Aphantasia - lack of mental imagery.

[hamster_nz]

Today I learned that I have Aphantasia - a complete lack of the ability to form mental imagery.

I wonder if it is common among people who tinker with technology for a hobby?

Feel free to ask questions if interested...

[tautech]

Ha, my wife would say you're a tactile learner and learn from mistakes in order to gain experience and when gained the ability to form mental imagery then develops. Of course to the limit of our experience, but isn't that where good education comes in  to give us the skills to problem solve and imagine.

Wonder where we can find some? 

[TerraHertz]

Wow. As someone who thinks with a mix of imagery and conceptual links, I find that hard to imagine.
By 'imagery' do you mean realistic scenes, like imagining a familiar view from a window, and/or abstract representations of 3D objects, like say visualizing a cube intersecting a sphere?

If you are setting out to make/construct something, how do you do it?

Also 'complete inability'? Are you sure? Not just maybe a bit weak in visualization ability? Because there's a wide range here. For instance take this comic page:
    http://www.powernapcomic.com/d/20160405.html

There's an object in a black plastic bag on the lounge chair in frame 1. It appears from a different view in frame 5, but it's now up against the opposite arm of the chair. To me that was immediately obvious, but some readers couldn't see that it had moved. (It was discussed in comments.) Probably changed due to the artist not having great left-right & model rotation ability either. This is pretty typical, even among very good artists. For instance Minna, who draws Stand Still, Stay Silent (A truly brilliant artist, great story teller too, see http://www.sssscomic.com ) is hopeless with left-right symmetry. She's even been known to  gets hands backwards.

Btw, the current and recent pages of ssss are chapter-break filler art. That's why they don't make any sequential sense. To those following the story they are delicious for their character background.

[jancumps]

I visualize everything in my mind. In electronics and in almost every case where I'm thinking through something.

[Artlav]

I wouldn't be surprised.
For an embarrassingly long time i thought that all sort of "he thought 'carp, how are we getting out of here?'" references of spoken-word thoughts were just a tool by the authors to convey what the characters were thinking about, before i found out that many people do actually think by hearing words inside their heads.

We tend to consider out experiences as default for every human out there - Richard Feynman in one of his books tells stories from his childhood how he found out that some kids count by saying words inside their heads, while others count by imagining a ribbon with numbers scroll by their eyes, and everyone was surprised when that got found out (the kids were putting bets against someone being able to count to 60 and recite a poem at the same time).
And i think it was the same book where he described having an argument with someone who claimed that all thinking is words - his counterargument was along the lines of "how do you describe a car's rear axle to yourself then?", which apparently made the other person realize that there was something more to it.

Interesting stuff, for sure.

[Rerouter]

I'll play it out how i do, because i defiantly cannot build elaborate scenes, but after working on something for a while i can start playing with a good enough representation

First thing i would say is try and pull up a memory, it could be of a face, it could be of your favorite childhood toy, or the interesting thing you pass every day,
No matter how you approach it, that is what visualization is, building things from chunks of memories, no one has a CAD package between there ears, keep it simple.

Next try and imagine whatever did come up and try and put them with another object, doesn't matter what, for me right now, my childhood toy fox and a bottle of water where the first things i could actually see when i tried, and wallah you can visualize, just not that well,

Now try and imagine how the 2 might interact, your mind is hard wired to be very good at approximating how things react, in my case what happens to the water bottle if you throw the fox toy at it,

For myself i am much better at small chunks of software and pcb layout, for the software i dont see all the letters, but more the few words come into focus as i pay attention to them, and abusing this i can think of changes to software i am very familiar with with no devices or paper,

for PCB layout, generally i have already been working at the thing for an hour and have a very good understanding of the schematic and layout, and i can only do it for a few hours after (purely in short term memory), but in that time period i can play around with how i can make it smaller, again until i focus on something it stays out of focus, which makes big picture stuff a little harder,

This is from a person who cannot recall subconscious dreams, also there are such things as conscious but not lucid dreams, Where say you wanted to dream so bad you started feeding in details to set the scene, your body has turned off control of the limbs but your still fully aware, and your playing narrator to your dreams, I recommend people avoid that, and if they can go lucid, as your technically not asleep when you do a conscious dream. and so you literally end up feeling like you didn't sleep at all.

[hamster_nz]

Ha, my wife would say you're a tactile learner and learn from mistakes in order to gain experience and when gained the ability to form mental imagery then develops. Of course to the limit of our experience, but isn't that where good education comes in  to give us the skills to problem solve and imagine.

Wonder where we can find some? 

Only one problem... I have no ability to form a mental image. Zero, Zip, Nada.      For me 'In your minds eye picture...' is just a metaphor!

[miguelvp]

I'm the same, I think in concepts so I guess I can visualize imagery but not actually see it.

[tautech]

Ha, my wife would say you're a tactile learner and learn from mistakes in order to gain experience and when gained the ability to form mental imagery then develops. Of course to the limit of our experience, but isn't that where good education comes in  to give us the skills to problem solve and imagine.

Wonder where we can find some? 

Only one problem... I have no ability to form a mental image. Zero, Zip, Nada.      For me 'In your minds eye picture...' is just a metaphor!

Got that.
I used to struggle with concepts and imagery (and still do) and the basic thing that has always helped is dissection of a problem, that is chopping it into building blocks. Quite relevant for electronics IMO as many design parts are repeats of those that have been around for decades.
Little steps........

[hamster_nz]

Wow. As someone who thinks with a mix of imagery and conceptual links, I find that hard to imagine.
By 'imagery' do you mean realistic scenes, like imagining a familiar view from a window, and/or abstract representations of 3D objects, like say visualizing a cube intersecting a sphere?

Anything.

If you are setting out to make/construct something, how do you do it?

Like anybody else I guess - take a problem/need, decompose it into little bits, build the bits to make the whole.

Also 'complete inability'? Are you sure? Not just maybe a bit weak in visualization ability? Because there's a wide range here. For instance take this comic page:
    http://www.powernapcomic.com/d/20160405.html

There's an object in a black plastic bag on the lounge chair in frame 1. It appears from a different view in frame 5, but it's now up against the opposite arm of the chair. To me that was immediately obvious, but some readers couldn't see that it had moved. (It was discussed in comments.) Probably changed due to the artist not having great left-right & model rotation ability either. This is pretty typical, even among very good artists. For instance Minna, who draws Stand Still, Stay Silent (A truly brilliant artist, great story teller too, see http://www.sssscomic.com ) is hopeless with left-right symmetry. She's even been known to  gets hands backwards.

Complete. If somebody says "imagine what the room you are in would look like with blue walls" I have no imagery.

Yep, I can see it has moved, but it is not by some sort of disagreement between my internal model of the scene and what is on the comic.

I have no problem solving 3D puzzles like wooden crosses or Rubic's cube, but I don't do it visually at all. I decompose it into sub-assemblies, configurations or waypoints that need to be reached, and then work towards them. In fact I think of myself as better than most at the.

I do suffer from a bit of left/right confusion, and used to rely heavily on physical and visual queues when very young, so my directions are more referenced to external frames - e.g. "go down the road and turn north at the intersection, the head east at the roundabout." rather than "drive the road turn left at the first intersection, then right at the roundabout"

[sarepairman2]

it is taxing for me to imagine a vivid scene in a every day sort of mind. i usually get some kind of roughly formed disfigured bullshit visualization and then have to actually work with some kind of material/computer to get something down iteratively to a refined state.

i dont know how to describe it but i seem to think in analogies.

[IanB]

There's an object in a black plastic bag on the lounge chair in frame 1. It appears from a different view in frame 5, but it's now up against the opposite arm of the chair.

It could be debated that this is a matter of perspective. It is surprising to me how many real life scenes "look wrong" to my eyes, even though I know what I am looking at is real. Is the bag really up against the opposite arm of the chair? You can see neither side of the bag from that view, and neither can you clearly see a gap between the far side of the bag and the far arm of the chair. So it might just look like it is not touching the arm from that angle, even though it is.

[IanB]

Today I learned that I have Aphantasia - a complete lack of the ability to form mental imagery.

I wonder if it is common among people who tinker with technology for a hobby?

Feel free to ask questions if interested...

I wouldn't know how to say what this means. The only time I can see images in my mind is when I'm dreaming. When I'm awake, all there is when I close my eyes is blackness. I can picture what scenes look like as memories, but the pictures are imaginary, not real. If we try to say that some people don't have memories of places and events they have been to, then I can't imagine what that would be like. Is it really a case of not having memories?

[IanB]

Also, can you not have daydreams, where you act out stories and scenarios in your mind? You cannot fantasize?

[Cerebus]

We tend to consider out experiences as default for every human out there...

Philosophers have a word for this "qualia" [prn. kWarlia] - singular "quale" [prn. kWarl]. So, the colour red has a certain quale in my mind. How do I know that the quale I experience for 'red' is not the exact same quale you experience for 'green'? Thus was many, many hours of philosophic discussion started and continues.

[hamster_nz]

Also, can you not have daydreams, where you act out stories and scenarios in your mind? You cannot fantasize?

Correct. Assuming that when you 'act something out in your mind, you are in some way viewing the characters as they interact. I do daydream, but it is more me 'switching off' the outside world to think about something free from distractions, getting lost in my own thoughts.

Perhaps that is why as a child I found non-fiction stories as dull and preferred to read non-fiction...

[timb]

Huh, I was just talking about this with a doctor last week. I was thinking about someone born deaf; what does their inner voice sound like? Do they think in sign language? When I think, I "hear" the words inside my head. It's really hard for me to get my head around what it would be like to think in sign, or even be able "see" the words inside my head, instead of "hearing" them, if that makes sense.

I guess that's because I can't "see" things in my mind. For example, if I close my eyes and try to picture an apple, I don't actually *see* a clear picture of an apple; instead I get a sort of vague impression of the shape (it's roundish, there's a stem sticking out) and color (red, shiny; green, dull). It's the same when I think about a person; I get a "feeling" of what they look like, often accompanied by an emotion.

I do daydream, but it's more like I'm narrating a story to myself, rather than actually seeing what I'm doing as in an actual dream.

If I'm designing something, I can't close my eyes and conjure up a clear picture of what it will look like. Again, I get a sort of vague sense of what it looks like (a box, with switches on the front, an LCD, etc.)

I guess I'm just more logic oriented.

[Cerebus]

I can picture what scenes look like as memories, but the pictures are imaginary, not real.

I think that's what hamster is saying he lacks, the imaginary pictures in his head. He, of course, can't confirm this as it's equivalent of asking a blind man 'do you recognise this' when showing him a picture . What you describe I think is the 'norm' in forming mental imagery - you see a picture but it's not like the picture you'd see by actually looking at something, it's sketchier, looking around that 'picture' involves re-imagining/recalling it from a new focal point not just flicking your eyes across. That's certainly what I experience 99.9% of the time.

I can, sometimes, close my eyes and form a picture just as if I'm looking at it, where the mental equivalent of flicking my eyes across works and there is much more detail than in the imagined/remembered picture. It's at the level of 'realness' I imagine a hallucination to have, with the obvious proviso that I know that what I'm looking at is just a mental image. It's difficult to mentally maintain the image and quite easy to loose it. I suspect that I'm relatively unusual in being able to do this.

I can very rarely do the equivalent with sound, specifically music, and there the experience is clearly just like an auditory hallucination in the sense that I perceive that I am hearing the music and can pick out particular parts just like I could if I was listening to a record. The only difference from an auditory hallucination is that I know it is a memory and I have some voluntary control over what I hear. The first time I experienced this I could 'hear' a record I had heard in real life only for the first time the day before but I could recall literally every detail. On the odd occasion I've been able to do this and 'hear' music that I'm improvising in my head. My flute teacher said he could sit down with a written full orchestra score and 'hear' the whole thing in his head while he read it as if he was instead listening to it.

[Mechanical Menace]

When I think, I "hear" the words inside my head.

Personally I "see" the words. If I'm remembering say my desk or my partners face I read a bullet pointed description, if I'm thinking creatively I'm writing one. Then build a model (not a picture) based on the description. I have no ability to hear anything in my head. Surprisingly I love music and used to be quite an accomplished musician...

[hamster_nz]

When I think, I "hear" the words inside my head.

Personally I "see" the words. If I'm remembering say my desk or my partners face I read a bullet pointed description, if I'm thinking creatively I'm writing one. Then build a model (not a picture) based on the description. I have no ability to hear anything in my head. Surprisingly I love music and used to be quite an accomplished musician...

Humm... actually 'see' the words? I wonder what it was like before you could read?

I definitely have a running internal dialogue that are my thoughts, however my internal voice sounds nothing like my actual voice -and thinking a little bit more. it isn't really an actual voice, as it has no accent or changes in pitch or loudness.

[Smokey]

You might have seen Dave wearing his "Directors Cut" tshirt a while back.....

Penn Jillette has Aphantasia. 

http://serve.castfire.com/audio/2512630/penn-15-06-28-ss-mp3_2015-06-28-180830.64k.mp3?ad_params=zonesPrerollPreroll2MidrollMidroll2Midroll3Midroll4Midroll5Midroll6PostrollPostroll2station_id1723

Skip to around 75:15 (1 hour 15 min)

[miguelvp]

Funny thing is that even if I can't visualize imagery on my head my wife tells me that I have good visual memory because I know where everything is at and when something goes missing I do recall the last place I saw it at.

[Mechanical Menace]

Humm... actually 'see' the words? I wonder what it was like before you could read?

Wild guess maybe I process my concious thoughts more through the parts of my brain that deal with writing where others are doing the same more through the parts that deal with spoken words. Obviously none of us are actually seeing or hearing anything but cope with the experience as best we can. For a lot of people that's by getting the impression of a voice talking away, I get the impression of text.

I definitely have a running internal dialogue that are my thoughts

I wonder what it was like before you could speak?

[hamster_nz]

I definitely have a running internal dialogue that are my thoughts

I wonder what it was like before you could speak?

But I could speak before I could read (and I assume you could too!). At some point you must have switched over.

[amspire]

What happens if you read a novel - say science fiction? Is it just boring or do you just go along with the flow of events and not worry about what the space ship looks like and what it feels like to fly?

[hamster_nz]

What happens if you read a novel - say science fiction? Is it just boring or do you just go along with the flow of events and not worry about what the space ship looks like and what it feels like to fly?

Ornate 'Lord of the rings style' fantasy universe building bores me senseless . I prefer stories with fewer characters and more complex themes than "let's go on a quest and fight evil along the way'.  Grew up on Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clark, Douglas Adams. Early cyberpunk was good... Strangely enough, the more it leaves to the imagination the better - I guess I just don't bother to fill in the blank spaces as they are not important. I thought 'Life Of Pi' was great page-turner - a boy, a boat, and a few animals.

However most my reading is now non-fiction. things like "Why buildings fall down" (strangely enough by the same author as "Why buildings stand up"), Pop-Sci stuff, harder-core  PopSci (e.g. Road to Reality - Roger Penrose),  That sort of stuff.

You will never find me in the fiction section at libraries!

[Mechanical Menace]

But I could speak before I could read (and I assume you could too!). At some point you must have switched over.

That sort of assumes you can't think before you can speak or that you're not using those parts of your brain before you can speak or write, I doubt that but am sure someone who knows better than either of us will come along.

I do have APD (auditory processing disorder) so that could be a part of it.

[hamster_nz]

That sort of assumes you can't think before you can speak or that you're not using those parts of your brain before you can speak or write..

I do sort of assume that unless you have some sort of internal monologue running, or you can express your ideas in some sort of physical way, then you have great trouble with abstract thought (or at least communicating that to others). I'm pretty sure my smarter husky had ideas and could plan and scheme. The other one, not so much!

[Rerouter]

Generally your ways of thinking are biased by the limitations imposed by your language (If you only know 1 word for red its red, if you know 4 words for red, then you split it up between them), that and to my knowledge people only start forming long term memories around the late 2's to 3's, meaning by then you have already begun to learn to talk, if anyone began a mute, it could be an interesting perspective,

This is part my view point and speaking to others in the past, with my earliest memory being 2 years 11 months based on the photo i found, (Could recollect details outside of the photo)

And another person that can speak in there head, i hear the voice as i type normal languages, don't need it to read, and dont need it to program, for that its more automatic or conceptual, The voice is only voices i can make myself, including helium voice,

[amspire]

Grew up on Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clark, Douglas Adams. Early cyberpunk was good... Strangely enough, the more it leaves to the imagination the better - I guess I just don't bother to fill in the blank spaces as they are not important.

That is interesting. Philip K Dick was all about exploring concepts on things like altered states of reality rather then painting a picture. In Douglas Adams' books, it is all about the clever dialog. Roger Penrose - definitely about ideas. Arthur C Clarke - I am still trying to work out what "2001: A Space Odyssey" was all about.

Sounds like you would be perfect as a Quantum Physicist. That is all about understanding a physical world that cannot be visually imagined.

[timb]

When I think, I "hear" the words inside my head.

Personally I "see" the words. If I'm remembering say my desk or my partners face I read a bullet pointed description, if I'm thinking creatively I'm writing one. Then build a model (not a picture) based on the description. I have no ability to hear anything in my head. Surprisingly I love music and used to be quite an accomplished musician...

It's not that I actually hear the dialog, it's... just inside my head. Here's a question for you: When you read something (not out loud) what is it like? Obviously you wouldn't "see" the words in your mind, since you're already staring at them, right?

As someone else mentioned, we don't "think" in our own voices, or any voice really. There's no pitch or tone to it. It's just a vague impression of the words, I guess. Music is the same. I don't literally hear the music, as if I've got a radio in my head. Instead, it's more like the tune is being hummed (or beatboxed). I can also "hear" the lyrics being spoken (but not both at the same time).  Maybe that's why I can't sing or play a musical instrument! I have an ex who's bi-polar; she told me that she *could* hear music, just like she had a radio in her head. She was a good singer.

Anyway, for most of us, the inner dialogue is linked to the speech center of the brain, for sure. Why? Well, try thinking about what you're about to say, like you're trying to figure out how to phrase something (or even thinking about a post or email you're composing). For most people, their tongue (and sometimes facial muscles, if they're deep in thought) will *jussstt* start to move, just as if they were actually talking.

[chickenHeadKnob]

Sounds like you would be perfect as a Quantum Physicist. That is all about understanding a physical world that cannot be visually imagined.

Until today I did not even know aphantasia was a thing, but my first thoughts centered on what I read about the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac. He was a Nobel winner for his work in Quantum Mechanics. It was reported that he did not depend on or generate visualizations  when creating mathematical formulas, something I did not think possible. I suspected he was generating imagery just not consciously aware of it. When we make decisions all kinds of subliminal processing is occurring in the background and then with a type of back-annotation a rationalization  for the decision is formed into narration that is conscious thought.

Now I am not so sure about Dirac, although I don't believe he had aphantasia. Dirac certainly exhibited some signs of the autism spectrum, like many science/math nerds and forum members including myself. But I am almost completely dependent on my mind's eye when doing mathematics. Autism is sometimes referred to as an over masculinization (Simon Baron Cohen), particularly in females with autism http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37056/title/Autism-Masculinizes-Female-Brain/. With the brain differences between the genders involving  spatial reasoning and the male brain being more asymmetric in the function of the hemispheres although this is controversial. When I was in university I would come across various mathematical problems which grabbed my fancy because I could easily form a visual representation of them and then carry them around with me whilst I performed geometric manipulations.  I would then go on  prolonged thought binges ignoring the rest of my studies whilst I tried to solve them. Problems like  graph isomorphism - no I didn't solve that. I imagined all other math inclined slight autistics were the same, at least there many like me who heavily depend on spatial reasoning and geometry. I also have a sense that most autistic savants are utilizing a visual lookup table to achieve their remarkable speed, that is they see with their minds eye all the pre-computed solutions and use a visual pattern match to select the desired result in constant time.

[amspire]

I have been at a Paul Dirac lecture on antimatter, but sad to admit, I knew very little about Quantum Mechanics back then and antimatter to me sounded like a science fiction idea that luckily didn't exist in the real world. I knew he had won a Nobel Prize, but I didn't really understand that this was one of the most exceptional minds of the 20th century. The lecture may have been when I was at Uni in Sydney in 1975 when he visited Australia, but I actually think it was earlier when I was still at school - 1971 or 1972.

I wish I could go back in time.

I think that it may be true that Dirac understood Mathematics and Quantum Mechanics in a way that does not depend on visualizations. He would look at a proposed equation and reject it because it does not have the right kind of beauty to be a correct equation. He would tell students not to worry about the meaning of equations - just worry about the beauty of equations. He would see relationships or similarities  between equations and think "that can't be chance - there has to be a reason why that relationship exists". He hated seeing infinite numbers so when he did see an infinite number in say the charge density inside an electron, he would reject it and work out new equations that eliminate the infinite. Before Dirac, Quantum Mechanics was a jumbled mess of ideas, and Dirac was the one who put it all together into something that was mathematically beautiful and consistent.

In the worlds of Freeman Dyson:

The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed then Dirac's. His great discoveries were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought - it was this purity that made him unique.