I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.

A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.

So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.

I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.

I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.

Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.

> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue?

Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.

If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.

So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I spent my entire life thinking that "picture {something}" is just a figure of speech. And the fact that this phrase (with several variations) exist in all languages I speak kind of always flew over my head. From everything I read, there's no consensus on what is really going on for those of us that have it.

One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?

I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes.

If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.

I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.

It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes.

I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight.

It’s almost like remembering the experience of seeing it, or inventing a new memory of seeing it.

A good analogy for the difference between seeing and visualizing... speaking a statement is to thinking a statement as seeing a thing is to visualizing the thing.

This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.

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.

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...

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?

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.

> 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 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.

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 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

"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.

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 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.

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...

Well, all that says is that something that is activated by seeing something can be activate by other means (and that some lack this). What does it mean to "see something" in the mind's eye? For me it triggers a similar response to if I saw it, but I certainly do not see it. I see a lot of people that believe they have aphantasia just because they don't actually see things when they imagine them and this "aphantasia test" should be truthfully answered by "everyone" that they do not see it.

On the other hand, I can do hypnagogic meditation where I am on the verge of falling asleep, and something like visual dreams start before actually falling asleep, and in that case I can actually see things as if I saw them with my eyes, and I can look at details and so on.

On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't!

And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.

Yes, some of it can be quite wild, especially dreams but most of it isn't. The fun part of it is being able to place people in funny situations. Many people just do a rewind and visualise real life events from earlier.

Most of the visualisation I do is extremely mundane, like if I'm planning a route or doing something with the garden.

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.

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.

I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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))

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.

It's just some vague image. Only outstanding features like shape and color are recognizable. Probably how brain processes and stores these visual data.

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 think the apple is just a small example to enable comparison.

People that actually have aphantasia will know from a lifetime of experiences (like thinking "counting sheep" is a metaphor), but might not know that the condition now has a name or that most others have a different experience.

On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."

(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)

But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).

If I am to believe that I am a visualizer. No, not really. With the negative "after image" it's almost like an artifact in your physical vision. More like seeing a floater IMO. But with the "mind's eye" it's completely non-physical. I can imagine an apple like I would see it with my eyes just strictly in my brain, but I can't "see" it. There is no visual output. It's very bizarre to put into words. I think of it like AR/VR. I can overlay objects onto my physical world.. AR. But I can also just think and manipulate things in some imaginary brain space... VR

I don't know how other people experience it, but it's not like a full-blown hallucination as the exercise would imply. Personally I experience it as something in between the concept of an object and the perception of an instance of one.

If someone says they're looking for a purse I would still have some ambiguity, visually represented, about the material, color, texture, shape and size, type of clasp, if it has a strap or a chain attached to it, if it was new or showed wear, if it appeared to be ful or empty and flat...

No, it is nothing like retinal fatigue, which is what they are referencing in that sentence.

The later section on "What Do Most Visualizers See?" is a better description, although the level of detail is highly dependent on effort, and lack of distraction.

And I'd argue that detail is not particularly important as the visualization is just there to represent conceptual things.

Sort of. For me it’s more like seeing out of a third eye (while also seeing out of your real eyes). Like how if you put your finger right in front of your face, you can see two images of it at once. With concentration I can ignore what my real eyes are seeing to prioritize the visualization, but the real eyes are constantly pulling my concentration back.

Not for me. My memories, fantasies, thoughts just look like movies. If I get deep into thought it takes over my whole perception and I don't see the world around me at all. Kind of scary when I get home from work and realize I was lost in thought and can't remember the drive.

You might find it interesting to read up a bit on blindsight and the neural plasticity of the congenitally blind.

E.g. fMRI experiments on some such people show rich activation of the visual cortex when the blind person is going about and space and hearing and feeling things. This could just mean that region has been recruited to do non-visual processing, but it could also be that the visual cortex is producing strange and unimaginable images in their mind's eye in response to sounds and feelings, such that they are really literally "seeing" sound and such.

> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it.

Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were insanely impressive.

Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have.

And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46.

The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.

I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid.

Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick.

My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.

I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.

Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.

I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.

I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"

When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.

> it opened my eyes to many things

Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.

I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had".

And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D

> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.

This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.

Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)

It depends on if when you visualize e.g. an "8", you visualize something like a lemniscate turned 90 degrees, or e.g. visualize a number line, e.g. maybe a straight line with dashes at the 7, 8, 9, and with these dashes having e.g. some visual label, and so on.

I.e. if your "visualization" of eight is something like a picture, such that I can show you various pictures and you can say "yes, my visualization is sort of like drawing A, but also has such and such elements from drawing B", and so on, then, yes, this is clearly not total aphantasia. But if no such picture could ever have any similarity to your visualization, and you are somehow just experiencing some kind of non-pictorial "logic content" here, then, yeah, that sounds pretty aphantasic to me.

We still have memory, it is just not visual. I forget what they call it, I think it is structural memory. But yes, we certainly laugh. It is only visual memory loss, not memory loss.

The only test they have somewhat developed is a pupil test. When you tell someone with Aphantasia to imagine an apple their pupils do not change.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.

It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.

But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.

I would say taste and touch are my strongest recall senses. I can still remember the experience of my favorite sandwich at a local sandwich shop, discontinued around 2009.

For the apple test, while I can visualize the image of one, it's much easier to imagine the sensations associated with biting into one. The taste, the texture against my teeth, the stickiness of the juices, etc.

> There are some theories that aphantasia allows complicated dreams like this as it is a difference between involuntary and voluntary, but then are controlled dreams truly involuntary?

N of 1, but I do not have aphantasia and I regularly have vivid, complex dreams. So maybe aphantasia influences things here, but it's hardly a requirement (as you write with "allows") for them.

Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.