Aphantasia - the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images

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#1

With apologies for the tangent: this is a phenomenon (or more accurately, a spectrum) known as aphantasia, and I suspect it’s somewhat more common than people realize. In fact, I didn’t realize that this was not the normal state of affairs until I first encountered the word for it; I’d always assumed that “picturing” something in your mind was simply a metaphorical fancy. :sweat_smile:

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s some genetic component to where one falls on the spectrum… though both my parents claim to have vivid visual memories, while I have, at best, the concept of an apple.

Ironically, this made my own brief dabblings with AI images rather magical: it was the first time I’d seen concepts that had only ever existed as words in my head.

And, to keep this vaguely on-topic, I share your preference for simple, “clean” images — particularly when they may be displayed only very briefly.

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#2

Yep! When some guided meditation asks me to visualize something (like a beach or a mountain view of sunrise), they might as well be asking me to translate into Chinese. On the other hand, I can run through abstract geometrical forms, spatial navigation routes (through familiar buildings and towns), and also musical sequences, pretty well.

It’s interesting, @etardiff, that I too have a preference for imagery that I can really digest. With nearly all my banner-ideas, there’s a finite number of variables such that I could pretty readily reconstruct the whole thing from scratch, even using different tools (svg or illustrator instead of omnigraffle). I wouldn’t say (with @Scott_Sauyet) that I’m “not a visual person” but clearly there’s a kind of leaning toward the conceptual rather than the saturated or sensually-detailed. (I think that’s one of the personality variables in the Myers-Briggs set of axes: an “intuitive” vs “sensory” scale.)

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#3

Thank you very much. It’s nice to have a label and to realize that it’s not particularly rare.

I will definitely read the material, but I don’t know if I will follow up any further than that. It’s always seemed just an interesting quirk, one that doesn’t disable or even inconvenience me in any way.

Still, it is nice to know we’re not alone.

Thank you! (And thanks too to @nemo, who passed this along in a direct message.)

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#4

I split these posts off the main thread to avoid derailing the topic. And I want to specifically invite @nemo to participate, who shared the same pointer to aphantasia.

Ditto, except for the music. Never had a good ear. On a related note (:slight_smile: ), I can share driving directions with my son easily (“go 2.3 miles, turn left on Cedar St, then take your third right onto Oak”) but those directions don’t work for my wife and daughter, whose directions only occasionally work for me (“go down past that big yellow farmhouse, then turn across from the house that used to have the llamas. When you hit the rock that looks a bit like a big dog, take your next right.”)

I have no idea if that’s part of the same condition, but for me, a developer who does plenty of web stuff, thoughts of visual style come late, if ever.

I think I was in my late 20s when I had that realization, which was still a decade or two before the term was coined. Sometimes I still feel like people are putting me on when they talk about it.

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#5

Interesting stuff. Thanks for being open with it guys!

I first heard of this pheonomenon after wondering why some of my pupils (10-12 year olds) had such a hard time with the drawings in my technology classes and, it turns out, also their math class “symmetry exercizes”. I read up on the phenomenon but I don’t know for sure if this is the explanation for their difficulties so, everyone here who suspect they have aphantasia, may I ask if it would be very difficult for you to complete the following image by hand? (I’m not asking you to actually do it, just what you’d guess.) And if it is not, then do you think it would be significantly more difficult for you as 12 year old compared to peers?
(I’m pretty certain it would be tedious for anyone, but that’s a different matter.)

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Second question: Do you “see” in your nightly dreams? I mean, do dreams appear like the normal world visually?

#6

Can’t speak for Scott, but I will say this exercise would be very easy for me, now and in grade school. As a child, I actually seemed to be significantly better than my peers at this sort of thing, and in drawing from life — and I do think this is probably related to my aphantasia. My anecdotal impression is that other people have a mental image of “dog” or “apple” or “castle”, and this (often-simplified) representation intrudes when they’re asked to draw. Conversely, since I don’t have any mental images to replicate, I can only observe what’s in front of me, and I tend to be quite accurate.

I do have visual dreams (largely indistinguishable from real life, as far as my sleeping brain is concerned) but I’d say I retain less than 1% of them for more than a few minutes after waking. And, to answer a question you didn’t ask but which really puzzled my mother when I first mentioned it, I don’t have any issues recognizing places, objects, or people when they’re actually in front of me — but I couldn’t draw my mother’s face if my life depended on it.

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#7

On the contrary, my guess is that I, now or then, would have an easier time than most. A mathematician by training, abstractions like symmetry come much more naturally to my mind than things like color or other purely visual concepts.

That’s a harder one. I go through periods of my life where I wake up remembering lots of dreams, and others, like now, where I rarely do. I don’t know for sure if they have normal visual “perceptions”. But I know that any recall of them is not accompanied by visualizations, just like my recall of non-dream memories.

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#8

Thankyou for the invite!

FWIW, I only know of aphantasia in the academic sense. I’m not at the opposite end of the spectrum (hyperphantasia), but I’d say strongly biased that way. However, despite imagining things easily, I’m a hopeless artist. I can’t really draw (though I enjoy attempting to sketch technical diagrams of ideas)

Yup, that feels completely plausible to me. I can visualise the end result of drawing something, but any attempt to get there in the physical world is imperfect and frustrating. (I have loaded some drawing apps on my tablet recently, and have played with that. Having an undo does help a fair bit)

#9

Well, it’s certainly not something I’ve ever been embarrassed by. I don’t know if I’m missing an important world of experiences, but it’s never felt like any sort of handicap.

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#10

I should add: while aphantasia doesn’t seem particularly disabling for me when it comes to this type of task, I do think it’s likely that some of your students may be struggling with (undiagnosed?) learning disabilities that do impact their ability to mentally reflect or reproduce a diagram. I think dyslexia was the only disability with much widespread recognition when I was in school myself, but in the last decade or so I’ve heard increasingly about similar issues like dyscalculia (which affects several of my friends) and dysgraphia (which I think my younger sister must have, though she never got a specific diagnosis either).

#11

Thanks for your reply. I, for unknown reasons, only addressed my questions to Scott but obviously it should be for everyone with the condition - now edited.

So, both you (@etardiff ) and @Scott_Sauyet say the task would possibly be even easier for you than your than peers at that young age. (Maybe my amateur diagnosis of my pupils is totally off)

Not sure about “intrudes”. I was always pretty good at drawing. But it is still very tricky to translate the mental image onto a paper, just like it is tricky to translate what you physically see onto a paper.

Really interesting. So if you think back of a dream, is it… only words and sounds? Or how is the recollection of a dream manifested for you?

Actually, if you watch a little short film clip and then is asked about details in it… do you not have any recollection of the visual stuff? (assuming you didn’t verbalize details e.g “OK, the girl is wearing a green skirt”)? With that said, it is an established fact that most people have a totally unreliable memory in all aspects and we make up stuff to post-explain and rationalise for ourselves.

#12

I’m not the person you were asking but:

What I have is like what J J Gibson might call affordance-memory. I orient to interactions, possibilities, schematics. I don’t have a visual of a door, I have awareness that there was a push-to-walk-through-able possibility, as it were. I recall what kinds of things were immanent, what to brace for, what I recognize as invitation-to-do-x-y-z.

It’s not that the visual channel is replaced by another sensory mode (such as auditory input), but that “inputs” or “impressions” are not the right metaphor… It’s not like watching a movie, but more like being a decision-maker in a predicament (or in a positive fantasy), and being aware of the relational factors that shape my decision-scape.

#13

I generally have very little recollection of my dreams, but when I do remember them, it’s largely in terms of abstract concepts or narrative — thus, like Scott, the same way I remember anything else.

I wouldn’t say I have to mentally verbalize visual details to remember them (actually, my “inner narrator” seems to be less consistent than many people describe, unless I’m performing a specifically verbal task like composing a text). And I have quite a strong grasp of color (when it’s in front of me), and strong opinions on aesthetics and visual design in general, so I might notice a detail like that and retain it in the short term even if I didn’t think the words “green dress”. In the longer term, though, it would almost certainly be lost to me unless I’d consciously considered it… and I wouldn’t be able to “replay” the scene to refresh my memory of such details, the way some of my friends say they can.

Perhaps relatedly, my autobiographical memory is also quite weak; I remember the facts and the general narrative, but it’s hard for me to retain specific experiences unless I was exceptionally “present” at the time… and even then, I’m more likely to remember the act of thinking (and perhaps the emotions I was feeling, in the abstract) than any sensory information.

I do get earworms, though, and I can “play” familiar music in my head. Spoken voices aren’t quite as reproducible as singing… and I can hear accents, but I don’t seem to retain enough to reproduce them unless I’ve consciously noted the phonological phenomena at work.

#14

No, there’s much more about abstract relationships than there is about words and sounds. I have a much better recall of rhythms and melodies than of colors and textures, but even that’s not great. (Although with @etardiff, I’m very subject to earworms, annoyingly so, since fewer than half of them are for songs I actually enjoy!)

If I were to explain a dream to you, it might sound like this: “So three of us were moving through this long hallway, with doors on both sides. We kept looking for something; I can’t recall what exactly. Nancy was there for most of the time, and at one point Paul and Jason joined us. But we couldn’t check all the doors, so we did only some of them. One room was full of pencils; floor to ceiling pencils. Another had a large swimming pool, and dozens of naked people were swimming in it. All sorts of weird things. But we needed this – oh damn, I almost remembered what it was – this whatever desperately. So we kept moving. The doors were not opposite one another, but staggered. However, there were some gaps where we would expect a door to be. I started to wonder about that, and said something, and you said – oh didn’t I say you were there too? Well you were at the end, anyway – and you said, maybe there are hidden doors. That’s when I woke up. I wish I could remember what we were looking for…”

You’ll note that there are no real descriptions here. If I noticed the color of the walls or the timbre of your voice in my dreams, it’s not there when I recall it. But I can recall it in the details that matter to me. The pattern of the doorways is much more memorable than the colors or visual textures.

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#15

Thanks @Springer . You have certainly a better grasp of how you experience reality than I do for myself. Wow.

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#16

I’d say your dream description is exactly how I would describe mine as well. Maybe that means it is the same or maybe any differences are just left out of the description. But then you do recall the “pattern of the doorways” in, what I interpret to be, a visual sense.

Anyway, interesting stuff :slight_smile:

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#17

Some years ago I read the book ‘born on a blue day’ by the savant Daniel Tammet and released for the first time that some could visualize things in there minds. (I could not). So I tried really hard for a long time to see images with my eyes close, unfortunately this led me to develop synesthesia - I started to see music as moving kaleidoscopic images. Although very pretty they were intrusive, fortunately they eventual went away after I stopped try to force myself to see mental images. I now can visualize images a little bit, but my main way of ‘visualizing’ is by feeling the layout of space, I can ‘imagine’ scenes by remember the feeling of their spacial layouts.

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#18

You too? Maybe it is not uncommon…
According to Brave browsers built in AI;

According to various studies, aphantasia is estimated to affect around 3.9% of the general population

1 in 25. Pretty common then! I wonder if it is the same with “mental imagination” from other senses?

Oh! I’ve only heard of synesthesia in the context of it being an advantage, but I can see how it distracts if one is not used to it.

#19

Article and discussion on Aphantasia :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138338

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#20

Thank you. I’d seen the Quanta article yesterday, but the HackerNews thread is new, and extremely interesting, at least so far, although I’m only about a quarter of the way through the very lengthy list of comments.