When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visualizing the apple but not _really_ seeing it?
For me, it's like a second sense of vision, which does not get hallucinated into the primary sense of vision and which cannot be confused with actual vision, yet nonetheless feels much like vision, with the exception of "not feeling real". By default it is "someplace else", but I can overlay it onto my primary vision if I want to (e.g. imagining an object on my real-life desk), but that doesn't affect my primary vision, merely gives me a sense that the imagined sight corresponds spatially with the actual reality in the intended manner.
If I had to describe it, I'd say it's more like an extra set of eyes that is just looking at the thing I'm imagining. It doesn't replace what my physical eyes see.
Note that these eyes need not be static, even when I am. I can easily imagine myself flying through some space, looking out through those eyes, even if I'm in my chair. I can also have them grow a body and interact with the imagined scene in front of me.
While it doesn't replace what I'm seeing in the real world, it takes up some attention - I might not be paying as much attention to things physically in front of me.
I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.
Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way.
All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (even people who claim to be non-aphantasiacs will concede that it's not literally like seeing), so how do I know that other people aren't having essentially the same internal experience but choosing different words to describe it?
It also doesn't help that it doesn't seem to have any bearing on cognitive ability, or ability to perform tasks that one could effectively measure. I have never felt like I can't do something because I have aphantasia. I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
I have read that there are some tests for aphantasia that don't ultimately depend on introspection and vocabulary (e.g. pupils reacting to imagining something bright or dark, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35356890/) but I haven't found anything that I can do at home to be sure that I'm really aphantasiac and not just pessimistic about describing "inner images". If anyone knows such a test that one can do at home, I would be very interested.
This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).
A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:
1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake
2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery
Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.
This is my experience too. I have aphantasia for all intents and purposes but I have had one single experience years ago during meditation where I suddenly experienced "being in" a scene that was vivid and clear that I knew to not be real. It's nothing like when I "imagine" something and don't see anything.
It was also nothing like when I dream, where I too can visualise - it was much clearer.
It's clear to me that most of the time when people question that this is possible, it's an indicator they have aphantasia.
> All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not.
I don't know. Have you tried the ball on the table test that's inside the article? What was your answer to the last question?
It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.
Ha, I was going to describe it the same way. The image is there in the buffer, you have full bit-level access to it; the only difference is that there's a firewall preventing it from being rendered to the primary display. Dreaming allows rendering it to a virtual display which is temporarily considered canonical.
I think the resolution and bit depth of that buffer is the aphantasia spectrum. Some people are working from a 160x120 1-bit image, for some it's 640x480 8-bit, and some can load up an 8K at 32-bit deep color.
I don't know if everyone is like this, but low-res is not to be deemphasized. When another comment had a test about bicycles, I can see the shape of a bicycle frame, but I definitely can't see how many gears it has unless I zoom in on the gears (and I don't know how many gears a bicycle is supposed to have, but I can imagine any number up to about 5.)
In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..
In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"
It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.
That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?
For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.
Our world exists. Don't overthink it. But dreams aren't real at alll, they just fill in a bare minimum of data and handwave the rest. Which is also what I was getting at with my visual imagination, although the rest isn't handwaved away at all - if I think of an apple on a desk I'm under no illusion there's any more than a ("low res") image of an apple and part of a desk.
Those tests could also depend on some third thing, such as not believing that you're visualizing a bright light. I can't see their methodology. "Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength." Really, objective measures of how bright an imaginary light is, how on earth do they think they can measure that!? Was it like "we gave them a sheet of paper where they had to score how bright a light they were imagining, and the sheet of paper objectively existed so it was an objective test"?
Well anyway the whole concept, and the science, seems like a giant troll.
If the concept of the mind's eye seems like a giant troll to you, you're either aphantasic or haven't connected the right dots. Can you remember a song? If so, can you do something similar with a picture?
> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.
As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mathematical rules that is easy to abstract and rotate. It gets more complicated with complex objects and that’s where visualizing things really matters. Here’s a question, can you accurately visualize a loved one’s face, see it in your mind and describe all the features if you were for instance talking to a police sketch artist. I couldn’t even do that for my daughter or my wife.
I definitely can't - if I had to describe my wife or son, I would be hard pressed to go beyond very generic descriptors (long black hair, brown eyes, and so on), nothing useful to create an accurate sketch. And I wouldn't be able to draw them from memory even if I were good at drawing. This could also be explained simply by having bad memory for faces, though.
But yes, little bits of subjective introspective evidence (like that one, and also mostly ignoring visual descriptions in books, and the perception of having no mental images at all that is asked by the standard self-report tests, and so on) add up and make me 99.9% sure I have aphantasia. It's just that it would be nice to have the objective unambiguous external test, the silver bullet, to be totally sure that they're not a bunch of busses in a trench coat as so many honest beliefs are.
note that many autistic people (overrepresented on HN) have face blindness which is (probably) a separate thing. They don't develop the specific specialized circuits for recognizing facial features.
I think this is a better self-test.
Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?
Now, answer these questions:
- What color was the ball?
- What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
- What did they look like?
- What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
- What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?
And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?
This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.
Right. Details come in, for me, based on:
- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.
- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.
- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.
And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.
You might need to take a person's background into account as well.
I, for instance, am an avid billiards player. A "ball on a table" naturally makes me think of a billiard ball on a billiards table. A whole host of detail was filled in for me, but all specifically in that context. I could answer some of the answers as if I could visualize, but most of them as someone who could not.
n = 1, I know, but sometimes it takes only one example.
Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.
I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.
With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.
I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.
But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.
Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.
That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.
Then you are almost certainly aphantasic. "It is all just semantics" has to do some incredible acrobatics to make sense of so much language and reported experiences, and doesn't seem biologically plausible either.
Of course, we can never be sure, but from a theoretical and empirical standpoint "all aphantasia discussion is just semantic confusion" is not useful and a complete non-starter.
I have doubts about aphantasia as a legitimate phenomenon, but whether it is or it isn't, it seems likely that many of the positive reports are a result of a misunderstanding, semantic or otherwise.
Certainly some self-diagnoses (positive or negative) are definitely based on misunderstanding, much semantic, as I already agreed in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468528.
Sometimes I think so, I don’t visually see anything in my mind it’s all just thoughts about things like I can feel the image but can’t actually see it.
However I have taken psilocybin mushrooms and when I do I can literally visualize things in my mind as crystal clear as I can see the real world. So I think it isn’t just semantics
I have been wondering this as well. I took part in a study at the local university that seemed related to visualization ability. Aside from various questionnaires about imagining different types of objects, they had me do a test on a PC where I had to look at moving shapes for a few seconds at a time. The shapes would then disappear and I'd have to click on it when it reappeared in a new position a few seconds later. You were meant to be able to predict the location based on the shape's trajectory and could react faster that way.
I doubt it was trying to identify aphantasia though, since that seems like a task you could do well in even without being able to visualize the shape.
Aphantasia and hyperphantasia can be measured. See section 6 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11437436/
I'm sure it's not, because most of the time I'm aphantasic and rarely I'm not and they're completely different phenomenological experiences.
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).
I think a couple of the comments in this very thread above, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467695 and https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=slibhb are quite relevant to your case. Thinking this is just semantics is a strong indicator you are likely highly aphantasic.
It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details spring forth unbidden as an image first, and then you attach the language, and it isn't the reverse order. I suspect also tests of visual memory of complex pictures should reveal similar things here, because e.g. language and other things don't really seem to be able to represent such details, and neurobiologically, there isn't much plausible other way your brain could be memorizing a complex photo without retaining / having activation patterns similar to the actual viewing (and this is what we see in fMRI studies).
If you are careful at noticing your thoughts (and not aphantasic), you can also notice if you are a highly visual thinker, you might sometimes confuse certain memories of things (spellings, place names, other things) that are similar only visually, but not logically or in any other sense modality representation. This would suggest the representations are genuinely visual in these cases.
But yes, no way to be 100% certain, but the "it is just semantics" case is very weak and can't explain much.
I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visually". I still think many self-diagnosed aphantasiacs are tripping on the semantics of wording in a self-report survey, because I could easily talk myself into the other label based on second-and-third-guessing "but what does it mean to _see_ something I'm imagining?" etc. If there is a group of people with an actual quantifiable brain difference, I suspect it is much smaller than the group of "all self-diagnosed aphantasiacs".
Ironically your comment has strengthened my belief that aphantasia is real and that I have it. :-)
The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".
If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."
But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.
Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.
Yeah, you don't sound aphantasic to me then either. I am certain you are right some self-diagnosed aphantasics are caught up in semantics: psychology instruments in general are quite terrible, and certainly anyone that just does some self-report test and reads no further I could very easily see becoming confused here.
But the more a person thinks and read about it, especially given how much easier it is to find people writing and talking about it today, then I think the likelihood of being caught in such a semantic trap will go down a lot. Or at least, that should happen so long as one doesn't attach excessive moral value to or get bogged down in "identifying" as aphantasic/not.
How could it be just semantics if I and others cannot do what you can? The comment you responded to said "I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language" to which you responded "I'm very convinced this is what's going on." -- but what is "this"? They said that they don't see anything, which is by definition aphantasia, but you say that "I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here". You are clearly the one who is confused. If your self-report is accurate then people differ in this regard -- and we already know this from differing physical measures when people are tasked with visualizing.
The people who hold that it's just semantics and all minds are alike in this regard are just expressing a belief that has absolutely no evidence to support it and a great deal of counterevidence.
It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.
It is Qualia only until they can measure it. Which they can now. Blaming everything you do not understand on neuroticism? Might as well go back to dunking witches.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...
I'm not really sure what the hostility is about. That's an interesting study albeit small: 42 non-aphantasiacs and 18 self-diagnosed phantasiacs. If one really wanted to quibble I'm sure there are other possible confounding variables which could be involved in both pupil dilation and self-reported aphantasia. I'm not "blaming" neuroticism, I'm pointing out that these self-reporting surveys are subjective in a way that can be influenced by personality traits.
A lot of people here are insisting, with no evidence whatsoever, that a lot of other people are deluded, or are in it to make money, or for an ego boost, or to get pity, etc. ad nauseam ... so don't play dumb.
Aphantasia, hypophantasia, phantasia, and hyperfantasia are all real, per the evidence. Absolutely no evidence supports the contrary claim.
I won't respond further.
I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.
My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.
I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.
I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.
It's not semantics.
Yeah, I’m convinced this is the case. Accurately conveying something like that (the qualia of mental imagery) to another person using words is more or less impossible, in my opinion. People like to label themselves and feel special, this is an easy way to do it.
I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.
There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.
Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?
Oddly, it keeps shifting to cutting a slice out of the apple instead. But with a bit more focus, yes. Even with the specific peeler I have in the kitchen, which has a blue handle. Maybe I'm not actually below average.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
Oh proper images. And if I focus I can increase resolution. I can get to where it’s as good as real life, for most things. But if it’s a book character I’ve never seen, the details are more oddly distributed and not stable over time, except when the author does a really good job with descriptions.
Seeing mental images that are as good as a well done animation, on the other hand, is a lot easier and less draining to hold.
I see actual images, but at least for me its not anywhere near the same as actually looking at something. Its sort of like watching a low fidelity movie for me and I can't really "focus" in on specific details of what I'm visualizing. I think there is definitely a spectrum.
exactly the same for me
It’s not hallucinating. Drugs of a certain type will do that, but even then you can still visualize at the same time. It’s a different “set of eyeballs”. A third eye.. if you will.
I don’t know if you know how to lucid dream but I find I can visualize inside one while still just seeing the regular scene in front of me. Even “over there” it’s a separate sense.
There is no “really” seeing. There is just “seeing with this sense”, “seeing with that sense”. You can feel with your right and left hand separately, no? It’s not “one thing”.
If you have good visualization ability, you can project your image onto a location in the real world, maybe sort of like a translucent layer or image placed on a clear film placed over reality, or you can just sort of visualize the image in "mental space" which doesn't correspond to any particular location. Likely what is more common depends on the person.
wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?
now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?
lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?
it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))
No I don't actually see it, but I can clearly think of the concept of it down to the details and can alter that concept in space (like spinning the globe in Google Earth). What happens when you think of memories? Like imagine the feeling after someone tells you a joke so good that has you gasping for air, can you imagine that without actually feeling it? Visualization is similar to me just about a different sense.
Neither, they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head.
Realising this is not the case is waking up, but then some attention seekers gave it the name aphantasia to make themselves feel special.
It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.
This is close to my experience as well, but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everyone. My wife can picture things in her head and describe them in vivid detail and talks about how she can move and manipulate the objects and change the colors and shapes in more or less infinite detail
It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc.
I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.
I don't navigate by visualizing the road ahead, I mostly navigate by recalling what I saw on Google Maps. Yes, always with north at the top and if I rotate the map 90 degrees it'll be completely unfamiliar - I have tried that - I think that's fairly normal though.
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