in which I present an analogy

[kaberett]

So. Aphantasia. The inability to form mental images.

(This is a thing I have for all practical purposes -- I know that I can "visualise" things if I'm tired enough or in enough pain or whatever -- at the point at which my brain starts serving up things more-or-less indistinguishable from hallucinations -- but otherwise, if I close my eyes and imagine an elephant or a wheelbarrow or what have you, I do not get an image of any kind.)

What it is like, by Alex, aged 33½ plus a bit: have you ever accidentally opened an image in a text editor?

That, but you are actually able to derive useful information from it.

(For me it's usually a tactile sense of How Things Fit Together In Space plus a multilayered associative mess that resolves down to something not dissimilar to a tag cloud.)

Comments

[davidgillon]

a multilayered associative mess that resolves down to something not dissimilar to a tag cloud.

That's an interesting thought for how the brain works.

[rugessnome]

👋 I mean my dreams seem to be visual enough and I had the idiosyncratic and not great experience of finding out that one particular antidepressant made ever-changing kaleidoscopic type patterns play wherever I closed my eyes.

But my ability to consciously visualize things is about on par with early computer displays that had text and maybe some basic vector/math plotting capability if you're lucky. The only texts that might possibly produce a movie clip in my mind like how phantasic people talk about books playing for them are like, math transformations. (I would joke about the sheared sheep in Lay's Linear Algebra except that I can't really visualize even a cartoon sheep.)

(also I have a bit of a story about accidently viewing photos as text: I worked on a research project several years ago where at one point I needed to batch process photos via the command line. One day I made a typo while entering a command, I think by putting in an unneeded space, and was slightly appalled and alarmed when the console spat out tons and tons of giberish at me (what proved to be like 8MB worth iirc when we tried piping it into a file for troubleshooting purposes). ... turns out my typo had accidentally routed the finished images to the console, where they were interpreted as text in a huge mojibake-like incident, instead of saving them into the intended destination folder.)

[kaberett]

HEE. Which is very confusing, yes!

(I too have visual dreams! but that is just Not a mode my brain does otherwise except under significant duress, at least that I've experienced so far.)

[madgastronomer]

Do you know what a memory palace is? Because I'm aphantasic, and I managed one, and that's basically supposed to be impossible, but I managed it by using a real environment with which I was extremely familiar and using real objects from it. I didn't need to picture them, because I knew where each one was and what it was.

[kaberett]

Huh! I'd have been mildly baffled by the idea that It's Supposed To Be Impossible because of how strongly I associate objects with the sense of how I'd have to reach to pick them up, but have never actually tried myself -- good to know!

[madgastronomer]

Well, when I proposed to try it on a server that had multiple people on it who were familiar, half of them said it was supposed to be impossible for someone with aphantasia, and the other half were eager to see how it went and suggested that it might even help me to visualize in the end (it did a little). I was supposed to be on a podcast for it, but the episode never published.

But yeah, non-aphantasics (phantasics?) do tend not to understand that we may have other ways of knowing objects, because the classical method is so firmly focused on visualization. Once I worked out a method that was good for me, it was pretty easy.

[azurelunatic]

(I am a visual artist, among other things.)

I'm not completely aphantastic, and I get what I compare to a skeleton outline with, yes, your tag cloud is an excellent referent. I get a lot of visual information that I can process and such, and I can often draw/paint what I've imagined, but the "picture" in my head is generally only a ghost of what I wind up painting.

(My default apple is a smallish Gala and nicely striped.)

[kaberett]

Yes! I do not make much visual art but not having a picture in my head doesn't mean I can't create representational art!

[emperor]

I can't either, and for the longest time assumed that when someone said "everyone close your eyes and picture a beach" or whatever, they were just being tediously metaphorical.

[kaberett]

RIGHT. Isn't it BIZARRE. I think it's only the fact that I've had the kind of just-on-the-edge-of-waking-hallucination that I have that I'm able to go "... wait, that happens for you all the time?!"

[shanaqui]

I'm entertained by how many aphantasic people are gathering in one space here. Joining the crowd...

The very concept of a mind's eye frustrates me. What do people mean?! I can tell myself what things look like; is that not what other people do? Tell me to imagine an apple and I can tell you it's mostly green with a bit of a blush on it, but I'm describing to myself a specific apple I saw once and cared enough about to remember, I don't "see" anything. Do people even really and truly do that? I know people say they do, but it makes no seeeense. Is it not distracting? Do people not realise how bizarre that all sounds???

...I'm tired, I should go away. Good night.

[madgastronomer]

I have had the "wait other people really do see things???" conversation multiple times, from both sides. Having figured out that I am aphantasic, it seems to be my job now to explain to others that they are, too.

ETA: Aphantasia really must be much, much more common than anybody realizes, because both "aphantasics coming out of the woodwork" and "you are aphantasic" are things I see multiple times every year, something every month.

[shanaqui]

I agree, the number of people in my life who are shocked that it isn't a metaphor and people can really do that is surprisingly high.

(Surprisingly enough, I think if I remember rightly about my sister having some level of visual memory/imagination that I'm the only aphantasic person in my family. It's like they ran out when they got to me, and the supply recovered by the time they turned out my sister.)

[madgastronomer]

I don't think I've ever asked anybody in my family if they are too, usually for me it comes up in pagan circles. A lot of exercises for learning magic are visualization-based.

[venta]

Yes! I spent a long time thinking I was crap at meditation, because everything started with "visualise a candle / black cross on a white ground / whatever". Then someone finally let slip the dangerous information that all this visualising malarkey was just to enable you to not think of anything else. Why did no one mention it? Not thinking of things is easy!

Relatedly, I never understood the whole thing about it being impossible not to imagine a purple horse once someone has mentioned it. If someone says "don't think of a purple horse", I don't.

[madgastronomer]

There are other purposes to visualization meditation than emptying the mind, but yeah. Behaving as if everyone can do it is useless.

[kaberett]

YES. Like, my only point of reference for "no what they're talking about MUST be--" is, as I've said, the things that are on the very verge of hallucinations! the idea of that happening ALL the time (but? only selectively??? when your eyes are closed?????) is, as you say, baffling!!!

[shanaqui]

My father can replay whole videos in his head.

We were in some ways mutually incomprehensible to each other until we worked out that he thinks almost completely visually, in very great detail, and I completely and utterly lack the ability. Like he got all of it and there was none left over for me. (My mother is very visual, as well. Now I wonder about my sister...)

[vass]

I'm... yeah, functionally aphantasic would be a good way of putting it. I get more visual than you do, by the sound of it: if I close my eyes and imagine an elephant or a wheelbarrow, with effort I can produce a slowly loading, non-detailed, inaccurate, unstable render. One detail at a time. Or sometimes (depending on the thing) a very quick flash of a very small and low res memory of a still image. I get a lot more information if I'm not trying to render an image.

And I dream in, I guess, wireframes or armatures, with colours. Not pictures, moving or still. Phosphenes, almost.

I figure I have a very very shit onboard graphics chip, and and also not enough RAM and am constantly swapping. Whereas someone who can't voluntarily make images at all (but can get visual dreams or hallucinations) like you might (in addition to or instead of those issues) lack certain visual codecs and not be able to view visuals in those containers or use software that requires them.

"multilayered associative mess" is not a bad description of my thought processes too.

[kaberett]

Oh I like that Extension Of Metaphor, thank you.

(I do a similar thing with music, actually -- I don't really "play" music internally, at most I can "hear" a single line of melody... EXCEPT when, again, I am exhausted or otherwise on the verge of hallucination, whereupon I suddenly get proper surround-sound orchestra. If this is what composers of my acquaintance have all the time then I am Deeply Envious.)

[azurelunatic]

I get fully rendered dreams, complete with text (apparently some people can't read in dreams) and I seem to have Several Missing Codecs. A lot of the face processing and storage codecs in particular.

The people who say that they cannot tell a smile under a mouth and nose mask baffle me. Have they no concept of how eyes work?

[madgastronomer]

I also get fully rendered dreams, with readable text.

[venta]

This sounds not wholly dissimilar to my graphics. The best I can ever manage, though, is a very crap and fleeting 2D projection. Which, oddly, makes it easier to remember a photo of someone than it is to remember the the actual someone - like if a third party has done the work of the projection, it's easier for me to load.

[vass]

I find remembering still, flat photos easier too.

[simont]

if I close my eyes and imagine an elephant or a wheelbarrow

Entirely off topic, but when I read this while slightly sleepy, I read it as an elephant in a wheelbarrow, and the resulting mental image concept is now keeping me entertained :-)

[kaberett]

this too is excellent! a VERY SMALL elephant or a VERY LARGE wheelbarrow or, probably, Both, given how large even small elephants are...

[simont]

In my head, the elephant was not quite small enough to fit properly in the wheelbarrow, and was looking a bit confused about that. :-)

[elisem]

"Functionally aphantasic" is a very useful term and I am swooping down on it and carrying it back to my nest. So is the notion of "something not dissimilar to a tag cloud."

I make my living now from art. For the longest time, before I knew what my art was, I was in despair when I took any classes about art, because people would tell me to draw my ideas, and that's not how my ideas work. So I figured I must not actually be an artist at all.

(My ideas work by holding materials in my hand or piling them on a workbench or in a workbasket and asking them what they want to be. I describe it as "co-creation with the materials." Synaesthesia fits in there too.)

I first realized that aphantasia was something that could describe me when I read Stephanie Law writing about it and her art.

[kaberett]

Oh I had not realised that was part of Stephanie Law's experience as well -- I missed that essay/interview/item!

You make beautiful things, and I'm sorry "learning" environments were so disheartening <3

[madgastronomer]

I have never taken a drawing class, because I don't want to deal with basically that, and typically I will say that I am bad at "flat art". I probably could learn to be not bad at it, honestly, but I really prefer my art to have texture and dimensionality.

BTW, one of the methods of weaving I practice is called Saori, or free weaving, and for me, it is similar to your co-creation. Listening to the yarn.

[silveradept]

Well, if you can read the Matrix code, then you do well enough, anyway, even if it never resolves into pictures.

[beckyc]

I think my experiences are somewhat similar. I have mental images to a certain extent but I can’t spontaneously create them. For many years I assumed such things as counting sheep or picturing something were metaphorical.

[aldabra]

I am certain I had visual imagination as a teenager. I remember what it was like using it.

I think my brain stores things verbally, and the more I think about them the more verbally my brain processes them. Where I used to have an image of an apple I now have "an image of an apple". When someone tells me to visualise a rotating cube I think "visualise a rotating cube". It all works the same way except that the actual images aren't there any more. It does this with memories too. I remember the tags, and I know which memory had those tags, but I don't think I have the actual memory any more. I just have the pointers.

Perhaps I remember "what it was like using it". Bother.