Aphantasia... apparently 3% of the world has it. Any aphantasists in here, who've had success improving their condition?
10 years ago, I'd have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I'm interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn't feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
On the good side, we're much less affected by trauma, because we're not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there's that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like "moist", and describing disgusting things that they "see" in their heads, while we're unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
I'm me and I'm happy. I find that the strategies I learned as a kid sometimes allow me to think more clearly and procedurally than others. I'm not haunted by images of the past. I do take extra photos now that I know what's up. All in all, I don't see it as much of a negative. It's far better than some of the other conditions I was thinking I might have, before I learned about aphantasia.
I was fairly active on r/aphantasia for a bit, but I started to back away when they went for this "total aphant" thing, where you weren't really in the club unless you couldn't imagine with any senses at all.
I sometimes wonder if there's not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don't have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it's like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it's like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn't there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that's certainly not my experience (though it's possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don't actually exist in my vision. It's definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there's a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it's sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it's doing, all of the physics and such still work, it's just not ending up on my brain's screen.
What's the opposite of aphantasia? I have that. I can picture things in my mind so viscerally I have made myself throw up involuntarily on multiple occasions.
But it is also my engineering super power. Double edged sword.
These topics are always some of the hardest for me to fully comprehend. There's also always going to be at least 1% of me that suspects you're all lying or just don't realize that you do have the same abilities as everyone else, but that's likely just my brain trying to cope with what I just truly can't understand. It's not even first nature, it's instinctual rooted in me that I hear this voice in my head and see these images and sounds and all sorts of stuff. However I think the closest I can get to relating is when someone recently told me their thoughts and dreams are vividly colored... vividly colored? No sir, my thoughts and dreams are barely colored, sort of more like it's all in sepia color and dull. Almost like old black and white TV, but a bit of color. So now I know I'm missing something I've never had. This became a ramble, I just woke up, sorry!
The voice actress of the Narrator in Baldur's Gate 3 Amelia Tyler said in a recent interview that her aphantasia has helped her in being a better actress, because she thinks of situations and stuff in terms of emotions. So that way she could get really well into the heads of the characters she played.
I don't understand what it is. I read a blurb about it, but i don't really get it. I can remember what my house, car, dog, etc. generally look like, but i can't think of a time i tried to imagine a picture or visualize an item. I'm terrible with faces and intruduce myself to the same people repeatedly. Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they're thinking or reading.
Is it called the same thing if you can't visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife's. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child's face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can't remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
From my amateur independent digging I actually found people fall into three groups on this, not two:
Aphantasia - Not being able to visualize 8at all*
What I consider "regular" visualization, ie a "minds eye" or "back of the mind" sort of thing, that's distinctly different from how you normally see visually with your eyes.
Prophantasia - In which you can visualize things that appear to you how simply looking at something would appear.
I saw someone on reddit apparently go from aphantasia to prophantasia but people were calling BS on them. I'm in group 2 myself and would love to be able to do prophantasia. So I'm curious if anyone has managed it?
My ability to visualize things varies dramatically based on my mood, context, if I'm asleep, and whether or not it's "voluntary". It's never better than a fuzzy, 80-90% transparent image, but sometimes I can "see" color and some finer details, and other times it's just an outline. Involuntary visualization (visualizing something in response to written or spoken statements) is a lot stronger for me than voluntarily visualization. If my involuntary image becomes voluntary (because I try to intentionally maintain it) then it goes away. Additionally, I tend to be better at it if I'm in a good mood than if I'm in a bad mood, and I'm better at it if I'm externally prompted to visualize it ("imagine this if you will...").
The best way I'd describe it is that it's like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. The moment I try to reach out and grab it to get a better look, it goes away. Most of the time the images aren't in front of me, but are "in another dimension". I'm aware that the image is there, I'm aware of what color things are, what their shape is, what texture they are, but I can't actually "feel" or "see" anything.
Except for when I'm asleep.
My dreams tend to be very vivid. Not like a lucid dream (usually), but vivid enough that it's led me to speculate that my seemingly partial-aphantasia might be less about missing neurons and more about a mental block preventing me from directly visualizing anything (I speculate that you're using the same neural pathways when you're dreaming as when you visualize something while awake).
For me personally, I think a lot of practice is going to be about training my "mental fine motor skills" and learning how to "be gentle" with my mental images so that I can interact with them without immediately dispelling them in a puff of smoke.
Something you might try doing is reading short, basic stories (like children's books) without any pictures, with the conscious intent of imagining what you'd see if you were filming them. Don't intentionally imagine things, but keep the idea that you are imagining things in the back of your head. You're creating the belief that you're visualizing something, which may actually help you to visualize it. This is something that people sometimes have to do when they're learning to lucid dream.
One of the main starting points for lucid dreaming is remembering your dreams; but what do you do if you can't remember your dreams? Well, firstly, start a dream journal. Then, once you've got your journal, notepad, text app, etc open, start writing what you think you dreamed about. You're not "making something up", you're "remembering what you think you dreamed". Your brain is either too dumb to know the difference, or smart enough to understand the intent. Either way, your brain will start to get the message that it's supposed to be remembering your dreams and will start retaining them instead of throwing them away.
Doing something similar might help with visualization.
So not exactly the subject, but: when I am about to fall asleep/ extremely tired / just woke up, my «phantasia» ability gets multiplied like by an order of magnitude. I can literally picture any object in perfect details from any angle. It only lasts for about a minute tho, then it fades away, and it all becomes kinda boring and not that exceptionally good.
It's like I have access to a new hardware acceleration for a minute
But i think i have it or at least closer to it than fully visualization. One thing that helps is to sort of mentally apply the first concept related to something that you think of. So for example, if someone says imagine a cabin, if you would say that a stereotypical cabin has a porch, then just go with it. In my mind if i try to think of a cabin there are so many variables (how many floors, windows, material, roughness, porch vs no, chimney or no, etc) that nothing can materialize in my mind. But if i just pick one of any of those that pop in my head then it feels a bit easier to get a glimpse. Idk if that helps at all 😅
I used to think I had aphantasia, but I'm not entirely sure if that's the case. For example, I can't visualize in my mind's eye something as vivid as a dream. My memories are not totally vivid either, but it's not as if I can't remember things visually.
I do wish I could imagine more vividly, but for me it's far from not being able to visualize at all.
As far as tips, I think you have to stop repeating this thought to yourself that you're limited in ability or unable to do something. If you try to do something but say to yourself "I can't do this" then you aren't going to succeed. If you believe you can there's no guarantee that it'll make it happen, or happem immediately, but you'll undoubtedly get better results
I have aphantasia. And also extreme crippling insomnia, it has been the last 3 or so years that i learned that other people can actually visualize at all. I always thought it was a metaphor. In my searching about a way to potentially improve it I found this article.
And it absolutely cured my insomnia. I can sleep easily for the first time in my life. Didn’t do a lot for the aphantasia but i did manage to successfully get an image or two a couple of times. Mostly i just love that i can finally sleep without hours of lying in bed beforehand.
I hadn't known a thing about this until last year.
I was a 0/10 until college, though I have improved quite a bit over the past few decades using tabletop role-playing games. I can now keep several blobs in my head and know the general distances between each.
I'm still flummoxed with colors and definition, but I'm happy with what I have.
I have aphantasia, typically a big fat 0 on the red star test. The only times I can visualize at all are when I'm really tired or really high. Even then I only get up to about a 3 at most.
This (and the human brain in general) is fascinating to me.
I've always been on the opposite end of aphantasia, although I've never been officially diagnosed with hyperphantasia.
I don't understand it at all it just seems natural.
When there's a question about physical objects I close my eyes and just check. It's not that my memory is particularly good but I can "synthesize" shapes. I might tell myself a story like, "Start with a point. Expand it into a line segment. Now pull that line parallel to itself to create a rectangle. You can spin that plane around a bit and then grab a point in the middle and pull it up into a pyramid. And so on. I basically watch a color-coded animation when I say something like that.
With music it can be a bit distracting. I'll go through phases where I get some piece of music stuck in my head and when I do it's incredibly detailed. I can pick out individual instruments in an orchestra and hear reverb. It can actually get so distracting that I have to play a trick to get it to stop. I need to find a piece of interesting music that I've never heard before. I can play that enough times to "drive out" the other one but not enough to "light up" the new one and I'm fine.
As a kid it was obvious that this was not something everyone did and I thought I was special. It turns out that beyond being an interesting curiosity I haven't found any actual use for it. Too bad. I still find these differences really interesting.
As an aside, I'm also one of those people that's terrible at remembering names and faces. I often completely forget someone's name and face within minutes of meeting them. I've started using Anki to help with it. I make flashcards of all the people I'm supposed to know and run through them every night. It's a hack that works well enough that (some) people think I'm one of those people that never forgets a face.
And here I am, just cluing into how the Disney movie "Fantasia" is literally artistic visual interpretations of old classic music. Maybe they say that in the movie? Blew my own mind here.
I'm aphantasic for sure, I think I'm even entirely mind-blind so to speak, I can't imagine smells, tastes, sounds, images, or textures.
I can still dream and I can even recall the details vividly the morning of, but I suspect myself of being on the autism spectrum as I've always been super obsessed with finer details. Besides those recollections aren't in a mental image, it's more so concepts.
When I think of an apple I know the physiology of an apple and thus I can discern the details onto paper (albeit crudely as I'm not artist) but I've always suffered with geometry since rotating a shape in my head is impossible, algebraic translations, flips, etc across the x or y axis are also super difficult for me to grasp. But I can deal with arithmetic easier.
In terms of getting better at it? I'm not really in an environment or situation where I could safely test out hallucinogens, but with my ADHD on top of suspected autism, I really don't think I want to see images in my head. In 2019 I had my deepest dive into depression, and while I was having a 2am panic attack (the peak of my depression I'd say) where I had endless racing thoughts just coming at me from all directions. The "noise" of my own thoughts overpowered everything. If I could imagine sound (and by extension, voices) beyond my own I might have actually gone farther than a 2 second peak of "I want to die".
I don't have aphantasia but I have ADD. It causes me so many problems in my day to day life and in my relationships. It's one of those things that people think that either I am too lazy to "just do it" or "just make an effort to remember" or that I am mentally challenged If I try to explain it. Or worse, people think they have it too because they have all the symptoms some of the time. For me it's not a woopsie daisy kind of forgetfulness, it's every. Single. Time. All. The. Time. So I don't have aphantasia but I kind of understand the struggle, of not being neurotypical. I am very curious about what it means to have aphantasia, would you care to explain what it's like?