When AI isn’t factual it’s called “hallucination” lmao
You ate the onion.
That guy IS the onion
ratlimit is a well known shitpost account btw
Sarcasm as an art form can’t survive the internet.
This has to be satire please God
Could also be part of a significant portion of people have undiagnosed aphantasia.
Learning that some people can’t mentally visualize anything, but pictures of memories that they can’t modify since they have no imagination felt wild.
When I learned that there are humans out there who can’t picture even simple things within their minds, I felt confused.
I was able to create entire worlds before going to bed when I was a kid, fantasy worlds to explore.
I thought all humans could picture things in their minds.
All people can unless they are in the extreme minority that suffer from highly particular neuropathic disorders that render them absolutely dysfunctional as human beings. Having a weak drive for creativity and imagination is not the same as suffering from a clinical incapability.
Ive only recently been able to visualise things, but only when im close to sleeping. My wife got annoyed at me when I first discovered it because I couldnt stop laughing at the amount of detail I was able to make on a fence. Only problem is now when im awake and unable to do it, im more aware of the ability I dont have.
Also, people who can just make shit up and see it in their heads, how do they get anything done? I feel like id just be imagining stuff all day long
people who can just make shit up and see it in their heads, how do they get anything done? I feel like id just be imagining stuff all day long
Yep, that’s literally what daydreaming is. People do it all the time, especially kids at school. I spent most of primary school exploring fantasy worlds in my head, while the teachers were trying to snap me out of it.
Aphant here! I would actually love your theory to be true but unfortunately no amount of training or practicing makes me better or even able to visualise. Believe me, I spent many years trying and practicing art before I heard about aphantasia and realised thats what I have.
If I looked at 10k slop pictures and their corresponding prompts I wouldn’t be able to imagine the outputs any more than I already can (which is not at all).
Likewise I can’t do meditation or self-hypnosis where the guide says stuff like “imagine you’re lying on a beach” etc. At least it makes me immune to those stage hypnotists who try to get someone suggestible up on stage.
I don’t know if training would help alone, forcing your brain to create new neuronal connections is probably necessary.
Personally that came from deep painful emotional instances in my early life where I had nowhere else to hide but within myself. I have 3d imagination in which I can create full environment and caracters. It is entirely different from dreaming that I remember while waking up,. Memories or half awake dreams that I make operational decisions.
I actually had the reverse issue of you. I had to learn not to imagine what was discussed, saw or dreamed since some people would discuss things I didn’t want to imagine. It made my memory worse though.
https://youtube.com/@codeparade
Since finding this developer, I have been trying to visualize 3D environmental as 4D. I can create some new axial rotation, but I am still trying to determine how to find the actual 4th vectorial rotation in objects. Unusual problem to have I guess.
Just watching his video “I published a math paper” from your link and he’s very good at explaining things for the layman (me)
It’s so trippy to me because I’m opposite of that. If I’m daydreaming, I see the worlds inside my head almost as clearly as the real world, to the point where they overlap. I can be looking at a street in the real world and wherever my daydream is taking me, I see that as well on top of the real world.
I find it both fascinating and hard to imagine (ironically) how someone could see absolutely nothing in their head if someone told them to think of a tree growing out of a lake or a car that is also a three story house.
If there is one thing that upsets me about living, it’s that I will only ever experience the world once and through one perspective.
Maybe that’s not true… https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
That last paragraph really hits me. I wish I could experience either of your perspectives as someone in a middle ground. My mental pictures are like theyre made of smoke. They form and quickly warp and dissipate. They also take effort to form
The way you describe your mental images sounds equally beautiful and frustrating haha. I can relate, actually! When I have racing thoughts, it’s like everything is flickering in my mind, thousands of images and I can’t hold on to any of them. Maybe it’s not so much smoke in my case, but more like a vicious hailstorm, hitting your face all at once like little projectiles.
I prefer daydreaming to that scenario. It’s easier to slow down if I’m going through stories in my mind that I want to write. That’s when I see two “realities” at the same time. But when it’s just thoughts, like random everyday thoughts, it’s like a slideshow on speed and oh, let’s also add a random song and play that on top over and over. There was a month where I had the Burrito Burrito Taco Taco song from South Park stuck in my head 24/7. So fucked, man. Many years ago my boyfriend told me that he didn’t always think of something. That sometimes his head is just empty, in zen mode and he’s relaxing. I thought he was joking because don’t everybody have projectile-thoughts in their heads all the time? Nope. Not everybody has. And not everybody see words and numbers in colors with texture and taste either.
Brains are so chaotic and strange and unique and wonderful ❤️
I have gotten to the point that I could design furniture in a spreadsheet. That’s mostly what I do already; I’ll design it in FreeCAD, I use the Spreadsheet workbench as a table of all critical dimensions, and then I’ll build the CAD model from there, but I draw less and less of the model. I usually just take a copy of the dimension spreadsheet with me into the workshop, very rarely relying on drawings unless I’ve got some intricate joinery to lay out.
I’m working on a case for my grandfather’s flag, and I modeled a part of the thing as a sanity check.
I might just do it as a challenge to myself, design and build a piece of furniture in LibreOffice.
Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It’s as though there is some particular step between “add the object to the environment, conceptually” and “render the object” that doesn’t happen for me.
The very tired imagery when going to bed is Hypnagogia and isn’t visualizing, it’s more akin to dreaming which also isn’t visualizing.
If those 2 things are why you think you aren’t a total aphant, you’re probably a total aphant.
I’m a total aphant as well.
Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.
I’ve tried to work with things in that state as well thinking maybe it could translate as well. Its a very interesting state though. If I try too hard it’ll wake me up and go away. If i don’t try enough, nothing happens, but when it’s just right, I can somewhat influence it.
I’ve had some success in the past transitioning into lucid dreaming from that state as well.
So… You kind of percieve a symbolic representation of space, a sort of platonic ideal version? Must be a very different experience for you to read books than it is for me.
I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
Oh hey thats basically what I have but with bits of visuality
That’s kind of wild. I can’t visualise anything in my head. My internal monologue and thoughts are entirely symbolic and linguistic.
Yeah, for some folks aphantasia comes with weakness/absence of other kinds of imagination, like audio or spatial, and for others it doesn’t. I feel like I have a decent sense of audio imagination - I can “play back” a memory of a song, and my experience is like a ghost of hearing. It is as though there is a second set of ears somewhere in my head that doesn’t “feel” the same as originally hearing it, but elements of the song I never really thought much of - maybe an audio glitch in the recording or a quirk of the voice or some non-instrument sound effect - also play back as just part of this “flat”, single-layer stream.
I never really thought much until now that I might have a duller audio imagination than others, because what I do have is at least closer to the experience of hearing than my spatial sense is to seeing.
If I could have your brain for a day, I would, so I could experience what it’s like for you! I’m so curious about how differently people think. It’s kinda like how I can somewhat picture what it might feel like to be a man or a plant or non-human animal, but I can never know for sure. There are these experiences that we just will never get to have due to our own physical limitations and it’s a bit frustrating to me.
I think I can imagine what it’s like for you, based on your description, but I will never know for sure. So frustrating!
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
That last bit may also be you someone who can’t easily enter trace. There are less visual guided meditations (i like energy work which involves tactile imagination), but some people just struggle with the mental state guided meditation aims for
Stage hypnosis is fake, anyway. You can’t hypnotize somebody unless they want to be hypnotized.
Can you imagine other senses like the heat of beach sand?
I can’t. Scents, tastes, and sounds are out too. When I am aware of having dreams (which is rare) I don’t ever remember any actual sensory information, just concepts. Those concepts can be quite detailed, but it’s the idea of them rather than the perception of them
I can only imagine sounds. I also have no visual memory either. I can only remember a description of how something looked which means I also have near total face blindness. My wife jokes that I should always keep a photo of her around because if she ever went missing I wouldn’t be able to tell the police what she looked like.
My wife is like this, and she keeps trying to find her people, but everyone can picture an apple on a table that isn’t there.
But like you described with the memory she can do that but cant edit it, so she has a really good memory.
God is dead in this timeline
Probably for the best, have you read his weird fanfic book?
We found a cure for aphantasia everyone, if this is real it needs official studies because aphantasia is a real condition (the inability of imaginining things) that impacts people
Just listened to this episode about aphantasia yesterday Third eye blind
I know a guy who has aphantasia and is using AI image generation to actually see what he’s thinking about. He explained that his imagination is more like an itemized list.
That’s exactly how my imagination is.
I can imagine an apple
It’s red It’s round It has stem and sticker
I can’t see it at all
How do people imagine stuff? When people say something like “I can imagine X vividly,” I really can’t relate. When asked to imagine things, I can only have split-second snapshots of the things in my mind. My mind’s eye is more like reading a comic.
no thought process is wrong as far as I know. you don’t need to visually imagine things even to be successful in art, I know at least one artist who doesn’t think visually, they still paint beautifully, their process just involves a lot of references and live models when possible. there’s a lot of creative professionals who use just as much visual references as they do.
For ne it just happens, like blinking, no though needed. I picture a red ball and it is there i see it, i can spin it, i can even move tge camera around. Even the empty space between the ball and wall and there.
You’ve just injected a 3d animated scene into my brain and I like it
Maybe you could train yourself to imagine longer passages?
I have a similar problem. My apple becomes like 30 different recent apple images I have seen. Like I can try to imagine a Red delicious and at some point I lose focus and it might become a granny Smith and then back to like a honey crisp.
I’ll get snapshots that are blurry, like a momentary glimpse at a developing photograph, then it moves to the next portion. I’ll see shades of apple colors, faded to just the shape, a silhouette and only a concept of depth. I’ll imagine the weight, having thrown them so often. But no. There is no apple.
How do you know that’s it’s round and red and has a stem and a sticker if you can’t see it?
Because I’ve seen them before?
It’s no different to if I wrote it down
“condition” makes it sound like it’s a problem lol, it’s just a variation of thought
Good point i will keep in mind this
Aphantasia haver here. Full detail controllable movie in my head sounds cool. I also don’t really care that much, though.
It appears to be a functional lack with no upside its a disability
It doesn’t really have any downsides either so it’s neutral
We don’t get caught up in memories the same way which can make moving on from things emotionally easier. While things can still be traumatic, not reliving them in such detail can be less traumatic.
I wouldn’t say there’s no upside.
We still function just fine, it’s just a different experience.
Phantasia, at least to a certain point, can be trained. During all the constant busing to my college, whenever I couldn’t use my laptop from the person seating on the side of me, imagined things, then tried to create mental images of them.
Another weird thing is, that I found out, my dyspraxia could be made much less worse, almost on par with the average person at least, by using a better pen. Probably in my case it’s a mixture of having a weird skin that makes things hurt that shouldn’t, and people really wanting me to learn dexterity with “ball games” (read: football, played on hot asphalt) as a kid.
if that’s true, that would be an interesting development, and help understanding and treating it
Yeah, ngl I was like shoot, do I need to start doing some ai image shit?
I have no idea, really. I don’t even think the post is real. I barely undertand mental images
In grade school I thought teachers were using a weird metaphor or something when they said close your eyes and picture…. Little did I know, other people actually can do that!
In college, I learned how to see 3D through drafting class. Like someone else posted, I bet you can train yourself to see mental images, with or without AI.
I bet you can train yourself to see mental images
my own experience leads me to believe this isn’t always possible; I’ve tried previously to ‘train’ a visual imagination for years with no results. Combined with finding out that even DMT doesn’t give me visuals, i’m pretty sure it’s impossible for my brain to picture anything.
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just like some people (Austin danger Powers included) don’t have an inner monologue.
We need gen-AI to be perfected first, right now its makes humans with 7 fingers and it gives me the heebie jeebies, nah, gotta wait like 10 years
Not really anymore. I mean it cant do backflips but it has been passing tests like will Smith eating soaghetti
I’m having a hard time telling if this is trolling or idiocy.
Like all good satire it is rooted in reality
Poe’s law struck again.
It blows my mind that some people can’t visualize things in their mind. I can see anything I’d like to in remarkable detail, and often explore old places or properties from my childhood when I’m trying to fall asleep. I would be kind of crushed if I suddenly couldn’t.
For me, the best way I can describe what it feels like for me is: I can imagine an apple and I get a feeling as if I was seeing it, but I don’t actually see it. I don’t see an image in front of me. I only feel like I’m seeing an image, and I have to focus pretty hard to see anything in detail, but I can still use it to, for example, try and manipulate something in 3D, or try to remember what I was doing on a given day by trying to walk back through a place. I don’t know under what category that makes me fall under.
Hrm, AFAIK that is the norm. I’m not sure people can actually create their own augmented reality.
That’s regular.
see the thing is I can’t even tell if I can do this or not
like I can think of something and know the shape and quality of it, but I don’t see it in my mind
I’m a mechanical designer, I design tooling and machines all day, and my hobbies include woodworking and 3D printing functional stuff. right now I’m thinking of the design of a kumiko lamp, and the grid pattern I want to use, but I just don’t see it. it’s the same with the essentially lego tooling I design at work, I know this block has this shape and connects to this other one with this surface, and the assembly of 10 parts looks like whatever, but I do not see that shape when I think about it. it’s more that I know the description of it
I can lucid dream, though, so that’s pretty sweet
Yeah, pretty much the same here. I can imagine shapes, smells, textures, whatever, but it’s entirely different from seeing, smelling, or touching. Concepts, not images. Feels like the same part of the brain I’d use to, for instance, write a computer program. No issues visualising and designing 3D models either, or imagining what something in a book looks like.
Same when dreaming; I could describe everything in my dreams (if I had time during the few seconds after waking up when I still remember them) as if I had seen, heard, and felt it… but it was a completely different experience from actually seeing, hearing, or feeling it. Which means I can never mistake a dream for reality (which I suppose means I lucid dream too), because it’s immediately obviously different (and I’m on the bed, with my eyes closed).
yep, I saw reference to books somewhere else, mentioning that do people not picture what they read or what
I’ve always been an avid reader, and I have no trouble conceptualizing what I am reading. but I can’t picture it. I can relate it to other similar things I’ve seen. I can understand what a thoroughly described bridge in a forest looks like. I don’t see it.
I used to have the same question. What finally convinced me was imagining an apple sitting on a table. When I try to imagine specific parts (e.g. the stem, or the specular shine on its skin, or water beads on its side) I can actually see that part of the apple in my head, and the images change when I change the color, form etc.
See, if I imagine an apple there’s no images. There’s just… the concept of an apple, I suppose.
I know what an image of it would look like. I know what light shining on it (photorealistic, phong, gouraud, take your pick), or water beads on its side would look like. I could draw it for you, if I didn’t suck at drawing. Make a decent vector image of it, sure, with the right software.
But I don’t see it. I’d need eyes for that, and my eyes point towards the outside of my brain, not the inside.
Yeah, my imagination area does not overlap with my visual field. My imagination area is fully-featured, but not normally interestingly-populated until I decide to (day)dream or will myself to do visualization exercises.
Out of curiousity, if I put an apple infront of you for you to look at and then had you close your eyes, could you see that apple?
Not see it, no. I could describe it, from memory, if I had looked at it for long enough and paid enough attention (especially if I knew beforehand I’d have to describe it), but obviously I wouldn’t be seeing it. There’d be no image, just a memory.
I’m pretty certain the visual processing parts of the brain are not involved when I imagine or remember stuff.
I mean, there’s a lot of image processing going on in the retina and optic nerve (edge detection, contrast highlighting, and whatnot) that’s obviously not available when not using the eyes (which makes it very hard for me to imagine how this seeing images in your brain thing works), then a lot of spatial and temporal signal processing (motion detection, noise reduction, speed classification, and so on) in the thalamus, then there’s several layers of visual cortex doing the rest of the image processing, pattern recognition, and whatnot, and then there’s the rest of the brain (mainly prefrontal cortex and parietal and temporal lobes), which actually deals with that information, stores it, recalls it, and whatnot.
I imagine the whole retina-thalamus-visual cortex bit isn’t significantly involved in the way I “visualise” stuff, while it might be more involved for people who “see images” in their brains.
All the processed stuff (concepts, descriptions, dimensions, spatial and temporal relationships, and whatnot) is still there, though, just not the raw visual data (which would be superfluous in most cases anyway, unless I was trying to do something like recall a written page I hadn’t read in order to read it later, which I can’t do but you or someone with photographic memory might), so I’ve got everything I need anyway.
Damn, that’s wild. Kinda cool, though, that a remembered description is enough to be able to recognize things.
I can read a page I never read before, but there are times where the visual memory help fill in the gaps. When I read music and play it later I’ll do that, where I essentially read the music again, though I find that can actually be a little slow and limiting at times but it has its uses.
yeah I’ve tried the apple thing a few times a year for the past few years, and not once have I felt like I was seeing it. I just think of the outline of an apple, maybe how the light would reflect off it, and of a colour. all separate
I just imagine past apples I have seen, and it’s really hard to hold onto one specific apple.
I couldn’t possibly remember specific apples.
I could describe to you the Granny Smith variety (the only one I like), or maybe the Golden or Gala (the other varieties common in supermarkets around here), but not particular apples, unless I had actually tried to memorize their details (which would look like a list, not an image).
Maybe I don’t care enough about apples.
I could describe my old pets (I did care enough about them to remember them), but, again, that’d look more like a list.
why did that convince you? if i imagine an apple on a table i am unable to tell i “see” it or if i “know” it based on all the properties i know it should have. like, is it a mental image or a description mapped into some sort of imagined space?
For me it’s a mental image, which is definitely distinct from a collection of descriptions. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it feels like my head uses circuitry close to other visual circuitry while I’m focusing on this kind of mental image. Almost like the mental image is “injected” into hardware/software used for other visual processing.
I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it’s weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn’t occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn’t just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don’t notice, because if you’ve lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.
As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn’t realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren’t, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I’d have no way of knowing.
Shit’s trippy as hell.
That reminds me of a thought I already had as a teenager. We perceive the world through our senses. But there could be countless other “things” happening around us which we simply aren’t able to perceive with our limited senses.
There are.
We can’t see magnetism. Or most of the electromagnetic spectrum.
We can’t hear too low frequency or too high frequency sounds.
We can’t perceive gravity (other than by its effect on our body), or the strong or weak nuclear forces.
There’s a flood of neutrinos constantly going through us without us noticing.
There are whole ecosystems of minuscule animals and bacteria living on and in us, which we can’t see.
We can’t even see the very air we’re breathing.
Yeah, I skipped this part of the thought. So we know there are and then there could be countless others we have no idea of.
Same. I genuinely don’t understand what life is like without this. If I need to remember that there’s a specific thing in the basement, I’m visualizing what’s in the basement and looking at each thing. Do these people just like have an actual list in their head for this?
if I’m not at home and need to walk my spouse through something like checking for a tripped breaker, I’m visualizing the whole process so I can explain it in detail. How does the other side do this? No judgement, I’m genuinely curious how it works.
-
Open the breaker.
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It’s on the left side (if I remember that much)
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It will look like it’s not aligned with everything else, find it and flip it back on.
Not that hard.
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The fact that someone could “look at a memory” and spot new things in it is astonishing to me. I didn’t think it went that far, I thought everyone would remember the list, and could recreate the picture from the list… remembering the picture independently or instead of the list… wow.
I don’t know for sure that I’m on the other side
that said…
I can visualize processes just fine. let’s say I want to instruct someone on how to chisel out a feature on a piece of wood. I can give them exact instructions on how to do that, because I know where the tool needs to be and where their hands need to be and what material needs to be removed. but I don’t really picture any of that in 3D, I just… know it as a description of the 3D. if that makes sense
I just can’t visualize a process to walk you through it. Like on the PC I have to just do it myself or do it at the same time so I can tell you what to do. There is no list, I just remember (or don’t) if something is there kinda intuitively. I think my memory is pretty good. I can picture absolutely nothing. It’s just all black. It’s not even all that bad. To me it’s just normal.
Since aphantasia is a bit of a spectrum, I have it to a decent degree as I can only imagine blurry images in my head. I only learned about it doing some psychological testing when it was a test my psychologist wanted me to take. I can only speak for myself as I don’t know anyone else with the same kind of condition IRL, but in general I just sort of memorize task order for repetitive things. I imagine you do the same, but you have visual cues memorized in the same way I just know the steps to do something. It’s not like I don’t recognize what I’m looking at when it’s in front of me. I tend to think of it as having to be very analytical when doing one of those “spot the difference” image puzzles. I know both images have a potted plant, but it’s easier if I have them side by side to know that one was a succulent and the other was a fern. I don’t know if that analogy helps you. I don’t know what it’s like to have a vivid visual imagination, so it’s the best metaphor I can think of at the moment.
I have done remote tech support for software that I wrote which was pretty difficult if I couldn’t look at it myself locally. At least for me, I can know the properties of something such as a friend having long, red hair, but I couldn’t just visualize their face. I would still recognize them immediately when I see them. If it’s something like a tripped breaker, I just know to tell the person which room to go into and what a tripped breaker will look like so they can identify it themselves. It’s not like you don’t have a memory, but for me the visual parts of those memories are just too blurry to describe that way.
I can read fiction just fine, but it helps if the characters are illustrated in some kind of way so I know what I’m supposed to imagine while the action is happening. That could even just be a single picture of cover art. At least for me, I can still picture a cobblestone street, but I sort of just see a lot of beige or gray things in my mind with almost no definition. From reading online of the 1-5 scale of aphantasia and comparing it to the test results I got back in percentages, I think I’m somewhere between a 3 and a 4 for levels of intensity if that helps to clarify my perspective at all.
Apologies for the essay response, but I hope it helps to understand! If it’s any consolation, I find it kind of ironically hilarious that I can’t imagine having a vivid imagination.
ETA: It looks like the original test used 1 as completely unable to imagine things and 5 to a vivid imagination. That scale was flipped for the second version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. My scale of 1-5 is based on the second edition, I am on the lower end of the spectrum of vividness, but I can still sort of imagine things to a certain degree.
No apologies necessary - thanks for this. We can’t ever be in each other’s heads to experience how each other thinks, so this is amazing.
Have you ever heard of the mnemonic device of a “memory palace”? Can you do this? Or would it not work for you?
I appreciate that outlook on life!
I have heard of the concept as a “mind palace”, but I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I just assumed it was a meme. I’ll try to practice it a bit to remember something. My mind sort of works like this with word or concept associations already, but it’s much less organized than this concept. As I can visualize blurry images, it might work to some degree.
My career is in various areas of software development, and learning to make diagrams with tools like Mermaid really helped me because I can struggle to visualize the diagrams I want to create. Since you just type out the connections you want to make programmatically, it allows me to make diagrams more easily than with any kind of visual tools. Hopefully that clarifies what I mean by thinking in concept associations already rather than visualizations.
If you’re familiar with the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, one of the hosts (James Harkin) has aphantasia and discussed it in an episode within the last few months that quite a few animators at Pixar experience the condition as well. I also assumed when I learned about it that it was why I’m terrible with visual arts. It would seem that’s not a good excuse.
Associations are very similar to psychoanalysis concepts. There’s a wide range of ways of thinking. I can sometimes think the way you do. Thought and structure is like a routine, carving mental structure. The ways we are taught and lived can really impact the way we think.
Thanks for the perspective! And I will check out the podcast, thank you.
The memory palace really works. I had a combination lock in grad school and used that method to memorize the combo. 38 is 3 crates of beer with 2 bottles on top, 24 was 2 dozen doughnuts, and 30 somehow got associated with a plant. Which I placed in a cubicle in a set of 6 from the place I worked before grad school. Still remember it more than a decade later.
I tried this a few times as a kid after watching Dreamcatcher, so granted this was a long time ago, but my memory of how this went was basically the same as everything else I’ve said in this thread - I remember the route, I can picture the layout (but not the details), but I was never able to associate memories to a certain location.
but to be fair I’ve never met anybody who actually did this anyways
so if I say cube, you don’t immediately see it (not even if you close your eyes) and can’t then turn said cube in all 3 axis visually in your headspace?
no, I just know what it looks like, and if I think about rotating it, it just jumps from one perspective to the next because I know what those perspectives should look like
I can think about how the light reflects off it as it rotates smoothly, and I know what that would look like, but I don’t actually visualize it happening
If it’s a completely grey cube, I can sort of imagine it, but it’s like I can’t smoothly rotate it or visualize things like lighting or shades of grey. It’s sort of like just seeing it jump from one angle to the next with a lot of the angles just not “showing up” in my mind, and they aren’t really connected images. I couldn’t visualize movements on a Rubik’s cube, but that’s not the same as not being able to run the algorithm and solve it with my hands. For clarity, I don’t know the algorithm to solve one, but I mean the colors aren’t something I can really imagine on the cube. Like I said, I don’t have complete aphantasia, so this is solely my experience. I don’t know if that’s just me or purely the aphantasia.
fascinating. thx for sharing!
You’re welcome! It’s not something I really think about often as it really doesn’t affect my day to day life in a meaningful way, but I’m happy to help clarify it a bit for others! I was extremely confused when I found out people can just fully imagine an apple or something with loads of detail. Haha.
I think my aphantasia is at one on any scale. I cannot imagine a cube at all, but the other direction is not a problem. The instant I see a cube I know that it is one.
I can draw a cube based off remembered facts, having noticed things like perspective and angles and how dice work over many years. There is nothing in my mind that I am trying to reproduce on the paper, but I will know it when I see it.
That’s really interesting. That’s more or less how it is for me. I know to draw two overlapping-but-offset squares and to connect the corresponding corners with a line, but I can sort of visualize the concept of a cube more than the cube itself. I also can generally instantly recognize a cube on paper if I see one.
When you think about a memory, do you see anything at all visually? I can imagine a very blurry image, but the actions feel like it’s stop motion and very out of focus. I just have to sort of know or have an intuition for what the objects may be. As an example, I know the first vehicle I drove and the physical details, but visualizing it only shows a sort of rough, dark outline that I can’t place any of those details on or even really describe them in enough detail that someone else could draw it.
I wonder if those people read fiction. How could you possibly read for fun if you can’t picture what’s happening? For me, a book is as good as a movie.
Super descriptive books turn me off.
Less description, more things actually happening, and dialog make for a fine book.
Tolkien taking a whole chapter to describe a mountain range, not so much. I gave up on it pretty quickly before I even knew.
Tolkien is a bad example, my god that man was boring AF. Never got past a few chapters in any of his books.
The Expanse does it right. Perfect balance of character’s thoughts, scene description, all that.
I loved the shows… I’ve never actually read a book after watching a show based off a book.
I know people get upset about shows (although not necessarily The Expanse) as they don’t line up well with what they visualized while reading it. I wonder how that would go the other way given something I have seen and have a sense about, but wouldn’t be able to visualize while reading.
How could you possibly read for fun if you can’t picture what’s happening?
Probably better than people who need to visualise stuff.
There’s much more in books than just the visuals. There’s the story, there’s the characters’ thoughts and personality, there’s the author’s style, and influences… they’re infinitely more detailed and nuanced than film or TV.
Limiting them to the visual aspect seems like a disservice to both reader and author.
And, anyway, I know what’s happening, it’s written right there on the page, why would I need to visualise it?
And what if I imagined it a certain way, and later the author describes it differently than I imagined it, or adds some new detail that was missing in my mental image? Personally (if I experienced books like I do films) that kind of thing would completely pull me off from the story…
And what if the book is set somewhere alien to our senses? How do you visualise Flatland? Or the other universe in Asimov’s The God’s Themselves?
Frankly, needing to visualise books seems more like a handicap to me.
Interesting! However you seem to think effort is involved. For me, visualizations are automatic. If I find I’m not “seeing” the story, that means I’m tired and not really reading, just passing words through my brain pan with no understanding.
i’m not reading their reply as assuming there is effort involved in visualisation, at all.
No, I’m not taking about effort. I’m aware the brain does it automatically, and puts it in the same energy budget as the rest of the reading experience (though now I’m wondering if the brains of people with aphantasia consume less energy when reading).
What I’m saying is that there’s so many more layers to books than to film that being “forced” by your brain to see books in a visual way might produce a limited experience when compared to someone who can enjoy a book as, well, a book.
More importantly, whatever you’re visualising is made up by your brain… based on the author’s descriptions, sure… but those descriptions might be incomplete until the very last page.
If you’re viewing the book like a film, you’re necessarily making up details that can conflict with later descriptions by the author, which means you’d either have to change your visual representation (akin to a recast of an actor, which is often jarring) or ignore the author’s description (I had a friend who, having read The Hobbit, somehow imagined Gollum as a sort of gelatinous blob; I suspect this is what might have been going on there). Again, this seems like it’d lead to a lesser experience than just experiencing the book like… a book.
Frankly, needing to visualise books seems more like a handicap to me.
For me, it’s a balancing act which depends on book I’m reading. Sometimes, depending on the book/passage/etc, authors like to write in a visually evocative where being able to picture the environment feels important.
Other times, the emotion or sensation is much more important so the world is described in far less detail.
Funnily enough, I feel like I imagine generic things a little blurry in my mind (like, pick up the red apple and rotate it to face the bottom) when people talk about this topic, but books/fanfic is perfectly clear and expressive and everything. Like I curse my inability to draw and animate cause I can see that stuff vividly in my head. I guess I just need extra word pizazz and a love for the topic to really manipulate it into whatever I want in my mind. Weeabo curse I guess.
Oh wow, imagine that.
So, I heard of aphantasia (the lack of a ‘mind’s eye’ or ability to visualize) after I noticed a pattern in my customers at the job shop: The creative types that needed something made that was out of their wheelhouse (the musician who wanted to design an accessory for their instrument, the sculptor who needed a water hose…thing for their studio, the carpenter who needed a duct attachment for his saw) I could describe what I was going to do in words to them and they got it.
The business school BMW driving golf shorts Karens who had an idea they wanted to “invent?” If I showed them a CAD model, it had to be correctly colored. The wood part had better be brown or it was outside their capacity to comprehend. Absolutely no ability to think abstractly. I wonder if this had been pounded out of them by whatever caused the rest of their personality. Or, if the inability to visualize just pipes people into business school.
Your understanding of Aphantasia is a bit off, I think the folks in the second group are just stupid. I have complete Aphantasia, and if it was explained to me, I can understand what your plans for something would be. If I was shown a CAD model, it would be extremely clear. The things I can’t do is see my wife’s face in my head, or picture the last place I left something. However, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t describe to you what my wife looked like, or that I can’t remember where I left something. Also, thinking abstractly is what people with Aphantasia are best at. I can’t remember the specifics, but they are significantly more likely to end up in a STEM field where all they do is abstract thought (myself included)
I understand though, it’s easy for me to think about how someone who can picture things in their mind would experience things, because I can see things with my eyes. But someone who has a mind’s eye can’t really understand what it would be like to not have one. Most things that people would think are issues for me aren’t, I’ve just got different ways of remembering and thinking about things that doesn’t require needing to see them in my head.
I do have a mind’s eye, and quite a capable one apparently. I’ve seen some people say they imagine in flat shades or even in black and white, I can imagine and remember things as clearly as I can see. I can imagine the cross section of an engine running. I can’t vouch that my mind correctly models firing order and timing of an engine of more than two cylinders but if I focus on one cylinder the details are right.
I also have quite a capable mind’s ear. Pretty much all day I hear my thoughts in my head as if they’re being spoken, I can also imagine music. I just tried it out by imagining the Top Gun anthem as played on the SNES’ sound chip with that orchestra sound that was used on the console quite a lot. Not a problem.
It utterly fascinates me that some people outright can’t do that.
This reminds me of the time I showed a design mockup with lorem ipsum text and a couple of people got really confused by it and were still confused even after I explained it’s just filler text.
Having Aphantasia (no minds eye) or Anendophasia (no inner voice) is just a different way of perceiving the world.
Here is an article that show that even though peops have these (I know because I am both) it does not need to affect their lives. I did not even know I had these until my late 50’s. Below is an article that shows this. A quote from the article.
“Surprisingly, within fields as varied as science, art, politics, and sports, some of the most innovative and successful figures openly acknowledge having Aphantasia.”
https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/world/20-famous-people-with-aphantasia/
My brother has aphantasia but is a better artist than me. And I spend most my day in my minds eye. I have to explain to people that half the time Im looking at something I’m not actually even seeing through my eyes anymore. I completely check out like I’m dreaming
The BMW driving golf shorts Karen probably suffered from bike shedding. A lot of faux leadership types often feel the need to contribute something, even if it’s something mundane, into “complex” (in their eyes) projects.
Honestly you want them to be picky about the color because they might be picky about something else that would be harder to control.
Drop the “the”! It’s cleaner!
(a memorable line dropped by Justin Timberlakes character in the Social Network. It sums up this phenomenon pretty well.)
Makes me wonder if it’s good for our society to allow such creativity challenged people to obtain such positions of power.
We need more people with imagination
Yeah that wasn’t aphantasia (someone with aphantasia would have no problem understanding your model; probably even less than someone without it, in fact); that was them having their heads so far up their own arse they weren’t able to see and think properly (and lack of experience doing the latter).
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As someone with aphantasia: I wish it did.
Maybe spending hours upon hours producing AI slop is the cure?
Well I guess I will never be cured then.
Honestly if AI can cure aphantasia like this I’d consider it an actually good application (the ethics of training the AI notwithstanding).
I’m already cured… I can visualize my AI gf np because it has all the wrong answers
Do you get the Tetris effect where after playing you dream of Tetris?
I wonder if this guy ai slopped the same thing
When I first got the game Factorio, for the first week, I was having full on hallucinations of the little conveyor belt arrows twisting and snaking all over my vision when I closed my eyes. Even when I blinked, id get a flash of some grotesque squirming abomination. Scared the shit outta me because I’d never experienced that before nor even heard of it. I was relieved when I learned it was a known thing but it was still distracting as all hell.
I get that with most video games, so I’m pretty used to it
The effect from factorio was intense for me though. That game is something else
Happens to me a lot with video games. Apparently after Nintendo introduced Tetris to the United States, people were seeing blocks falling from the sky.
I see ducks I want to hunt
I wouldn’t know, it’s extremely rare that I remembrer my dreams.
I almost never do either, and I am aphantasiac as well. I wonder if that is related.
I remember my dreams very vividly and I am also a l ucid dreamer where I can sometimes participate. I cannot see imagery in my mind when I’m awake.
It seems there are research hinting at this : https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/06/being--mind-blind--may-make-remembering--dreaming-and-imagining-
But for me it changed, there were times in my life when I remembered my dreams much more (but still not that much). I think my dream memory declined a lot when I started meditating a lot.
This…this is satire, right?
yes
I don’t see a /s tag so idk
Imagination was discovered by John Imagine in 2023 when he tried to run a genAI prompt but forgot to turn on the computer
Pretty sure it was actually discovered by John Lennon in 1971 when he took some drugs but forgot to take some drugs.
You’re actually both right, Lennon actually took so many drugs that he astral projected to the 2020s. He tried to use chat gpt while he was projecting into the future, but he didn’t know what a computer was so he didn’t turn it on
And then wrote the song A Day in the Life about it… “I’d love to turn you on…”
Wrong. It was created by the Imagi people before John Imagine appropriated it.
It’s Twitter, so there’s an excellent chance this is manipulative engagement bait. But it would be really, really interesting if heavy usage of AI image gen proved to be an effective kind of visualization “exposure therapy” for people with aphantasia. We’ve never before had the ability to so quickly and reliably convert words to images, so maybe experiencing that connection on demand a few thousand times is enough to activate those mental pathways for people who lack them? The closest we’ve had up to now is a Google Image search, and those results are much more varied, not as precisely tailored to the search term, and not something that people generally do over and over again for leisure.
People with aphantasia may not realize that most people can “see” images they generate in their minds. Some with aphantasia say they thought using the word “see” in that context was a metaphor.
The evidence just keeps stacking for me
What killed me is when people say like “picture yourself on a beach” and people are actually just doing that. My whole life it was a metaphor
I think I’ve slightly frustrated people when they asked me something like “how do you think this chair will look in the corner of the living room?” and all I really could say was “yeah it’s a nice chair, has about the same colour as the sofa”
👋 (have aphantasia)
Well imagine that.
As a person who CAN imagine and hear my mind speak… I can’t imagine that.
That sucks. How do you handle / have you handled art projects in school?
That was just trial and error. Just because i can’t visualize stuff in my head doesn’t mean i can’t evaluate concepts and how they might be together. If you have the ability to imagine stuff in your head you might think “oh yeah that is a terrible idea to put these two concepts together” whereas me i can’t tell that unless i have seen it before and internalized it in a non-visual way. Like say you wanted to draw a bouquet of flowers, if you looked at different flowers you could start placing them in your mind together. For me i would have to had to see it before and remember “x and y flowers together don’t look good”. But if i haven’t seen them before then id either have to try drawing them together for the project, or if we’re talking about flowers maybe i could make a bouquet and see it that way before putting it to paper
Edit: also i don’t think it’s really that bad. I never knew it was any different than how other people did stuff until the past decade or two when more people started talking about it. One of my friends shared his experiences with it and i was just like “that’s normal, isn’t it?”
That is insanely fascinating! And it’s super cool to me that you found ways to work with it, to the point where you didn’t even notice you had it! Ever since I learned about this a few years ago, I’ve been wondering if a childhood friend had it. She always had to draw or find pictures of things before she could decide if she liked how they look. One time we had to pick a flower that we liked from a provided list of flowers. We’d all seen them before (common flowers to our residence), but she had to look up each one in a book, before she knew which one she liked. I was describing them to her, so she wouldn’t have to look them up, and she knew that this was the red one that grows outside the school and that one was the blue one that grows in the park and so on, and she still had to look them up. After your comment, I’m almost positive she had it and no one knew. The human mind is fascinating!
Yeah definitely possible. When i learned about it i ran to my wife of over a decade and asked her if she can see things in her head. She thought it was a silly question and goes on to tell me when she reads books it’s like a whole movie in her head and i told her for me it’s just words in a book lol.
How did that change the way you view the world, in general or specifically on something?
you might think “oh yeah that is a terrible idea to put these two concepts together” whereas me i can’t tell that
You know what’s funny? Even though I can visualize things internally, I imagine it being better than I can make it in real life. Especially woodworking, I end up making mistakes at the design level. When two pieces of wood don’t sit flush because I bungled the proportions in my mind, oh it’s the worst.
Always wanted to ask, do you read fiction? It’s like watching a movie for me, can’t imagine reading would be any fun otherwise.
Also have it, the fun parts of fiction for me are the dialog and (being a scifi nerd) the thought experiments. Most of my reading focuses heaviest on what’s being said by the characters - which, luckily, happens to be where most of the meat occurs anyway. Long descriptive sections just kinda go by like white noise, though I try to catch and remember any important notes that may be referred to later, but more as concepts - e.g., “big wall” as a concept, not an image. If you ask me for the physical description of a character in a book in which they have been physically described, odds are high I’d come up empty, but I could probably give you a solid summary of their character as they have acted and based on what they’ve said.
Seeing a book like a movie seems extremely limiting to me.
There’s so much more depth to books than to film. Limiting them to the visual aspect would be like ripping off 90% of the pages.
Same!
Me too!
Yeah. People who have that in my job tend not to do well.
