I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.

The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.

I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.

People with no imagination are rewriting my industry as well

For anyone who doesn’t believe this is real, I recommend reading Thinking In Pictures. It’s a great book.

Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.

It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.

Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.

Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.

Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.

The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo

I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.

A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0]

They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.

[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104

It has been a lot of fun talking to those who are Aphantasiac. I am the complete opposite to the point where I think almost exclusively in imagery and when talking to folks I translate visuals to words on the fly. For a long time when people said that they saw black when they closed their eyes I assumed that meant that they choose to "see black". This is less about being able to see and more how we utilize that.

So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.

And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.

I never find the ability to visualize things, or imagine voices or sound, too interesting, as I have never used those abilities to do anything practical. I do not rehearse words in my head before talking, or create an image in my head before drawing art.

Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.

Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.

The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.

Aphantastic people of HN. Do you struggle remembering things in detail? My gfs family is all aohantastic and they just realized that it’s why they tell stories that are all a bit inaccurate. They remember the story but when placement, colors, shapes, etc come up, they can’t really tell you what it was. Comes up in weird ways

I thought that I'll never be able to tell what non-aphantasia people see and how they perceive things. I see full blackness with some noise, but I can't visualize a thing.

This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.

It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.

Also an Aphantasiac, the quote

> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.

my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.

I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.

Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.

Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.

Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions

> Why This Matters

Move on.

Let’s do a quick survey for aphantasics:

1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc?

2. Can you visualize pure motion? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense)

3. Can you visualize just colors? I discovered that I can conjure up colors without any associated shape. Takes a bit of patience but the color eventually arrives. Quite a thrill for an aphantasic!

I'm pretty sure I have this, for all senses, and I only just learned there's things other than iñner eye (which I only learned of a few months).

If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?

> Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.

Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.

Perhaps it is just spatial facts.

There is the theory of too many people being born, with not enough souls to populate all those bodies.

In that theory, people without an inner monologue and without imagination are soulless, real life NPC.

To me, this inner world is an essential property of being human.

I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.

Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.

I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.

Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.

People with aphantasia probably overestimate how good it is.

I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.

It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.

Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.

Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.

But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.

A test was recently mentioned to me, regarding aphantasia vs visual thinkers.

Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?

Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.

This kind of matches my experience. Not sure if I have Aphantasia, but my mental visual imagery is pretty sparse and not that well formed.

And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.

My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.

“Science” this is not. It seems closer to religion. “Rewriting” imagination is an amusing oxymoron.

This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.

There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?

Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.

I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.

Aphantasia is fake. I can “see” when dreaming, ergo the brain simply (adaptively) suppresses the same when awake.