I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and stumbled on an article regarding aphantasia. It caught my attention because, although I don’t think I’ve ever consciously considered it before, I’ve always had a vague notion that when someone spoke of visualizing things or picturing things in their mind’s eye that they were speaking figuratively. Apparently there is a whole world out there that I am unable to participate in.
My mind’s eye is blind. I cannot visualize walking along a beach. I can imagine the feeling of my muscles moving as I walk, I can imagine the feeling of the water on my feet and the feel of the sand as it is pulled out from under my toes as the waves recede but when I try to picture it all I see is black. Instead of visualizing the image I have an internal monologue that describes the scene to me.
Unlike the person in the article I have no issue recognizing faces. It also seems to be common for people with this condition to to be readers. I am different in this as well as I am a voracious reader. I don’t visualize as I am reading but as reading a book is very similar to how I imagine other things I find I can still become very immersed in the book.
When I posted this on my Facebook I had one friend post that, like me, he had never really considered that others actually have visualizations and another post that his imagination was a vivid high definition experience with full colour and sound as well as extras that walk into the scene and start conversations with him. How do the denizens of the SMDB compare? Is your imagination a super vivid experience that compares to real life? Are you more of a high def TV screen? Something else?
This is interesting. I’d never heard of this before, but it makes sense. I sort of have the opposite issue, in that my mental imagery is so vivid, that it can get distracting. For example, I’ve often struggled with reading, because I quickly visualize what it is I’m reading, and then I get into a loop where my eyes are still physically reading the pages, but my mental images just kind of go off on their own detached from what I’m reading. Eventually, I snap back to reality, realize I’m several pages farther than I remember, and I have to go back and reread. So, I wonder if, since you mention that most with this condition are avid readers, if perhaps this is perhaps partially a way people have trained themselves through a lot of reading and maybe those who focused on other means developed visualization skills instead?
Oops, I goofed on this. It should read that it is a common complaint of people with this condition that they are not readers because they can’t visualize the story and I am different as I am a voracious reader and get caught up in the story because reading is so much like the way I imagine other things.
As given my correction above I wonder if it could be the case that people on the two ends of the spectrum can have issues reading, one because they cannot visualize and the other because they visualize too strongly?
I have a very visual imagination but I can’t really choose any of the options. My imagination is more like a remembered dream, fairly good picture quality in the middle but getting blurred towards the edges with often many pictures sort of fighting for attention. Scenes with lots of detail lose things that aren’t important to the overall picture. More an impressionist painting than a TV of any sort, actually.
Sound isn’t that great, more like a description of a sound than sound itself.
I’ve had the IFLScience version of this popping up in my facebook feed and the amount of WRONG in that (and in the BBC article) just completely blows me away.
No, wrong. Galton’s original paper did not identify two cohorts - a “most people” who can “readily” do this and a “condition” in which some people couldn’t. He described a smooth continuum, in which there were strong visualisers, shading down to moderate, to weak, to none at all. Where do you draw the line there between “well, you’re normal” and "ooh. You have a condition :rolleyes:
IFLScience does even worse. “doctors have described for the first time a condition where people can’t form mental images in their “mind’s eye.””. Ok, sure. If you ignore that one dude a hundred and fifty years ago
This very thread, in fact, shows a shining example of how this labelling is going to skew people’s thinking on visual imagery. The name “aphantasia” is just begging to be interpreted as “inability to imagine” - what the blue hell does not producing distinct visual images have to do with not imagining? I have a perfectly functional imagination thankyou very much - a predominantly verbal one. “Ironically,” says the article “Niel now works in a bookshop”. And the ironic thing about that is … what exactly? Not visualising means you can’t appreciate NARRATIVE now? DID ANYONE WITH TWO FUNCTIONING BRAIN CELLS BOTHER TO RUB THEM TOGETHER FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THIS ARTICLE?
Ahem.
As you can see, I feel rather crabby on the subject.
In fact, mostly I feel condescended to. If you lump in weak visualisers (as in, weak enough that you normally wouldn’t bother with it particularly) with the people whose visualisation is seriously zero, you’re probably heading up to about a third of the population, and this doesn’t seem to have occurred to the writers of these articles.
And the REALLY annoying thing is (yes, I still have mental room for an EXTRA level of annoyance) - exploring the differences between the many and hugely varied strategies that people have to incorporate their particular level of visualisation into their mental diet is hugely fascinating. It’s really not served by this simplistic “Hey! There’s this thing that everyone can do! Except for that dude. He can’t do it. But the rest of you totally can” style of reporting.
That part of the article seems to be extremely poorly edited. I’ve seen quotes in other articles where Niel speaks specifically of having a hard time reading, especially passages with lots of description. Had the BBC included that quote it would have made the “ironically” line much more understandable. It would be interesting to know how Niel’s imagination does work. It might be more difficult for him because he doesn’t have a narrative imagination such as you and I have.
Missed the edit window and wanted to add the below:
What I find most interesting is how different people’s head space can be. Like I said in the OP, I’ve never really thought about it when people talked about visualizing things and just kind of went along with it as a figure of speech. I always imagined (hehe) that other people’s head space was similar to my own. I’d be really interested in a study to see how this differs in different people. Are there people who don’t have a visual imagination or the narrative imagination but something different? What is that like? Does the difference in visualization correlate to a difference in creative ability?
Galton’s original work on the subject mentions starting off with a bunch of scientists - in which good visualisers were extremely rare.
Visual artists, of course, are generally great visualisers - in fact, I can’t imagine how you could pursue that career without it.
I bet other careers out there shake out with a similar pattern of differentiation.
Of course, this just contributes even more to the common delusion that people tend to have, which is the “everyone is like me” fallacy (LessWrong calls it the Typical Mind Fallacy). The scientists are all going “hey, I surveyed five of my colleagues, and NOT ONE of them reported any of this visualisation crap - therefore, pack o’ bollocks”, and the artists, on the other hand…
I myself have an imagination which I call positional, but not visual. Which often confuses hell out of true visualisers. Like - if I imagine an object I immediately have a very strong internal sense of where it is, its size, extent, front back - but couldn’t tell you for peanuts what colour it is. No visuals to speak of, but a very clear sense of the object’s presence, which I think might be mediated by the vestibular system, or some other one of the extra 18 senses.
I’m great at imagining most things. Except sound and smell. I can’t imagine those properly. Though I also have a hard time identifying people by their voice alone, so this could just be a general thing and not an imaginitive thing (how can you imagine something you have a hard time with in real life?). Memories are like full video but with the sound turned off (spoken word simply “exists” in my mind, if that makes any sense - it’s like being able to feel words or something, difficult to describe). I have never experienced a smell in my dreams. So on and so forth.
Here’s another thing though, when spelling out a word - I visually create the word, a white word on a black background, in order to suss out the spelling. And when I count, I visually create white dots in my mind to represent numbers. I wonder how many other people do that sort of thing. I never thought about it before.
Visual art, I always figured, can be trained into a person if they really want to try. So I also wonder if training for art will increase your ability to visualize. Training for art means you get trained to really look at the world. How objects compare in size to each other. In color. What an edge really looks like, and what we’re just filling in. After a while this process becomes easier as you get used to comparing objects all the time. I’d imagine (ho ho) that like most artists, this would eventually lead to being able to do this inside your mind’s eye without a physical reference always necessary - but I have no studies to back this up.
Just as good as real life. I have what I think other people call an eidetic memory – vivid snapshots/video clips/muscle memory with sufficient fidelity that I can go back and check for details I wasn’t conscious of at the time. Like all brain things, it’s not 100% reliable, but it works exactly the same for real life, dreams, and scenes I have ginned up consciously. Consulting the recordings seems to depend in some way on keeping the appropriate sensory paths active (e.g., when pulling up mental snapshots, I do it with my eyes open and staring into space, and have a much harder time of it if I try with my eyes closed), and imagining stuff happens the same way. As far as I can tell, they all use the same circuits.
I fall on the visual and eidetic end of spectrum. Like others on the thread, it didn’t occur to me that others didn’t visualize like I do, although I knew my memory was different.
Interesting. I’m an author in a “doesn’t pay the bills but I love it anyway” manner. I may start a thread exploring this aspect. How does this impact the way people experience and enjoy fiction?
Speaking for myself, I love all kinds of fiction, but when I first found out about the visualiser/non-visualiser split, it was a real epiphany regarding the types of fiction I like. Aha! So that’s why Tolkein wrote all those pages and pages and PAGES about mountains and rivers and trees - he’s not being obtuse, he’s writing for his constituency. There are all these people out there who actually see rich vivid images as a result of reading this sort of stuff, while I’m crawling through it like a woman in a desert whispering “Dialogue! …must … have … dialogue …”
Not all descriptive writing is physical description, of course. Some of it is about people’s emotions and reactions and relationships, and that I can appreciate as much as anyone.
The net result of all this is that while previously I somewhat guiltily skipped through pages upon pages of physical description, checking in every paragraph or so for a quote mark or an internal emotional state, I now perfectly cheerfully and peacefully skip through pages upon pages etc etc, and have a much smoother ride through a wider variety of literature as a result.
As an artist (of sorts) I have a good visual imagination, but my creative imagination is a bit stale - I tend to fall back on the familiar and don’t take risks.
I have a friend who has this problem, diagnosed about ten years ago. He’s not a reader, he needs things spoken to him for him to be able to retain information properly. Ironically he works in television, a somewhat heavily visual medium.
I don’t visualize my thoughts very much at all.
I kinda sense the concept of whatever I’m imagining, but the imagery just isn’t there.
This must be going around FB - a friend of mine posted a big dialog about it just the other day.
For me it’s like a slow flip book. There have been times where I had a full-on video playing, but it’s rare enough that I can recall saying to myself “whoa, that was like a true day-dream…”
If I put a great deal of effort into it, I’m occasionally able to visualize something. Like for example I was finally able to stop having a stupid reoccurring dream about getting to work and not having my keys that had bothered me for weeks by deliberately visualizing where my car keys were before bed and visualizing using them to open the door at work. This was a lot of work to go through every night, though, so unless I really need to remember something, I don’t picture it.
It doesn’t bother me that most of my thoughts are just audio, though, so it’s not a priority. Okay, that’s not entirely true - I can get completely overwhelmed when people give a long set of instructions about some multi-step process they need me to go through without showing me what they’re talking about or writing it down because even if I wanted to, my visual skills aren’t good enough to keep up with how fast people talk.
I visualize constantly. My thoughts and dreams are like 3D hi-def movies with colour, sound, touch, smell, parallax, the whole works. I’ve often wanted a video-out jack on my head; then, I could be my own movie studio.
I can rotate things in my head and look at the different sides and take them apart.
I run into problems, though, when I visualize metaphors. There’s a song about ‘killing me slowly with her song’ which just creeps me out because I take it literally. It took a long time before I started learning about subtext.
Learning about this is very interesting. I want to ask a couple of people I know who are not readers, neither of whom are the least dyslexic; I know, because I asked them. Reading, to them, is like watching grass grow.
I can easily imagine a described scene or a scene in my memory or a merging of both. Imagining walking along a beach is a snap. Water lapping at my bare feet as I walk over white sand or pebbles, how the waves sound, a boardwalk on my right or left depending on the direction I’m walking, people everywhere and the sounds they make, or I’m alone. Bright blue sky, clouds or no clouds, it can go on forever. But my imagination and/or ability fails here:
Well, no. Try as I might, I cannot draw or paint, and I never could. I was always the worst artist throughout school, which sometimes caused problems, so if I could have produced art, I certainly would have. Anything more than a square, a circle or a cone is a mystery. I’d screw up anything more than a stick man. I could not copy a scene if I’m in front of it and if my life depends on it.
I can imagine it, in colour and in any type of light, but I cannot reproduce it short of photographing it. So I don’t doubt that some people cannot imagine a scene, seeing only black or whatever they may see in their imaginations.
I think I have a pretty good visual memory though not as good as some savant or something. I specifically remember moments in school when I couldn’t remember answers to question and I would visualize the text book and often I could remember the answer from the picture in my head. I’m really good at the bass guitar, been playing over ten years and there is a certain degree of visualization that goes on where I can imagine what sounds will be produced by putting my hands in different points on the fret board even if I’ve never played that before, a kind of link between the visual and the sounds, at the same time I can’t draw at all whatsoever for some reason, even my stick figures are laughable. Some people on the autistic spectrum appear to think in highly visual images and not words the way most people do. A lot of this is a kind of sensory distortion, students with that disorder tend to be better visual learners than auditory ones.
AFAICT, that is what people call an eidetic memory. It feels so much less impressive when you’ve been doing it all your life. I find that most depictions of it in fiction are written by people who don’t have it, and are not especially accurate.
The oddest part of mine is that it is genuinely a visual snapshot – if we’re driving and someone asks me what that last mile marker said, I don’t actually know the number. I have to pull up the snapshot, look at it like a picture, and read the number off of it. They store as raster graphics, and the OCR doesn’t run until I tell it to, if that makes any sense.