I've got aphantasia too. When I first heard about it about a year ago I was surprised to learn that others can actually see things in their mind's eye. Had to confirm with friends and family, with questions like 'so you can actually see a ball if you think about it?'. Their answers blew me away.
So far I've boiled the side effects down to:
1. A complete and utter lack of direction. I literally get lost in suburbs surrounding my home (i'll very often take an extremely sub optimal route home from a store that is just 10 minutes from my home - a bit embarrassing tbh, gives my wife a laugh though). These are streets I've travelled for over 30 years. Apparently quite common with aphantasia.
2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Regarding no.2, photos are super important. There was a period of 10 years or so where I didn't take many photos, and that period feels like a black hole.
I'm not sure I connect either of those side effects. I discovered I have aphantasia a couple of years ago from a chance encounter with a previous news discussion of it.
My sense of direction is fine to good, and as far as I can establish, it's common to visualise "metaphorically". So I'd visualise a route or 3d model as another might visualise honesty - I know what it is, I can precisely express it, but I can't picture it in technicolour. It seems to work well enough that hobbies over the years have included model engineering - including design, fell walking and geocaching. I never needed a 3d model to "see" a plan, even while drawing it, even though I cannot "see" it. Saying "I just know" seems completely inadequate, but that feels like how it works. I can pick up on potential problems where a) might interfere with b). Language gets difficult for this!
I can juggle a model but again metaphorically. I can do it quite easily and it never occurred to me in 50 years that images were an optional component for others. :)
The only other I've encountered with a similar lack of images among my friends reports just the same ability to do direction, map reading and spatial interrelation just fine, without seeing it. Just knowing seems to be enough to do the rest.
Rumination and regret is perfectly possible too - the feelings, the consequences is plenty enough to get that going. The pictures are better on radio also applies - not a literal picture but the feelings and the metaphorical. :)
>I'm not sure I connect either of those side effects. I discovered I have aphantasia a couple of years ago from a chance encounter with a previous news discussion of it.
Don't people misdiagnose things all the time? Unless not diagnosed, you could just not have it, and e.g. expect something super special/realistic when people talk about "seeing images" in their minds eye, which is not the case, and comparing with that.
E.g. even for us, without aphantasia it's not like what we envision with our "mind's eye" has the same richness, texture, reality etc to it as things we actually see (else, I guess, we'd had trouble knowing if we really did something or just imagined it).
Perhaps - as a discovery that has attracted no research in a century and a half, diagnosis seems unlikely. When I came across it a few years back it was a news piece about some university research into an unexamined phenomenon. That must have been Essex uni in 2015.
It was only after that news piece I realised literally seeing images was even possible! I always just assumed anyone who spoke of "seeing" was just using a poor visual metaphor to describe something far vaguer. When I speak of visualising there is nothing I could call visual in proceedings, it's a feeling, a concept, a sensation. "I just know", and can sense and explore without seeing.
Like the commenter I replied to, having heard of this thing I had to ask a selection of friends similar questions "so you actually see a ball?". Oh. Wow. Really? So then I wanted to know how vivid, how often, how controllable etc. It also blew my mind somewhat as I just assumed visual was entirely metaphoric.
For me, it's not having a vague or ephemeral image and expecting something special or super realistic. It is being in a basement or coal mine during a power cut. Nothing. The mental cinema screen is firmly off. For all of my life.
I have never once been aware of any visual aspect to any of my imaginings or dreams. Not even a sense of light or dark, colour or even some vague, blurry outline. The sense of 3d and spatial awareness and modelling isn't - for me at least - connected with an ability to create images. I seem able to do the former just fine, and the latter not at all. Yes, it does seem strange to be able to do the spatial without any visual whatsoever, yet it's consistently worked quite easily. Describing it adequately is far, far harder... :)
As someone who also has aphantasia, I have a very good sense of direction. For me I think I feel a sense of direction in my body the same way you might feel a blanket on a side of my body. And am also good at recognizing objects and feeling their location in relation to my transit around it...
The article mentions varying ability to picture things. You may have good spatial reasoning but less visual imagination. I know that when I picture something in my mind it isn't always a clear image, often just a shadow of the thing I'm imagining. I find spatial reasoning has a different quality, it's like sensing the position of your arm but you can apply it to objects that aren't a part of you.
Yes, spatial reasoning and visualisation seem like two separate unconnected subsystems, even though it seems like they should be related.
I seem able to do the spatial just fine, and the visualisation not at all.
> it's like sensing the position of your arm
Very good, yes it's exactly like this. I know, but I don't need to see. I can explore the model or plan, and know how the result will be, and still don't need to see!
Have you ever noticed a similar effect with sounds? Or does it feel like a purely visual/spatial thing?
For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it. Is that just as weird for you as being able to see a ball?
> For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head
sigh you've got to be kidding me. You can actually replay a sound in your head??
well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(
I've also never been able to sing along with songs. It always blows me away when my wife can just start singing along with a song she's heard a few times.
Some people are able to do a lot more than that, once I was sitting on a plane next to a guy who turned out to be an orchestra conductor - he was silently reading an orchestra score like a book. I mean that was a dense score, some modern symphony for dozens of instruments, and the way he described it to me was he simply hears it in his mind just like if he listened to an orchestra recording. Most incredibly, he said he has never heard this particular music performed before!
That comes from training - you spend enough time hearing clarinets and violas and timpanis, and after a while you can imagine what new combinations sounds like. Traditional orchestral composition involves developing this practice (I speak from experience, having been trained as a composer and sat through these classes).
I think these skills are to some degree learnable.
That orchestra conductor probably spent a large part of their life studying music. Part of learning music is ear training: the ability to name/write chords by hearing them, and conversely to "hear" them in one's imagination given the name (or from written music). No different than the way many people "hear" words in their head when reading.
They are, indeed, learnable. Even a mediocre amateur musician like myself learned to 'hear' the music when reading simple scores. Took a while though. But it's useful. I can look through score music and pick the ones I like, without having to actually play from the score first. Pros and orchestra conductors are on an entirely different level of course.
It's not that hard at all. After some years studying music as a kid I can read piano sheets. He with 10+ years of experience can definitely cope with much more complex ones.
Ha, don't feel bad. That skill is important for maybe less than a thousand people in the whole world to have. And it can be done with computer programs anyway.
Actually, this is not true. Find me a program that can extract the scores from a complex piece of music and attribute the right notes to the right instrument/voice. I haven't found one yet. But maybe that's because I am not versed in the music analysis software available. Never needed it. Now I think of it, it would be really handy for my job though. If you know of one, please let me know. Especially one that can analyse the music live and then transposes it to midi notes/OSC without a hefty lag.
Well, composers, conductors and improvisers (e.g. jazz, folk) need to have it, so that would put it to several hundred thousands, not "less than a thousand".
Maybe, but I think improvisers wouldn’t even have to be able to read music at all. Just imagine sounds that go with the current tune and then play them. You don’t have to picture a score in your head to do that. Whenever I’ve jammed with other people that’s how it’s worked.
Yes, I think that is common to be able to replay music you've heard in your head. I feel confident this is another thing that is a spectrum, not binary. So some people just need to hear something once and have it perfectly, others need to hear it a lot and still don't remember it well.
My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.
I speculate that this is almost entirely to help you properly react to things that woke you up. You were sleeping, now you are awake. But why? You still hear the sound in your head, was it something falling, or a glass window breaking, or your dog barking, or a gunshot, or just thunder? It could be very important to know.
> My favorite thing about sound memory is echoic memory[1], a very specific type of memory that is basically like a buffer or a cache. Basically perfect audio memory of the last few seconds. You can replay the sound in your mind and analyze it for that brief moment in time.
Interestingly, I've found it super valuable when learning music by ear, especially given that I find myself able to slow down the "replay" of the sounds to better hear the individual notes, although it is also mildly entertaining to be able to hear a long sequence of sounds (e.g a car outside my window beeping repeatedly) and slow it down in my head to count the number of individual beeps.
I sometimes have the experience that there is one word in a sentence that I did not get (often prompting me to say 'huh'), and that after some pondering, I suddenly get it and 'hear' the word being replayed in my head, and it suddenly becomes perfectly clear what word the person said (often prompting me to say 'okay').
Echoic memory is also very useful when someone says something, but you haven't understood them right away. There is also iconic memory, which stores the things you see and lasts less than a second.
I have echoic memory for audio, and that's indeed very useful.
But I don't have 'playback' memory for anything else, definitely not for visuals or touch. So if something is said around me and I didn't listen, I can replay the last couple of seconds or so, and that's usually enough. Helps with languages you're not fluent in too. But if I suddenly notice that I'm now touching something that I shouldn't, say, for example with my arm, in a crowded pub, there's just no way I can 'replay' history, not even the last moments, to figure out how that happened. Unless I actually paid attention when it happened. Same with visuals. If I didn't recognize what passed before my eyes there's no way to replay that to take a better look. Unlike with audio, where I can do precisely that.
It's cool to find that echoic memory has a name - the number of times it has saved my bacon in class when I'm not paying attention and the teacher asks me what they just said to call me out....
Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head?
Do you have verbal thoughts?
> I'm starting to think I might be brain damaged.
You are probably just neuroatypical. You should try to discover if your neuroatypicality gives you an edge over neurotypicals in some areas and exploit it.
You might enjoy reading experiences of someone who is neuroatypical in opposite way. "Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding". By Temple Grandin, Ph.D.
>Can you have imaginary discussion inside your head? For example, before you are meeting someone can you plan the discussions inside your head?
>Do you have verbal thoughts?
Not the OP, but my mind's ear is deaf just as my mind's eye is blind. I can plan a discussion in my head. I don't really hear it, I just think of what word I'm going to use, in a similar fashion to how I can think of a sphere but not actually see it. I think more about the points I'm going to make sure to make, though, than the actual phrasing. When I'm practicing a speech or something, I can feel my jaw and mouth muscles trying to move, so I think I'm sub-vocalizing it or something. That realization makes me very careful around others when I'm having private thoughts.
When I'm thinking about a solution to a programming problem, or any problem really, I sometimes "disappear" for a while and when I come back I have an idea about how to best proceed. People have commented in the past about my becoming completely still and zoning out for a period of time.
The inside of my head is a pretty quiet place usually. I just noticed that my jaw was making the movements I would use were I to speak the end of that last sentence. Weird.
Interesting. In your daily activities, you cite your mind as 'clear' -- is it just of visual imagery/sounds, or in general? Do you 'feel' thoughts some other way? What is going on when you 'zone out' in your mind? Say for a programming problem, If you don't see code in your mind, do you still 'feel' it some other way?
Can you describe what you experience when recalling something?
For me, (it of course varies by the object of recall) it is most times imagery, although sometimes it can be emotions, sounds, etc. (I use the imagery as an 'address' after which other related memories are linked to and emerge).
I like to imagine it as if we're all CPU's that has come out of a lab that organically grows them. But as a result of that they're all a little different.
Unfortunately sometimes they're heavily different with extra or missing depth in certain areas, which makes the generic software that we're trying to install on them struggle to adapt (in various different ways).
Maybe your Brain-VCR is missing the Rewind button. :)
It's super interesting how memory works. Like, I can remember the content of songs because they have rhyme and rhythm and pleasantness, but I can't remember anything else word-for-word. I'm the king of paraphrasing jokes and quotes, because I can never remember how they originally went.
edit to add: I'm just kidding about the brain damage thing, but seriously, I very much don't like the idea of presenting this as "aphantasia" as though it is a lack of something. I think it's (probably) just a different system that's optimized for different kinds of behaviors.
I do also suspect that the mental visualization could be learned. I feel like when I played Legos as a kid I was incidentally practicing my visualization, perhaps the only reason I'm good at it now is an aggregate of those kind of coincidences.
In my case, songs or melodies are nearly always playing. If I'm awake, chances are that something is on in my mind's radio. Conversation and writing seem to be the only activities that consistently quiet the music, though there are other times during the day when it's less noticeable.
This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.
I’m much the same. I think that’s part of the reason I’m quite a good musician and can play by ear really well. I can visualise auditory/musical things far more vividly than I can images, and correspondingly I find visual art quite difficult. I can still imagine images to a reasonable extent but I suspect that people who can draw and paint well probably can do it more to the extent I can hear music!
Interesting. I wonder if the musical practice led to the mental music. I am also a musician, but I'm not certain whether the mental music began before or after I started playing (I started playing more than ten years ago as a teen).
I have an almost pathological hatred of silence on the outside - because when there is, there's also silence on the inside. Unless I actively think about a tune, or decide to hum or whistle a song, there's no radio. So I'll only hum/whistle or sing a few bars or a chorus and distract to thinking about something else.
So sitting in silence quickly becomes wearing. I have to keep thinking of stuff, and music, to fill it.
Now if I go fell walking or find myself in a forest or on a deserted beach, there's always enough sounds of nature that it doesn't feel silent. Not like a house, class or exam room or office can. It's only that which quickly gets oppressive.
I can hear/imagine a human voice singing, (similar to the way my internal voice 'talks' when thinking) but i usually can't imagine instruments, because they always end up sounding as if they are performed by a human voice.
Several times i did listen the sound of instruments as if real, but it happened only before falling into sleep, and just thinking about that would wake me up enough to bring the human voice back.
Do you / have you ever played any instruments before? Maybe it's just case of associating something else with the sound the instrument makes - for example perhaps you need direct experience of producing say, a guitar sound, in order to associate the 'performance' of the act, with the actual sound it produces.
> well, i'll add that to the list of things my brain can't do :(
I see it more as tradeoffs that make us different. For example you may have noticed that you are better than average at folding paper in your head and other spatial tasks. You have your aphantasia to thank for that.
I would separate visual and spatial. They are not the same thing.
Part of the reason why I didn't realise that others are literal about being able to 'see' with their eyes closed is that I can tell you spatial relationships more precisely than most people I know.
I know and can recall where things are in relation to each other with ease.
E.g if you asked me to sketch rooms in my house, I would be able to reproduce it in a huge amount of detail even though I can't 'see' them,by walking through what is where in relation to what and plot it out.
If I draw from memory rather than from sight or imagination, however, - something I learned as a child without connecting the dots - was that I do tend to draw in a much more 'sanitized' style. Clean lines etc. As if I'm drawing a diagram.
Interesting - I think that matches up with my experience. As I said in a response to another comment in this thread, I don’t have anywhere near as strong visual visualisation as I do auditory, but thinking about this third axis I think I do have quite good spatial visualisation. I’ve always been way better at diagramming, planning layout of things (part of my job is designing circuit boards and I used to do web design back in the day), etc. than artistic drawing.
For some reason I can do more artistic drawings if drawing from fantasy (I still don't "see it") or sight than from memory. I think that is largely because when drawing from fantasy I don't need to painstakingly recall the spatial relationships as much, even if there's an extent of recalling an archetype of what I'm drawing...
And the closest I get to auditory recall is internally humming the music - I can recall e.g. operatic arias that I have no hope in hell of reproducing with any accuracy out loud, but I can hum them out internally with a lot greater precision, but I can't hear them in any other voice than my own (and I can sense muscles around my mouth twitching as if I'm vocalizing while doing so)
Second this. I'm aphantasic, but when I think about 3d space, it's like there's an invisible grid in my mind that helps me keep track of relative positions, and my sense of direction is possibly even a bit above average. Conversely, I'm often surprised by common it seems to be for strongly visually minded people to have a terrible sense of direction.
I have enjoyed exploring and comparing my inner experience with other people since I discovered I was aphantasic (my ex was an artist and very visual, and first I thought she was the odd one). Now I usually do a little informal psychometric test session with people when the subject comes up. Asking them to imagine standing outside the house where they grew up, then walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of milk. I have them rate their inner experience on a hand-to-hand scale for: color, sharpness, detail, focus area size, opacity/transparency. It's interesting how much people vary
My inner experience as aphantasic is:
Visuals:
- Closing my eyes I generally see black. Sometimes I can see vague, morphing images, blurry and colorless, if I'm falling asleep into a dream. On high doses of marijuana or normal-to-high doses of LSD I get some stronger visuals, but it still seems a far cry from many others sober-state visual imagination
Sound:
- This was my next surprise after discovering I had visual aphantasia. That other people apparently hear themselves talking in their head. I have an inner monologue (and dialogues), but there is no real sound quality to it. Same thing if I imagine a song or a melody. I know how it goes, I can sing along in my head. I'm a songwriter, so I also make up melodies all the time, but I don't 'hear' anything in my head. This is a more confusing concept to convey than the abstract spatial awareness.
Taste / Smell:
- Again, apparently it's common to be able to imagine eating this or that food, and actually smelling and tasting it. I lack this ability too. I can get an idea of whether something will taste good with something else, but there's no sensation of taste
Dreams:
- My dreams are actually very vivid, and after experimenting with lucid dreaming before, my dream recall is generally good too (though dream recall works like other memories, so it's all abstracted into spatial positions, dialogues and knowledge about location and details)
Also agree with some other things that some people have written here:
- I've always found it hard to pursuse long-term goals or imagined futures. I tend to gravitate to what I find most interesting at the moment and follow that impulse
- I find it fairly easy to get over bad experiences
- I don't 'miss' people much, even if I really like it when I spend time with someone close. I imagine getting over a breakup would be a lot harder if you kept having vivid memories of times you spent with them. My memories are a lot more abstract and vague.
- Photos are a memory aid. Should take more of them
- I'm bad at recognizing faces, especially if it's someone I don't know well and they've changed their hairstyle, or they look similar to someone else. I easily mix up characters in films/series, or fail to notice that some character is played by [famous actor I know] until the credits roll
- I generally enjoy reading non-fiction much more than fiction. Though I have read a lot of fiction books in my life. Knowing what my experience of reading fiction is, and comparing that with what it can be for people who are not aphantasic, I do feel a bit envious
Since I discovered aphantasia, I've at times felt like I'm lacking something, and missing out on part of the human experience. However, after talking to people at the other end of the scale, I actually appreciate that I can close my eyes and all I see is black, and that silence is actually silence. If you have no control over the images and sounds that appear in your mind, I feel that it could be both exhausting and anxiety-inducing depending on the content and intensity
Thanks, I was about to ask about reading fiction. You answered that for me. I'm an avid reader (I could read all the time if I didn't have anything else to do), and I've always been in the "books have better images" (than movies) camp. Well, radio has better images too, for me. I still think fondly about the stories I listened to on radio when I was a child. That would be called audiobooks today I guess. Fantastic images is what I remember.
On the other hand my mind is not graphical. I'm a programmer but I'm utterly useless with graphical/diagram design tools. My mind is actually very visual when I think about program design, it's just different in some way. It's not pictures. It can't be drawn on a piece of paper, or a computer screen.. very hard to explain. But still it feels visual, just in some other kind of dimension.
I'm not sure this one is actually directly connected. I can visualize things in my head, but I rarely do that when reading fiction books, despite enjoying them immensely, and far more than movies. If you asked me to, say, sketch any of the characters from the last book I read for pleasure ("The Left Hand of Darkness", for umpteenth time at that), I wouldn't be able to do so; it's all abstract.
Listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History (The Celtic Holocaust) last night, I wished I had that ability
The graphics bit is interesting. I was into drawing comic strips when I was a kid, and in my teens I got really into making cars for the first Grand Theft Auto game. My early attempts looked terrible, but towards the end of that period, I was rated as one of the best in that little scene. I've worked a bit with graphic design in other periods, and I still enjoy some UI design, though I'm mainly focused on coding (mobile apps/games) now. Now, having worked with some great designers & illustrators, I know they're in a completely different league than I could ever hope to be. Thinking about the creative process is interesting though, as I clearly have some idea of what I want the end result to be, without being able to mentally picture it in any way that would make sense to non-aphantasiacs
Any chance that someone from the old GTA scene is hanging about here btw? :D
This resonates _a lot_ with me. I've always had an awful episodic memory but quite good conceptual memory. In other words, I experience almost everything but the present (and maybe sometimes even the present) in the abstract. For a long time I thought this was a "deficiency", but I am actually quite happy with it now and often see it as a strength.
Can a mind really focus equally well on the forest and the trees? I have my doubts.
But I will never see the tree - that's for sure. Fortunately I've found beauty in forests.
> Asking them to imagine standing outside the house where they grew up, then walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of milk. I have them rate their inner experience on a hand-to-hand scale for: color, sharpness, detail, focus area size, opacity/transparency.
A suggestion: Add in motion.
I'm decent enough at most of your list, but am almost entirely unable to visualize motion or (I believe related to that) living beings. In your example scenario, I had a point of view but no limbs - my visualization jumped between fridge -> gallon of milk -> poured glass, with almost no fluidity between the steps.
For that visual part, I think that that is the case for most people, including those without aphantasia. From what I have gathered from personal experience and by talking to other people, this so-called mind's eye is (somewhat unintuitively) not really related to your actual eyes, so closing them would not necessarily lead to you seeing things. When I personally know something strongly enough to "see" it without it being in front of me, it feels more like I begin to momentarily stop focusing on the input from my eyes and instead prioritize that thing. It is not like overlaying some images over what I am seeing with my eyes (although some people are apparently able to do this also), but rather I temporarily ignore my eyes and am more interested or focused on this alternative source. This is an entirely* voluntary process and can in fact require some effort on my part depending on how corrupted the data is, but I could not say how it is for others. The images are not at all intense or of high fidelity, and failing to focus on them is sufficient to stop seeing them for me. I might just have relatively weak image visualization though.
I am not sure if I have any meaningful anecdotes regarding reading fiction. I do not believe I have seen or otherwise visually imagined the events in either fiction or non-fiction most of the time unless reading it made me recall something that I remember. It might be possible if I were actively trying to do that, but I can say that whatever experience I am extracting from reading fiction is not primarily due to being able to see it. If people are really imagining that sort of thing automatically, I feel pretty envious of that myself.
When it comes to sounds though, I am something of a captive in my own mind. For the majority of the period that I am awake and not highly focused, my mind is using approximately 98% of its resources to replay, construct, combine, and modify music. This is usually much more interesting than what I am hearing and what most people have to say to me, and it can require conscious effort to hear the latter. Unlike the images, this sound is of high quality and is not at all consensual. I have been told that this is not quite normal. In hindsight, this could have been a useful trait had I worked with it instead of worked through it.
*Assuming that these memories are not brought on through involuntary means, such as some drugs and trauma-induced flashbacks.
> For example, once I've heard a song enough, I can just replay it in my head, and it feels the same as actually listening to it.
It's terribly easy for me to acquire earworms (aka "stuck song syndrome"), and I have to avoid listening to certain kinds of music too late in the afternoon/evening - otherwise I can't sleep for music turning in my mind.
I actually ripped out the stereo from my car years ago. I don't need it. If I want to listen to some music I just let the head play it. Same thing.
Which leads me to the surprise my wife gave me one day - she told me that the daughter said a strange thing to her, she (my wife) had asked what she was doing - she was just sitting there - and the reply was "I'm listening to music in my mind". That was astonishing for my wife because she didn't know it was possible to replay music in the mind. She had never heard about such a thing. Which sounds awfully like aphantasia for audio - although I think it would be limited to just music. It's hard to imagine not being able to 'hear' a sentence in your mind.
The funny thing is that my wife is an amateur musician, and her ear is very good. Better than mine, I think.
Sounds are the easiest to reproduce for me, perhaps even more so than images.
But I have experienced other things as well. Since I was a kid I play this game when I'm bored... let's call it "visualising". But not for images, for other sensory input. For example, I try to imagine really hard the taste and texture of a cake, the smell of coffee or a perfume, touching something fluffy with my hand, feeling hot or cold... It works, although I don't feel it physically in my body per se, it's just like... a very vivid memory of it. As if an invisible limb was experiencing this feeling again.
I'm still a bit skeptical as I can't really confirm by visiting someone else's mind.
What if they just define their thoughts differently? When I say "I can't see a ball", I mean that while I can reproduce how it would vaguely feel like to see a ball (like the difference between tasting something and recalling a taste), and kind of trace its outline, I can't have a picture in my mind with a similar accuracy as actually looking at a ball.
Someone else might say "I can see a ball" even if internally they experience the same as me, because they might set their bar lower. Could it be that people with aphantasia are just more demanding for what they count as "seeing"?
After speaking with enough people about this topic, I can assure you it's not just a difference of language.
It's incredible what friends, family and coworkers have told me they're able to do with visual imagery. A large portion of them could overlay imaginary objects over the real world. My wife, who may be hyperphantasic, can spend hours watching TV shows/cartoons she's created in her head. She has no idea what it's like to think without visualization.
I'm extremely jealous of their abilities to replay memories, old or contemporary, as films in their head. I can tell you basic facts about what happened in my life, I can't re-see those experiences.
>because they might set their bar lower. Could it be that people with aphantasia are just more demanding for what they count as "seeing"?
Yeah maybe. How could we ever really know though? I guess we have to take them at their word. I would like to be able to visualise my son's face while I'm at work, but I get nothing just black, thank goodness for photos :)
I have aphantasia too as I said in another comment, but I have an excellent sense of direction. I'm excellent at learning maps in computer games too.
I also wouldn't describe myself as able to let go of things easily. When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
I believe that I have aphantasia, this is all coming on very quickly right now, but after talking to my wife for about 30 minutes I'm certain of it. She highlighted the fact that I don't have any ability to recall my dreams outside of exceptionally rare instances.
I, too, have a good sense of direction and am often relied upon to be the guide on hikes or backpacking trips in places that we've never been before. I know how to read maps and use a compass and orient myself but that is less visualize than it is analytical, IMO.
But! I also have the black hole effect that the GP described. I have an almost uncanny ability to just get beyond trauma and bad experiences and I'm seeing now that that is probably due to this black hole memory effect. I don't carry memories with me the way that other people do, but I've known that about myself for a while. It's caused some strife in my life, and it continues to do so, but I've taken to keeping a physical journal and making frequent notes about things that happen throughout each day. The act of writing this stuff down seems to force these things into my memory. I learned recently that my father operated similarly in his career, using a single sheet of A12 folded into quarters where he'd divide each quarter into an hour of work, with 8 folds in total representing the average day. When he worked 12/16 hour shifts, he'd add additional folds.
And, so... I guess that in light of this, I've always wondered if I'll have dementia or Alzheimer's late in my life. My paternal great grandmother lived well into her 90s, but my paternal grandmother succumbed to dementia in her mid 80s. My maternal family has some folks in their 90s, as well, and everyone there seems to have their memory in tact. But, my father has had his struggles and I've personally noticed that my mother is starting to struggle with conversational memory recall today.
I can still picture things in my head, but with huge gaps and difficulty; when I was a kid, I used to replay a 17km road to my grandparents with exquisite details in my head: the bus, the driver, walking down the isle, seating myself, the initial jolt, watching the road turn, every unique house, porch,bench, tree, telephone wires and so on and all without a conscious efort "what happens next" .
If I try real hard and ask myself questions like "ok, so now picture grandpa's mustache, now his hair, now his neck" then maybe I get a glimpse of his whole face.
My sister and I used to play a game as teenagers: one of us would closd his eyes, the other would narate a scene, it was pretty great.
In the 7th grade I was a 6/10 student at math, then trigonometry came and I was a 10/10 at trigonometry and 6/10 at algebra, because trigonometry made absolute sense because I could draw everything in my head; I needed tutoring with algebra, but never with trigonometry.
I also almost never remember any dreams; my rem and deep sleep are toast anyway, according to fitbit.
As opposed to my childhood when I woke up exactly once per night to drink water from the cup my grandma left beside the bed -- the rest of the night I had great adventures, I'd be chased my demons, fly across the clouds, escape some trap my grandfather told stories about.
Nowadays I get about 1 hour of tossing and turning througout the night, and depending on my anxiety I sometimes get completely wake for 1-2 hours at about 4AM; only about 1h of rem and 1h of deep sleep, the rest is just light sleep according to fitbit.
I'm not parent, but yes, I've always been this way.
Just like he says in the article, and other posters are saying, for decades I didn't even realize because I didn't think people were being literal about "seeing pictures" in their head. I thought it was simply a label for remembering.
It was only when doing the course "Learning how to Learn" and getting frustrated with the memory techniques that I found out that people really do see with their mind's eye.
Your math anecdote resonated with me, but with Chemistry instead. I was a Chemistry/CompSci major. I only did a Bachelors degree, but for Chemistry I never really had to study or memorize much because I could generally figure out just by imagining the structure of molecules and feeling how they might interact (this was for organic, materials science and inorganic chem wasn’t so intuitive).
Same with algorithms on data structures- I would imagine a toy data structure and play around with how algorithm would interact with it.
The compulsory first year Math papers on the other hand were impossibly hard to follow, even with a lecturer who happened to specialize in mathematics education I was always lost about 20 mins into a lecture and always struggling to catch up.
I don’t feel like I can picture things as clearly as some people describe in this thread, but it’s not a total blackout either. Something in between.
Everything you've described rings 100% true with me as well (great with directions, can only recall dreaming every few years, no issues moving part traumatic events, etc).
I have not yet tried journalling as a coping mechanism; I may have to give that a go.
Similar here. I can reconstruct spatial relationships from memory in great detail, to the extent that before I realised people are literal about being able to see things, I considered myself to be a very visual thinker.
E.g an example I often used is that I remember pieces of code by how they look on screen to the extent that the syntax and formatting is something I'm unusually obsessed with because it affects my recall, and that I remember pages from papers I read 25+ years ago by visual appearance and layout.
But I can't see them, even though I can recall them to the point that I know what they would have looked like had I been able to see them.
> have an excellent sense of direction. I'm excellent at learning maps in computer games.
That's interesting. I wonder how your mind has learned to compensate. Maps are such visual things, you must be tapping into some other brain areas to store/retrieve this information.
> When I remember traumatic experiences I don't visualize them, I remember the feeling, the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment.
hmm, interesting. Maybe this part of my personality isn't related to the aphantasia.
Basically, aphantasiacs tend to do just as well at spatial reasoning tasks as people with imagery, but tend to be somewhat slower and do not exhibit the gender gap that has been identified in the broader population.
I'm aphantasiac as well, and can identify with some of the experiences you've mentioned in this thread, and not at all with others. My spatial reasoning is great, and I'm a singer who has no problem at all with singing along to songs - if they're sufficiently regularly structured, even singing along with the chorus the second time it happens in a song I've never heard before. However, like you, I cannot replay sounds in my head. Memories are easily put behind me.
We're clearly very early in understanding what impact aphantasia has on people. It's a fascinating topic, and always interesting to teach people about.
A map is just a visual representation of spatial relationships, and often a poor one because it's from a fixed vantage point that is certainly not well suited to visual translation into what you see at a street level.
When I look at a map, I rarely try to remember what it looks like (I couldn't visualise it anyway) - I remember directions and distances relative to other places.
I used to think I had aphantasia and an uncanny ability to let go of bad experiences. Then, I hit a wall after a particularly rough time in my life which forced me to “look back” at my life, and I realized that I was pushing down extremely traumatic memories. Recognizing that, it was almost as if those events caused me to get really good at blocking out images in my head, and the reason I felt that I could get past bad experiences was because nothing really added up to the things I faced in my younger years. Also, the traumatic events caused me to kind of disassociate, never really being present enough to experience things on a deep emotional level - good or bad.
Dealing with the trauma has opened up a richness inside my head that I didn’t realize I had. I can visualize almost anything I imagine, and I’ve began drawing. I’ve always had very good spatial reasoning, sense of direction and audible memory.
> 2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Are you sure? I am not a psych(atr|olog)ist, but that sounds consistent with some sort of dissociation. People can even be impacted by traumas that they do not remember at all.
I'm not purely aphantasiac (occasionally have momentary flashes of fuzzy, vague imagery), but I'm still in the category, and I identify strongly with the "superhuman ability" to get over traumatic experiences.
I've had very few traumatic events in my life, but when I hear people talk about flashbacks or reliving trauma, it confuses me utterly. I understand theoretically how it could happen, now that I finally know about visual memory, but the practical effect is still completely outside my experience.
My wife had long been envious of my "superhuman ability" to stay in the present, neither lingering in the past nor staring off towards the future. Once we realized I was aphantasiac it made more sense, as memory and fantasy simply don't exist for me in remotely compelling or seductive ways. It's all just abstract word-forms (and occasionally sounds).
As a programmer, writer, musician, and occasional photographer/painter, I've long insisted that when making art "There is only implementation."
I still think there's a lot of truth in that, but I do now realize that most people can meaningfully "see" their work before incarnating it.
I also have aphantasia, and my wife has hyperphantasia. makes for interesting conversations.
1.While I do not experience visual images in my mind, I do 'form' what I can only explain as proprioceptive relationships between things. I can mentally rotate objects or my environment, but have no visual experience of it. This is a long-winded way of saying I have very good spacial understanding, direction and concept of how things relate to each other - I'm a hang glider pilot, motorcyclist, loves driving and hiking around, and never get lost.
2. I do relate with having a superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. I don't dwell on the bad for long, and tend to forget the bad experiences pretty quickly.
My memory of accidents are also more proprioception and relation to things in my environment than visual.
No 1 I never connected it to this, but yes, I have terrible sense of direction. I do okay if there are physical landmarks (Like lake to the west or hills to the east) and numbered streets help too, but I still regularly make wrong turns and don't realize it in cities I've lived for a long time.
No 2 I don't feel. I ruminate a lot. My memory is weak, but I still manage to ruminate on things.
Ask me to dive deep into software architecture and I'm all good. Ask me to "visualise" re-arranging the office furniture or think up a children's fantasy story with magic animals - and I'm totally, utterly lost. I have found my "creative outlet" is actually music - DJing. The repetitive logical arrangement of electronic music still gives opportunity to also be creative.
I can relate to the lack of interest in fiction books others have written on this thread. I struggle to visualise what's going on with the characters/scenes so get bored (and frustrated) very quickly.
Oddly I can relate strongly to your point 2. My father is the same - emotions get switched off and practical mode kicks in. He's working on a solution to one of the problems as a result of whatever's happening around us, be it financial, logistical, or anything which could "help" in his eyes. It's not so much put bad experiences behind me, but rather put them in a mental box (ironically, I can't imagine) and not worrying about it.
I don't think either of those are necessarily aphantasia. I'm an excellent navigator, and in general I know the spatial arrangement of things well. Likewise, though I'm pretty stoic about stuff, I can feel shame or other emotions about past events long past.
Not the OP, but I learned how to solve them not long after they came out. I solved one on my own, but it was more about learning a series of logical moves and applying them, along with some trial and error and some luck. I then learned a method of solving the cube from a book which I can still do to this day. But there's no visualization involved. I just look at the cube, notice that these particular faces are in this configuration, then apply the appropriate sequence of moves to get to the next step. Rinse and repeat.
So far I've boiled the side effects down to:
1. A complete and utter lack of direction. I literally get lost in suburbs surrounding my home (i'll very often take an extremely sub optimal route home from a store that is just 10 minutes from my home - a bit embarrassing tbh, gives my wife a laugh though). These are streets I've travelled for over 30 years. Apparently quite common with aphantasia.
2. An almost superhuman ability to put bad experiences behind me. People with aphantasia don't have the tendency to ruminate. I've had some traumatic experiences in my life and within a few months it's as if the experience never happened. I can recall details of it but the recollection is as if the experience happened to someone else.
Regarding no.2, photos are super important. There was a period of 10 years or so where I didn't take many photos, and that period feels like a black hole.