It’s funny, people make aphantasia out to be a huge disability but ironically that just feels like a lack of imagination on their part. The things where you actually need to see images instead of just abstract thinking are pretty rare.
it’s not a significant disability frankly, that’s part of the reason it’s only just now received a lot of study. It’s more of a dysfunction than anything.
It is fundamentally a lack of imagination, we cannot imagine things, it’s impossible. Ironically, it’s quite helpful to some individuals, me in particular i really enjoy any sort of complex stated systems. I can really latch onto those and comprehend them pretty well. I can do artistic things for about fuck all though.
It is a lack of visual or sensory imagery, but not a lack of imagination.
I’ve always suspected my wife has this, and I just inquired. She said she can’t picture faces or things, but can recognize them. Her memories are more like feelings. I asked if she were separated from our daughter in an apocalypse, if she could remember what she looked like. She said, “I have no idea what she looks like right now.”
Now she’s in kind of a dark place.
This is the level that I am at and it’s hard to explain to people that, “no, I don’t remember so-and-so’s smile on their birthday.” Like the feeling of the experiences are there and an analytical capture is, but vision? Gone the second I don’t see it anymore
I can’t imagine my families faces, and I prob couldn’t even manage a photofit of my own face to be fair. Its strange when you first realise this isn’t standard for most people and its actually a thing.
Put photos in a necklace for your wife or something similar if it bothers her.
That would actually be a really thoughtful gift, OP should do that.
It’s hard to imagine… not imagining images. It’s such a weird perspective to think about.
It’s possible that she hasn’t got aphantasia, but something called face blindness (prosopagnosia). The Wikipedia might be an interesting read for you guys!
This matches my experience. Everything and everyone has a feeling, not so much a word, or an image, or a number, but a simple to recall, and hard to explain feeling.
If she’s still in that dark place, ask her whether she can recall what your daughter’s “feeling” in her head. If she’s anything like myself, that feeling is the sum of her relationship with your daughter all in an instant. Not only is that something you probably can’t do that she can, it is an interesting way to perceive others. It helps a lot with code switching too, that same feeling of someone else also sets the tone with which you can effectively communicate with them in my experience, though it doesn’t work on everyone.
They play it poorly. Source: aphantasiac with short term memory disabilities who can’t learn chess well bcit’s too much visualization and memory
Friend, someone has to break it to you: as you can see by others in this thread and coming from a fellow complete aphant:
No, they don’t play it poorly. With chess it’s like anything else, a high bandwidth. I can’t see shit for example but I can conceptualize really well - don’t need no pictures for that.
You have your gifts, I’m certain of that. Don’t let the hand given to you by life hold you back! Instead look out for the things that make you capable🤗
Oh no I was specifically thinking of Aphantasia + Dyspraxia&ADHD (and working memory deficite in general) in that comment. I didn’t really state it clearly though, I had made it sound like aphantasiacs in general in the first half but that’s not what I mean. I quite literally cannot think ahead many moves thanks to that combo lol. I guess that’s why there’s apparently no chess masters confirmed to have both aphantasia and ADHD though, despite there existing many with the former and some with the latter.
It’s actually similar with mathematics, I am completely screwed when it comes to mathematical visualization lol. But otherwise I’m definitely a math person, which checks out for aphantasiacs.
You have an abstract concept of the board in your head. The logical connections are still there, there’s just no image of a chess board that represents the moves. Basically the same way a computer thinks without images, too.
this was always my take on this discussion as well.
i think this whole phenomena is more or less a communication misunderstanding and a matter of semantics. I believe that the people who report not being able to “see the apple” are people more inherently capable of more introspection and other metacognitive tasks. they identify correctly that the “mind’s eye” is basically the brain imagining what sensations of vision a particular thing might elicit, the same way we might imagine the sensations of touching something fuzzy or imagine the sensations of tasting something bitter. I think very few minds can “project” visual imagination of an apple before the imaginer as thoroughly indistinguishabley as if you got real sensory input of an apple.
i think that people who claim to really see the apple are taking the imaginary sensation of vision as equivalent to the sensation of vision generated from real sensory input, and therefore presuming that it counts as actually seeing it. and those who claim not to see the apple are likely just noticing the difference and assuming they’re lacking because the imaginary sensations and actual the sensory stimulus are clearly different things.
we have a word for when people actually see things they cannot ordinarily distinguish from reality, even if they’re aware of them as such: hallucinations.
I was a decently rated chess player (nationally) in my youth and I have level 5 aphantasia i.e. I see nothing at all.
While I absolutely cannot play or picture game states without a physical board in front of me like most pros can, I had no great difficulty otherwise.
I practiced with a friend at the same general skill level that was very good at playing sans voir, which incidentally is how I realized I don’t have the same mental imagery as him. This was ~25 years ago, and I didn’t run into the word aphantasia until around 2020.
Wait, how do you get ranked for aphantasia? I did sure have it but have never had a name for it
Aphantasia is a condition that prevents people from creating mental imagery . It is rare, affecting only about 4% of the global population… My visual memory is like looking through a frosted window. I see some colors and blobby shape and that’s about it.
Downvoted for telling you how to dream more, stay salty!
This happens to me periodically and I seriously think it means we just need more potassium, less sleep disruption, and more time in nature to absorb green colors (soothing in memory, gives you good dreams) and exercise the eye muscles with long distance focus.
Absorb green colors haha. How many crystals should I carry while I do the absorption?
Are you sheltered or something? Looking at verdant green spaces has been proven to have a positive psychological effect. You should wear crystals over your eyes if you are nearsighted to help. 👓 Aphantasia is just a difference in language games people use. It’s been debunked.
You do realize that when people are confined entirely to urban spaces they report having anxiety dreams about interior spaces?
I don’t see things in my head, it’s still blank but i can imagine the concepts. Do i have aphantasia? My dreams are vivid tho
4% is a pretty big chunk of the population. That’s 1 in every 25 people. Which makes it all the more insane that nobody realised it existed as a condition until just a few years ago.
It just doesn’t come up all that much. Folks live without knowing they are different.
And it is on a spectrum. Some folks is nothing others are can force a few pictures if they have to but aren’t clear. I dunno.
It really depends on how you define aphantasia. Often the VVIQ score is used, a vividness score ranging from 16 to 80.
About 0,8 % of people have a score of 16, and 3,9 % have a score <= 32. The figures are from one of the more recent studies. Other studies report similar figures, for example one study by Zeman found 0,7 % with a score of 16.
About ¼ of all people with visual aphantasia also have multisensory aphantasia (all classical senses and emotions).
Aphantasia is not actually a real condition btw, the whole “imagine an apple” discourse is completely lacking in rigor. It’s like the online ADHD discourse, or MENSA. It’s a way for boring people to talk about themselves to each other. (Like most of Reddit and Wikipedia.)
We got a no-apple-seer over here
No, everyone can imagine an apple. This is stupid. Even this guy admitted he can remember things, he’s just not satisfied with the quality. A cup of coffee would make him see an apple.
Lol wtf are you on about. It’s realistic to you that people can have PTSD, hyperphantasia, photographic memory, schizophrenia, bipolar, blindness/deafness, multiple sclerosis, and all these other otherworldy experiences which most people wouldn’t believe without being educated on it, but not realistic that a portion of people have deficient or non-existent mental imagery? Or even that a portion of people have ADHD?
I seriously doubt that you know better than neuroscience&psychology researchers and people who have the disorder but alright.
Also aphantasia isn’t “no remember thingies”. Memory is complex and it isn’t reliant on your ability to project images into your vision.
I have never been able to actually mentally visualize something, I always thought “imagine being in your happy place” was a metaphor and not that you’re actually supposed to visualize a place. I have always took “visualize” to mean metaphorically and not literally put it in your vision. The closest I have is dreams and sleep paralysis hallucinations lol. No amount of caffeine or concerta could possibly change that. You’re crazy if you think because you can’t imagine it that there’s a conspiracy of “so-called aphantasiacs and medical researchers” who are lying about the existence of lacking mental imagery.
I’m curious as to where you allegedly saw aphantasia being “debunked” because all there seems to be is crazies on internet forums (specifically, Reddit and ycombinator) who notably aren’t psychology researchers, have no qualifications regarding the matter, and are just random people who want to feel like they cracked the code. Often times it’s people who have never been able to visualize who think their deficiency of mental imagery is the norm and that most other people have never been able to visualize either.
I’m also curious as to whether you think developmental/congenital prosopagnosia is fake or if it’s just a phase like you think aphantasia is.
“Neuroscience researchers” but you don’t post a source, just an essay on how invested you are in this being real. Keep huffing that Quanta magazine, buddy. MBTI testing is also horseshit. I didn’t see it “debunked” on Hacker News and Reddit, those are the #1 aphantasia and ADHD havers in the entire world. It’s hilarious you think something less rigorous than IQ testing is on the same level as PTSD
“Neuroscience researchers” but you don’t post a source, just an essay on how invested you are in this being real.
These 2 are by Rebecca Keogh, an actual cognitive neuroscience specialist/psychology researcher who has a PhD from one of the most well-regarded universities in Australia. Here they establish that there is real evidence that aphantasiacs lack mental imagery, and finds that there is no evidence backing the claim that “aphantasiacs have mental imagery”. Keogh also has some works that delve deeper into mental imagery and how it’s a spectrum, including aphantasiacs and hyperphantasiacs.
Here’s Cleveland Clinic casually affirming its existence too.
I shouldn’t even have to give sources because I’m not the one claiming an abnormality in visual imagery is fake but here you go anyways.
It literally comes up immediately when you search for aphantasia research. You clearly have not even tried to find research on aphantasia. Now where are your sources? I notice you didn’t link any, at all. And I bet
Does Aphantasia also cause the development of superhuman levels of patience? Because my dude, i don’t know how you managed to entertain this troll for as long as you have. This whole thread was highly entertaining though, so thanks for that, lol.
(I know it goes deeper but i didn’t want to bury my comment that far down)
I just witnessed a murder lol
This is the problem with the I Fucking Love Science crowd, your fun facts quickly turn into barrages of narcissistic gibberish whenever someone doesn’t give you validation. There’s no rigor, there’s no questioning, there’s no meta-analysis.
Just TRUST THE SCIENTISTS, LOOK AT THE STUDIESESS nevermind whether they’re any good. Go post about the Stanford Prison Experiment or something you irritating pseud.
Hahahahaha oh my god Psychology Today has done a numbet on you, what a moron, the first study has N=15, it’s entirely based on self-diagnosis and surveys. The want to come up with a neurological basis for it based off fifteen people self-reporting fuck off lmfao
Can’t wait to see the second one.
This is like when my sister decided she was a super taster and that cilantro tastes like soap.
I never said I was particularly impressed with the rigor of ALL NEUROSCIENTISTS, they are as bad as physicists involved with string theory. Unfalsifiable nonsense. This is the kind of shit I’m talking about when I trash the entire field of “smart science” that’s been picked up by TPOT and Lesswrong and other pseuds.
saw it debunked
Oh you want me to prove aphantasia isn’t real lol, no wonder you have trouble with things like this where people play word games, you’re completely devoid of logic. The onus is on you, and neuroscientists, to prove it exists.
What you did is go pull every paper you could possibly find which reinforces your identity.
If there is anything keeping people from having solid visualizations throughout the day, it’s not sleeping enough. It’s a night-and day difference in mental imagery. None of these studies control for anything like that or sleep, which really just shows you how hard they are fishing for something which isn’t there. A lot of sleep issues are totally incurable without switching to back sleeping, getting rid of lint (people refuse to do this), and eliminating a sedentary lifestyle. Now if you tried to do studies on people like that you wouldn’t be able to find any. But I can tell you I’ve experienced “aphantasia” and it’s cured by getting a good night’s sleep. A lot of people never get a good night’s sleep ever.
An article about it :- https://en.chessbase.com/post/aphantasia-in-chess
What does it mean to visualize a chess position?
I don’t exactly “render” the board or pieces. It’s like when you look at a board, and then make connections and feel whatever you feel, I just recreate those things.
I assume it’s similar to other people, but the phrase “not being able to create images” sounds like people do “render” things in their head.
It’s not the same as seeing it visually, but yeah I’d say it’s a mental “render”. Sort of like how having a song stuck in your head isn’t the same as actually hearing it.
You move the pieces around in your mental picture of the board to reassess what the potential position would look like.
That’s so far removed from how my brain actually works, it might as well be magic. I simply stare at the board and make mental notes which spaces would have which pieces, but there’s nothing visual to it. Take away the board and I can’t do a thing to plan my next moves.
For the record, I also never have any songs stuck in my head. When listening to stuff, I can recognize wrong notes and such, but I cannot in any form listen to music in my head. Heck, I can barely hum the tunes of my favorite songs after listening to them hundreds of times.
It’s incredible how our brains can accomplish the same things in different ways.
It’s not like the average player can picture the full board state and play blindfolded chess like some GMs can, but I’d expect that it’s pretty normal to visualize pieces on potential spots for tactics.
I can imagine what the board state would be if my piece is there, I just don’t create a mental picture of it.
It’s not the same. Aphantasisa is the total absence of being able able to picture things mentally. I have it to a degree except it takes me some effort to picture things. I can’t imagine scenes from books. I get like a fleeting image.
So like, I’ve heard about this for ages but I struggle understanding. I definitely cannot “see” anything when I close my eyes, I definitely cannot “see” anything in my mind/imagination. I can “picture” things but that picture is more or less an emotional feeling about the thing, I can imagine certain parts of it but it’s more or less a conversation with myself about what I would see or experience about the thing, as if I were describing something that I’m feeling while blindfolded.
When they say visualize something in your head, do people actually see something as if they were looking at it? Else I just figured that visualizing meant more or less an analogy of how we make sense of the actual experience.
It’s not as vivid as seeing it for real, or even dreaming of it. It’s more akin to how you can “hear” a song that’s stuck in your head.
See, now that’s the funny thing. I can totally listen to music in my head, vivid enough that I even unconsciously will start to bob my head or shoulders in time. I get goosebumps the same as I would for a song that’s actually playing.
It’s just a made up fad condition. It’s not a real thing.
Yeah i never believed people see anything in their head, bunch of liers.
Did you believe in the gluten intolerance epidemic that’s been magically cured too?
I’ll never forget the day I learned that “picture an apple in your head” or “picture the audience naked” wasn’t just a saying and was literal.
I remember not believing my friends who said they could see their imaginary friends.
You thought they were smelling them or what?
TIL I have aphantasia
like people who don’t have it? Chess is strategy, not art, or engineering.
Chess is a series of strategic moves. You just make them. Are yall out here experiencing some kind of bizarre 5d chess i’ve never experienced before?
source - me, i have it.
For those that don’t have aphantasia, can you do a mental face swap or do other “edits” of mental imagery and keep it consistent in your mind?
And for those that do have it, how does remembering pictures work for you? Like the Mona Lisa, or an MC Escher, or the last supper? Is any memory purely word-based or do you get flashes of imagery that aren’t really vivid but still there somewhere?
I ask because I’m not sure if I do or don’t have it. I can imagine audio much more vividly and rich than imagery, but I can still recall pictures and images as images. I can create them, but if I try to go into detail or make “edits”, I start losing it.
It’s like primitive AI since it’s the same but the details aren’t there and if the details are there, I’m not getting the full picture. It can instantly swap between the two be they never seem to overlap
for me the only way i can describe aphantasia is in terms of how a computer works.
I have a visual encoder that can store images in my visual memory but lack a visual decoder to be able to display any image. like if you could only open a jpeg in notepad. that doesn’t mean the information is lost or can’t be interpreted, just that my cognitive brain deals directly with the binary format. i understand the attributes like depth or color but if asked to recall something i can only verbalize the attributes. this means i can verbalize visual concepts and memories, but can’t generate or visualize them inside my head.
the chess example i wouldn’t even consider thinking visually to see the moves ahead but create a list of possible actions. I’ve always struggled with chess as i don’t have the ability to store the depth of actions available.
Thank you, this is a great analogy and tracks exactly with how I would describe my experience.
As an aphantasic, I remember what I know about the Mona Lisa. I know that her lips are famous, I think her face is placed more to the right, and her hair and clothes are dark. I am not sure if you can see her hands, I would have said you cannot (I checked and I am wrong).
Apparently, I was never aware enough of her hands to know that they were in the painting. And I could not tell you how her hair lies or what her smile looks like.
It is not word-based, but just knowing. I just know the clothes are dark. There is no experience that can be edited.
When I collect the characteristics to write them down, I think in words.
Reading this post has made me realise that I haven’t deliberately used visual imagination in a long time, and I’m finding it harder to do that sort of thing now.
I used to be practically limitless in my ability to recall imagery or change it at whim. Since then I’ve gotten years deep into a cycle of overwork, distraction based entertainments, parenting, and drinking. Also, a mild case of COVID that left me feeling slightly foggy a few years ago. No idea if that’s related.
Did not plan to start my Friday at 5 am with an existential crisis, but cowabunga it is. Time to reclaim the inner empire or go mad in the attempt.
I had the same thing actually, but I got back into books and recovered a lot of it. I did have to initially make myself stop and concentrate on the visuals, sometimes reading descriptive passages multiple times to get the details down, but it comes a lot easier now. Really good feeling too get lost in a book.
I’m all about that. I keep bouncing off Consider Phlebas. Think I’ll take another crack at it on my reader
I mean, it’s definitely visual, but it’s not like I could recall or recreate it photographically.
I remember certain “broad strokes”, but my brain just fills in the details with approximations (that are probably wrong). Like, I could tell you which way the Mona Lisa is facing, the color of the background, what her hair and face sort of look like, but without googling, I have no idea what clothes she is wearing.
I have this and have often wondered if it works against me. I have also been weirded out that it’s normal for people to actually “see” pictures in their head ever since I found out about this.
Anyways yes. This must be why I am not great at chess. Let’s blame it!
I now have a mental picture of you sitting at a chess board straining to visualize it in your head and losing. At least you are spreading imagery to others.
They project into the ceiling
