Aphantasia Beginner's Guide • Hacker News Board

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#311

Post by jibal » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

jpfromlondon wrote: post #178

andrewla wrote: post #120

It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…

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 mentio…

> Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object

Prove it.

> If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means.

This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated.

> irrationally annoyed

Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident.

> I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking

You suspect a lot of things based on no evidence whatsoever.

> some people I've met mention it every chance they get angling at it being some sort of disability

How is being able to see things in one's mind's eye a disability? Ah, but you meant the opposite -- your whole framework is irrational, baseless, intellectually dishonest, bad faith, and indeed quite annoying.

> I get it, you don't see anything...I don't see anything either...nobody does.

Again, it was the claim that people do see things that you were rejecting. You can't keep track of your own argument because it's irrational and devoid of evidence or logic.

I won't respond again.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#312

Post by strken » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

ToyKeeper wrote: post #273

I know someone with aphantasia. It's absolutely wild to me that he can't see things in his head. Totally alien from my perspective, since I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I see what's in my head so vividly that I often won't see things in real life which are right in front of me. But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Re…

I believe some people have aphantasia and hyperphantasia, but a lot of people who claim they have either are somewhere on the bell curve between them.

I also suspect that some of the people who think they have aphantasia could learn. I personally am not good at visualising and don't naturally do it, but these days I can imagine a not very good apple if I try hard, and I trained this by building on my existing ability to imagine the tactile feel of holding an apple and on spatial awareness.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#313

Post by jibal » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

throwawaythekey wrote: post #298

andrewla wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365 ) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing. I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this…

If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default? Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset. One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry in…

> If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?

Indeed, that acknowledgement by the GP undermines his entire argument:

> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.

What he and others here don't grasp is that we see with our brains, and the signals that the brain processes do not have to come from the eyeballs.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#314

Post by nomel » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:30 AM UTC

techgnosis wrote: post #292

ToyKeeper wrote: post #273

I know someone with aphantasia. It's absolutely wild to me that he can't see things in his head. Totally alien from my perspective, since I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I see what's in my head so vividly that I often won't see things in real life which are right in front of me. But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Re…

I'm one of the naysayers denying aphantasia in the comments. Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantic…

> zero evidence besides a self-reported experience

There are clear differences in brain scans [1].

[1] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/01/mind-blindness...

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#315

Post by metabagel » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

case540 wrote: post #260

ozten wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.

I was good at mechanical drawing in college, meaning I could visualize the view of something from different sides. But, generally there was a perspective to work off of.

I don’t have aphantasia, but I believe I have reduced ability to visualize things with accuracy and in detail. My visualizations are very imperfect and more like glimpses than strong visualizations. In particular, I struggle to visualize faces.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#316

Post by jaggederest » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

estearum wrote: post #291

andrewla wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365

Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.

I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)

It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.

I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#317

Post by selcuka » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #306

techgnosis wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the naysayers denying aphantasia in the comments. Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantic…

It was funny to watch this discussion turn from skepticism at the top to then a bunch of proponents moving in and crowding out the rational voices. It feels a bit religious to me, at least unscientific, there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions, and so people seem to dig in on their sides more than if there was a real basis for comparison. I default to not believing in it until there is…

I'm not sure how the examples given in this thread, such as brain scans, are "unscientific" while simply saying "nah, I believe everybody else is exactly like me" is "rational voice"?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#318

Post by jaggederest » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #172

andrewla wrote: post #120

It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…

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 th…

> Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see.

Okay, so people can't see a bicycle when it's in front of them either, point granted.

How does that prevent people from precisely replicating that phenomenon in their mind, and why does that not count?

Regardless of how you define "seeing", people can do it in their brains, and their visual cortexes light up. It's a bell curve phenomenon, so the average person can't draw a bicycle, some people can't picture a bicycle at all, and some people can describe the rust on their 1969 Schwinn in detail.

How is any of that falsification of the idea of internal visualization?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#319

Post by jaggederest » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:47 AM UTC

jawns wrote: post #250

antonvs wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t. Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”. Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If…

Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane. So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.

That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#320

Post by zeofig » Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

estearum wrote: post #290

D-Machine wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.

Yeah, this is a valid critique of the whole internal monologue idea, but interestingly aphantasia has been quite empirically confirmed and the simple apple test has been validated!

I don't consider self-reported nonsense to be empirical confirmation. There can be correlations between different self-reports, that doesn't mean that our idea of why those correlations exist is correct.