Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

Skepticism is healthy, but there is an overwhelming body of evidence that visual imagination is real. Even if you don't take people's testimony as proof, MRI scans demonstrate that areas of the brain associated with visual processing engage when people imagine visually. Disbelieving all of this simply because it doesn't match with your own personal experience of mind is bordering on arrogance.

I do think visual imagination varies greatly, even amongst those who have it. Mine is not particularly strong — everything I imagine is very "shadowy" and ill-defined, but nonetheless it is there. It is hard to describe such an intangible phenomenon, but imagining/remembering visually feels qualitatively different from imagining/remembering facts, sounds, words, etc.

For example, I can imagine the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, and when I do, I "see" the painting in my mind. This imagined image is far from clear or sharp, more like a fuzzy ghost of the original. Also, the imagined image is separate from the sensory input I'm receiving from my eyes. I don't see the van Gogh painting plastered over whatever I'm looking at. Instead, it's as if the two images coexist in my conscious awareness, although it takes a deliberate effort to maintain the imagined one, and the image from my eyes is much stronger and clearer. Closing my eyes can help me focus more easily on the imagined image.

My dreams are similarly lo-fi, visually speaking. The best way I can describe is that everything in my dreams is very poorly lit. It's like being in a darkened room, where you can see objects, but can't make out their details. This tends to frustrate me, and I often spend a lot of my time in dreams trying to address the problem by reaching some more brightly lit environment, and then getting confused as to why I still cannot see properly.

Surprised no one's linked this yet: SSC's "what universal human experiences are you missing out on without realizing it", which describes this phenomenon in particular:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...

Basically, there are a lot of cases where people assume something is part of everyone's internal experience but which can be refuted with detailed, literal comparisons of your first person accounts.

For me, it was alcohol. I have never actually liked it, in the sense of "enjoying the sensation of drinking it". The best drinks to me are merely "bearable". I always assumed everyone was pretending as some excuse to get drunk.

The one that surprised me the most was the inability to replay music in your head. Probably because I do that a lot.

Here's a series of things you could try.

- Sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" out loud.

- Do it again silently -- don't vocalize -- but keep moving your mouth, lips and tongue. If you're like me, you'll also still feel your throat and vocal chords moving.

- Do it again silently, without moving your lips, but still move your tongue and vocal chords.

- Do it again silently, but keep your tongue still, just move your vocal chords silently.

- Do it again, entirely silently, in your head.

I'd be interested to learn which steps are hard for you. When I'm singing a song "in my head" I'm actually doing any one of the latter three actions.

Relatedly, when I'm talking to myself in my head -- which I do often, usually while reliving an old conversation or anticipating a new one -- I often do the throat and tongue motions. Occasionally I even do the mouth motions, which is a good way to get people to look at you strangely :)

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery.

I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible.

And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see sheep?

Notwithstanding my apparently poorly functioning mind's eye, I've never had any problem with spatial reasoning, and have scored +2sd in tests with a spatial ability component. I find myself able to "feel" the forms in a way that seems to have nothing to do with vision.

Does anybody else recognize this experience?

Absolutely, sadly. But it nudged me into trying to find a real test, so in that sense it served its purpose fully.