagine very fine details in, say, the handlebar mustache I invent. Yes, those details will probably have come from reality, but I don't know from where, and I can visualize it very clearly if I choose to.

In answer to a question you didn't ask, when I read books I rarely have a detailed image of a character. They're kind of faceless people, roughly sketched. I actually discussed this last week with my either-year-old, and she had the exact same experience, but had never really stopped to think about it. (Like what I was saying before about the nose missing not being weird.)

The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source didn't matter to the rest of my brain.

People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing on.

It sounds like this might be aphantasia, but if it is, it's really hard for someone with it to understand what's being asked of them. :)

I take that to mean that I do have it, but I am just slightly not sure, just like the GP.

But it's hard for me to believe that anyone else would use these words to describe thoughts.

No. See this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365277.

1. Ability to visualize

2. Accuracy of memory

3. Ability to produce technically accurate drawings

Those aren't one thing, it's a combination of things. The same commenter tried to use helicopters (a thing which people are even less familiar with in general) to bolster their point. Like I said in that thread, I've got friends who work on helicopters (engineering side) and could produce remarkable technically accurate drawings, and some friends from the same office who couldn't draw to save their lives. It says nothing about their ability to visualize and more about the accuracy of their memory and ability to draw.

Same with visualising a bicycle. I've seen many bicycles and I know what parts a bicycle has and roughly how they fit together, but unless I've paid attention to the exact shape and position of each part, I could at best visualise a rough approximation of a bicycle.

I'm not aware exactly what is wrong, just as I would not be aware of what part of the paragraph I changed. But in many ways it doesn't matter, because the high-level idea is there mostly unchanged, just as with the text. The difference is that if you don't fit the parts in exactly the right way, the bicycle will not work, but I'm unlikely to completely change the paragraph by substituting a few synonyms.

This is not even getting into the jump from visualising to drawing, which would depend on my ability to draw.

It seems clear at any rate from the way these discussions always go that aphantasia vs. non-aphantasia, as real as the distinction may be, is hardly predictive of anything else about a person, and the subject only attracts so much interest because people mistakenly assume it's more predictive than it is.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0448405776

They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire

Think about the smell of freshly cut grass, or gasoline, or a pumpkin pie. Can you smell these in your 'mind's nose?' Majority of folks can. I found out that I can't imagine smells about a year ago and it's been throwing me for a loop ever since.

On the plus side I've made some interesting observations about the nature of smell... there are tactile aspects to smell that I can imagine... the "nose feel" of a beer, the feeling of smelling a pot of steaming soup. But the purely olfactory component is missing for me.

Customers will sometimes comment that it's strange I need to get a menu, but the staff seems to agree with the method.

I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding aspect.

Come join the fun! Examples of some stuff I made with OpenSCAD:

https://gfycat.com/edibleartistichornbill (Low-poly Rose Twist Vase)

https://gfycat.com/carefulangrybirdofparadise (just a neat keycap)

https://gfycat.com/costlyglaringhyracotherium (an entire keyboard: Switches, stabs, case, keycaps, etc were all made with OpenSCAD)

Warning: OpenSCAD can be frustrating because of how they designed the language but eventually you get the hang of "how it wants you to do that" hehe. RANT: Drives me nuts having to use `: ?` for conditional assignments everywhere. I hate the ternary operator! It's so obtuse.

My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing. In those sports it is critical to have a deep visualization of the course. For ski racing, you will see racers waiting around the starting gate for their start time with eyes closed lightly swaying their head and moving their hand in visualizing their ideal path down the course (we even sometimes crash in those simulation runs and shake our head and restart...)

In sportscar racing, an important drill is to drive the course in your head, making every shift, turn-in point, apex, and track out point, visualizing and feeling your attitude, balance, the forces, at every point on the track —— and do it under a stopwatch so you know you have a realistic timing of the track with your car. I could typically come within a second of the real times, and it was quite vivid, and for 'fuzzy' sections, I could go back and sharpen the visualization.

These seemed to me and my coaches as essential skills for the sport, and I never heard of anyone in either sport without that ability.

I want to know if people without that innate capability just get filtered out early, or if it is trainable. Does anyone have any data on that?

Does this mean I have aphantasia? From what I have read, I would say the opposite. Though their are many, many people fitting the above description, I'm confident I could pick her out in a lineup of hundreds of them. There is visual data in my head that I cannot articulate about, e.g., bone structure, skin texture, gait, etc. On the other hand, I cannot summon a picture of her in my head with high enough fidelity to be able to recall her eye color. If you are aphantasic, what is your experience recalling someone's face? Is it like this, or is everything you remember verbal, or verbalizable?

Then I'd say, in my self-diagnosed experience, I can describe things I remember, maybe not in painstaking detail but I can. I'm not able to see an image of the same thing if I close my eyes and try to imagine it.

I feel like the difference is, I can recognize your face if I see it again, but if I need to recall what you look like I get a list of features written in words out of my brain, not an image.

I think with the right vocabulary, and some prompting for details, we could get a lot more out of you.

For instance, you would know the answers to at least some of these questions, I think, and not just matter-of-factly, but from your visualization:

1) Are her features highly unusual? Scar, missing eye, really far-apart eyes?

2) What color is her skin? (Relative answers are fine, like "the same color as mine")

3) What size was her nose? Tiny, average, huge?

4) What shape was her face? Long and tall? Round and cherubic?

5) Was she wrinkly?

6) Was her jawline prominent?

I think with the right vocabulary, I could describe my mom's face. I could certainly sit with a patient enough sketch artist and get a great sketch. I can definitely pick her out of a lineup. But I couldn't describe to you how far her eyes sit from her nose or something. I'd have to see the sketch and give feedback on why it was wrong, I guess.

But thinking about coming up with an unknown, generic face (GAN style, if you will): I cannot see it. Or something simpler, an apple: very foggy visual+takes a lot of effort to keep seeing the vague blurry image I might be able to come up with.

If said close your eyes and picture your mom. Do you see black, or do you actually see your mom. If you don't see your mom clearly, you have a some form of aphantasia.

I can vividly picture people. I can recognize and describe most people I've ever met in my adult life. I can remember and picture our conversation we had the one and only time we met at a bar 3 years ago. Where we were in the bar, the people around us, the drinks we had (at least the type of glass, I can't taste in my head).

But your name? No where to be found. Disappears almost instantly.

It's incredibly frustrating.

I struggle to determine if I can visualize imagery or not. I don't trust my initial answers and would prefer something that is less dependent on my own assessment. Would something like a (lack of) aptitude for manipulating unfolded 3D shapes or something work for this, perhaps? Or the ability to plan a route based on the shortest map distance? Because I can do that..

I also have Musical anhedonia (an inability to derive pleasure from music). Music does absolutely nothing for me. I've never had an emotional response to any music. I've always wondered if my inability to dream (or remember dreaming) is related to my inability to derive pleasure from music.

Neither of these are things I feel are true disabilities. Music could go away completely and my life would not be affected in any way. The fact that music exists also does not affect my life in any way. There are no ill effects from not listening to music. I've also never had any ill effects from not dreaming.

(IIRC I got this story from Chuck Jones' autobiography, if you want citations.)

My personal experience as an artist is that some strains of marijuana can give my visualization abilities a temporary boost into that domain; a lifetime of regular drawing also tends to improve these skills - I'm fifty, and I can skip a lot of steps that younger me couldn't. I generally like to describe the process of learning to draw as "installing a 3d renderer and a library of models on your brain".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Qu...

I call that "my brain," and I tell it to shutup a few times each day. It feels like thoughts I'm not in control of, I'm just listening to them. Usually, they're off-topic. Often, I don't even like them.

Although I'm not sure I could swear they aren't silent. I relate to a "voice" in my head, but it's definitely not a third-party narrator, and it's certainly not auditory. It's more like I'm imagining a voice saying the words (generally at a pace that is much faster than I speak).

So, as proposed in some other comments, I think I can see how either description would fit me, and how people might view their own inner thoughts as either voiced or silent, even if those inner thoughts were identical to mine.

but this ability is completely lacking for me in reality. If I try to picture some of the obvious things mentioned in this thread - my wife's face, an apple, an elephant - I can, but it's a fairly muddy 2d image and I couldn't tell you what direction the elephant's trunk is pointing for example ...

Then I started training myself, first by visualizing basic 2D shapes, then letters, then 3D letters ... eventually I was able to conjure up complex images at will, just like in a vivid dream.

Some time later, it occurred to me that by doing this, I likely stored more data than necessary in my tiny little brain, so I spent more time to untrain myself, by deliberately ignoring images when they pop up.

Now I can no longer conjure up images. My dreams have become more abstract. It has become harder for me to remember faces. On the other hand, I have generally found life easier to process and understand. I feel wiser than my younger self.

For that to be true, it would seem like the following would also have to be true:

- He never heard anyone talk about dreams

- He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads

- He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art

- He never saw a TV show where a police sketch artist was used and people describe what they see in their memory of an event

- He never saw a TV show where the act of "visualizing" something was demonstrated visually

- He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image

- He never heard about someone having a photographic memory

- Etc.

It just strikes me as entirely implausible.

Reading "in your head" does not require hearing "your voice" while you do that.

I can draw perfectly well, but when it comes to drawing things I've seen, I'll be drawing from my memory of observation of features ("his eyes were close together"), not from the image in my head.

All of your other examples are similar: I never assumed that everyone can visualize exactly the same or that the term "photographic memory" refers to majority of the people: I rather assumed that this was out of the ordinary (and it is, just on the other end of the curve).

I've always had trouble with following flow-charts: they were never helpful for me. But I realised that most people like them, and that it's likely their brains are wired slightly differently.

So in short, I could notice that there are some special things about my brain, but I did not know that this might be "aphantasia" (I was thinking maybe that's why I was so good at math and resolving complex programming problems). I've noticed other things as well which I don't know the name for or if it's only a symptom of a wider difference in processing (eg. I have a hard time separating multiple voices when they are talking at the same time, even when I notice others can easily do it).

I, for instance, don't find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that you find it implausible that adults would only learn about a fringe "condition" like this (which doesn't stop them from any of the daily human activities) later in life, but I find it extremely unreasonable! Because human brains are extraordinarily complex beasts, and we understand only a miniscule part of them.

I recommend reading the classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks to learn about the variety of ways brains can malfunction without people ever noticing. For example seeing only the right-side of the world (and, for example, when asked to draw a clock, drawing half a circle and putting all 12 numbers on it without any concern the object is incomplete).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

https://teddit.net/r/Aphantasia/comments/qurw0k/what_sayingp...

>Police sketches. I never realised other people could remember those kinds of details (e.g., particular facial features) because they can ‘see’ the person’s face in their memory.

Film, TV, books etc have an arsenal of narrative shorthands and contrivances to depict people's thoughts, because the mind is so difficult to describe objectively. People don't really have thought bubbles, their mental narration isn't usually in complete sentences, their dreams aren't real-life-except-foggy-and-white-tinted, they don't literally imagine a lightbulb activating when they have an idea. And then there are figures of speech: "train of thought", "memory lane", "brain fog". We take for granted that these are just metaphors and don't ask whether there is literally a train or a lane or a fog inside someone's head. So for someone who doesn't have mental imagery, all the talk of that subject would just be rationalized as yet another colourful metaphor.

And then you have people like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366734 who just flat-out deny that mental imagery exists and that we're all lying or deluded.

I have vivid dreams. I don't usually remember them, but occasionally enough, and the images are as real as it gets.

> - He never had a teacher tell anyone to read in their heads

I can easily read in my read, but there's no internal imagery involved. I'm looking at something with my eyes and reading it to myself.

> - He never saw anyone draw or paint or sketch except directly in front of the object of their art

I can barely draw. When I do, I'm drawing on memory, but I don't "see" anything in any meaningful sense. If you ask me to draw a dog, I can wing it, but I couldn't draw a specific dog, even my own pet. I can sorta draw simple shapes like a specific cartoon dog (maybe Snoopy), but other people likely wouldn't recognize it as such. If I were to try to draw a picture of Snoopy standing next to Brian Griffin, you wouldn't be able to tell which was which, and neither would be that close to the real thing.

> - He never saw someone try to remember the numbers in a PIN or other code by following their mental image

When I remember numbers, it's never visual. I don't think about how I type a PIN or a phone number. I once memorized the first 100 digits of pi to see if I could. I could, but it took a few hours over a couple weeks, and I can only remember about 10 now. It doesn't involve visualization at all. I've always had a good memory for facts/figures/numbers/trivia, but none of it involves visual aids. If anything, I find visual memory tricks to be a layer of abstraction that makes it harder for me to remember the underlying information.

> - He never heard about someone having a photographic memory

You hear about this in popular culture and fictional media all the time, but I question how prevalent it really is. The only person I can recall who really demonstrated it is Stephen Wiltshire[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire

There are countless anecdotes of exactly this scenario across the internet. It's trivial to find people sharing their experiences of growing up without internal monologues, mind's eye, etc, and not realizing that they're different. E.g. they may have thought visualization was a figure of speech. You can find examples in this very thread.

You can vocalize thoughts and be conscious in a linear train of thought way of what you are saying but not hear them.

This difference is highlighted when you try to sing mentally or play a musical instrument in your head. It's more about the feeling associated in your vocal cords than the feeling associated with your eardrums.

Imagine playing the violin of a melody you have practiced tons of time, you feel every little intonation in your hands, you can feel the emotions you try to give to the music, but hear absolutely nothing. It's like if you where playing the violin with some earplugs.

Try reading “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks.

Most of your examples don’t have any obvious connection to what was posted.

E.g. most people don’t have a photographic memory and we all know that, so why is that relevant? Reading in your head doesn’t require you to visualize anything. It just requires you not to say what you read out loud.

You probably use this same cognitive feature when writing/reading but you don't even realize you're doing it. Here's a simple example: When you read some text with parentheses do you "speak" "open paren" in your mind? What about when you add parentheses around some text? I certainly don't! That's because we perceive punctuation as a completely different thing (in our minds). We just, "know" that a comma or period can indicate a pause (and a good moment to take a breath).

Would it be that surprising if there's some people out there who read and write everything using the same mental mechanism that the rest of us use for punctuation?

This leads me to think other things from brain are interfering with this visualization system and only when the other things are reduced by sleep or relaxation does visualization mechanism work for me.

I never made a distinction between them before, before these discussions made me really think about it.

It makes me wonder if people's 'visual memory' isn't some for of GAN, where people with good visual memory just have great generative networks with synthesize details which aren't there based on broad parameters.

Because when I'm lucid dreaming, or partly asleep, I can have these vivid experiences where I can see imagined objects with perfect clarity, stable detail, even color, something I'm not able to do when normally conscious. Like if I think of red lips, or a red apple right now, I don't really perceive the 'red' -- its abstract.

Perhaps the real issue is a 'visual cache' that expires too quickly. Like if your brain is using GAN-like techniques to synthesize imagery from learned network weights, maybe some people have a better working cache, and so it disappears less quickly -- is more persistent.

I tend to think abstractly and my mind often gets filled with a bazillion ideas when I'm trying to imagine things, so perhaps I'm experiencing a kind of 'cache thrashing' that I don't get when sedated.

Similar to Steve, I enjoy (and do well at) abstract thought and mathematics.

But contrary to Steve, I dislike diagrams (they are mostly write-only for me) and prefer words for describing complex stuff too. I also enjoy drawing and can draw reasonably well.

Now, my dreams are usually pretty vivid, but I see that's "normal" according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

If this is accurate, it makes me wonder two things:

1. Is there even a unique condition of not seeing the apple or are you just very far off to one end of the spectrum ? (Perhaps this isn’t an important distinction)