It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
Prove is a strong word. But it supports the existence of the condition as it coheres with our scientific models of visual experience. You can always reach for obscure philosophical puzzles about phenomenal experience to try to invalidate the science, but at that point you're just having a different debate than the rest of us.
In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?”
If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.
Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.
For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.
I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.
The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.
Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.
> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).
While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.
I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)
Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.
But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.
I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.
I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
I feel you, in the same boat, though I can't actually isolate any trauma or anything like that, reliving unpleasant experiences verbatim is no fun. And the early 2000s was not a fun time with all the pop earworms running around.
It's funny, I've never met anyone but my family who can do this like I can, so cheers! I always say I don't have a perfect memory, but I don't know anyone I can test myself against except my mother, who can "relive a trail ride she took 45 years ago down to the plants and opening and closing the gates". Having to remind people about significant shared life events is a real downer.
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.
It's a real phenomena. Mental imagery corresponds to voluntary activation of the visual cortex[1]. The quality of the self-reported imagery corresponds to the degree of activity in the visual cortex[2] while imagining some visual scene. People with aphantasia have little to no visual cortex activity.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595480/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/
I had thought this was all people misunderstanding each other's descriptions of their inner subjective experiences; but if this is accurate I switch sides.
Electricity in the brain is all we are.
Also its more aligned with the general theory of mind, that destinct variety of peoples would naturally observe destinct variations of sensory qualia and exhibit different internal subjective experiences.
Naturally conscious language fails to articulate these gaps because they are themselves the lack of words.
platos cave, etc
And the claim implied by TFA here is not that the VC is summoning or rendering images, but actually receiving and using a signal to suppress the visual attention from the eyes during imagination. Aphantasics suppress real vision less, so in theory they can’t see their imagination model of the world as cleanly.
I'm familiar with these studies but I don't think you can assume that activity in the visual cortex is phenomenal experience. I'm sure there are differences in self-reported aphantasics and people who don't claim to be aphantasics, but I don't think the existence of differences proves there is a difference in phenomenal experience.
Prove is a strong word. But it supports the existence of the condition as it coheres with our scientific models of visual experience. You can always reach for obscure philosophical puzzles about phenomenal experience to try to invalidate the science, but at that point you're just having a different debate than the rest of us.
In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.
I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.
But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.
Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli present” and “visual stimuli recalled or imagined”.
I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.
A quick demonstration I sometimes use to tease out this distinction: “imagine a six-sided die. Are you imagining it? Good. How many dots are on the side closest to you?”
If the phenomenal experience was the same and the difference is in the description, everyone should still be able to give a number as their answer, even if they have to use different processes to derive the number from their different descriptions. But aphantasiacs will visibly struggle to answer this question, or give a non-number non-answer like “no side is closest to me” or “depends on which way the die is facing”.
Aphantasia is a real thing. As are probably many other differences in how our brains work. But the difficulty of describing qualia is likely why we are so unaware of them. And why even the "known" ones remained largely obscure until the age of social media
I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.
It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
I spent an enormous percentage of my life very frustrated with other people because they couldn't just see the answer to things.
For example, I can put an engine into a car, and still tell you where every part of that engine is located relative to every other part, without being able to see it, including the internals, and describe, for example, over the phone how to troubleshoot it without being able to see it at all in person - just a mental model. And, for reference, I have almost no fundamental knowledge or experience with engines besides taking one or two apart - and it would not extend to other engines. It's been at least 20 years and I could still do it verbatim.
I'm way out on the end of that bell curve, but I'm not unique. I've worked with people who found that ability completely baffling, and would have to break out diagrams and blueprints to do that.
The gap is a lot wider than you think it is, it's not subtle, and this is known as the typical mind fallacy.
Edit: And funnily enough, further down there's a comment about Feynman realizing that his friend counts visually and he counts verbally - and I'm on the verbal side on that one, unless it gets complicated, and then I end up tallying mentally - but I have to count them verbally at the end.
> If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.
There was a couple who streamed on youtube who reacted to meme compilations, and years ago one of the things they reacted to referenced a similar topic. During that stream everyone learned the woman has no inner voice (including herself, she'd never even thought about it before and had no idea an inner voice was a thing).
While he was asking her what it was like, he brought up the voiceovers in tv and movies that were supposed to represent a character's thoughts. She had no idea that's what it was supposed to be, and always just thought it was some nebulous narrator describing what was going on.
I think any such signals would be a similar "wrong mental model" situation where you can usually only tell by poking at it with very specific questions or actions.
I hesitate to come to this conclusion.
When I was a kid, I could visualize things so vividly, I could almost overlay the visual signal onto my real visual field.
The visual cortex signal was "loud" enough that I could trick the propioceptive parts of my brain.
E.g. I could visualize falling so vividly that I would actually feel the stomach drop sensation.
As I get older, I still have a very visual mind, but not nearly what I used to have as a kid. It also feels more "far away" from my actual visual field.
Though some days if I'm stressed, I don't seem to have as much control/access to the visual side of things.
So I kinda get where aphantashisa people come from.
I certainly have to try. And the results often ain’t great.
I have wondered if painters and interior decorators and such were typically blessed with much better tooling for that.
I don‘t know how closely visual recall and creative visualization are related, though.
I imagine it's tougher to do. My friend who has become a well known tattoo artist has exceptional visual recall of minute details. I have to believe it contributed to his ability(tho he grinded hard, used to borrow anatomy textbooks to learn from)
Not to say someone with poor visual recall can't make great art, it just may be tougher to make something closely representative from memory.
But there are obvious giveaways. Among your friends and colleagues there are people who can’t sing and people with perfect pitch perception despite no training, ones that can barely coherently speak but can write beautiful prose and vice versa, some can stare at code for 12h straight while others find the sheer idea of it horrifying. There’s people who believe in ghosts or even believe they’ve seen ghosts while others are grounded and rational. People with photographic memory and people who cannot recall what they were doing 5 minutes ago (me). The list of distinctions could keep going forever. Everyone’s good at something and shit at something because everyone’s mind is different. It’s silly how most people completely underestimate the diversity of human internal experience - maybe this type of close-mindedness is part of it too.
I don't see how people being different from one another (uncontroversial, obvious basic fact) means that people have fundamentally different phenomenal experiences. You're conflating ability with experience when they are not the same thing.
Do you know the anecdote about Feynman and John Tukey doing a mental counting task and the one being able to talk while he's doing it and the other not, and then the reveal is they are using a completely different mental representation:
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.
Here's an easy test: If you imagine something, is it more or less vivid than your dreams?
Either way, you've established a difference in subjective phenomenology and there are people on either side of that divide.
But abilities (and inabilities) are intrinsically tied to phenomenal experiences. And you can even shape your experience by learning. It feels different to look at code, speak a language, play an instrument or do a kickflip when you’re an expert (or exceptionally (un-)talented). Some people are biologically or developmentally predisposed to different abilities, and if you talk to them enough, you’ll learn that the way they experience these abilities is different from yours. I am conflating it because this is conflated in reality. This should be obvious in hindsight - your brain doesn’t have separate ability and qualia compartments, you know.
I'm not sure if people overestimate it either, some people just have strong memory and powerful mind's eye. My memory is probably from early trauma and represents the extreme other end. If anything it can be a detriment sometimes, I'm not sure a super powerful ability to picture stuff really impacts day to day living for the average human in history. There's no reason for it to disappear evolutionary if it's not a big disadvantage.
As examples I don't listen to music that frequently, I just listen in my head. I can hear songs pretty much completely in my imagination. I'll forget lyrics consciously but letting it play and zoning out the proper music and words appear at the right time. I can also watch days of kindergarten(or any grade) like it's video.
If people are trying to do that and can't tell a single visual detail from a memory or hum a passage from a tune I don't think it's a communication problem, there's just a real difference in experience. To be clear from my personal experience not being able forget stuff or not picture stuff you dont want to sucks. And I have some pretty bad tunes upstairs.
I feel you, in the same boat, though I can't actually isolate any trauma or anything like that, reliving unpleasant experiences verbatim is no fun. And the early 2000s was not a fun time with all the pop earworms running around.
It's funny, I've never met anyone but my family who can do this like I can, so cheers! I always say I don't have a perfect memory, but I don't know anyone I can test myself against except my mother, who can "relive a trail ride she took 45 years ago down to the plants and opening and closing the gates". Having to remind people about significant shared life events is a real downer.
Why would I be coping about anything?
Yeah I agree - how would you ever know if this is real or if it's just some people saying "sure of course I can visually imagine things, just like dreams" and other people saying "omg I can't visually imagine things at all, it's just like dreams".
I guess you can maybe do better than nothing but it doesn't sound like they have got very far. Also...
> Why This Matters
Come on guys at least try.
Except, as someone with aphantasia, I see things in my dreams, so I know that seeing things is possible with my eyes closed. I don't do that when imagining in a waking state usually. Except I have once, so I also have direct experience with a very clear and vivid distinction between the states.