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Aphantasia: A life without mental images

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Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#51

Post by m_i_s_t »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #45
cottonseed wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rarely, if ever, and never as images. If your dreams are like movies, mine are like stumbling through a dark house.

@cottonseed, @sall, @x3n How do you remember faces or your house, or your car?

This is not about memory, it is about what you can access consciously. Those of us who have no image in our minds have memories of our houses, cars, friends, etc. just like you do (as far as I know!), they are just not part of our conscious experience. If you want to relate to this, think of language processing: you are not aware of how your brain parses the sentences you hear, though you still have access to the meaning that is produced by that parsing. We don't have access to the visual images, but they are there somewhere and can be used by our memory system. (ps. I suspect that getting images to reach consciousness or not is not just a random 'accident', but rather reflects a more generally different brain organisation -- just not wrt memory having access to visual representations or not)

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#52

Post by m_i_s_t »

chime wrote: post #41
saalweachter wrote: post #40

Is there a more objective test than telling someone to visualize something and then asking, "Well, could you visualize it?"? For instance, are there visual tasks a person with or without aphantasia objectively could not perform? Like a psych 101 student, I immediately think I have a touch of any vaguely described mental condition, but I also know I probably don't.

How about this - Picture an elephant sideways. Don't let the elephant move. Is the trunk on the left or on the right side? If they can't answer, then it's possible they have Aphantasia.

That's easy to answer without images. Either by reasoning your way out of it, or more plausibly, with this kind of 'geometrical imagery' that comes instead of images. I 'see' a sort of figure-stick elephant and can tell you immediately where the trunk is. Maybe a test involving details of pictures would fare better?

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#53

Post by m_i_s_t »

carlton7 wrote: post #35

This is fascinating. I took the quiz and had to select "No image at all" for all the questions. I always knew I had trouble picturing things, but never realized others didn't also have a hard time. Strangely, I can play back songs in my head nearly perfectly, almost as if I was listening to them.

Ha! I thought everyone without images had a sort of stylized geometric visualization instead of images, but maybe different people 'substitute' differently, some with music, some with geometry, some with ??

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

kazinator wrote: post #26

> Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind? Very clear; I see some cons cells, making up a list, whose CAR holds the symbol BEACH, the main connective of an abstract syntax tree describing the whole situation.

Master, let me be your padawan. Teach me Your ways, for my path is twisted and I see now I am yet to reach the Enlightenment.

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#55

Post by tempestn »

I think I have a mild version of this. I can picture things, but it generally takes a fair bit of effort and concentration to get decent detail if the thing is complex, and it's a fleeting image. Especially picturing people's faces is difficult. I can get like.. an idea of the person's face, so I know I'd recognize it if I saw it, but I rarely see a picture of their face in my head.

I do have normal visual dreams though, which apparently many people with full-on Aphantasia don't. And I can picture and manipulate geometric objects in my head, that kind of thing.

Again, I guess it's mostly that my mental images tend to be vague and indistinct. I really wasn't aware that some (apparently most!) people see perfectly clear mental photographs of things. Now I'm trying to figure out how I haven't noticed the lack of this ability more! It seems pretty significant.

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#56

Post by irremediable »

Interesting! I think I have this, though I didn't know there was a name for it. I don't imagine things visually at all -- I just kind of "feel" things. I also have a limited degree of something like touch-synaesthesia... music, mathematics and emotions have some strong haptic associations for me.

And I'm terrible at recognising faces, but pretty good at remembering facts.

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#57

Post by brotchie »

rndn wrote: post #47
brotchie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, I always thought that what you've described was the universal experience of mental visualization. A combination of wireframes / blueprints / spatial relationships. When I think of my living room I can very clearly place where the couch is, its three dimensional form, what's next to it, the colour of the couch. However, when I recall these things in my head it's almost like I recall a "couch" object with a certa…

I'm wondering whether work with 3D modeling software can improve that. I used to play a lot with Blender when I was young and my brain has clearly installed some sort of graphics engine as a result. I can easily imagine specific perspectives in my room, rotate objects in ~10 degree steps and tweak the point of view. It's surprisingly difficult to translate objects by a small amount though. It also takes a while until…

Interestingly, I'm pretty good at mental rotations, thinking of complex shapes, etc though I don't actually "see" the objects in my "minds-eye". They still remain abstract concepts.

The only analogy I can draw is this:

Imagine these "concepts" in your head:

    Recursion
    Monad
    Quantitative Easing
They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understanding of the concept, yet I don't see it as a picture (I assume that most people don't actually see it as a picture, but perhaps they do).

Now, when I think of things like:

    A Dog
    Flower
    Sunset
I still think of them as abstract concepts. Like the activations in my mind when thinking of "recursion" are of the same kind as when I think of "flower". If I really focus strongly on thinking of a dog, I get a really fuzzy "flash" of a visualization of a dog, but it's in no way "image-like". When I do this I can feel my brain really really working hard and it's mentally tiring.

Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#58

Post by tempestn »

gojomo wrote: post #32
Paul_S wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled as well. I had no idea people could do that. I thought that was called hallucination. I can remember images, I can't see them. I think I'm missing the point somewhere.

Can you draw things from memory, and get the general shapes and colors right?

I'm not particularly skilled at drawing, but otherwise I'm fairly sure I could do that. I can remember all the major visual details of something like a room in my house, for example. But it's still not really like 'seeing' a picture of it in my head, except for little bits at a time, or a somewhat hazy collection of the whole. If I really focus it's a bit better, but some people seem to be able to just "see" memories by default.

Also, most of the time I have a lot of difficulty pulling up a mental image of a face, even one I know well, or holding onto it if I do manage to briefly capture it. (But I don't seem to have any particular difficulty recognizing people by their faces; I'm not picking out features or anything like that -- I definitely remember faces and what they look like; I just can't see an image of a particular face in my mind (clearly, most of the time).

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#59

Post by richardjdare »

DanBC wrote: post #49

If you have aphantasia, and wantto describe it to someone else: try asking them to picture "democracy" or some other abstract concept. Most people don't then have mental images of ballot papers or flags. Then tell them that what they're experiencing is what you experience when someone asks you to picture an elephant.

That's interesting, because I did! When I read the word "democracy" I started thinking about the concept, and my mind delivered pictures (or really, scenes) to me, The White House, scenes of the UK Parliament, diagrams representing political systems, a game of Civilization, me queuing to vote at the last election etc. etc.

In a conversation that moves quickly, I probably wouldn't begin this process of streaming images, but if I spend more than a few seconds on an idea, they just start arising. To me, it is "thinking" - it is much closer to me and more effortless than the logical articulation of abstract concepts.

Re: Aphantasia: A life without mental images

#60

Post by DanBC »

richardjdare wrote: post #59
DanBC wrote: post #49

If you have aphantasia, and wantto describe it to someone else: try asking them to picture "democracy" or some other abstract concept. Most people don't then have mental images of ballot papers or flags. Then tell them that what they're experiencing is what you experience when someone asks you to picture an elephant.

That's interesting, because I did! When I read the word "democracy" I started thinking about the concept, and my mind delivered pictures (or really, scenes) to me, The White House, scenes of the UK Parliament, diagrams representing political systems, a game of Civilization, me queuing to vote at the last election etc. etc. In a conversation that moves quickly, I probably wouldn't begin this process of streaming image…

I wonder if that means you hae an excess of visual imagination or I have a deficit?
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