10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
These topics are always some of the hardest for me to fully comprehend. There’s also always going to be at least 1% of me that suspects you’re all lying or just don’t realize that you do have the same abilities as everyone else, but that’s likely just my brain trying to cope with what I just truly can’t understand. It’s not even first nature, it’s instinctual rooted in me that I hear this voice in my head and see these images and sounds and all sorts of stuff. However I think the closest I can get to relating is when someone recently told me their thoughts and dreams are vividly colored… vividly colored? No sir, my thoughts and dreams are barely colored, sort of more like it’s all in sepia color and dull. Almost like old black and white TV, but a bit of color. So now I know I’m missing something I’ve never had. This became a ramble, I just woke up, sorry!
Sounds as well??? Well ffs. Other than my internal voice which I don’t hear so much as know it’s there, I can’t imagine sounds. I’m a fairly capable instrument player but I wouldn’t consider myself a musician. I can’t imagine sounds though. Like I’m trying to imagine a kick snare but there’s no sound, I just know what they sound like.
I can’t even picture my child’s face if I shut my eyes and try to conjure it up. If I shut my eyes hard enough I get like grey # kinda vision, but pretty sure that’s just pressure on my eyes.
Oh man that’s awful, I can definitely imagine sounds vividly, I can create a scene and hear everything in my head. Now I feel like it would be miserable to suddenly lose this. For some reason my mind jumped to a war zone and now I’m picturing guns and explosions and I can definitely hear them in my head.
Man, I couldve written that, I understand you so much
I wonder why your dreams are not vividly colored?
I used to try for lucid dreaming. Had some successful attempts. One thing that always woke me up from them was doing something too far outside my physical experiences. I could never fly like superman. But I could kind of float like I was in water sometimes. I tried to breathe underwater during these dreams a few times. It always woke me up. Until I got scuba certified. Now that I had had experience breathing underwater in real life, all the sudden that was fair game for the lucid dreams.
So my guess is your perception and processing of the world is somehow dull. I wonder if like those glasses that help some color blind people experience color would help shift that, or maybe time in a hyper saturated VR experience.
Also, one theory I have had is that it has a little to do with what I watched as a kid. I read somewhere that before color TV, many people dreamed in black and white. While I didn’t grow up in that time period, I DID watch a ton of shows from that time period with my grandma as a kid, stuff like I Love Lucy, The Munsters, etc. The way those shows looked is kind of how my dreams look and I think it’s why. The fact I also mixed in cartoons here and there is probably why I have any color to my dreams at all.
I didn’t want to dive too much into dreams because it’s a whole separate bee hive, but since you brought it up: I’m not in control of my dreams. At least not the ones when I’m sleeping. When I’m sleeping my dreams are like a movie reel that I watch, 99% of the time in first person, but I’ve had a couple where I watch myself as well. My day dreaming and imagining is completely in my control, but when I’m asleep I’ve never had any amount of control, or even realization that I am in fact dreaming. It’s just watching a movie without any play/pause/rewind/fast forward.
On the good side, we’re much less affected by trauma, because we’re not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there’s that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
So when Stormy Daniels described Trump as having “yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart” you didn’t get a perfect(ly traumatizing) image of that in your mind?
Also, we can torment visualizers with words like “moist”, and describing disgusting things that they “see” in their heads, while we’re unaffected.
Don’t you dare. I have this especially bad when someone mentions a medical condition or an operation they underwent. Anything involving cutting, implanting, or anything of the sort makes it feel extremely real to me.
Someone once mentioned off-hand about having a couple of screws in their leg bone and I started to imagine myself in their position on the operating table. It’s not a fun experience.
What’s the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
One of the reasons I smoke marijuana is so that my dreams chill out. When I’m not smoking I can wake up still feeling tired because my dreams were too intense.
Is it called the same thing if you can’t visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife’s. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child’s face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can’t remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
Look up face blindness. I have that and some level of aphantasia too.
I lost my mom recently and it makes me sad that i can’t see her in my head. I ‘meet’ the same people repeatedly. I’m worried that i won’t recognize my family one day.
I think I have this.
It’s hard for me to communicate online to my coworkers who do not have a profile picture. And then when I do meet them in person, I don’t recognise them straight away the next time I pass by them (or worse, in a social function).
The ways I remember people by are their mannerisms and everything else about them, except for their physical appearance. But because people change styles and environments change, it’s hard to instantly recognise them on the third or more times I see them.
Wait. So when you look in a mirror it’s a surprise every time? Im also unable to draw myself, but that’s more of a drawingskill issue than anything else I guess…
Yes, in fact if I look in the mirror and close my eyes, I forget what I look like in about a second, or two… maybe much quicker. Timing the brain is hard to do on yourself.
Yeah, it’s not a skill issue. I am not super great at drawing, but I can get a rough sketch of someone in front of me or a picture. But I could never realistically draw myself without a picture or image, nor could I draw anyone else without that or them being right in front of me.
That’s really interesting. I don’t have this condition but I wear glasses all of the time I can’t see without them, but if I were to think about what I looked like I don’t actually include the glasses.
But in my case it’s more that they’re just not part of my mental image of myself than the fact that they don’t know what I look like.
I think it’s really cool you can see yourself in your mind. I was blown away when I found out thats normal. If I want to try to picture myself I kind of have to build the image, and it comes out like a shoddy police sketch of myself than anything close to a mental image.
So I can have glasses or not, because I am not viewing, I am creating. It’s kind of like learning how to sketch for basics. First you make a generic face, then I add the facial features I know I have, and then come up with a generalization. But it’s different every time I do it, and looks far more like a generic man, then it looks like myself.
This happens to me too, but isn’t it normal?
Drawing or mirror? Drawing might be, but not knowing what you or others look like without viewing them is not “normal”
Man, they let that bum in here… Again…
Lol imagine not being able to picture things in your head. Oh wait…
So not exactly the subject, but: when I am about to fall asleep/ extremely tired / just woke up, my «phantasia» ability gets multiplied like by an order of magnitude. I can literally picture any object in perfect details from any angle. It only lasts for about a minute tho, then it fades away, and it all becomes kinda boring and not that exceptionally good.
It’s like I have access to a new hardware acceleration for a minute
I have this!
And sometimes when I am in that mode, I can close my eyes and still see the room perfectly (including correct rotation/translation as I’m sat up in bed with my eyes closed and moving me head around like an idiot)
It’s great fun, I wish it could always be like this
I used to do a lot of visualizing meditation. I can get myself to the point where I could imagine a different room all together (for meditation it was always the same fantasy “place” so that made it easier). When I was really into it I could change the perceived orientation of gravity. That is, when I was lying in bed I could sometimes complete the hallucination that I was standing in that “room”. That typically lasted only a few seconds but it was pretty wild.
I’ve had this too but in music. I have no training or ability to write and can barely play easy piano music. But just on the edge of sleep, I feel like I can compose piano pieces that are beautiful and complex. The tune swirls in my head as I add a harmony to go with the melody.
Of course, having no way to write them down, even the tune is quickly lost. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing and it was just nonsense sounds. Who knows?
I definitely have had this exact thing happen to me several times as well.
This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me. I’ve always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I’ve never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia. I don’t understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there’s a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It’s not that my memory is particularly good but I can “synthesize” shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I’ll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it’s incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven’t found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I’m also one of those people that’s terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone’s name and face within minutes of meeting them. I’ve started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I’m supposed to know and run through them every night. It’s a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I’m one of those people that never forgets a face.
It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I’ve never heard before. I can play that enough times to “drive out” the other one but not enough to “light up” the new one and I’m fine.
Ahhh finally I have met someone who understands the curse of an eidetic memory for sounds. Earworms can be absolutely maddening when your brain is playing the Cheeky Girls song on a loop for days.
Very interesting that you have a good visual mind but still struggle to remember names and faces. Have you ever tried using mnemonic techniques for memory, eg linking a name to something amusing, or a memory palace? Can’t remember the whole string anymore but about a decade ago I memorised the 8-digit alphanumeric code for my train ticket to prove a point. BG96 is all I have these days (big goat with 9 horns and 6 legs). Apparently the sillier the story, the easier it is to remember (something to do with brain responding to novelty).
Are you referring to Method of Loci? I’ve experimented with it a bit. For a while I would do daily mental walk-throughs of the apartment I grew up in and I practiced visualizing symbols for the 10 digits. After a few months I was able to successfully remember some pretty long numbers. Ironically, I don’t remember how long they were. It wasn’t that useful though. It took me a really long time to “store” numbers; longer than it would to just write it down. I didn’t have a system for storing anything besides digits. Worst of all, the “memory space” was limited to the size of my old apartment. I was able to increase the space by adding detail to rooms but it was never enough to be practical for anything besides trivia. Strangely the repeated “walk-throughs” ended up bringing back memories of smells and textures that I hadn’t thought about in decades
I think I’m much better at remembering and imaging things that can be easily articulated. I recognize my wife with no problem but I can’t really summon a good mental image of her. We have a photo of the night we met. I can visualize details of the clothing and jewelry she was wearing but when I “look” at the image in my mind I can’t really see her face. It’s hard to describe. Almost like there’s an image with a tag that says “link to wife’s face here” without actually loading it. When I really concentrate on it I can wither get a really blurry image of her face, a really zoomed in image, or a sort of “line art” version of her face. I don’t have real prosopagnosia. I can recognize faces, it just takes many more exposures than it does for most people.
And here I am, just cluing into how the Disney movie “Fantasia” is literally artistic visual interpretations of old classic music. Maybe they say that in the movie? Blew my own mind here.
Wow, that’s really cool. I was a little kid when I saw it so memory is very hazy, perhaps I should watch it as an adult with a career in music production, knowing what you’ve just told me I might have a different reaction to it. Thanks for the info.
I’m aphantasic for sure, I think I’m even entirely mind-blind so to speak, I can’t imagine smells, tastes, sounds, images, or textures.
I can still dream and I can even recall the details vividly the morning of, but I suspect myself of being on the autism spectrum as I’ve always been super obsessed with finer details. Besides those recollections aren’t in a mental image, it’s more so concepts.
When I think of an apple I know the physiology of an apple and thus I can discern the details onto paper (albeit crudely as I’m not artist) but I’ve always suffered with geometry since rotating a shape in my head is impossible, algebraic translations, flips, etc across the x or y axis are also super difficult for me to grasp. But I can deal with arithmetic easier.
In terms of getting better at it? I’m not really in an environment or situation where I could safely test out hallucinogens, but with my ADHD on top of suspected autism, I really don’t think I want to see images in my head. In 2019 I had my deepest dive into depression, and while I was having a 2am panic attack (the peak of my depression I’d say) where I had endless racing thoughts just coming at me from all directions. The “noise” of my own thoughts overpowered everything. If I could imagine sound (and by extension, voices) beyond my own I might have actually gone farther than a 2 second peak of “I want to die”.
flips, etc across the x or y axis are also super difficult for me to grasp
Very familiar with this. It doesn’t matter how many times I use a vertical / horizontal flip in programs like photoshop / after effects, I rarely pick the right one first go.
The “noise” of my own thoughts overpowered everything. If I could imagine sound (and by extension, voices) beyond my own I might have actually gone farther than a 2 second peak of “I want to die”
That’s the negative side (everlasting earworms are another for me, as I have eidetic memory for sounds). I use inner sound to help me sleep, as I can’t visualise numbers as suggested. Instead I try my hardest to visualise them and make a boring computer voice in my head say the number out loud. Also having Morgan Freeman as a temporary internal narrator was pretty cool while it lasted!
The voice actress of the Narrator in Baldur’s Gate 3 Amelia Tyler said in a recent interview that her aphantasia has helped her in being a better actress, because she thinks of situations and stuff in terms of emotions. So that way she could get really well into the heads of the characters she played.
Was probably in one or both of these videos:
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I’m kinda the same way but at times I feel like I can think up of something completely random that I’ve never seen and can imagine it in perfect detail
From my amateur independent digging I actually found people fall into three groups on this, not two:
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Aphantasia - Not being able to visualize 8at all*
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What I consider “regular” visualization, ie a “minds eye” or “back of the mind” sort of thing, that’s distinctly different from how you normally see visually with your eyes.
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Prophantasia - In which you can visualize things that appear to you how simply looking at something would appear.
I saw someone on reddit apparently go from aphantasia to prophantasia but people were calling BS on them. I’m in group 2 myself and would love to be able to do prophantasia. So I’m curious if anyone has managed it?
Okay wait.
My time spent in a custom job shop wondering why people are such morons may have just clicked into place. I spent a few years of my life drawing things in CAD software for clients–most of the software I used created solids in a default bland grey. And some variation of the following conversation would always happen.
“Here’s what I got.”
“It’s not going to be grey, is it?”
“…No, I’m going to build it out of wood, it’ll look like wood.”
“But it doesn’t look like wood, it’s grey.”
“That’s the computer model, I was focused on the shapes and dimensions.”
“I can’t see it unless it’s brown like wood.”
I spent the whole time thinking the world was just full of retrotards who went to business school for so long they literally can’t imagine “This, but brown.” You’re telling me this is congenital?
I was an aerospace machinist in a past life and I’m aphantasic. Never was it a hindrance in me making parts. You were just having a conversation with an idiot, which makes sense because shops seem to hire a lot of them.
There’s a difference between understanding “this isn’t going to be what it looks like, it’ll look like wood” and actually being able to visualize and “see” the wood version in your head prior to completion.
So looking at your grey version, someone with aphantasia (who isn’t a moron) might be like “I can’t visualize/imagine it as wood, could I see what that looks like?”, as in they understand it will be wood, but may have no clue what that actually looks like until it’s in front of them.
What you’re describing just sounds like a run of the mill idiot who also may have aphantasia.
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Here’s an online test to see if you’re affected https://aphantasia.com/vviq/
im going pray for you 🙏
There’s probably more productive ways you can help people in the real world. Soup kitchens & charity shops are almost always looking for volunteers!
