I’ve always suspected my wife has this, and I just inquired. She said she can’t picture faces or things, but can recognize them. Her memories are more like feelings. I asked if she were separated from our daughter in an apocalypse, if she could remember what she looked like. She said, “I have no idea what she looks like right now.”
Now she’s in kind of a dark place.
I can’t imagine my families faces, and I prob couldn’t even manage a photofit of my own face to be fair. Its strange when you first realise this isn’t standard for most people and its actually a thing.
Put photos in a necklace for your wife or something similar if it bothers her.
That would actually be a really thoughtful gift, OP should do that.
It’s hard to imagine… not imagining images. It’s such a weird perspective to think about.
This matches my experience. Everything and everyone has a feeling, not so much a word, or an image, or a number, but a simple to recall, and hard to explain feeling.
If she’s still in that dark place, ask her whether she can recall what your daughter’s “feeling” in her head. If she’s anything like myself, that feeling is the sum of her relationship with your daughter all in an instant. Not only is that something you probably can’t do that she can, it is an interesting way to perceive others. It helps a lot with code switching too, that same feeling of someone else also sets the tone with which you can effectively communicate with them in my experience, though it doesn’t work on everyone.
This is the level that I am at and it’s hard to explain to people that, “no, I don’t remember so-and-so’s smile on their birthday.” Like the feeling of the experiences are there and an analytical capture is, but vision? Gone the second I don’t see it anymore
It’s possible that she hasn’t got aphantasia, but something called face blindness (prosopagnosia). The Wikipedia might be an interesting read for you guys!
I was a decently rated chess player (nationally) in my youth and I have level 5 aphantasia i.e. I see nothing at all.
While I absolutely cannot play or picture game states without a physical board in front of me like most pros can, I had no great difficulty otherwise.
I practiced with a friend at the same general skill level that was very good at playing sans voir, which incidentally is how I realized I don’t have the same mental imagery as him. This was ~25 years ago, and I didn’t run into the word aphantasia until around 2020.
Wait, how do you get ranked for aphantasia? I did sure have it but have never had a name for it
As I understand it it’s simply differing amounts of realism in one’s recall.
I did discuss it briefly with my physician but he more or less shrugged it away as a novelty that can’t be helped. He showed me the chart on Wikipedia and mentioned the lack of information about it in general but also that there might be some overlap with autism.
I have a feeling that it’ll be a while before it can be adequately explained.
Aphantasia is a condition that prevents people from creating mental imagery . It is rare, affecting only about 4% of the global population… My visual memory is like looking through a frosted window. I see some colors and blobby shape and that’s about it.
4% is a pretty big chunk of the population. That’s 1 in every 25 people. Which makes it all the more insane that nobody realised it existed as a condition until just a few years ago.
It just doesn’t come up all that much. Folks live without knowing they are different.
And it is on a spectrum. Some folks is nothing others are can force a few pictures if they have to but aren’t clear. I dunno.
It really depends on how you define aphantasia. Often the VVIQ score is used, a vividness score ranging from 16 to 80.
About 0,8 % of people have a score of 16, and 3,9 % have a score <= 32. The figures are from one of the more recent studies. Other studies report similar figures, for example one study by Zeman found 0,7 % with a score of 16.
About ¼ of all people with visual aphantasia also have multisensory aphantasia (all classical senses and emotions).
I don’t see things in my head, it’s still blank but i can imagine the concepts. Do i have aphantasia? My dreams are vivid tho
Any mental imagery in general? Like through mind’s eye? Dreaming? I had a mind palace (like no joke) it took me years to build into something I could use, and I had a few seizures in relatively quick succession and I cannot imagine images with nearly the same clarity. My dreams are like trying to swim in molasses while wearing scuffed scratched glasses, and I haven’t been able to access my mind palace in years. Any time I close my eyes I just see vague blurry shapes and colors, there’s an environment there but I can’t see it. Now, I can still see faces and remember them, but imagining in my head kissing my girlfriend is impossible. Her face warps and melts and my mental vision goes fuzzy.
Aphantasia is not actually a real condition btw, the whole “imagine an apple” discourse is completely lacking in rigor. It’s like the online ADHD discourse, or MENSA. It’s a way for boring people to talk about themselves to each other. (Like most of Reddit and Wikipedia.)
This happens to me periodically and I seriously think it means we just need more potassium, less sleep disruption, and more time in nature to absorb green colors (soothing in memory, gives you good dreams) and exercise the eye muscles with long distance focus.
Absorb green colors haha. How many crystals should I carry while I do the absorption?
You do realize that when people are confined entirely to urban spaces they report having anxiety dreams about interior spaces?
Are you sheltered or something? Looking at verdant green spaces has been proven to have a positive psychological effect. You should wear crystals over your eyes if you are nearsighted to help. 👓 Aphantasia is just a difference in language games people use. It’s been debunked.
Downvoted for telling you how to dream more, stay salty!
I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven’t seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.
As far as chess, this means I’m logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don’t play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.
I just wanted to say I’m almost exactly the same way, and it’s kinda cool to see someone else stuck in this halfway point, lol. The way I describe it is that I can picture the concept of something in my head, but the moment I try to focus on any details, it gets warped or corrupted or simply won’t manifest any more detail. Same on struggling with faces/remembering people, not so much on spatial orientation.
While I haven’t played chess in a long while, I can kinda draw off my experience with similar games and logic problems I’ve worked on. I can kinda hold the concepts in my head, but not really visualize it. So I’ll not be envisioning the chess board, but I can still easily puzzle out “if I take this pawn, that one will take my rook, then I can take it with my knight”, etc.
Yeah, pretty much the exact same thing for me. I describe things as, I can get a single detail to pop, but then I lose the overall composition, and when I scale back to the whole image, it’s a different image.
Do you dream?
god yeah, i have aphantasia, but i also dream, so i often experience these unquantifiable dreams, which often bleed into reality, because my brain has never experienced anything other than “physically observing the world” so anytime i dream half the time my brain is just confused as fuck and considers it to be a real event that actually happened, because fuck it why not.
That has been the source of confusion more times than i’d like to admit. My more wacky and obviously not real dreams help a lot with that though.
it’s weird as fuck waking up, and having no mechanism to recall something that “happened” you have this like, weird fleeting state of emotion and vague comprehension of what happened. But no way to visually process it.
Yes, actually. Very vividly.
Well I don’t play chess in my head. That doesn’t stop me from being a reasonably decent chess player when there’s a physical board in front of me. I’m not sure why aphantasia would be considered relevant to chess?
Do you have it? I’m just curious how someone would plan multiple moves ahead without an image of changes to the board in their head.
“Well, if I move the bishop here, then it’s pinning the knight to the king. Then I can capture over here, threatening a fork.” etc.
I do. Feel free to ask further if you have more questions.
Basically, when I’m playing, and trying to look multiple moves ahead, at least for me it’s like a logic tree. Exactly like what you described. I just don’t visualise any images. To me, I’ll keep track that the bishop will be on this spot, this spot will be empty, etc etc. I just need memory for that, it doesn’t involve any imagery.
That’s fascinating. What about controlled squares? Like, visualizing the cross-shaped lines extending from a bishop? Or the asterisk-shaped lines extending from the queen?
In my head, I sort of “highlight” them like this:
Same thing, but with knowledge instead of colors. Like how you can (I assume) know your birthday without visualizing a calendar.
Wow. That’s wild. I suspect a lot of folks here without aphantasia are wondering what it even means to “know” something without being able to see (or hear/smell/taste/feel/whatever) it in your head.
I guess I “know my birthday” by virtue of the fact that I hear the words “August 17th” (not my real birthday, but yeah) in my head when I casually wonder what my birthday is.
If I know my birthday is on a Wednesday this year, I can picture a calendar page with the middle square of the third row “highlighted” like The Picard Maneuver was talking about with controlled squares above.
For me, I’m not sure I can imagine “knowing” something without either hearing or seeing (or otherwise sensing via some anlogue of the 5 senses) it in some sense in my head.
If I ask you your birthday, I’d expect you to hear “August 17th” in your inner voice before answering. But if I asked you “is your birthday January 3?” would you have to mentally say your birthday before answering “no”? I’d assume not.
My inner voice is used almost exclusively for forming sentences before speaking or typing them. If I’m alone, not thinking of conversations, and not reading, there’s rarely anything there except maybe a song stuck in my head. My inner voice isn’t constantly there saying “let’s go switch over the laundry” and stuff.
Folks with aphantasia are also more likely to lack an inner voice.
I wouldn’t say my birthday in my head before responding. My inner voice isn’t so different from yours, except being in a conversation mine is silent. With typing as well mine isn’t always present. Typing on my phone I have to think the word to swipe it, but on a keyboard I sometimes just type.
I guess I “know my birthday” by virtue of the fact that I hear the words “August 17th” (not my real birthday, but yeah) in my head when I casually wonder what my birthday is.
That would describe my experience. Aphantasia only affects the ability to visualise something, not the mental voice that I believe everybody has.
It’s funny that you mention it, because while I would of course “know” a date, any time I read one I always visualize a calendar at the same time.
Pretty much. I don’t visualise it with pretty colors, but I can look at the board and see their lines of control. I feel like you’re imagining aphantasia to be a lot more limiting than it actually is?
Maybe so then. In my mind, “seeing” the line that’s not there would count as visualizing.
Well you might be seeing an actual line. I’m mentally tagging the squares in that line as ‘line of control’. It’s like seeing somebody point a finger at something. I don’t need to visualise an actual line coming from their fingertip to be able to judge where they’re pointing at. It’s more a spatial thing than visualising an image.
IDK, it’s tough explaining how brains and thought processes work. They just… are.
This is why I’m always interested in talking to people about aphantasia. It’s like 2 people trying our best to describe colors to each other and wondering “are we talking about the same thing…?” the whole time.
Not an avid chess player, but as someone with aphantasia pretty much spot on for my experience.
A friend of mine has aphantasia. It seems like she has trouble with some board games but not with others. If she can stare st the layout of the board she’s usually fine. We’ve never played chess.
In addition to not being able to see anything in her head, she also cannot hear her own thoughts.
That last part is particularly interesting… So maybe it’s not just visual reasoning.
I think most aphantasiacs can’t hear their own thoughts, but I might be wrong.
She’s like the Helen Keller of thinking
You have an abstract concept of the board in your head. The logical connections are still there, there’s just no image of a chess board that represents the moves. Basically the same way a computer thinks without images, too.
this was always my take on this discussion as well.
i think this whole phenomena is more or less a communication misunderstanding and a matter of semantics. I believe that the people who report not being able to “see the apple” are people more inherently capable of more introspection and other metacognitive tasks. they identify correctly that the “mind’s eye” is basically the brain imagining what sensations of vision a particular thing might elicit, the same way we might imagine the sensations of touching something fuzzy or imagine the sensations of tasting something bitter. I think very few minds can “project” visual imagination of an apple before the imaginer as thoroughly indistinguishabley as if you got real sensory input of an apple.
i think that people who claim to really see the apple are taking the imaginary sensation of vision as equivalent to the sensation of vision generated from real sensory input, and therefore presuming that it counts as actually seeing it. and those who claim not to see the apple are likely just noticing the difference and assuming they’re lacking because the imaginary sensations and actual the sensory stimulus are clearly different things.
we have a word for when people actually see things they cannot ordinarily distinguish from reality, even if they’re aware of them as such: hallucinations.
I have trouble visualizing faces in my mind. The more I focus on “seeing” somebody’s face the less accurate it is.
Can you visualise the correct number of fingers on hands? I fear you might be an AI.
Same for me. I can imagine objects but only very abstract faces
Hypoanphantasia is a thing, it means small anphatasia or rather very weak phantasia. The characteristic is a spectrum, not distinct categories. Very few people see nothing but also very few people see the chess board or faces in great detail.
It’s funny, people make aphantasia out to be a huge disability but ironically that just feels like a lack of imagination on their part. The things where you actually need to see images instead of just abstract thinking are pretty rare.
it’s not a significant disability frankly, that’s part of the reason it’s only just now received a lot of study. It’s more of a dysfunction than anything.
It is fundamentally a lack of imagination, we cannot imagine things, it’s impossible. Ironically, it’s quite helpful to some individuals, me in particular i really enjoy any sort of complex stated systems. I can really latch onto those and comprehend them pretty well. I can do artistic things for about fuck all though.
It is a lack of visual or sensory imagery, but not a lack of imagination.
yeah, but a large part of imagination is being able to visualize something in your imagination. Otherwise doing things like 2 + 2 in your head would count as imagination.
Also technically, not visual/sensory imagery, just the ability to visualize things in your mind. But that’s semantics so meh.
What does it mean to visualize a chess position?
I don’t exactly “render” the board or pieces. It’s like when you look at a board, and then make connections and feel whatever you feel, I just recreate those things.
I assume it’s similar to other people, but the phrase “not being able to create images” sounds like people do “render” things in their head.
It’s not the same as seeing it visually, but yeah I’d say it’s a mental “render”. Sort of like how having a song stuck in your head isn’t the same as actually hearing it.
You move the pieces around in your mental picture of the board to reassess what the potential position would look like.
That’s so far removed from how my brain actually works, it might as well be magic. I simply stare at the board and make mental notes which spaces would have which pieces, but there’s nothing visual to it. Take away the board and I can’t do a thing to plan my next moves.
For the record, I also never have any songs stuck in my head. When listening to stuff, I can recognize wrong notes and such, but I cannot in any form listen to music in my head. Heck, I can barely hum the tunes of my favorite songs after listening to them hundreds of times.
It’s incredible how our brains can accomplish the same things in different ways.
It’s not like the average player can picture the full board state and play blindfolded chess like some GMs can, but I’d expect that it’s pretty normal to visualize pieces on potential spots for tactics.
I can imagine what the board state would be if my piece is there, I just don’t create a mental picture of it.
It’s not the same. Aphantasisa is the total absence of being able able to picture things mentally. I have it to a degree except it takes me some effort to picture things. I can’t imagine scenes from books. I get like a fleeting image.
I have this and have often wondered if it works against me. I have also been weirded out that it’s normal for people to actually “see” pictures in their head ever since I found out about this.
Anyways yes. This must be why I am not great at chess. Let’s blame it!
I now have a mental picture of you sitting at a chess board straining to visualize it in your head and losing. At least you are spreading imagery to others.
like people who don’t have it? Chess is strategy, not art, or engineering.
Chess is a series of strategic moves. You just make them. Are yall out here experiencing some kind of bizarre 5d chess i’ve never experienced before?
source - me, i have it.
I just think about what moves they may make from what I can physically see. It works well enough but I’m not good at chess. That’s most likely my ADHD working against me though not the aphantasia. Maybe both lol.
Speaking of ADHD, I’ve been into chess lately and have found it to be a really good way to practice extending my focus and not taking mental shortcuts, like I’m prone to do.
TIL I have aphantasia
They project into the ceiling
That works if you take enough tranquilizers.
