The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia

I'm mostly aphantasic: I get brief flashes of images, completely out of my control, and I can't hold onto them; images appear and disappear in a split second. After learning about aphantasia and the very surprising reality that some people can just see whatever they want in their head I started practicing. I've only gotten slightly better in about two years of practice. Best results are as I'm falling asleep, but I still cannot force an image to appear, I just try to hang on to whatever shows up, though it still doesn't last longer than a couple seconds. So this doesn't seem like something one can meaningfully improve through practice :/

Like quite a few people I discovered aphantasia and the fact I had it simultaneously. This was 0nly in the last few years as articles on the topic appeared. Since then I have been analysing my experiences relative to what I have been told is normal. Art tutorials I find especially odd, because they analytically break things into components the way I would. If people can visualise, why don&#x27;t they just draw what they see.<p>Thinking about that put me in mind of a curious possibility. What if no-one had a mind&#x27;s eye and Aphantasia is simply the lack of a delusion of a mind&#x27;s eye. Such tricks performed by the brain are well documented with regard to time, decision-making, optical illusions. Derren Brown exploits a lot of these for entertainment.<p>That leads to a philosophical notion of whether the delusion of having a sensation qualifies as a sensation itself. Would that make it the opposite of blindsight where people have the experience of being blind while being able to experimentally demonstrate they can see?

I was amazed to find out people have aphantasia. I&#x27;m def. a visual thinker. I went to art school, and had a hell of a time, until I could competently draw out what I imagined in my head (my hand&#x2F;eye coordination had to catch up!). But even before that, I could visualize a lot of detail on just what I wanted something to look like. I could see a detailed part, or manipulate the visual in my head.<p>I remember waking up and playing Tetris in my head before I got out of bed. I could keep track of the piece falling, the next piece and the board as it stood.<p>Even when I started programming, I would just remember like, the pattern the code made, and where it was within the file structure. I never used an IDE - I kinda felt like I could fit the entire thing in my head and just compile it dynamically to imagine what it would do. Some languages are easier to do that with then others. Even before that, learning HTML coincided with dreams of simply writing HTML and seeing the results.<p>I had a nightlight until I was at least 12 (off and on), as I would imagine the craziest things happening while I slept. I also suffered from sleep paralysis - I can still picture some of the demons that were on top of me from 25 years ago.<p>To this day, I live in a daytime world of constantly daydreaming, making up scenarios, and playing them out. I probably shoulda went into film.<p>Anyways, y&#x27;all aren&#x27;t like that? Weird.

Can people really see something that they imagine? I can only create a conceptual image in my head but I don&#x27;t really see anything. It&#x27;s like a symbolic version of the image. If I imagine a beach, I can tell where sand, ocean and sky are located but I don&#x27;t see anything visually.

Quite the other way round, excuse the possible off-topicness:<p>As a boy, way back in the sixties, age four or five, one day I overheard my parents talking of &#x27;color tv&#x27; and the possibility of getting such a thing. &quot;What is that?&quot; was my obvious question. &quot;A tv that can show colors, of course&quot;. &quot;But our tv <i>does</i> do color&quot;, I informed them, and was promptly told it didn&#x27;t. But of course it did. I was adamant. I <i>knew</i> that television was full of colors, and always had been. I could describe the colors of all sorts of things I&#x27;d seen on our tv. I remember knowing for a fact that a Volkswagen in some series I had been following was bright red. Stupid parents for not realising.<p>Next time the thing was turned on in all its vacuum tube glory, everything - to my immense disappointment - was greyscale, and remained so for several years until an actual color tv was actually purchased.

I went from hyperphantasia as a child to complete aphantasia in my early teens. When I was &lt;= 7 y.o. my favourite past time was playing and directing vividly realistic movies behind my closed eyelids. Sometimes I could even visualize things with my eyes open, creating a kind of &quot;extended reality&quot; with imagined things or creatures interacting with real ones. This ability started to gradually disappear around the time I went to school, and now I&#x27;m completely unable to visualize anything (other than occasional involuntary hypnagogues before falling asleep).

I have aphantasia (or am on the spectrum) and my mind can only see in &quot;concepts&quot; and flashes of light. I can&#x27;t think of a banana and &quot;see&quot; it. The closest i get to visualization is recalling photographic snapshots of things but only if i saw a photo of it once.<p>One interesting aspect are psychedelics. I only get open-eye visuals but almost no closed-eye effects except for light flashes (black &amp; white, no imagery), even on high doses of LSD&#x2F;Mushrooms. But i do get dream-like, very abstract &#x27;recreations&#x27; which are hard to describe. I get to relive memories etc, just not see them.<p>But, using DMT - i visualize like crazy with abstract &#x2F; geometric colorful patterns. And even when totally sober, i sometimes dream&#x2F;recall those patterns during sleep, which wakes me up immediately because it&#x27;s so overwhelming compared to my dull normal dreams.<p>This makes me think that i actually can visualize, i just block it out (i&#x27;m a very headstrong&#x2F;rational person) and i&#x27;m working with meditation techniques to open the gate (or chakra, if you&#x27;re esoterically inclined) permanently, so far unsuccesfully.<p>I do think that more research here would be great as i&#x27;m convinced it also impacts creativity and thinking patterns. For example, my strong creativity outlet is music; visual art is foreign to me.

OK, so I&#x27;m either aphantasic, or there&#x27;s some semantic confusion. Perhaps with me, I admit.<p>But anyway. Normally, I do not see stuff that isn&#x27;t (arguably) there. With my eyes open, or closed. But I can imagine stuff, and reason based on those imagined images or whatever. That is, I can do all those object rotation tests. I can imagine some thing, and create it in wood or metal, without anything but crude drawings.<p>Or when I read a good description of a fight, for example, I can imagine how it would work. Or not, if it wouldn&#x27;t.<p>But is this basically a form of blindsight?<p>Also, it was my impression that people who experience stuff that isn&#x27;t there are typically diagnosed with some sort of psychosis. And from my experience with psychedelics, I know what that&#x27;s like. Even with good marijuana, I sometimes see and hear people talking to me, just before I pass out.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine how it would work if I were constantly seeing stuff that isn&#x27;t there. How could I, for example, drive a car? Or walk across the room, even?<p>So am I confused, or aphantasic?

Language is unfortunately constrained when discussing internal mental states; we use “<i>imag</i>ination” to describe internal mental models of even non-image things.<p>Myself:<p>• I can “visualise” images moderately well; ditto the tingling feeling of UV light and pins and needles (the paresthesia, not the objects of the same names); and both real electric shocks and the experience of the same description that happens when withdrawing from SSRIs.<p>• I can “visualise” sounds, balance, sustained pressure, heat, and kinesthetic senses to the level they have sometimes become indistinguishable from my actual senses;<p>• I can <i>sometimes</i> switch off pain<p>• I <i>cannot</i> “visualise” smells or tastes at all. Pattern match to other similar tastes and smells is only possible while I am experiencing the thing I am trying to compare.

Has anyone had aphantasia onset after antibiotics? Or, a worsening.<p>I have had poor visualization for years. I do remember being able to see images in my head when younger though. In a fair of detail in some cases.<p>A few years ago (when I had already lost much visualization) I took a course of antibiotics for MRSA. After that I lost the ability to see colourful visions pre-sleep.<p>I used to get the most fantastic images in full colour with incredible detail. Then when on the antibiotics they seemed dark. Now I can still have visualizations, but I can&#x27;t see them. (Meaning, they&#x27;re happening, and I get glimpses, but I can&#x27;t continuously view them)<p>Sort of annoying as they were a good way to fall asleep. Focussing on them hasn&#x27;t seemed to rebuild the ability.

In the &#x27;New Yorker&#x27;, 2003, the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks explain that he had a very poor mental imagery. But once, it took a strong medication and his mental visual skill increased a lot but after stopping his medication everything got back to poor. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdfs.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;8da6&#x2F;ee8fa95f52476fc5d81f60ad4f89fca2ebb2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdfs.semanticscholar.org&#x2F;8da6&#x2F;ee8fa95f52476fc5d81f60...</a> (page 9)

Would love to read this - is there no way aside from paying for the content? (Can only read the abstract)

I&#x27;m not quite sure if I have it or not. I visualize mostly in 3d but without a specific viewpoint, or more exactly I get a feel from how it would look from various viewpoints simultaneously. I find it easier to mentally see as a 2d picture, something I saw in photo, or on a screen.<p>If I specifically force myself to imagine how it would look if I was at a specific position looking in a specific direction (i.e. do the 2d projection), I can in-paint in my mind starting from a black canvas, focusing sequentially my attention on a part of the canvas making details appear at the center of attention. I scan the canvas a few times in-painting details, and then I try to mentally take a step back visualize all those various details in a unique coherent picture, by un-focusing attention. It kinda work, but it needs to get into it. It&#x27;s easier to imagine looking at a photo from the scene I&#x27;m trying to visualize. I noticed my eyes do some REM when I do this. Color and illumination comes last. Closing eyes helps. I can mentally do a &quot;street-view&quot; experience of my home, moving inside and answer question about details, but I need to focus my attention first on the relevant area.<p>Those mental exercises are quite funny, not sure how useful they are though. Once you add some moving objects (like pendulums) in the scene in your mind, it gets even harder to make something coherent. Then you can add animals and people, wind. Noises, music. I guess when you add complexity, you must relax your attention to make a coherent global picture, then you get into a flow-like state, and it becomes more similar to a lucid dream.<p>On the other hand of the spectrum, I&#x27;m not quite sure about auras too. It&#x27;s kind like of synesthesia but for people instead of numbers. I guess the brain hallucinate colors around object&#x2F;people to make it faster to process. I find it quite unnecessary to hallucinate rather than having a specific feel about the person. And I feel it&#x27;s quite reductive&#x2F;intolerant to put&#x2F;interact with people into a category based on subconscious perception. But I guess that if I was a bouncer, I&#x27;ll probably be seeing colors around people too.<p>To conclude this already too long post, I think aphantasia is probably very correlated with hyper-attention.

I&#x27;m aphantasic, and like others here was blown away to learn that people can see things with their eyes closed. That statement seems like an oxymoron to me.<p>Once I started thinking about it more, I realised I can actually imagine a very precise scenario, except that it is always <i>behind</i> me. It could be similar to how a blind person perceives the world, not seeing anything but knowing that everything is there.<p>The way I see it, I can process two different worlds at once. I&#x27;ve always been very good at modeling abstract things in my head, e.g. binary trees or a graph.

As others I learned that this was not a universal thing a couple years ago. Ironically I studied physics. It makes a lot of sense why learning certain things were so damn difficult for me now.<p>It’s crazy how little we understand our mind still.

Got an related idea from the IQ thread: is there a correlation between aphantasism and IQ? Most IQ tests require you to visually imagine the sequences that lead to the correct answer.

Do such people experience differences in the study of topology?

I&#x27;m curious.<p>How many coders here also can&#x27;t picture things in their mind visually for longer then a quick flash?