Aphantasia: A life without mental images

Asterios-Polyp

Aphantasia: A life without mental images – BBC News

Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?

Most people can readily conjure images inside their head – known as their mind’s eye.

But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.

The BBC article includes a simple quiz to see how your ability to mentally visualize images ranks. I was in the bottom 5% – I have basically next to no mental imagery of that sort.

Honestly, before reading this article, I didn’t realize that other people DID have this sort of mental imagery. I mean, I heard other people say they were “picturing it in their mind,” but I always assumed that was a metaphor. So that’s a little bit freaky, to me.

It can go the other way, too. On Tumblr, “Rabbit Cube” wrote:

I think so visually that it took me forever to realize that other people sometimes thought in words. For the longest time I thought that inner monologues and thought balloons in comics were merely a narrative convenience, not an indication of how (some) people actually think.

I brought this up on social media, and a few people have been surprised that I don’t picture things in my mind, since I’m a cartoonist.

I can imagine things without picturing them – I can imagine the idea of someone running very hard with sweat pouring from them without having to see a picture of that in my mind. I can imagine that contained in a very narrow panel border shape that conveys tension and speed, again without actually seeing the picture of that in my mind.

To convert that into specific images I can see, I generally need to actually sketch the picture out. (Although the sketch might not be anything more than a stick figure). And sometimes, when I actually sketch an idea so I can see it visually, it’ll turn out that it doesn’t work.

Thanks to Mandolin for the link.

[Illustration: Excerpt from Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli.]

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24 Responses to Aphantasia: A life without mental images

  1. 1
    Ruchama says:

    I pretty much never think in words. Like, unless I’m thinking through a conversation or something that I’m reading or writing. Pretty much everything I think about, it’s visually. I’m not that good at drawing, though — some of it is because I have some motor issues with my hands, but it’s also just that I have trouble with getting the picture in my mind to look right on the page.

    I’m really good at those puzzles where they show you a shape and you have to rotate it in your head, though. And I’ve been the person in charge of directing the suitcases into the trunk of the car for family vacations since I was about seven or eight — my parents realized pretty quickly that they could fit about twice as much stuff in the car if I told my dad where to put each thing than they could if he just piled stuff in.

  2. 2
    Sebastian_h says:

    I can picture things sometimes, but I usually don’t. I often dream in physical feelings rather than visual images. I wonder if it is related to my early vision. I was 20/500 or so when I had my first vision test at five. When I first got glasses I said “trees have leaves even when they are far away!” I wonder if having everything blurry for the first five years made my brain respond much more to other stimuli.

    I scored in the bottom 9% on that BBC test. In the sun part of the test I’m pretty sure I was visualizing my screen saver of the sun rather than the real sun. Lol.

  3. 3
    Mandolin says:

    Thank yourself for the link. I’m pretty sure I found it in the sidebar. ;)

  4. 4
    RonF says:

    I think so visually that it took me forever to realize that other people sometimes thought in words. For the longest time I thought that inner monologues and thought balloons in comics were merely a narrative convenience, not an indication of how (some) people actually think.

    Something I have actually said multiple times in meetings at work when I realize everyone’s waiting for me to say something:

    “Ah! Sorry! I was listening to the voices in my head.”

  5. 5
    standgale says:

    This seems like one of the things that they could have discovered a lot earlier if they’d just asked people.
    What would be nice though, is if people just realised that not everyone was the same, and took people’s word for their own experiences. When I was at school I’d say that I couldn’t visualise things or that I didn’t know what they meant when they said to that, and I’d just get told off. Recently I discovered that there is a disorder where you have a lack of episodic memories (from a link on here I think?) – I wish I’d known that a year before when I was seeing a psychologist and I was insisting I couldn’t remember things the way other people could so I couldn’t answer her questions, and she was insisting that I could, and getting all shitty about it. I could have shown her some research!
    Although I don’t mind too much that I can’t visualise or remember things the way a lot of people can, it does make me sad sometimes because when people die… I won’t be able to remember what they look like, or relive our good experiences together. :(

  6. 6
    nobody.really says:

    I read an autobiography of physicist Richard Feynman, in which he described a challenge he and his fellow students pursued. Alas, I can’t recall the details, but it involved counting while engaging in some mental computations. One student seem to do this better than everyone else.

    Eventually Feynman realized that most people engaged in counting as a word exercise, hearing the the words “1, 2, 3….” in their heads, whereas the successful student engaged in counting visually, by mentally seeing numbers flipping by. So when they later changed the challenge to involve counting while considering how 3-D objects might fit together — a visual problem — the guy who counted visually was now at a disadvantage relative to other students.

  7. 7
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I can visualize a little– I’m a nine percenter on the BBC test.

    When I visualize, it’s a very small part of my visual field. I bet there are people who visualize in their whole visual field.

    Also, I think there’s a sort of visualization which isn’t conscious– that’s why while I don’t know how the hobbits looked in the books, I’m convinced that the movie hobbits are wrong.

  8. 8
    nobody.really says:

    [T]here’s a sort of visualization which isn’t conscious– that’s why while I don’t know how the hobbits looked in the books, I’m convinced that the movie hobbits are wrong.

    I have this same reaction, only with audio. Whenever I encounter the voice of some character I had previously known without sound, I’m persuaded that it’s somehow wrong. And that reaction tells me that I must have already created in my mind a voice that would be “right” for that character.

    For example, I had this reaction to hearing Barry Deutch’s voice for the first time. While I had never reflected on it before, the shock of hearing the voice force me to realize that, in my mind, he sounds like Douglas Adams. In real life, he sounds like my old D&D dungeon master. Kinda a let-down, really.

    Moral: Never meet your heroes. Or, at least, never listen to them.

  9. 9
    Ruchama says:

    I have a whole lot of trouble with listening to voices without a visual — when people on the radio are just talking rather than playing music, or things like that. It’s like, I feel almost itchy, just vaguely uncomfortable and wanting the sensation to stop. People keep telling me about podcasts that they think I’d like, and I’ve tried listening, but after a few minutes, I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. I can’t really get any information from them, anyway — once, when I was in Ireland, I went to a museum that used to be a prison where a lot of Irish Revolution leaders had been imprisoned. There wasn’t really all that much to look at — if you’ve seen one creepy damp cell, you’ve seen them all — and there weren’t really many signs explaining anything, just an audio tour to listen to through headphones. By the time I left, I was just totally frustrated, because I’d gone there wanting to learn about the history, and I couldn’t remember anything that the headphone voice had told me. If I read something, then I remember it. (Also, if I hear a song maybe two or three times, I’ll be able to sing it from memory. But if I just hear talking, I can’t remember it, and often have trouble just understanding it.)

  10. 10
    Jessica says:

    I took the quiz and scored really high but I don’t really understand how it works, because I don’t know how other people experience mental images. It seemed like the quiz was just asking again and again “how good are you at visualizing mental images on a scale of 1 to 5?” and I was like “I think I’m doing it, but is there something other people are doing that I’m not?” Is visualizing different from remembering similar images?

  11. 11
    Charles S says:

    Jessica,

    I had the same problem with that quiz. I think I’m moderately good at visualizing things, so I got a middle score. If I thought I was fantastic at visualizing things, I’d have gotten a really high score. I’m not really sure what a proper test of visualization would be. Maybe it would ask you to visualize someone or a scene, and then ask you details about what you are seeing and then loop back to earlier details in ways that weren’t completely obvious? If you are still visualizing her jacket as being a red leather jacket with big pockets after you’ve described what the furniture looks like, then you are really good at visualizing things, but if the details shift or if you don’t have answers to the questions then you are less good at visualizing things?

    Maybe it is just useful at the level of getting people to say “I can’t visualize that”?

  12. 12
    Mandolin says:

    I expect the actual research must be better…

    Mike, Barry and I all took it together so we could discuss what we thought stuff meant. Like Barry doesn’t picture a square at the word ‘square’–for me, that’s easy. Picturing your face? I can give a few details but I don’t see it as anything but a blur of pale and hair, really. I can picture cartoon you in modest medusa better, but not well enough to reproduce it. I don’t, for instance, know what the features look like exactly so much as the feeling I have looking at it and a brief flash of lines and color. I just saw Barry and could do slightly better. There are some photos of Mike or my mom or me I can picture reasonably through, essentially, memorization, but not in a way that I can hold onto for more than a brief, brief flash, mostly useful for rendering a description in words.

    Mike, on the other hand, can picture things photo realistically. He was unsettled a bit, I think, to realize I *cant* just picture his face and know exactly what he looks like, or imagine him in motion like I was watching a film, etc.

    But we came to a discussion of how to mark the stuff as a consensus because we could compare.

  13. 13
    Mandolin says:

    Or in other words, I scored low, but not aphantasic. I’ve known for some time that my visualization skills were well, well below average, because I can’t do mental rotation problems, the kind you do on the SATs. Like, at all. I kind of assumed everyone else was doing magic, really, until I figured out some people can imagine it.

    Even first person video games, especially things like portal, are completely impossible for me. I get lost. (Another reason I knew my spatial visualization was poor, after discussing with Mike his way of imagining and playing it.)

    Mike is on the very high end — it’s part of why he works at the job he does. Most of the geologists he works with are also very good at it, but even among those folks, he’s always been one of the best.

    But I figure I got lucky with the sophistication of how easily my brain does words, so I can’t complain too much if it stole those attribute points from my spatial visualization. ;)

  14. 14
    Jake Squid says:

    Questions for those who can’t visualize:

    What are your dreams like? Are there images at all? If so, are they vivid or indistinct?

  15. 15
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I can visualize a little. My dreams are pretty much all visual imagery– not extremely intense or vivid, but more than I can do consciously.

  16. 16
    nobody.really says:

    Questions for those who can’t visualize:

    What are your dreams like?

    A meaningful career where I can make a contribution. A special someone to call my own. Maybe kids. A dog. You know, the usual….

  17. 17
    Grace Annam says:

    nobody.really:

    A meaningful career where I can make a contribution. A special someone to call my own. Maybe kids. A dog. You know, the usual….

    Not to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women?

    Grace

  18. 18
    Elusis says:

    I’ve always found those scenes in police procedurals where a sketch artist makes a picture of a suspect to be totally baffling. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to describe someone, even a close family member, other than general face shape and hair color. “Close-set eyes?” Shape of their nose? Forget it.

  19. 19
    nobody.really says:

    What are your dreams like?

    A meaningful career where I can make a contribution. A special someone to call my own. Maybe kids. A dog. You know, the usual….

    Not to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women?

    Well … yeah, like I said, “the usual….”

  20. 20
    Charles S says:

    Mandolin,

    That makes sense that answering the questions with several other people (particularly, as you had, a group of people with a good range of capability at visualizing), and I think my evaluation of myself as being moderately good at visualization falls in line with your description of your visualization ability as being low but not aphantasiac. I can visualize your face fairly well, but not really consistently, maybe a bit better than how you visualize my face from Modest Medusa, but faces are a weak spot for me. I can visualize you and Mike as part of a remembered scene (say, having dinner at Tarboush or breakfast at that dinner that is now closed) better than I can visualize your faces generally, and I can sort of visualize object rotation, although it usually ends up schematic and rough, and not fluid. I can turn things by steps of 45 degrees, but not smoothly by fine steps.

  21. 21
    Ampersand says:

    To answer a question from a while ago, I seem to visualize things pretty well during dreams – like, the other day I woke up from a dream in which I was staring at someone’s nose ring, and I recall that as a pretty visual thing. But I can barely visualize at all while awake.

  22. 22
    Ampersand says:

    For example, I had this reaction to hearing Barry Deutch’s voice for the first time. While I had never reflected on it before, the shock of hearing the voice force me to realize that, in my mind, he sounds like Douglas Adams. In real life, he sounds like my old D&D dungeon master. Kinda a let-down, really.

    Gotta agree with you on that one. :-)

  23. 23
    Mandolin says:

    I think I imagined Barry with an operatic tenor.

    My brain believes I dream in moving, realistic ish (often surreal or distorted to my waking mind) images. Whether I actually do? Sort of impossible to know. I can recall some images, but that’s not inconsistent with the idea that my brain is coughing up one occasionally. Plus, I suspect a lot of dreams, at least mine, are more about mental tagging than experience. I see this staircase, I am afraid of it, but is it really that, or my brain playing “afraid of heights!!” on loop. Its not just a visual of a staircase, it’s the feel of a staircase.

    Which, btw, inflects a lot of my “visual” imagery anyway. A forest (going with a green one now, deciduous, West Virginia) is a thing I can picture, but also a jumble of other sensations, and a bodily and emotional response. I suspect strongly this combination is a major reason why my writing looks/feels like it does.

  24. 24
    Ampersand says:

    Man, everyone imagines me with a better voice than my real voice!

    Personally, if I could choose from any voice, I’d choose either Stephen Fry or Harvey Fierstein.