I wonder if author is one of the lucky aphantasics who doesn’t have SDAM [1].
I tried the exercise they described… and nothing happened.
I can’t even remember major life events that everybody is supposed to. Best I can do is recall there’s a photograph of the event, and using my recollection of the existence of the photograph, I can pull up a few facts I’ve intentionally made note of.
And now cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t.
There are people interested in overcoming aphantasia (or hypophantasia, an extremely weak form of imagination).
Today I have medium-ish hypophantasia, but I remember when I was doing phantasia exercises, in particular "snapshotting" and "memory streaming", at least two times, there was a subtle shift in my perception and all of a sudden I could remember a ton of things, as if I opened a door. It would only last maybe 10-20 minutes (I would practice 30 - 60 minutes per day).
It wouldn't surprise me a bunch of those memories are in the brain but you just don't have access to them in everyday waking consciousness.
So, for me, it feels like a lot of my memories are visually indexed, and if I can't visualize then I can't remember, but once I configure my mind through meditation and these exercises, it is like I can "tune my mind" to mind's eye access (radio/TV analogy here) and with it the memories.
Then once I stopped the exercise (for the day) it would go away in around 10-20 minutes (kind of like how a muscle pump goes away rather quickly after exercising).
Huh. If anything I have a better memory for things that I've experienced than others. My fully-phantasic siblings seem to struggle with recalling conversations and events from childhood that I can recount in detail, but they can do things like draw stuff from memory or put together outfits while shopping without having pictures of their closet or taking out stuff they've already purchased to match the colors.
I don't have the visual imagination, episodic memory, or time travel of the paper you linked, but I have had full-sensory dreams and I can make myself salivate and taste sourness by thinking of lemons. Hypnosis has never worked on me. I've experienced visualization once, under the influence of heroin (only tried it the one time, no idea if that experience was anomalous or not). Other drugs, including other opiates and opiods and a variety of hallucinogens have had no effect of inducing visualization for me.
I’m curious if there is a diagnosis criteria for SDAM.
It likely exists on a spectrum (just like mental imagery).
I have aphantasia and struggle quite strongly with autobiographical memory, but if someone reminds me of an event or I look through old photos, I can remember things.
This is why I love having Immich so much - it lets me feel connected to my past.
>cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t
I am much more on the hyperphantasia side of mental imagery but I am constantly astounded at how poorly visual imagery is conveyed as well as the difficulty in conveying the experience of mental imagery intuitively. Similarly it amazes me when people with mental imagery simply cant conceive that there are people without it.
I have always felt that comparing mental imagery to normal vision kind of misses the mark. For the common question people ask, where they say "imagine an apple sitting on the table of front of you" or something similar, where aphantasics simply can't conceptualize what that means, I have seen people say something similar to "Its like photo shopping an apple on top of what your eyes are seeing".
This, to me, sounds more like hallucination rather than mental imagery and I think completely misses the mark for explaining what mental imagery is like to people who don't experience it. For me at least, mental imagery is much more like having some space inside my head disconnected from the physical reality in front of me. So when someone says to 'picture an apple on the desk in front of you', what I experience is that a perfect replica to my surroundings is created in this non-physical space and in that space, there is an apple on my desk. Bare in mind, this is completely detached from what I am literally seeing with my eyes. I could picture an apple on my desk rolling off and onto the ground, and follow that path with my eyes in the physical space in front of me. Really though, I am imagining how this scenario plays out in the non-physical space in my mind, and mapping the motion data of the apple back into reality and using my eyes to see where it 'would be'.
I think what really becomes difficult in conveying mental imagery to people with aphantasia is that they completely lack the conceptualization that you can have all the qualia of a physical space represented to you without it being actually connected to your literal experiences of your surroundings and the space they take up. Like explaining color to the blind, or how some colors are warm and others are cold to a blind person, language fails to adequately transcend the difference in mental facilities. It seems much easier however to go imagine the experience of the blind as a sited person, much like a 3 dimensional creature could imagine the experience of a 2 dimensional one but not a 4 dimensional one.
Huh, so interesting. My imagination doesn't work like this. I don't need to see the apple. I can imagine where it would be, how big it would be, how it would act if I touched it (I can imagine it rolling, but without actualizing the visualization fully, etc.). But there's more like a semantic understanding that it's a mental pointer to an apple - with all the properties apples have very closely available in L1 cache. If I really try, I can pull up some mental jpegs or 3D models of apples, project them, etc., but usually that doesn't happen, I guess a 3D model doesn't get fully demand paged all the way in unless I really focus harder..? Maybe it used to and this is age?
That's interesting to me. I suppose I can think about the qualities of an apple or its location without having to render the obj and textures all in my head, but my default approach to 'imagination' is to render everything out completely in my head. Similar to how I can think without an internal monologue, but my baseline is that my thoughts tend to be constantly narrated.
Right. I have aphantasia and I've never felt bad about it. Maybe confused a few times, but that happens a lot anyway for any number of reasons.
I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
Hmm, agreeing that the pathologization of aphantasia is distasteful but then immediately positing that people who might feel shame and inadequacy about having it must be "simply attention-seekers" seems counterproductive. Not treating aphantasia as a disease and also acknowledging that people may suffer mental illness triggered by it are not mutually exclusive.
For me, learning that normal people go about their days constantly hallucinating had the opposite effect. I think it could partly explain some problems in society, e.g. people's susceptibility to advertising.
I think your implicitly getting at something here. Both are dealing with an inferiority/superiority dynamic. The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking). This ties back to the post where the author speaks of feelings of inadequacy (shame, etc...) about being unable to visualize, again signs of an inferiority complex. While such complexes may be traced back to particular memories or events, they're also habits of thought which are common place and culturally reinforced, so much so that they seem quite normal. For example, the culture of idol worship, like raising up of tech heroes while implicitly lowering your own self worth, which happens often on this site.
The fact that the author doesn't mention the details of the memory or events of the day also suggests shame and concerns of being judged for them.
The good news is they are writing about their struggles which suggests their willingness to work with these fears.
I think the answer probably isn't about pretending you're not better or worse, but accepting that being better or worse at something doesn't change your inherent self worth. Accepting that your not in control of many of your conditions and conditioning can free the mind from a sense of guilt and the fear around judgement of yourself and others. Hopefully this helps the author and those who struggle with notions of identity and self worth.
> The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking).
No, it's not a defensive/counterattacking reflex. The thought of people hallucinating all the time is terrifying to me, because hallucination is a sign of something being very wrong, like schizophrenia. After getting past the language barrier and finding out these were "mental hallucinations" rather than "visual hallucinations", it's slightly less scary, but still unsettling for me to think about. Finding out that visualization was actually a thing meant that idioms that I thought were metaphors or superstition were suddenly something the majority of the population takes literally. People who have "invisible friends" talking to them all day long scares me though.
Regardless of current mechanism, susceptibility to advertising would still be present even if all currently exploited cognitive pathways were removed or deactivated across all human minds, as the advertisers would keep experimenting until they found another one.
I will say it was a mind blowing experience to learn after decades of buddhist practice other people were LITERALLY seeing things (and in some cases trying not to). I never found it detracted from my experience as learning to NOT get distracted by that stuff is half the battle for a lot of people. So it can be a warp whistle in some ways. It is also why I am probably more interested in playing/listening to heavy doom music as it is hypnotic in its monotony. I reckon it is why I am fixated on genera lisp, smalltalk, self esque environments as they are more tangible for creating scenes on the screen that match how I am thinking about code (inside out and all that).
Well, even the idea of "diagnosis" in this case implies that there is something wrong. I saw the whole idea of aphantasia/variations in mental imagery enter the mainstream over the past ~decade, it's really disheartening how people just can not ever accept that there are differences between people without immediately branding one type as good and the other as bad.
So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".
In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.
Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.
After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.
In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
That's so funny: I also first started to realize I had aphantasia during a period when I was taking chess very seriously during university. Unlike even lesser skilled peers, it was so difficult for me to understand games written out in chess books without playing them out on the board and I couldn't understand why...
Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.
Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.
What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...
I definitely have memories linked to smell, but I can't imagine or remember and pull them up on demand, I am reminded of them when I detect that scent. I can make myself imagine/remember sourness though, but not other flavors. Just thinking of lemon, citrus, pickles, etc. makes my mouth water and start tasting sourness.
When the negative feelings are described (interpreted!) as resulting from a supposedly pathological condition, for example. Also, when negative feelings result from the idea that a certain issue is pathological. And when you put these two together in a loop you have a pretty clear dynamic of pathologization, I'd say.
Of course it's hard to argue with the bare fact of someone feeling something, but everything surrounding that such as the attribution of the causes, potential solutions, and the terms in which feelings are described are all open to debate.
They are missing an aspect of the human mind that the majority of humans have. It's defined as the "inability" to do something most humans can do. Research on cognitive performance shows it's most likely connected to worse memory. Some studies show reduced social skills. Then there are the deficits in autobiographical memory. It's progressive form is indicative of dementia.
I think it's weird to call an aspect of mental functioning a pathology simply because it's not the majority, regardless of any impairment in normal functioning. Depending on how you slice definitions many many things are in the minority.
Those studies, well, I'd have to see them. There's the risk that people for whom (e.g.) memory is accompanied by imagery automatically assume that imagery is required for memory. Vague correlations with social functioning can be drawn for nearly anything.
Regarding dementia: obviously the disappearance of imagery in someone who used to have it is very different from someone who never had it.
I consider myself to have aphantasia, but I have one singular experience of having seen things in my minds eye in a waking state, during meditation. I wish there was research into what might trigger this, and how, as I've not been able to repeat it.
(I'm sure I wasn't asleep as I both never remember my dreams, but have distinct memories of how "fuzzy" and ethereal the imagery in my dreams feel, while this imagery during meditation was crystal clear and I was fully lucid)
I'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it.
I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia. I don't see images. It took until I was in my 40's to realised that this wasn't most peoples experience.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
I get my ideas completely from inner monologue. But my ideas are mostly related to developing automated systems etc, I don't really need imagery for that, although I think I need to sense some sort of graphs or how things work together on the higher level.
I write a lot, including fiction, and I feel my aphantasia probably shapes what I like to read and write in ways I wasn't aware of (before realising aphantasia was a thing, and that I have it), but it doesn't stop me either.
E.g. when reading I tend to skim over writing that spends a lot of time describing the visual appearance of things unless the words themselves are beautiful to me, because no matter how well written the descriptions are, they don't achieve anything for me beyond the shape of the prose itself.
(I love the structure and flow of language, so there are absolutely moments I find myself reading visual descriptions because of the descriptions themselves)
When writing, I prefer to write relatively sparse prose that focuses on how things works and relates to each other, and dialogue, rather than trying to evoke imagery that I can't see for myself when reading the text back.
Best way I can describe it is as a different sense.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
Thank you for this description. It almost exactly matches my experience that I had trouble putting into words. I can "model" the things I'm asked to remember/visualize, but I do not really "see" it.
The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.
So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
Is it common for people with aphantasia to not realize it until well into adulthood?
One of my good friends has it, didn't realize it until he was married (~40 years old) and his wife "figured it out." He doesn't care for fiction - especially written fiction, but movies/TV to a lesser extent - I always wondered if that's related. Aside from that, you'd never know - he's a good photographer and excels with mechanical stuff (rebuilding/modifying vintage motorcycles in particular).
The reason so many people with aphantasia don't realize until adulthood is that we do everything you do. There's no real difference in capability, many things are identical or very similar, but the mental experience is different.
My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
I didn’t find out it was a thing until I was 38 or 39. And yes, I daydream. But it’s not like watching a movie. I don’t know how to describe it besides my mind wanders and there’s a narrative.
I think it is the case where you just assume that people are embellishing or being metaphorical about those things and you just refuse to consider for a moment that they are actually seeing something. But it does give this thought that why do people like to embellish or be metaphorical so much? I guess the answer is that they are not!
"seeing" is a pretty vague word. It has like 3 different meanings just in the context of discussing aphantasia. They are seeing something, but they're not seeing it. You see?
There are subtle verbal cues that give away the dominant modality the person thinks with: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, then you can tailor the session for that modality, using inductions for feeling- or hearing-oriented subjects. My dominant modality is kinesthetic, so I tend to use those first anyway.
Even though we live in a visually stimulating environment, and society tends to express things to us in visual ways, the goal of hypnosis is to relax the person and guide them to a comfortable place, so we can relate to people how they are internally and we don't have to worry about making everything highly visual.
Curious, do people with aphantasia "feel" the pain when they see other people hurting themselves (e.g. accidentally hitting their thumb with a hammer)?
No. I will wince or look away, because it is uncomfortable to see people experiencing pain. But I don't feel pain, I just feel emotionally uncomfortable due to seeing people in distress.
I am not aphantasic, but I would not say that I "feel" pain when I see people undergoing painful events (depending on how much weight the quotes around 'feel' are carrying.) I can remember that hitting my thumb with a hammer was very unpleasant, how much of my body it affected, and how it faded over time. I know that the last time I did it, I recognized it as being pretty much identical to the previous times. What I cannot do is imagine it with anything like the vividness with which I can imagine what tonight's sunset could be like.
Not related to article ncessarily, but more so to processing differences. One more thing that I think might be similar in fashion. In therapy I will say what I am feeling, e.g. anxiety, frustration or whatever. But then I am asked "where" in my body am I feeling it. And I have no clue what to answer. I don't think my feelings are felt in random body parts. Although supposedly this is not pseudoscience and people feel things in their bodyparts? I wonder if this is just another processing difference I have compared to other people. And my therapist kept asking even though I could not answer. I started to doubt if I have emotions in the first place.
I wonder if people process and feel what they think are same emotions in very different ways? I usually am externally quite unreactive though, but I didn't think I don't feel emotions actually?
Or maybe I do feel something in my bodyparts, but I am just unable to identify or recognize it? If I am frustrated or anxious and I focus on my brain, maybe I can kind of tell there is tightness? But then I could focus on other bodyparts, and I can also think that maybe there is chest heaviness? But then I can focus on my feet and think ok even my feet can feel weird, but is it because I am focusing on them and thinking there should be something?
This goes back all the way to the beginnings of Psychology. William James, who is considered the somewhat of godfather of Psychology, argued that all feelings are bodily feelings; ie. emotions are caused by bodily sensations. Your heart is not beating BECAUSE of anxiety, rather your beating heart IS anxiety. You don’t tremble because you’re afraid, you’re “afraid” (a complex emotion mediated by stories we have) because you tremble.
It’s a theory psychologists and philosophers still argue about.
So if my heart rate stays the same even though I feel anxious I am not anxious? I am thinking I am anxious and that I don't feel good, but I don't really notice any physical symptoms.
E.g. I am worried about upcoming deadlines, or whether I am going to make it, maybe it is not a direct fight or flight anxiety though, but what is it then, just stress?
I do think that my body is tensed up, but I think it is constantly tensed up. Or at least others say I am tensed up. I wonder if I have this constant tension then and I feel this constant sense of dread and anxiety and that is why I can't recognize change in my body, or emotions having physical meaning because it is just constant low grade tension?
But the tension is everywhere not necesseraily pointed to a specific location.
Like I don't ever feel what I think is "good". I feel like there is always something that I should be doing, solving some problem that is on back of my mind. I can try to make myself forget about the problems I have to solve temporarily, but mostly it doesn't work.
But it is always the same, constant feeling of pressure and inability to relax, while my therapist seems to assume it comes on and off and in a specific body part.
Isn't this 'pretend-and-perceive approach' what all aphantasics do by default when asked to imagine something? That is, until they know they're aphantasics AND choose to feel 'confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy' instead.
I've meditated, and experimented with self hypnosis (still on the fence on whether hypnosis works), and I simply always interpreted such "visualize" instructions as metaphorical, as I had no idea until a few years back that people meant them literally, so pretending was the only option I thought possible.
This is my take on it as well. You can only know what it’s like to be yourself and communicating the qualia of being you is impossible to do with words. You can only ever know what it’s like to be you, so aphantasia cannot be confirmed or denied.
People that think they have aphantasia like talking about it because we like applying labels to ourselves and it makes them feel distinct. I’m sure this is not a popular opinion, but given the inability of knowing what it’s like to be someone else, it’s the only rational belief about aphantasia.
I wonder if author is one of the lucky aphantasics who doesn’t have SDAM [1].
I tried the exercise they described… and nothing happened.
I can’t even remember major life events that everybody is supposed to. Best I can do is recall there’s a photograph of the event, and using my recollection of the existence of the photograph, I can pull up a few facts I’ve intentionally made note of.
And now cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
There are people interested in overcoming aphantasia (or hypophantasia, an extremely weak form of imagination).
Today I have medium-ish hypophantasia, but I remember when I was doing phantasia exercises, in particular "snapshotting" and "memory streaming", at least two times, there was a subtle shift in my perception and all of a sudden I could remember a ton of things, as if I opened a door. It would only last maybe 10-20 minutes (I would practice 30 - 60 minutes per day).
It wouldn't surprise me a bunch of those memories are in the brain but you just don't have access to them in everyday waking consciousness.
So, for me, it feels like a lot of my memories are visually indexed, and if I can't visualize then I can't remember, but once I configure my mind through meditation and these exercises, it is like I can "tune my mind" to mind's eye access (radio/TV analogy here) and with it the memories.
Then once I stopped the exercise (for the day) it would go away in around 10-20 minutes (kind of like how a muscle pump goes away rather quickly after exercising).
Huh. If anything I have a better memory for things that I've experienced than others. My fully-phantasic siblings seem to struggle with recalling conversations and events from childhood that I can recount in detail, but they can do things like draw stuff from memory or put together outfits while shopping without having pictures of their closet or taking out stuff they've already purchased to match the colors.
I don't have the visual imagination, episodic memory, or time travel of the paper you linked, but I have had full-sensory dreams and I can make myself salivate and taste sourness by thinking of lemons. Hypnosis has never worked on me. I've experienced visualization once, under the influence of heroin (only tried it the one time, no idea if that experience was anomalous or not). Other drugs, including other opiates and opiods and a variety of hallucinogens have had no effect of inducing visualization for me.
I’m curious if there is a diagnosis criteria for SDAM.
It likely exists on a spectrum (just like mental imagery).
I have aphantasia and struggle quite strongly with autobiographical memory, but if someone reminds me of an event or I look through old photos, I can remember things.
This is why I love having Immich so much - it lets me feel connected to my past.
I’m one of those lucky ones! It sounds like you’re implying that most aphantasics have SDAM. Is that the case? Do you have any sources?
>cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t
I am much more on the hyperphantasia side of mental imagery but I am constantly astounded at how poorly visual imagery is conveyed as well as the difficulty in conveying the experience of mental imagery intuitively. Similarly it amazes me when people with mental imagery simply cant conceive that there are people without it.
Looking at a test such as this one (https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq), the best descriptor for the most vivid mental imagery is:
>Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision
I have always felt that comparing mental imagery to normal vision kind of misses the mark. For the common question people ask, where they say "imagine an apple sitting on the table of front of you" or something similar, where aphantasics simply can't conceptualize what that means, I have seen people say something similar to "Its like photo shopping an apple on top of what your eyes are seeing".
This, to me, sounds more like hallucination rather than mental imagery and I think completely misses the mark for explaining what mental imagery is like to people who don't experience it. For me at least, mental imagery is much more like having some space inside my head disconnected from the physical reality in front of me. So when someone says to 'picture an apple on the desk in front of you', what I experience is that a perfect replica to my surroundings is created in this non-physical space and in that space, there is an apple on my desk. Bare in mind, this is completely detached from what I am literally seeing with my eyes. I could picture an apple on my desk rolling off and onto the ground, and follow that path with my eyes in the physical space in front of me. Really though, I am imagining how this scenario plays out in the non-physical space in my mind, and mapping the motion data of the apple back into reality and using my eyes to see where it 'would be'.
I think what really becomes difficult in conveying mental imagery to people with aphantasia is that they completely lack the conceptualization that you can have all the qualia of a physical space represented to you without it being actually connected to your literal experiences of your surroundings and the space they take up. Like explaining color to the blind, or how some colors are warm and others are cold to a blind person, language fails to adequately transcend the difference in mental facilities. It seems much easier however to go imagine the experience of the blind as a sited person, much like a 3 dimensional creature could imagine the experience of a 2 dimensional one but not a 4 dimensional one.
Huh, so interesting. My imagination doesn't work like this. I don't need to see the apple. I can imagine where it would be, how big it would be, how it would act if I touched it (I can imagine it rolling, but without actualizing the visualization fully, etc.). But there's more like a semantic understanding that it's a mental pointer to an apple - with all the properties apples have very closely available in L1 cache. If I really try, I can pull up some mental jpegs or 3D models of apples, project them, etc., but usually that doesn't happen, I guess a 3D model doesn't get fully demand paged all the way in unless I really focus harder..? Maybe it used to and this is age?
That's interesting to me. I suppose I can think about the qualities of an apple or its location without having to render the obj and textures all in my head, but my default approach to 'imagination' is to render everything out completely in my head. Similar to how I can think without an internal monologue, but my baseline is that my thoughts tend to be constantly narrated.
finally found a non-paywall version of your SDAM [1] cited:
(A)phantasia and Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory: Scientific and Personal Perspectives.
https://oro.open.ac.uk/53222/1/53222.pdf
>the (sometimes subliminal) states of confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy aphantasics feel when asked to visualize
Wow, take it easy.. This whole pathologization of "aphantasia" really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Right. I have aphantasia and I've never felt bad about it. Maybe confused a few times, but that happens a lot anyway for any number of reasons.
I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
Hmm, agreeing that the pathologization of aphantasia is distasteful but then immediately positing that people who might feel shame and inadequacy about having it must be "simply attention-seekers" seems counterproductive. Not treating aphantasia as a disease and also acknowledging that people may suffer mental illness triggered by it are not mutually exclusive.
For me, learning that normal people go about their days constantly hallucinating had the opposite effect. I think it could partly explain some problems in society, e.g. people's susceptibility to advertising.
I think your implicitly getting at something here. Both are dealing with an inferiority/superiority dynamic. The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking). This ties back to the post where the author speaks of feelings of inadequacy (shame, etc...) about being unable to visualize, again signs of an inferiority complex. While such complexes may be traced back to particular memories or events, they're also habits of thought which are common place and culturally reinforced, so much so that they seem quite normal. For example, the culture of idol worship, like raising up of tech heroes while implicitly lowering your own self worth, which happens often on this site.
The fact that the author doesn't mention the details of the memory or events of the day also suggests shame and concerns of being judged for them.
The good news is they are writing about their struggles which suggests their willingness to work with these fears.
I think the answer probably isn't about pretending you're not better or worse, but accepting that being better or worse at something doesn't change your inherent self worth. Accepting that your not in control of many of your conditions and conditioning can free the mind from a sense of guilt and the fear around judgement of yourself and others. Hopefully this helps the author and those who struggle with notions of identity and self worth.
> The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking).
No, it's not a defensive/counterattacking reflex. The thought of people hallucinating all the time is terrifying to me, because hallucination is a sign of something being very wrong, like schizophrenia. After getting past the language barrier and finding out these were "mental hallucinations" rather than "visual hallucinations", it's slightly less scary, but still unsettling for me to think about. Finding out that visualization was actually a thing meant that idioms that I thought were metaphors or superstition were suddenly something the majority of the population takes literally. People who have "invisible friends" talking to them all day long scares me though.
Regardless of current mechanism, susceptibility to advertising would still be present even if all currently exploited cognitive pathways were removed or deactivated across all human minds, as the advertisers would keep experimenting until they found another one.
I will say it was a mind blowing experience to learn after decades of buddhist practice other people were LITERALLY seeing things (and in some cases trying not to). I never found it detracted from my experience as learning to NOT get distracted by that stuff is half the battle for a lot of people. So it can be a warp whistle in some ways. It is also why I am probably more interested in playing/listening to heavy doom music as it is hypnotic in its monotony. I reckon it is why I am fixated on genera lisp, smalltalk, self esque environments as they are more tangible for creating scenes on the screen that match how I am thinking about code (inside out and all that).
I agree with you as an adult with aphantasia, but I think it's a relatively common experience as an undiagnosed kid in grade school etc.
Well, even the idea of "diagnosis" in this case implies that there is something wrong. I saw the whole idea of aphantasia/variations in mental imagery enter the mainstream over the past ~decade, it's really disheartening how people just can not ever accept that there are differences between people without immediately branding one type as good and the other as bad.
So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".
In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.
Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.
After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.
In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
That's so funny: I also first started to realize I had aphantasia during a period when I was taking chess very seriously during university. Unlike even lesser skilled peers, it was so difficult for me to understand games written out in chess books without playing them out on the board and I couldn't understand why...
Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.
Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.
What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...
I don't see any images, but I have trouble sleeping because of my inner monologue or not feeling calm etc.
Interesting. So that trope of smells being strongly connected to memories never really happened to me. I didn’t know this was also part of aphantasia.
I definitely have memories linked to smell, but I can't imagine or remember and pull them up on demand, I am reminded of them when I detect that scent. I can make myself imagine/remember sourness though, but not other flavors. Just thinking of lemon, citrus, pickles, etc. makes my mouth water and start tasting sourness.
He described his feelings, albeit as a generalization of all people with aphantasia. How can somebody describing their feelings be pathologization?
When the negative feelings are described (interpreted!) as resulting from a supposedly pathological condition, for example. Also, when negative feelings result from the idea that a certain issue is pathological. And when you put these two together in a loop you have a pretty clear dynamic of pathologization, I'd say.
Of course it's hard to argue with the bare fact of someone feeling something, but everything surrounding that such as the attribution of the causes, potential solutions, and the terms in which feelings are described are all open to debate.
They are missing an aspect of the human mind that the majority of humans have. It's defined as the "inability" to do something most humans can do. Research on cognitive performance shows it's most likely connected to worse memory. Some studies show reduced social skills. Then there are the deficits in autobiographical memory. It's progressive form is indicative of dementia.
How exactly is this anything but a pathology?
I think it's weird to call an aspect of mental functioning a pathology simply because it's not the majority, regardless of any impairment in normal functioning. Depending on how you slice definitions many many things are in the minority.
Those studies, well, I'd have to see them. There's the risk that people for whom (e.g.) memory is accompanied by imagery automatically assume that imagery is required for memory. Vague correlations with social functioning can be drawn for nearly anything.
Regarding dementia: obviously the disappearance of imagery in someone who used to have it is very different from someone who never had it.
Yes. Please don't turn aphantasia into yet another marginalized identity...
Tangentially, I've always been fascinated by this reddit post "Craniosacral therapy temporarily activated my mind's eye"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/payx1i/craniosa...
I consider myself to have aphantasia, but I have one singular experience of having seen things in my minds eye in a waking state, during meditation. I wish there was research into what might trigger this, and how, as I've not been able to repeat it.
(I'm sure I wasn't asleep as I both never remember my dreams, but have distinct memories of how "fuzzy" and ethereal the imagery in my dreams feel, while this imagery during meditation was crystal clear and I was fully lucid)
DMT and psilocybin are proven to help some people with aphantasia.
Author's short personal account, basically solving the mindblind imagery/hypnosis fail with another level of indirection. Her subtitle:
> Can aphantasics be hypnotized? My experience learning to be hypnotized with imagery-free inductions.
I'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it. I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia. I don't see images. It took until I was in my 40's to realised that this wasn't most peoples experience.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
I get my ideas completely from inner monologue. But my ideas are mostly related to developing automated systems etc, I don't really need imagery for that, although I think I need to sense some sort of graphs or how things work together on the higher level.
I write a lot, including fiction, and I feel my aphantasia probably shapes what I like to read and write in ways I wasn't aware of (before realising aphantasia was a thing, and that I have it), but it doesn't stop me either.
E.g. when reading I tend to skim over writing that spends a lot of time describing the visual appearance of things unless the words themselves are beautiful to me, because no matter how well written the descriptions are, they don't achieve anything for me beyond the shape of the prose itself.
(I love the structure and flow of language, so there are absolutely moments I find myself reading visual descriptions because of the descriptions themselves)
When writing, I prefer to write relatively sparse prose that focuses on how things works and relates to each other, and dialogue, rather than trying to evoke imagery that I can't see for myself when reading the text back.
yeah, I had a similar realization as an adult that not everybody else talks to themselves inside their head
Best way I can describe it is as a different sense.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
Thank you for this description. It almost exactly matches my experience that I had trouble putting into words. I can "model" the things I'm asked to remember/visualize, but I do not really "see" it.
The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.
So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
Can/do people with aphantasia day-dream?
Is it common for people with aphantasia to not realize it until well into adulthood?
One of my good friends has it, didn't realize it until he was married (~40 years old) and his wife "figured it out." He doesn't care for fiction - especially written fiction, but movies/TV to a lesser extent - I always wondered if that's related. Aside from that, you'd never know - he's a good photographer and excels with mechanical stuff (rebuilding/modifying vintage motorcycles in particular).
The reason so many people with aphantasia don't realize until adulthood is that we do everything you do. There's no real difference in capability, many things are identical or very similar, but the mental experience is different.
My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
I didn’t find out it was a thing until I was 38 or 39. And yes, I daydream. But it’s not like watching a movie. I don’t know how to describe it besides my mind wanders and there’s a narrative.
I think it is the case where you just assume that people are embellishing or being metaphorical about those things and you just refuse to consider for a moment that they are actually seeing something. But it does give this thought that why do people like to embellish or be metaphorical so much? I guess the answer is that they are not!
"seeing" is a pretty vague word. It has like 3 different meanings just in the context of discussing aphantasia. They are seeing something, but they're not seeing it. You see?
There are subtle verbal cues that give away the dominant modality the person thinks with: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, then you can tailor the session for that modality, using inductions for feeling- or hearing-oriented subjects. My dominant modality is kinesthetic, so I tend to use those first anyway.
Even though we live in a visually stimulating environment, and society tends to express things to us in visual ways, the goal of hypnosis is to relax the person and guide them to a comfortable place, so we can relate to people how they are internally and we don't have to worry about making everything highly visual.
Curious, do people with aphantasia "feel" the pain when they see other people hurting themselves (e.g. accidentally hitting their thumb with a hammer)?
No. I will wince or look away, because it is uncomfortable to see people experiencing pain. But I don't feel pain, I just feel emotionally uncomfortable due to seeing people in distress.
I am not aphantasic, but I would not say that I "feel" pain when I see people undergoing painful events (depending on how much weight the quotes around 'feel' are carrying.) I can remember that hitting my thumb with a hammer was very unpleasant, how much of my body it affected, and how it faded over time. I know that the last time I did it, I recognized it as being pretty much identical to the previous times. What I cannot do is imagine it with anything like the vividness with which I can imagine what tonight's sunset could be like.
Not related to article ncessarily, but more so to processing differences. One more thing that I think might be similar in fashion. In therapy I will say what I am feeling, e.g. anxiety, frustration or whatever. But then I am asked "where" in my body am I feeling it. And I have no clue what to answer. I don't think my feelings are felt in random body parts. Although supposedly this is not pseudoscience and people feel things in their bodyparts? I wonder if this is just another processing difference I have compared to other people. And my therapist kept asking even though I could not answer. I started to doubt if I have emotions in the first place.
I wonder if people process and feel what they think are same emotions in very different ways? I usually am externally quite unreactive though, but I didn't think I don't feel emotions actually?
Or maybe I do feel something in my bodyparts, but I am just unable to identify or recognize it? If I am frustrated or anxious and I focus on my brain, maybe I can kind of tell there is tightness? But then I could focus on other bodyparts, and I can also think that maybe there is chest heaviness? But then I can focus on my feet and think ok even my feet can feel weird, but is it because I am focusing on them and thinking there should be something?
This goes back all the way to the beginnings of Psychology. William James, who is considered the somewhat of godfather of Psychology, argued that all feelings are bodily feelings; ie. emotions are caused by bodily sensations. Your heart is not beating BECAUSE of anxiety, rather your beating heart IS anxiety. You don’t tremble because you’re afraid, you’re “afraid” (a complex emotion mediated by stories we have) because you tremble.
It’s a theory psychologists and philosophers still argue about.
So if my heart rate stays the same even though I feel anxious I am not anxious? I am thinking I am anxious and that I don't feel good, but I don't really notice any physical symptoms.
E.g. I am worried about upcoming deadlines, or whether I am going to make it, maybe it is not a direct fight or flight anxiety though, but what is it then, just stress?
Maybe your just good at keeping the emotions from tensing up any part of your body.
I do think that my body is tensed up, but I think it is constantly tensed up. Or at least others say I am tensed up. I wonder if I have this constant tension then and I feel this constant sense of dread and anxiety and that is why I can't recognize change in my body, or emotions having physical meaning because it is just constant low grade tension?
But the tension is everywhere not necesseraily pointed to a specific location.
Like I don't ever feel what I think is "good". I feel like there is always something that I should be doing, solving some problem that is on back of my mind. I can try to make myself forget about the problems I have to solve temporarily, but mostly it doesn't work.
But it is always the same, constant feeling of pressure and inability to relax, while my therapist seems to assume it comes on and off and in a specific body part.
Isn't this 'pretend-and-perceive approach' what all aphantasics do by default when asked to imagine something? That is, until they know they're aphantasics AND choose to feel 'confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy' instead.
I certainly think that is what I've done.
I've meditated, and experimented with self hypnosis (still on the fence on whether hypnosis works), and I simply always interpreted such "visualize" instructions as metaphorical, as I had no idea until a few years back that people meant them literally, so pretending was the only option I thought possible.
No. I can imagine just fine without visualizing. It's the same as "thinking". Posit a sphere of radius x. Why do I need to see to imagine that?
So apparently, even when a web site is for users who can't form mental images, you still have to put a picture at the top of each article?
Without being able to experience the world as another the existence of aphantasia can’t even be confirmed.
The myth that everyone, or even anyone, can imagine anything, and is doing so regularly, has no basis, yet is the only cited basis of the diagnosis.
No.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia#Research
This is my take on it as well. You can only know what it’s like to be yourself and communicating the qualia of being you is impossible to do with words. You can only ever know what it’s like to be you, so aphantasia cannot be confirmed or denied.
People that think they have aphantasia like talking about it because we like applying labels to ourselves and it makes them feel distinct. I’m sure this is not a popular opinion, but given the inability of knowing what it’s like to be someone else, it’s the only rational belief about aphantasia.
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