The most astounding thing to me (able to form mental images just fine thanks) is that aphantasia does not cause more problems. Naively I would have assumed such a condition would cause problems navigating abstract problems, nearly as badly as actual blindness impairs physical navigation.
Some people can't see mental images
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Re: Some people can't see mental images
#12> He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.
Do you see them in dreams? I normally struggle to visualize things but when I'm half asleep my imagination suddenly has color and detail that normally doesn't happen when I try to picture stuff
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#13Is this related to internal monologue? I don't see mentioned in my view.
Yeah, aphantasia is talked about a lot but similarly whether people have an internal monologue, and to what degree, varies a lot. But they're not necessarily highly correlated, if at all.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#14I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
I was thinking the same! At first, I thought I was firmly in the “can clearly visualize” camp, but the more I read and hear people describe how they form (or don't) mental images, the less sure I am.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#15I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
I’ve interrogated people about this but can never get a straight answer.
——
“So you can really see things in your head when your eyes are closed?”
Yeah!
“And it’s as though you’re seeing the object in front of you?”
Yeah, you don’t have that?
“So it’s like you’re really seeing it? It’s the sensation of sight?“
Well… it’s kind of different. I’m not really seeing it.
——
…and around we go.
Personally, I can see images when I dream, but I don’t see anything at all if I’m conscious and closing my eyes. I can recite the qualities of an object, and this generates impressions of the object in my head, but it’s not really seeing. It’s vibe seeing.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#16I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
If you have something to describe "in your mind's eye" then you don't have aphantasia. We can't "see" anything in our mind.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#17I developed aphantasia around 13 after a series of heart procedures where I had to be under.
Evaluating qualia in others is extremely difficult/philosophically impossible, I have pre/post expierence with both states of being.
I can still somewhat conjure up imagery from prior to the procedure series, it almost feels like I can see them, my mother's face, my father face, kinda of, it did not effect my dreams or ability to have imagery in my edge of dreaming state, not immediately at least.
I went from being very imaginative to trying to surf that half awake state in the mornings because it was such a loss.
At this point it's all mostly gone. My memory is entirely text strings now.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#18I wonder what happens when you e.g. flash a 5 digit number to a person with aphantasia for say 0.1 seconds. Can they read it from memory? Or are they worse at this task than people with mental imagery? How about mentally rotating 3D objects?
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#19> He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. This is the quintessential aphantasic experience. I still struggle to believe that other people "see" things in their heads.
Do you see them in dreams? I normally struggle to visualize things but when I'm half asleep my imagination suddenly has color and detail that normally doesn't happen when I try to picture stuff
I can't speak about my immediate experience of dreams because I'm not dreaming right now, but when I remember my dreams I remember them the same way I remember anything else, which is to say, without mentally reproducing any visual component of the memory.
Re: Some people can't see mental images
#20I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
It might be easier to think in terms of what you can actually achieve with your visualization.
I am terrible at visual art because I struggle to picture what I am drawing before I draw it. When I do calculus problems, I have to write down in full every intermediate step because I can't visualize how the equations change more than one or two steps in the future.
Those kinds of things seem to me like more objective measures of someone's ability to visualize, although I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence to back that up.