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Comment by robluxus | Hacker News Reader

Are there tests for aphantasia?

It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pretty wildly.

I myself don't have aphantasia I think but I feel like I really have to work on "drawing things up" when I try to picture something with my eyes closed. Or maybe that's just the normal amount of effort for the complexity and detail I'm trying to capture? Actually it's easier to "imagine" things with my eyes open which I always thought was weird before I read this comment about daydreaming blocking out vision. Which still sounds extreme to me, but maybe not more extreme than all those other reports that claim they can procure fully detailed houses / places / system architectures / electrical diagrams / etc on a whim.

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Conversations around this kind of thing are so fascinating to me, because they seem to present this fundamental breakdown in human communication - how impossible it is to convey what 'really is going on' inside your mind.

The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'.

But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not.

Picture a dog in your head. It’s such an fuzzy, imprecise action that you can skew the definition of “seeing it” from nothing (you are mostly reasoning about what this dog looks like) all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision.

Depending on what they think "seeing it" means, 100 different people can have 100 different explanations for the same phenomenon.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not.

Yeah, this is exactly the issue, and it's really just impossible to know. There's this popular 'apple test' image that gets posted a lot, where you're supposed to self-diagnose your level of aphantasia/visual imagery prowess based on which 'tier' of apple you can visualize, and people will always say: yeah, I can see [extremely vivid, realistic image of an apple] in my mind perfectly well. And that seems impossible to me, but then, how are we supposed to know what other people can actually see in their mind? It's in their mind, after all.

The one thing for me that does make me believe there is some major difference is murder mysteries; I have friends who can visualize scenes and solve mysteries that would be impossible for me.

One interesting thing to consider is the "draw a bicycle" test. When presented to a population of phantastics, many will produce severely flawed bikes that could never exist in real life, yet they will claim that it matches the "image" they have in their head of one. However in my own experience despite being aphantasic I can very easily draw a physically accurate bike, not by rendering to paper the "picture" in my head, but rather by working from first principles about how the components of a bike have to interact.

Interesting!

Many years ago, I drew the opposite conclusion: that people that cannot draw also cannot picture the image of what they want to draw. My informal quiz confirmed my suspicions, but it has one serious flaw that completely undermines it:

I am a decent (if untrained) artist. I can say I draw well. I can also picture things in my mind very vividly.

However, I cannot draw horses. I can see them in my mind clearly -- as I type this, a realistic brown horse popped in my mind -- but if I try to draw it, it will look like a badly drawn dog. Drawing horses requires a theoretical understanding of their anatomy, it would seem.

I still think most people who cannot draw also cannot imagine the subject. With exceptions.

I would be one of the exceptions. Or an example of an incomplete theory. The ability to visualize may be one of several prerequisites to have an innate drawing ability. Another possible prerequisite is the ability to translate image to paper. An ability I lack.

Sorry for the long explanation below. I’d write less but many people have had questions and I’m trying to answer some of those here.

I’m able to vividly experience a virtual world including smells and tactile sensations. But it goes even further, I can simulate experiencing it through a different mind, sort of like a virtual machine. I can literally put myself “in someone else’s shoes”. (I’ve called it my mental holodeck.)

I think part of the reason I developed this is because the emotional hardware in my brain is broken and I have has spent my entire life interpreting all human behavior through logic. The other part is intentional practice through lucid dreaming and manic episodes rewiring my brain to support additional channels.

You think with all this I would be able to draw pretty well. I can’t. Just like emotions, my brain isn’t able to translate vision to motor control or spoken language. (I believe this is also due to broken hardware.) Fortunately, I am much better at translating to written language.

That is very interesting! Perhaps there is some kind of disconnect happening between different parts of your brain, and physiologically you have created new pathways that work around that in some way.

In my youth I practiced lucid dreaming and astral projection techniques, as well as lots of experiences with psychedelics. I have recently started undergoing Ketamine treatments for anxiety, and while under the effects, I experience very vivid images similar to lucid dreams, while also being aware of what is going on around me such as my guide walking down the hallway to check on me periodically.

I am also an untrained artist, and can picture things with great detail in my mind. When it comes to putting them down on paper or canvas, I'm unable to get physical aspects down, such as perspective and proper lighting. Most of my art is very abstract and pattern based, and when I paint people or objects, they often come out similar to a Picasso painting (but unintentionally). I've learned to work with the way my mind works, and have adapted my art style to it, but it would be fascinating if there were some way for me to "break through" my difficulties and gain a grasp of 3 dimensional objects, in 3 dimensional space.

There are objective tests for visualization that show that aphantasia isn't just a miscommunication about internal processes. You can learn more here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

while reading this, my mind started trying to imagine dogs...

I didn't do it on purpose, it just did.

They were all barking, and had a collar... That probably says something about me.

It can also vary depending on the subject to be imagined.

For some people faces, especially familiar ones, I can see their faces in high detail (flaps of their noses, even pockmarks and other texture). The "picture" doesn’t stay still and it sometimes requires effort; though some imagery comes unbidden and effortlessly.

Other topics I have a harder time with and are more abstracted.

The problem with discourse at this level, however, is how subjective it is: when I say I can picture in my head the beautiful outdoors scenery of my last vacation, how accurate is it? If you could download a hardcopy from my brain, would you tell me "this doesn't look like a photo at all"? But what if I'm actually there, watching with my eyes -- is the image that forms in my brain accurate? Maybe someone would also scoff at it if they could download it, "this isn't what the scenery looks at all!".

I fear we will never be able to solve this riddle.

For what it's worth, I spoke to my friend who professes to be able to visualise things very vividly. I think there is something to it because she was able to confirm that she can literally see the thing she is visualising as if it's there, I asked her many questions about it so I don't think there is much room for miscommunication. She confirmed that it is as if that thing is there and that she can hold that imaginary thing in her field of vision for long periods of time. She can do this with her eyes open.

There must be some sort of spectrum of ability with this stuff. But I agree that it's difficult to prove and measure. I do think that great artists must be on the more "gifted" side of this spectrum.

>There must be some sort of spectrum of ability with this stuff.

right there are spectrums applying to for every other human ability, so obviously also for this. The idea that the people on the low or high end of the spectrum are just miscommunicating their experience is a weird idea to hold, as it implies that there isn't a low or high end to the spectrum.

I’m skeptical about these testimonies because peoples drawing ability does not match. “ I can see this right in front of me and it is detailed as a photograph.” OK, trace it. (They can’t)

I can't picture things in my mind like that, but I also can't do a very good job of reproducing a photograph that I am directly looking at. If I can trace it that's one thing, but if I can see the photo but not hold my tracing paper directly up against it then it's a skill I haven't developed well.

Picture Dorothy’s dog Toto from the Wizard of Oz. Now look at her shoes. Don’t look too close!

If you are like me, you get incredible detail so long as you don’t linger. Is the detail really there, or an illusion? And why does attention destroy the detail, like the waking within a dream?

It's this kind of casual dismissal that makes the aphantasia so frustrating to talk about. The people who are able to visualize find it so fundamental and easy that they literally cannot conceive that someone else might be lacking this ability. They tell aphantasiacs that what they've experienced their whole lives isn't real, they just misunderstand what visualization actually is.

No, I understand what visualization of something in your head is. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I can still see part of my dream in my mind's eye, but it fades quickly. I can't do it consciously. Never have been able to.

If you tell me to visualize a dog and describe it to you, I can't do it. I can describe what a dog looks like in general, but I won't be able to tell you what the specific dog that I've conjured up looks like because it doesn't look like anything. I'm not looking at an image in my mind's eye of a dog.

It's not just aphantasia, it's about all diabilities. Especially but not limited to anything mind-connected. It's much easier to not say "Well if it's so hard to walk, why don't you just get out of that wheelchair?". That is obvious. But understanding something that is so fundamental to your being is not possible for someone else is causing so much misunderstandings and problems. Things like "I can do this so why don't you just try that?" to someone that is totally incapable to do it is so sad. And this even from people whos job it is to help handicapped people live a normal life?

I mean I definitely see flashes of images of a dog. Isn’t one of the tests to see if you can seamlessly rotate a yellow star in your head? I can do it in flashes but I know people that can pause it midway through a rotation and draw the exact image they are seeing.

> all the way up to a visual mental concept of it that does everything but actually block your field of vision.

That does sound like it would put an upper bound on what "seeing with your minds eye" means, but then what about this line from GP above:

> daydreaming has a weird effect of completely blocking out my vision.

This was claimed by a person who also self-reports aphantasia, and I (as a person that claims to NOT have aphantasia) just can't imagine (pun intended) how this would work.

When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them.

This makes me wonder two things:

  1.  Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation?

  2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things.

As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.

> 2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

Yes, many reports suggest that most do. But I haven’t seen any rate comparisons with people who don’t have it.

>2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?

Yes, I do. As it goes, I think it is some neurological thing, a receptor that is misfiring, or something. I've been testing it for the past decade and I only found three conditions where I can see images:

1. Dreams

2. Transition between awake and asleep during classical music concerts (This one is very interesting, cause one of my most vivid experiences was actually seeing different seasons during a Four Seasons (by Mozart I think?) piano concert, based purely on the music, without knowing which one was actually playing).

3. Psychedelics. Or, at least, mushrooms. Haven't tried others.

It seems when some neurological inhibitor is turned off, the images come back, but I don't know if there was any research on that, or whether it is even true.

For myself, I don't think I have aphantasia, unless it is something that can come and go. There are times where I daydream and experience vivid visions akin to psychedelic closed eye visuals (except actual visions, and not geometric patterns). Most of the time when I daydream, I can picture something in my head, but it doesn't have the depth and detail of what I experience when deep in thought.

I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new.

This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).

I think it might be a literacy that can be honed. A 100 years ago a curriculum was devised to develop commercial art skills. Part of the curriculum I went through required 6 hours of life drawing a week for 2 semesters. The likely result is a strong visualization skill that can be expressed on paper

The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.

> Are there tests for aphantasia?

Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures.

Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).

> Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).

Thanks for mentioning this... did an extremely quick Google and I suddenly understand everything about my memory.

Also useful: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Picture an apple in your mind. What colour is it?

...

Most people say red or green.

If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.

Wait, but, I know apples are red. I mean, picture "2 + 2 = " in your head and fill out the scene. What comes after the equals sign? It's 4, obviously. Nobody needs to hold anything in their visual field to know that.

Wouldn't a better test be one of "visual reasoning"? I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well.

> I'm thinking: construct a visual scene, object A is on top of object B, etc., and then ask a question that would be obvious to someone actually seeing the scene, but very difficult to reason out otherwise. Obviously such a test would be hard to come up with, hence why we don't seem to be able to talk about this stuff very well.

Yeah. I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but the big thing that made me understand (some of) the gulf in terms of visual rendering abilities was murder mysteries. I read a lot of them with friends and oftentimes mysteries rely on an ability to construct an image of the scene in your head. Not being able to solve such a mystery doesn't mean you have aphantasia, of course, but there's this feeling for me in these that they're literally impossible, and yet other people can definitely solve them.

Without spoilers, could you just list one or two such murder mysteries for me to read both for enjoyment and as a bit of a self-test?

My memory is really bad for this kind of thing, sorry. I think some of Keigo Higashino's recent translated works have this kind of physicality in their mysteries, but I'd have to reread them to remember ahahaha. (But on the enjoyment angle, I do really like Higashino's works, so I do recommend them if you like mysteries)

You can learn a lot more about aphantasia here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Yes. My partner was tested for it once by a psychiatrist. From what I remember it's a lot of visual pattern and recall questions.

Yes there are tests, an MRI. Anyone claiming to have it is probably self-diagnosed and full of it. I'm tired of the self-diagnoses of everything trend over the last 5 or so years, sorry if my tone isn't the best.

I'm tired of all the gatekeeping by the health industry telling us that we need to use their absurd rube goldberg processes, which often tell us "no", to know anything about ourselves.

Gatekeeping != Rigor. Set the bar higher.

Doesn’t apply. Aphantasia is not recognized as a medical issue and there are no official diagnoses being conducted.

This is my conclusion as well although I did find a paper that said you could use an MRI of the vision region to tell.

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