As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…
This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).
I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually.
This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.
> I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).
Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.
What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"
I have a form of aphantasia, but with that lack of visuals I also have a rich internal sense of touch. Like you, I can create and manipulate 3d objects in my mind; I really feel them down to texture and temperature (and I must say, that cow has textures I didn't want to feel, thanks for nothing) Most of my dreams are like this too -- I know where everything is, but I don't see it.
But my aphantasia isn't complete. Sometimes when I think of a person I get a dim image of their face for about a tenth of a second. And very rarely, I do see things in dreams.
You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.
A while back, I did an experiment: drawing a typing keyboard. It's something I see and use every day, so it should be easy, right?
Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.
Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.
The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow.
A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.
Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.
The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.
And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.
> Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image.
If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image.
If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind.
I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
> My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image.
Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them.
After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
I obviously failed to communicate my point, I'll try one last time.
If I ask you to imagine you can see something, and you haven't decided on basic details like what it looks like, this is exactly equivalent in my mind to me saying "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
We can go through and tediously define every word we're using but hopefully the above paragraph will allow you to tell where our definitions differ.
> "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
I don't really feel like that's true. If you asked me to choose a specific number, sure. But if the task really were just to imagine the concept of a number, unbound to anything, it wouldn't be a specific number until it needed to be.
Similarly, when thinking of a cup, unless I'm explicitly trying to imagine a specific cup, as close to reality as possible, it is merely a cup. Not a red cup, or one with a tiny annoying handle that I can only fit one finger into.
There are two questions there. Select the properties of a randomly chosen cup, and relay them to me. At which point i'd feel like im making it up as you ask for specific properties. Or just picture a cup, squashing, stretching, rotating. I think very much that these mental images are deeply baked into the ways we interact with the world (and are not literally seeing so much as attention to details of idealized concepts). It can't be a coincidence my mental image having transformations applied to it effortlessly is because of my work with 3d modelling and robotics.
If my mind wanders into those things, I could imagine the cup morphing between those scenarios, unreality forming into reality. Seeing with the minds eye is not seeing, in a literal sense.
I believe that there is a sense in which if we were forced to actually see the real world as it is, every detail of everything all at once, as a camera sees it, it would be far too much (consider things like optical illusions, human blind-spots in the visual field). Hence all sorts of mental shortcuts are taken where below the concious layer things are stiched together to make a false sense of cohesiveness out of a distinctly disconnected and incoherent stream of input data. Every sense even has varying time-lag, to the point the brain predicts nerve signals before they come in, hence phantom limb pain etc. It ends up that so little of you is actually the concious mind you.
Objects in the minds eye are similarly abstract objects. You cannot see every detail unless you decide upon what you choose to see. An apple, in my mind, has the blotchy, slightly coarse texture on the outside most apples have. But is it a red apple or a green apple? It's somewhere between the two. The digits of my number are a blur approximating all digits, the digits I expect to see, until I look closely. Similar to how the room in your peripheral vision is still the same. Probably.
If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_?
I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
> If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_?
I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying.
If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image.
This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like.
Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image.
Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
I've watched something about an autistic person with a photographic memory who said they had trouble with the concept of "a church" because in their mind they could only picture specific churches and they all looked different. I've seen anecdotes of people with perfect pitch saying that if a tune was transposed to a different octave or played in a different key or interpretation, everyone else says it is "the same tune" but to them it has different notes so it's a different tune.
I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
On the other end of the spectrum, Nikola Tesla's visualisations were so strong that as a child he would vividly hallucinate objects when their names were spoken to him.
It might be that what I am describing falls short of aphantasia (though my difficulties recalling motionless faces do suggest it).
I sometimes wonder if what it actually is, is a kind of fundamentally unexplored thought or experience.
There's a bunch of other examples.
Like... I can't _really_ tell my left from my right on an instinctive level, though I believe this to be inherited because I have relatives who can't.
Ask me directions in a hurry and I'll get them wrong even when I am sure they are right. I don't really have a "left" and a "right"; I have two sides that don't feel that different.
So I also can't really use mirrors well.
I have surprisingly quick and accurate reflexes for catching falling things but I can't catch a ball thrown to me.
The question about all of these things is: are they just things I have never found the right way to deliberately work through into a conscious process? Are they things I can't do now because I didn't learn when my brain was fresh?
OK so -- on this score. I have, I believe, a kind of partial aphantasia. Though maybe it's normal and people just don't really see the distinction?
I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.
That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.
(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)
This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.
But then I discovered two really interesting things:
1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)
2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.
A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.
My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/
So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.
On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.
One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".
This is all extremely interesting. I also struggle to remember faces, and most of my are tied to emotions, sounds, smells, sensations, etc. When I recall something/someone, I don't see it/them, I just "know" + feel.
And I find myself very easily fooled by subtle changes in a person's appearance. If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.
> If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.
That is true aphantasia.
I don't have this aspect of the problem -- indeed, I often have the weird super-recogniser problem of correctly identifying that I have seen someone unknown to me before, and where. I might be able to even describe the clothes they were wearing that last time or something they were holding or doing.
But I would struggle to describe their face to someone else.
