It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:
… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?
No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.
Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.
Yeah, this is a valid critique of the whole internal monologue idea, but interestingly aphantasia has been quite empirically confirmed and the simple apple test has been validated!
I don't consider self-reported nonsense to be empirical confirmation. There can be correlations between different self-reports, that doesn't mean that our idea of why those correlations exist is correct.
There are plenty of examples multiple times in this thread that show that what is self-reported is demonstrated in non-self-reported phenomena, so those self-reports are clearly not nonsense, basically by definition.
The aphantasia theory is clear and parsimoniously makes sense of all this, but your "it's all just semantics" does not, and additionally requires rather other extreme acrobatics with regards to much of the entirety of human experience and discourse. Scholarly research also basically says this.
Your mind is clearly closed and you do not have any serious interest in understanding anything here.
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They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.
As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.
As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.
People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that.
I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
This is why the denialism about differences in visual experience are so indefensible: they basically require an assumption that the whole world is out to lie and deceive.
Like, so, people just say things like "I see it in my mind's eye", and insist it is not a metaphor... why, exactly? If the typical mind fallacy assumption of denialists was correct, then no one would have any incentive to use such metaphors, because they would feel false. So clearly minds do in fact differ.
To state otherwise is a kind of narcissism / solipsism, or at least there is something monstrous about this kind of denial. "Everyone else is clearly wrong about their experience and their descriptions of it. I know better".
I think you just have a different interpretation of how you "see" things. Sounds just like any other anecdote of getting distracted on the road, those can be dramatic, but nothing here points to actual visual hallucinations.
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Here’s a helpful overview of anendophasia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/anendophasia
And a few active communities for anyone interested:
Aphantasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
Anendophasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anendophasia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/silentminds/
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.
Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
If you can merge them, that's the key to a few things.
Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.
I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.
> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will.
Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it isn't uncommon at all, and comes up regularly in some spiritual and meditation practices.
Tell me you can still tell it's two separate layers though. You aren't actually getting visual feedback, you are combining the actual visual feedback from your eyeballs with the pseudo-visual feedback from your imagination.
I would say when I do this, it's more like underlaying my imagination with reality, than overlaying reality with imagination - the combination is still clearly imaginative. Right? (I think I'm a 3 or a fraction higher, on the apple test scale)
I can almost always tell the projection and reality are different, but in some very rare and extreme cases (psychedelics, sleep deprivation, extremely protracted and deliberate meditative focus / practice, or e.g. in situations where the projection is properly aligned with the actual stimuli, like seeing a face in the clouds, or in vivid / lucid dreams), the differences can be so small that what allows you to distinguish the two can simply be knowledge of the will / effort involved or e.g. knowledge from laws of physics that what is visualized cannot be present, or, in the case of dreams, an inconsistency with autobiographical memory.
Otherwise, yes, in almost all other cases, I suspect our experiences aren't that much different.
For me, when I'm really concentrating, the imagined becomes more dominant.
I like to do mechanical/visual designs in my head, intentionally avoiding whiteboards and whatnot, so I don't lose the ability! When I do this, I've had people come up to me and wave their hands right in my face to get my attention, because I don't see them. I "spaced out" alll the time as a kid.
Those people here (not you) telling all of us what is and what is not possible have their view based on how they see things. That's it. I hear they don't see things in mind, visually like a phone or a screen. Or do overlays. I remember finding out and being incredulous about whether others did something I don't.
My mother can take herself anywhere in the world she has been. However, she doesn't render people. This is full immersive. She said I disappear when she's doing it, if sitting there with her. This is simply daydreaming, a well explored topic.
All one has to do is read up on the idea. Anyone arguing against "seeing in mind" likely doesn't and will have some degree of difficulty understanding they are that way. I did. You may as well, or not.
In closing, what exactly is the Mind's Eye. History tells us a lot about what people describe it doing, when it works or is not blown out.
It is a red flag to me too.
If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.
There is a full visual memory, just not any sense of an image or sound nor smell in my case. I am very sure there is a difference after interrrogating multiple people about it.
> Of course, this is not possible.
I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people.
I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack.
Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at.
When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would basically describe it as effectively identical to seeing them.
So now I'm confused about if these few people are the exceptions or the norm, and to what extent I'm lacking something that some others have.
I think when I dream it feels real, but upon closer analysis, it's about as unstable as when I imagine things. It's just overlaid with the additional semantic vector of "yes this is the real world and everything is normal" or something.
I'm going to second you for a different reason:
I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot.
Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
To make this into a more concrete test, there's a study that most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like [1]. I'd ask somebody who insists they have phantasia to picture a bicycle, ask them if they see it clearly and in full detail as though it's in front of them, and then say great, how many gears do you see? Does it have a chain? Which way does the handlebar go? Please draw it.
Of course they don't need to draw a perfect bicycle, they could be imagining an imperfect bicycle, but I suspect what would happen is that they would be dynamically adding detail as you asked them (e.g. about the break cords) rather than having seen the whole thing in all of its detail at once. I think that's just an implausible amount of information to pull up for the average person in a moment and render.
1 - https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.
Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.
How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?
Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.
How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?
That's how it went for me. I thought of the correct shape of a bicycle frame (I think I've seen this art thing before) but didn't "pull up" the little pieces like gears and seats until you actually mentioned them.
> most people don't even remember what a bicycle looks like
Not only people. LLMs too.
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test. In fact it calls it an illusion.
> This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization
The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor pattern of the apple. Then, you switch to the white light which is broad spectrum. You fail to see the green, leaving red (blue is almost green, and our colour triangle is not equilateral). So, you see an afterimage of the apple but in red. This fades quickly as your green receptors recover from the overload. It has nothing to with aphantasia and the article does not claim it does.
In a sense I agree with you that this is the intent of the article. I find this kind of laughable because I do not consider myself to have aphantasia (I can visualize things just fine) but the afterimage test is not even vaguely representative of how I visualize things.
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
I think the poll itself is faulty. You appear to be suggesting that the two things - seeing an afterimage and being able to consciously superimpose an imagined image into your visual field are related. An afterimage is literally a physical phenomenon as I explained before, and it passes quickly. There is an explanation of this, in an article that somebody posted a link to the other day in the discussion about Olo. https://dynomight.net/colors/
> Can you superimpose onto your actual visual field an arbitrary imagined image? Not just imagine what it would look like, but see it
This is your only question. No I cannot is my answer.
I don't know if its because I am aphantasic (which I definitely am) or not or if a phantasic would be able to do that either. Just because they can see something in their minds does not mean that they could superimpose it over the visual world they were seeing. I can only guess at this, but 'minds eye' is like another dimension. You can imagine things there, and your brain can simply focus on them instead of the signals you are getting from your optic nerves, or your auditory sensations, or the feelings from your butt as you sit on the chair.
I do not see things in my minds eye but I can conceptualise them perfectly well. I basically never remember if I have any dreams, perhaps I do not, but I do remember waking as if from a dream and realising that I had had a significant recognition moment, as if I had experienced a thing before. Perhaps I had a non-visual dream.
In my opinion, as someone who does *not* think that they have aphantasia, the two things are definitely not equivalent. I know what the afterimage is, I know what it is to visualize something, and they are completely different both qualitatively and intellectually.
But as I keep saying, there are people on this thread that are saying they are literally equivalent. I don't know if I believe them, but that is what they are saying -- talk to them!
People are saying they are phenomenologically equivalent (or close to), not that they're literally equivalent as in generated by the same mechanisms.
It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.
For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.
A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.
The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.
I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?
The cube test is an interesting one, but, to pile on another stupid internet trend, that seems more like a "shape-rotator" vs. "word-cel" question. For very simple fold-ups I can do this, but for more complex decompositions (like if you have me an octahedron) I doubt that I could reliably do this.
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
> If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram.
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.
When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.
I have 3 kinds of mental vision.
One, which some people call "phosphenes", is the ability to paint mental images on the field of vision that corresponds mentally to the signals I get from my retina. I can only see these kinds of images with my eyes closed and shielded from light. My ability to do this has waxed and waned over the years, and has never been good enough to create photographic imagery. At one point, I lost the ability to generate any colour, and I trained until I got colour back.
Two, the ability which seems to be called "phantasia". This is photographic mental imagery that runs on a separate channel from my visual channel, so I can consult this channel with my eyes open, and see things like people's faces. I couldn't do this at all a number of years ago, and was unaware that I was missing this ability. Then I discovered I had aphantasia, and I did some training which got me up to the level that the OP calls "hypophantasia", or maybe a bit better than that. I think that ability may have waned over the last few years since I last trained up.
The "afterimage test" is physically working at the phosphene level. It does not provide an accurate subjective experience of phantasia.
Three, the ability to visualize 3D geometric objects. It works great for wireframe polyhedra, and also works for maps that I hold in my head and use to navigate while driving. This ability has always been very strong, and I originally mistook this ability for phantasia. This is the ability I would use for your equilateral triangle example. I can position 3D objects in space relative to my body, rotate them, etc. Because I am strong at this ability, it is my job to efficiently pack luggage into the vehicle for camping trips. My partner is bad at this, but is much better at phantasia, and is a visual artist who can draw realistic faces.
What I wrote is based on personal experience. I am not selling anything. I know from internet forums that different people have different wiring in their brains. Some people have subjective experiences that other people have never encountered. It is impossible to prove the existence of first-person subjective experiences to a determined skeptic. The best you can do is collect field reports from a lot of people, compare them, find patterns, then make your own conclusions. This is called phenomenology.
> Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia.
Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition.
It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in early psychological experiments, and meditative and/or spiritual and esoteric practices. It would be really odd for people to spontaneously just give such specific nonsense instructions if they couldn't just do it.
I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?
The projected image is not typically indistinguishable from normal vision, namely in that there will be an "ephemerality" to the image. Some examples of this ephemerality:
- the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there
- the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you let any aspect of your mind wander or stray from the task, the translucency increases, it may pop out of the visual field, or lose details
- the projected image (say, an apple) doesn't have full details at every particular point, i.e. if I focus on where the stem would be, that detail intensifies, but the surrounding areas become more ephemeral; with a real apple, this happens somewhat depending on the focal point too, but not nearly as much
- the projected image can be made less ephemeral and more rich and stable with the use of pscychedelics (e.g. psilocybin) or quasi-psychedelics (e.g. cannabis)
So, yes, you can "see" it in reality, but not, in most cases, to the degree that you "see" a real apple. Often the ephemerality really does manifest in a way extremely similar to how an afterimage persists, but this isn't always the case.
Now I'm wondering if the mental focus that a trained mage requires to sustain an underworld portal, or any other spell, is the same feeling as an ordinary person in real life uses to hold a visualisation.
If you want to get really kooky, read up on Western Esotericism and Chaos Magic or tantric Buddhist practices and etc. They make basically this exact claim that this is how you "do magic" or similar such things, via sustained, "one-pointedness" and focus of attention and the Will ("gnosis"), and that, yes, often this one-pointedness of mind/attention is what lets you manifest things.
Untrue, of course, but very clearly something people have believed almost universally for centuries.
I have no doubt it can allow you to walk on coals or similar.
I created https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365 to see how many people perceive things this way.
It is quite possible that this is drawing a line, as you say, between hyperphantashia and regular phantasia, though I'm not yet willing to give up on the idea that we are just giving subjective names to the same phenomenon.
To wit, when I "hear" things with my "mind's ear" I can "hear" them very well in all the layers and components, I can "hear" drums and guitar and bass and voice, etc., but they are very clearly in my head -- they do not have a location in real space the way that real sounds do; I can't "hear" a sound so loud that it makes me cringe or so quiet that I have to strain to hear it.
In case you missed my other comment linking to similar polls and stuff on Reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469522. The hyperphantasia subreddit covers all other sense imagery too, and I am high on all of them.
Also, to be clear, my images usually are NOT spatially located, but I can choose to make them so if needed, and occasionally they just are spontaneously.
You might also find the work of Louis Sass ("Madness and Modernism", and other works) to be relevant, as he notes it is extremely common for schizophrenics to always be localizing (sensing) their thoughts have specific locations in space, or e.g. are "moving from the front of my head to the back", and other such extreme (and arguably unhelpful) spatialization of aspects of the mind's eye. He argues this might be part of why they are prone to hallucinations and delusion.
Same here (I don't actually see the circle)
I would characterise myself, per your original question, of being able to superimpose imagined objects onto my visual field.
I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detailed and solid.
This feels a bit like "is my red the same as your red?". What do even mean when you say you can "imagine that wall with the red circle on it", but you can't "see" it? Is there no visual aspect to your experience whatsoever? Do you have a spatial sense of the red circle's size and position? Do you experience (hear?) verbal statements about the red circle's existence and properties, or is this some conceptual sense of the red circle that is both non-verbal and non-visual?
I actually agree with you about the "is my red the same as your red" -- I do not believe that aphantasia is real but simply that people are talking past each other and getting hung up on semantics.
I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers. I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is *akin* to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this. I don't know if I believe that other people can. But a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'" -- I'm not interested in you, you are like me, I'm interested in people who say that they can "see". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365#49469495
> when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. [...] The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them. [...] a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'
I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of the time, visualizing is indeed only analogous to seeing, i.e. visualizing is "seeing, but not 'see-see'ing". However, with extreme focus, regular practice, and/or altered states, this distinction breaks down, and it is harder to make the separation so clear.
I suspect the more hyperphantasic you are, the more easily you can find examples in experience that blur the boundary between seeing vs. visualization, but with normal visualization capacity, these blurred cases are likely quite rare. But I don't think, fundamentally, except in true aphantasics, that there is always a 100% clear dividing line between seeing and visualization.
I'm with you -- human experience is complicated, and language is a poor approximation to our inner lives.
But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a helpful metaphor", but there are a lot of people (including yourself) who say that you can. I want to see if I can pick out that difference. I almost wish the survey instead said "No, of course I can't *see* it, nobody can" to really nail down that perspective.
Cool, I was really worried I might be sounding dismissive. This has been an obsession of mine since long before it got popular, and I've been enjoying your comments particularly in this thread.
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things.
That's your experience. Other people have different experiences.
> That is what seeing is.
What an incredible leap of petitio principii. Yet there are people who can't see despite their eyes being open and the optical machinery working correctly, and there are people who see things without having eyes at all -- in some cases things that are only in their imagination, in some cases due to brain probes, in some cases due to synesthesia, in some cases due to having an array of probes on their backs that translate images into touch sensations which their brains translate into images. You seem to know nothing of any of this, or how the brain works at all, or how language works, but you have a whole lot to say about it in this thread.
BY DEFINITION you have aphantasia, according to your self-description. You seem to believe, for no good reason and contrary to a large amount of evidence, that that everyone else also has aphantasia (i.e., no one has phantasia), but that's a different issue.
I won't respond to you further.
No, based on the description they are normally phantasic and are just quibbling semantics.
Frankly, it is very hard to tell at times.
The self-description I referred to is
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is... Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this.
But he also said
> I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Initially this struck me as logically incoherent, but reading it again and taking into account the fact that he defines seeing as using eyes--an unreasonable circular precondition--he does indeed seem to be describing normal phantasia, given the reference to images that do not disappear, and to visualization. As someone with near-complete aphantasia, I cannot produce such images or visualizations and I certainly can't rotate them around.
What is quite clear here is that people are describing different sorts of experience, not mere semantic quibbling (which defining seeing as using eyes is certainly an example of) ... and we have physiological data that supports that view. I find it quite bizarre that there are so many people on this page who insist that these differences cannot exist, that everyone is exactly like them (even though there are differences among those who claim this), to the degree that they claim that others are lying, seeking attention, seeking profit, etc. ... there is no reason at all in evidence or logic to support these claims or the position that everyone's mind is the same, in this or any other aspect.
I have hypophantasia, so it's very easy to convince me that both exist (because I'm right in the middle between the two)
Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.
I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.
No, it's definitely akin to imagining a song for me. It is not confusable with actually seeing things.
"Exist" is probably the wrong framing. It doesn't seem unreasonable that such a phenomenon could occur after a traumatic brain injury, for instance. I'm sure there's some evidence of it, neurologically (like split-brain syndrome). But it's also true that people who say they "aphantasia", in 99.9% cases, don't experience that phenomenon.
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
See also Reddit, there has been lots of discussion and some similar polls. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/, and https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/comments/kkbxom/when... for the specific poll.
Having been on the "vivid imagery" spectrum I could easily superimpose images onto my vision. Now, after covid infection some years ago, I have aphantasia, so I can tell you it's a very real thing. A lot of the stuff mentioned in that guide is very true as well, I lost the "feeling" of my childhood memories for instance.
As I understand it, many (most?) people with phantasia can't really superimpose images onto their vision like this, but needs to close their eyes to imagine something, but I for sure could. I was fully aware not directly seeing it, the image is composed in the mind after all, but I guess a good analogy is you "playing music" onto music you're listening to. It's composed together in your mind, but you're fully aware only parts of it is coming through you ear.
Last, since you can imagine images in your minds eye like you describe, you clearly do not have aphantasia...
Not sure about phantasia, but aphantasia exists. I don't know why you say it doesn't?
It exists. You're wrong. Update. Thanks.
You're absolutely right.
Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object, it's like an object instantiation with default properties that you can name/describe, nothing more.
If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This nonsense makes me irrationally annoyed, I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking, some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability. I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Can you explain why people who report aphantasia don't show physical responses (like sweat or pupil dilation) in response to imagined visual stimulus (like being described a scary scene), while people who report mental imagery do show these physical responses to the same stimulus?
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing.
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.
One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.
> If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?
Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:
> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.
What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.
> Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object
Prove it.
> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.
This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.
> irrationally annoyed
Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.
> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking
You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.
> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability
How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.
> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.
Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.
I won't respond again.
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I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.