My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

I can't visualize things when I'm thinking consciously about them. But I do lucid dream, and when I lucid dream, I can visualise things perfectly. When I'm designing complex robotic mechanisms, lying in bed half awake in the morning is by far the most productive I'll be. I have no problem designing 3D mechanisms in CAD, or painting, and I tend to think of myself as a very visual person, but if I close my eyes and try to visualise something when fully awake, it somehow escapes me. But even when awake, I can sort of see things in my subconscious - it's almost like they're in my peripheral vision. As soon as I concentrate on them, they disappear. The brain is a weird thing.

Sometimes this can also be a good thing. I think for me it's the opposite, when I read the news and they are telling about rape, torture, killing or all this horrific stuff, it's really hard not to have bad images in my head. When I see some of the bad things online on newssites or twitter/reddit it's also really hard to get those images out of my head again. That's one of the reasons I want to stop reading the news. I probably going to switch to reading a newspaper that's been published once a week, should keep me up to date and doesn't give me anxiety for the rest of the day.

I have the opposite problem where I feel overwhelmed with imagery and colors, sounds and vibrations or hums or harmonies, and psychedelic-feeling visuals at pretty much all times. Just thinking about trying to remember something usually involves a visual or emotional slideshow of sorts transitioning among various somewhat related images, concepts, colors, feelings, smells, sounds, etc until I get to what I was trying to remember.<p>My dreams are extremely vivid and sometimes bleed into wakefulness for several minutes; daydreaming can become entire out-of-body experiences. There are times where it can be difficult to distinguish between real memories and fantasies.<p>It also has significant downsides with negative imagery and intrusive thoughts.<p>But at the same time it is very helpful for being creative and finding intuitive understandings of things.<p>Oddly enough, actually taking psychedelics feels more like being able to focus this kind of thing!

I have the same thing and never knew until HN&#x27;s discussion last week: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37718999">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37718999</a><p>The article mentions Image Streaming, which I&#x27;ve been practising since. Interestingly, it seems to work! I&#x27;ve have been seeing vivid dreams, and have been able to randomly visualize shapes. Nothing to prove it &quot;cures&quot; aphantasia, but we&#x27;ll see :)

Like many things in life, there’s a spectrum for this. Some people are aphantasic, or completely lacking in the ability to produce mental imagery. Tell them to visualize an apple, and they can’t. Others have hyperphantasia and can visualize the apple from a gray shade to full vibrancy. I suspect hyperphantasia was a bigger deal in the ole hunter gatherer times and being able to mentally simulate would be important to survival.

I have total aphantasia, in fact I still can&#x27;t believe people can literally visualize things in their heads. However I have pretty good memory of my other senses, especially sound and smell and can &quot;replay&quot; conversations and music pretty well in my head.<p>&gt;Some people ask me if my aphantasia can be cured. The easy answer is no, because you can’t cure what isn’t a disease, and anyway we don’t know enough about it yet to influence it.<p>I disagree there, aphantasia is at least a condition and we just began inspecting it seriously, I wish I could contribute in some way.

&gt; People can actually invoke shapes and colors in their minds.<p>Please can some of you chime in. I have never been able to picture things and I don&#x27;t have a voice in my head. Do you? I assumed my way is the norm, it&#x27;s weird finding out that it might not be. What does picturing things even look like, is there a floating object in front of you?<p>On the voice thing I saw a Reddit thread where people were expressing surprise that some people don&#x27;t have an inner voice when they read or think.

&gt; I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally<p>This is interesting, I would have thought that if one can describe and draw something, they&#x27;d be able to mentally visualise it.<p>My sense of visualisation is often not so strong, in the sense that I don&#x27;t get to imagine vivid situations during the day, unless I&#x27;m recalling something I&#x27;ve seen. What I&#x27;ve noticed is that when I&#x27;m sleepy, it becomes exponentially easier to visualise things I&#x27;ve never seen.<p>I&#x27;m curious if anyone else has that happen.<p>I&#x27;ve been able to control some of my dreams, though that&#x27;s off-topic and something that was recently discussed here.

I&#x27;m glad this now has a name. I realised I couldn&#x27;t do it when I was pretty young, after the first few times I encountered the concept of &quot;counting sheep&quot;. Like, what sheep? Even if there are sheep, surely my eyes need to be closed in order to fall asleep? Can other people really see sheep whenever they want to see sheep?!<p>Unlike the writer of the article, I would definitely &quot;fix&quot; this if I could, a mind&#x27;s eye sounds like a very useful thing to have. (I have other deficiencies&#x2F;differences which I wouldn&#x27;t choose to fix, though.)

I think I&#x27;m aphantasic, probably not 100%. But I also wonder if perhaps this helps in abstract thinking; as it comes more natural.

For a potential cure:<p>Search for &#x27;aphantasia image streaming&#x27; on Youtube. I&#x27;m in a hurry now, maybe I will provide a link later.