Aphant here! I would actually love your theory to be true but unfortunately no amount of training or practicing makes me better or even able to visualise. Believe me, I spent many years trying and practicing art before I heard about aphantasia and realised thats what I have.
If I looked at 10k slop pictures and their corresponding prompts I wouldn’t be able to imagine the outputs any more than I already can (which is not at all).
Likewise I can’t do meditation or self-hypnosis where the guide says stuff like “imagine you’re lying on a beach” etc. At least it makes me immune to those stage hypnotists who try to get someone suggestible up on stage.
I don’t know if training would help alone, forcing your brain to create new neuronal connections is probably necessary.
Personally that came from deep painful emotional instances in my early life where I had nowhere else to hide but within myself. I have 3d imagination in which I can create full environment and caracters. It is entirely different from dreaming that I remember while waking up,. Memories or half awake dreams that I make operational decisions.
I actually had the reverse issue of you. I had to learn not to imagine what was discussed, saw or dreamed since some people would discuss things I didn’t want to imagine. It made my memory worse though.
Since finding this developer, I have been trying to visualize 3D environmental as 4D. I can create some new axial rotation, but I am still trying to determine how to find the actual 4th vectorial rotation in objects. Unusual problem to have I guess.
That last bit may also be you someone who can’t easily enter trace. There are less visual guided meditations (i like energy work which involves tactile imagination), but some people just struggle with the mental state guided meditation aims for
It’s so trippy to me because I’m opposite of that. If I’m daydreaming, I see the worlds inside my head almost as clearly as the real world, to the point where they overlap. I can be looking at a street in the real world and wherever my daydream is taking me, I see that as well on top of the real world.
I find it both fascinating and hard to imagine (ironically) how someone could see absolutely nothing in their head if someone told them to think of a tree growing out of a lake or a car that is also a three story house.
If there is one thing that upsets me about living, it’s that I will only ever experience the world once and through one perspective.
That last paragraph really hits me. I wish I could experience either of your perspectives as someone in a middle ground. My mental pictures are like theyre made of smoke. They form and quickly warp and dissipate. They also take effort to form
The way you describe your mental images sounds equally beautiful and frustrating haha. I can relate, actually! When I have racing thoughts, it’s like everything is flickering in my mind, thousands of images and I can’t hold on to any of them. Maybe it’s not so much smoke in my case, but more like a vicious hailstorm, hitting your face all at once like little projectiles.
I prefer daydreaming to that scenario. It’s easier to slow down if I’m going through stories in my mind that I want to write. That’s when I see two “realities” at the same time. But when it’s just thoughts, like random everyday thoughts, it’s like a slideshow on speed and oh, let’s also add a random song and play that on top over and over. There was a month where I had the Burrito Burrito Taco Taco song from South Park stuck in my head 24/7. So fucked, man. Many years ago my boyfriend told me that he didn’t always think of something. That sometimes his head is just empty, in zen mode and he’s relaxing. I thought he was joking because don’t everybody have projectile-thoughts in their heads all the time? Nope. Not everybody has. And not everybody see words and numbers in colors with texture and taste either.
Brains are so chaotic and strange and unique and wonderful ❤️
I have gotten to the point that I could design furniture in a spreadsheet. That’s mostly what I do already; I’ll design it in FreeCAD, I use the Spreadsheet workbench as a table of all critical dimensions, and then I’ll build the CAD model from there, but I draw less and less of the model. I usually just take a copy of the dimension spreadsheet with me into the workshop, very rarely relying on drawings unless I’ve got some intricate joinery to lay out.
I’m working on a case for my grandfather’s flag, and I modeled a part of the thing as a sanity check.
I might just do it as a challenge to myself, design and build a piece of furniture in LibreOffice.
Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It’s as though there is some particular step between “add the object to the environment, conceptually” and “render the object” that doesn’t happen for me.
Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.
I’ve tried to work with things in that state as well thinking maybe it could translate as well. Its a very interesting state though. If I try too hard it’ll wake me up and go away. If i don’t try enough, nothing happens, but when it’s just right, I can somewhat influence it.
I’ve had some success in the past transitioning into lucid dreaming from that state as well.
I have the same problem losing both the temporary hypnagogic visualization and lucid dreams, rare as the latter even are for me: it’s so easy to do something silly, like pay too much attention to it or get excited about it, and BAM, it’s been destroyed.
I did have one occasion where the hypnagogic thing had mild success when I tried to imagine something non-stationary, in this case sort of watching landscape go by as if I were in a car watching it through gaps between concrete pillars in a bridge railing.
So… You kind of percieve a symbolic representation of space, a sort of platonic ideal version? Must be a very different experience for you to read books than it is for me.
I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
Yeah, for some folks aphantasia comes with weakness/absence of other kinds of imagination, like audio or spatial, and for others it doesn’t. I feel like I have a decent sense of audio imagination - I can “play back” a memory of a song, and my experience is like a ghost of hearing. It is as though there is a second set of ears somewhere in my head that doesn’t “feel” the same as originally hearing it, but elements of the song I never really thought much of - maybe an audio glitch in the recording or a quirk of the voice or some non-instrument sound effect - also play back as just part of this “flat”, single-layer stream.
I never really thought much until now that I might have a duller audio imagination than others, because what I do have is at least closer to the experience of hearing than my spatial sense is to seeing.
If I could have your brain for a day, I would, so I could experience what it’s like for you! I’m so curious about how differently people think. It’s kinda like how I can somewhat picture what it might feel like to be a man or a plant or non-human animal, but I can never know for sure. There are these experiences that we just will never get to have due to our own physical limitations and it’s a bit frustrating to me.
I think I can imagine what it’s like for you, based on your description, but I will never know for sure. So frustrating!
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
I can’t. Scents, tastes, and sounds are out too. When I am aware of having dreams (which is rare) I don’t ever remember any actual sensory information, just concepts. Those concepts can be quite detailed, but it’s the idea of them rather than the perception of them
I can only imagine sounds. I also have no visual memory either. I can only remember a description of how something looked which means I also have near total face blindness. My wife jokes that I should always keep a photo of her around because if she ever went missing I wouldn’t be able to tell the police what she looked like.
Aphant here! I would actually love your theory to be true but unfortunately no amount of training or practicing makes me better or even able to visualise. Believe me, I spent many years trying and practicing art before I heard about aphantasia and realised thats what I have.
If I looked at 10k slop pictures and their corresponding prompts I wouldn’t be able to imagine the outputs any more than I already can (which is not at all).
Likewise I can’t do meditation or self-hypnosis where the guide says stuff like “imagine you’re lying on a beach” etc. At least it makes me immune to those stage hypnotists who try to get someone suggestible up on stage.
I don’t know if training would help alone, forcing your brain to create new neuronal connections is probably necessary.
Personally that came from deep painful emotional instances in my early life where I had nowhere else to hide but within myself. I have 3d imagination in which I can create full environment and caracters. It is entirely different from dreaming that I remember while waking up,. Memories or half awake dreams that I make operational decisions.
I actually had the reverse issue of you. I had to learn not to imagine what was discussed, saw or dreamed since some people would discuss things I didn’t want to imagine. It made my memory worse though.
https://youtube.com/@codeparade
Since finding this developer, I have been trying to visualize 3D environmental as 4D. I can create some new axial rotation, but I am still trying to determine how to find the actual 4th vectorial rotation in objects. Unusual problem to have I guess.
Just watching his video “I published a math paper” from your link and he’s very good at explaining things for the layman (me)
That last bit may also be you someone who can’t easily enter trace. There are less visual guided meditations (i like energy work which involves tactile imagination), but some people just struggle with the mental state guided meditation aims for
It’s so trippy to me because I’m opposite of that. If I’m daydreaming, I see the worlds inside my head almost as clearly as the real world, to the point where they overlap. I can be looking at a street in the real world and wherever my daydream is taking me, I see that as well on top of the real world.
I find it both fascinating and hard to imagine (ironically) how someone could see absolutely nothing in their head if someone told them to think of a tree growing out of a lake or a car that is also a three story house.
If there is one thing that upsets me about living, it’s that I will only ever experience the world once and through one perspective.
That last paragraph really hits me. I wish I could experience either of your perspectives as someone in a middle ground. My mental pictures are like theyre made of smoke. They form and quickly warp and dissipate. They also take effort to form
The way you describe your mental images sounds equally beautiful and frustrating haha. I can relate, actually! When I have racing thoughts, it’s like everything is flickering in my mind, thousands of images and I can’t hold on to any of them. Maybe it’s not so much smoke in my case, but more like a vicious hailstorm, hitting your face all at once like little projectiles.
I prefer daydreaming to that scenario. It’s easier to slow down if I’m going through stories in my mind that I want to write. That’s when I see two “realities” at the same time. But when it’s just thoughts, like random everyday thoughts, it’s like a slideshow on speed and oh, let’s also add a random song and play that on top over and over. There was a month where I had the Burrito Burrito Taco Taco song from South Park stuck in my head 24/7. So fucked, man. Many years ago my boyfriend told me that he didn’t always think of something. That sometimes his head is just empty, in zen mode and he’s relaxing. I thought he was joking because don’t everybody have projectile-thoughts in their heads all the time? Nope. Not everybody has. And not everybody see words and numbers in colors with texture and taste either.
Brains are so chaotic and strange and unique and wonderful ❤️
I have gotten to the point that I could design furniture in a spreadsheet. That’s mostly what I do already; I’ll design it in FreeCAD, I use the Spreadsheet workbench as a table of all critical dimensions, and then I’ll build the CAD model from there, but I draw less and less of the model. I usually just take a copy of the dimension spreadsheet with me into the workshop, very rarely relying on drawings unless I’ve got some intricate joinery to lay out.
I’m working on a case for my grandfather’s flag, and I modeled a part of the thing as a sanity check.
I might just do it as a challenge to myself, design and build a piece of furniture in LibreOffice.
Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It’s as though there is some particular step between “add the object to the environment, conceptually” and “render the object” that doesn’t happen for me.
The very tired imagery when going to bed is Hypnagogia and isn’t visualizing, it’s more akin to dreaming which also isn’t visualizing.
If those 2 things are why you think you aren’t a total aphant, you’re probably a total aphant.
I’m a total aphant as well.
Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.
I’ve tried to work with things in that state as well thinking maybe it could translate as well. Its a very interesting state though. If I try too hard it’ll wake me up and go away. If i don’t try enough, nothing happens, but when it’s just right, I can somewhat influence it.
I’ve had some success in the past transitioning into lucid dreaming from that state as well.
I have the same problem losing both the temporary hypnagogic visualization and lucid dreams, rare as the latter even are for me: it’s so easy to do something silly, like pay too much attention to it or get excited about it, and BAM, it’s been destroyed.
I did have one occasion where the hypnagogic thing had mild success when I tried to imagine something non-stationary, in this case sort of watching landscape go by as if I were in a car watching it through gaps between concrete pillars in a bridge railing.
So… You kind of percieve a symbolic representation of space, a sort of platonic ideal version? Must be a very different experience for you to read books than it is for me.
I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
Oh hey thats basically what I have but with bits of visuality
That’s kind of wild. I can’t visualise anything in my head. My internal monologue and thoughts are entirely symbolic and linguistic.
Yeah, for some folks aphantasia comes with weakness/absence of other kinds of imagination, like audio or spatial, and for others it doesn’t. I feel like I have a decent sense of audio imagination - I can “play back” a memory of a song, and my experience is like a ghost of hearing. It is as though there is a second set of ears somewhere in my head that doesn’t “feel” the same as originally hearing it, but elements of the song I never really thought much of - maybe an audio glitch in the recording or a quirk of the voice or some non-instrument sound effect - also play back as just part of this “flat”, single-layer stream.
I never really thought much until now that I might have a duller audio imagination than others, because what I do have is at least closer to the experience of hearing than my spatial sense is to seeing.
If I could have your brain for a day, I would, so I could experience what it’s like for you! I’m so curious about how differently people think. It’s kinda like how I can somewhat picture what it might feel like to be a man or a plant or non-human animal, but I can never know for sure. There are these experiences that we just will never get to have due to our own physical limitations and it’s a bit frustrating to me.
I think I can imagine what it’s like for you, based on your description, but I will never know for sure. So frustrating!
In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.
As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:
Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.
Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).
One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.
Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.
If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.
Stage hypnosis is fake, anyway. You can’t hypnotize somebody unless they want to be hypnotized.
Can you imagine other senses like the heat of beach sand?
I can’t. Scents, tastes, and sounds are out too. When I am aware of having dreams (which is rare) I don’t ever remember any actual sensory information, just concepts. Those concepts can be quite detailed, but it’s the idea of them rather than the perception of them
I can only imagine sounds. I also have no visual memory either. I can only remember a description of how something looked which means I also have near total face blindness. My wife jokes that I should always keep a photo of her around because if she ever went missing I wouldn’t be able to tell the police what she looked like.